Season Opener

from MSO Program Booklet 2022-23

Season Opener

phony begins with the simplest of rhythms—an upbeat followed by a downbeat (like the word “ballOON”). This simple rhythm is present throughout the movement, which could easily become tedious. But Brahms plays with it by adding notes in between the “syllables” (“ball-a-LOON-a”) by adding more syllables at the end of the idea (“ballOON game”), by having it sometimes very detached and other times extremely connected, and by changing the stress (“BALLoon”). And to make things more interesting, the conductor Fritz Steinbach, a close friend and colleague of Brahms, left instructions about how to conduct Brahms’s music; he mentioned the importance of “Brahmsian nuances,” chief among which was stressing the upbeat more than the downbeat (“BALLoon”) even when it wasn’t marked in the score, which would make it harder for listeners to find the beginning of each bar.

T he second movement contrasts sweeping lyricism with almost march-like figuration, which is a trick Brahms may have learned from Schubert. The third movement plays around with accents in a more straightforward way—it may remind us of the peasant dances often evoked in the scherzos of symphonies by Haydn and Beethoven but with a duple rather than a triple beat.

Brahms’s sense of himself as a carrier of that “Classical” tradition—German composers from Bach to Schumann—is especially evident in the last movement, which is a passacaglia, or a ground bass movement . It is a series of variations all built on the same 8-bar-long bassline, which occurs 33 times in the course of the movement, with some extra bars for transitions between the variations. (Some of the variations take only one go-round of the bass; others take two or more.)

Ground bass is a compositional device that originated well before Bach and which is probably most familiar today from Pachelbel’s famous “Canon in D.” However, Brahms’s contemporaries would probably have associated the technique with Bach, not only because they thought of Brahms as an inheritor of that Germanic tradition in general, but because he was known to be deeply involved in bringing public attention to Bach by sponsoring the first complete edition of his music.

©Mary Hunter 2022

Chiharu Naruse

Piano Soloist

Chiharu Naruse has performed as a soloist and a chamber musician throughout the United States, Germany, France and Japan. Her broad range of orchestral repertoire includes performances of Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann piano concertos with multiple orchestras. Naruse has also performed with the DaPonte String Quartet, the Portland String Quartet, Venti Cordi, and the Portland Ballet. Her musical projects range from German classical repertoire to regular collaboration with contemporary composers in the interpretation and performance of their compositions. Naruse is frequently contracted by recording companies to record contemporary music. To date, she has several recordings with Navona Records and, most recently, released a solo album of compositions by Kenneth Kuhn from Big Round Records.

In addition to maintaining a regular performance schedule, Naruse is also a well respected teacher, chamber music coach, and competition adjudicator, with many of her students receiving competition awards and gaining acceptance to major music conservatories. Naruse is currently a Collaborative Pianist and member of applied music faculty at Bates College and the faculty of the Portland Conservatory of Music.

Naruse is a graduate from Hochschule fu r Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin, Germany, where she studied piano with Klaus Ba ßler, art song collaboration with Wolfram Rieger, and chamber music with Suzanne Glutzmann. She is also a former student of Frank Glazer.