Student Recital Series 2024 – 2025 Season
Ralph J. Wakefield Recital Hall Saturday, November 9th at 1:15 PM
Lola Gehman, viola
Julie Miller, piano
Cadenza per Viola Sola (1984) Krzysztof Penderecki 1933 – 2020
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op. 11, No. 4 (1919)
Fantasie
Thema mit Variationen
Finale (mit Variationen)
Paul Hindemith 1895 – 1963
Lola Gehman is from the studio of Dr. Shelly Tramposh.
This program is presented to fulfill the junior recital requirement for the Bachelor of Music degree in Performance.
Penderecki: Cadenza per Viola Sola
The Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki wrote his Cadenza for solo viola as an appendix to his Viola Concerto. The cadenza explores grief and viola virtuosity side by side. It opens in the same way as the concerto – with a repeated falling interval of a minor second – which develops into a vivace section that mimicks the second movement of the concerto. The cadenza ends with the same falling minor second that it begins with, reminiscent of a person who has been broken and puts themselves back together. Both works fall within Penderecki’s third compositional period, during which he focused more on harmony as opposed to his earlier focuses on sonority and the avant-garde. Those familiar with his music in the 1980 film The Shining will be pleasantly surprised by how approachable this cadenza is as a listener by comparison – although it remains just as haunting, and far from tonal.
Hindemith: Sonata for Viola and Piano
Paul Hindemith wrote the 1919 sonata shortly after making the decision to permanently switch from violin to viola. It is one of 6 instrumental sonatas that comprise his opus 11. All three movements are performed without pause in between, opening with a Debussy-ian fantasia followed by a simple folk-tune theme and seven variations. The final four variations are laid out in sonata form, with a flying coda that begins just as simply as the original folk tune. This sonata is as “tonal” as Hindemith can be – he wrote the work early in his career and then coincidentally grew to dislike it later in life as his compositional style developed away from tonality. The wide variety of characters present in the work, however, are unmistakably Hindemith’s, from the “ruhig und einfach wie ein Volkslied” (calm and simple like a folk song) to the “mit bizarrer Plumpheit vorzutragen” (to be played with a bizarre crudeness).