2017 Program Book

2017 SUMMER MUSIC PROGR AM 2017 Summer Season

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"I

would like this to be a place of collaboration, of creation, of permanent change, the opposite of a museum, which is a place for preserving works of art in one definite place. The museum part, which represents permanence, is but a small part of the overall project. All the activities taking place around these works of art are much more important than the museum part, and they give life to the art.

Because of these activities, the works of art continue to live because they communicate their message and dialogue with the public." —AimÊ Maeght

2017 SUMMER MUSIC PROGR AM July 7 - September 16 Fishtail, Montana

Tippet Rise Art Center S

et on a 10,260-acre working sheep and cattle ranch, Tippet Rise hosts classical chamber music and recitals and exhibits large-scale, outdoor sculptures. Concerts are held on summer weekends in the Olivier Music Barn, or outdoors under the Domo. Sculptures can be toured by bicycle, on foot, or by carbon-neutral electric van.

Tippet Rise is located in Fishtail, Montana, against the backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains.

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About Tippet Rise

Cathy and Peter Halstead have known each other since they were 16 years old. They both grew up in families that for generations have sought to bring art and education to communities both in the United States and abroad. Cathy is an abstract painter who has shown around the world. Peter is a pianist, photographer, and poet. He has published several volumes of poems and photos, and has two piano albums, which will soon be available through the Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation.

Cathy and Peter are trustees of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, which makes over 90 grants annually to charities in the United States and England. They were inspired to found Tippet Rise by Hudson Valley’s Storm King Art Center, England’s Snape Maltings concert hall, and by the many institutions they have been lucky enough to work with, as a way to share all the things they love: music, sculpture, poetry, and nature.

The Founders

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2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome To Tippet Rise 8

Before Tippet Rise 23

The Olivier Story 40

Looking for Paradise 10

Sustainability 25

The Pianos of Tippet Rise 44

The Philosophy of Tippet Rise 12

Working Ranch 26

Introduction to Season Two 48

The Ecosystem of Tippet Rise 18

The Sculptures of Tippet Rise 30

Week One July 7-8 54

The Canyons of Tippet Rise 20

The Tiara Story 38

Week Two July 14-15 88

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About Tippet Rise

TIPPET RISE ART CENTER Week Three July 21-22 110

Week Eight September 8-9 246

Tippet Rise and the Community 320

Week Four August 4-5 146

Week Nine September 15-16 260

Tippet Rise Partnerships 322

Week Five August 11-12 166

Works to Live by 280

The Team at Tippet Rise 324

Week Six August 18-19 188

Artist Profiles 284

A Closing message from Cathy and Peter 328

Week Seven August 25-26 210

Educational Programs 318

Staff and Credits 332

VIEW A SELECTION OF OUR 2017 VIDEOS ON PAGE 330 2017 Summer Season

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Welcome to Tippet Rise from Cathy and Peter Halstead

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e were raised in New England, with its smattering of Thoreau, Whitman, and Transcendentalism, its upstanding small clapboard communities with their church spires lending a sense of honesty and devotion to the Currier & Ives winterscape.

In Montana we share a great affinity with the values of our Puritan ancestors. We have the gift of the land, with the sense of awe and humility it inspires in all of us. There is nothing finer than a day spent in hard work on the land, chopping wood, shoveling snow, driving a tractor, or tending cattle, to return to the delights of

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About Tippet Rise

family and hearth. Throw in a few good books, and a poem before bedtime, and you have the essence of a life well spent.

In Montana, we are lucky to be far away from the noise and distractions which intrude on this bucolic American dream. Our cities are just the right size, and always close to the outdoors. We are free to pursue the Teddy Roosevelt concept of rugged individualism, life at our own pace, in our own time, with plenty of nature around.

The one thing missing from this idyll was being able to go next door and hear a concert. With our second season at Tippet Rise, our friends and neighbors can do that. We can be a gathering place, with good food and fellow feeling. Everyone here feels immensely lucky to have been taken into this wonderful community, and to be able to add that one more ingredient to a magical childhood, as Isabelle Johnson slyly snuck in the south of France to her paintings of Stillwater County, to broaden our sense of the way we see ourselves. The way we add a croissant to our breakfast, or English tea to our afternoons, we can add Mozart to our Saturday mornings.

Everyone who played music in Fishtail last summer wanted to come back, and they will, spread out over a few years to make room for new friends and new ways of integrating music into our evenings.

People from all over have been tempted to take part in the spirit of the hills here, a shiver of warmth and excitement that wouldn’t happen without our visitors who have traveled great distances to experience the exhilaration of our small, big-hearted community, or without you, our friends and neighbors, who make it real.

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Looking for Paradise

by Cathy and Peter Halstead

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About Tippet Rise

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e had heard that Montana was the last frontier. We owed it to ourselves to see it before we settled for something less open. And it was true. Montana put every place we’d looked at to shame. We looked all over the state, from grassy plains on the Hi-Line to river ranches in Paradise and Gallatin Valleys to the isolated prairies of the Rocky Mountain Front to more wooded smaller ranches around Glacier National Park.

We always liked the rolling parts of every ranch we looked at, but they were usually small parts of each ranch, with the rest of the land unusable for our purposes. We wanted to be able to hide sculptures in gentle canyons.

Finally we found Bev Hall’s ranch in Fishtail; it was exactly what we’d been looking for.

It had no bad parts; it was 100% good parts. It was all deeply rolling: our favorite kind of terrain. It was covered in tall grass and sage, which brought back the Scottish Highlands and our many summers in Nantucket. It had few trees, so it wouldn’t be subject to the mountain pine bark beetle kill, which was turning much of the West into a fire trap. It was under the Beartooths, which were a revelation: alpine tundra feet from the road, Gothic mountains surrounded by tarns and meadows, which usually would take days to access but were here minutes away, all on the road to Yellowstone’s vast valleys and prehistoric wildlife. There were a few other abutting ranches available, and ultimately we put together twelve places to make one contiguous area.

There must be spots equally beautiful somewhere; but in years of looking, this was the most amazing landscape we ever found. In this part of the state, the land lightens.

It goes from dark pines to endless horizons of hay. The air becomes radiant, as if it carried grasses from the plains in it. The mountains become somehow comforting, accessible, while also being completely Jurassic.

We decided to name the ranch Tippet Rise. A sheep’s coat slows its growth in winter, but in the spring new growth resumes. This soft new growth is called the rise, and is easier for shepherds to roo, that is, to comb the wool from the sheep. We have always felt that sheep were natural accomplices of outdoor art, maybe inspired by Henry Moore’s sculpture park at Much Hadham, where ewes huddle around the art, or the sheep in the fields around the Glyndebourne Opera, where the audience strolls during the hopefully golden intermission. A rise is also a gradual upthrusting bench, as our ranch is. A tippet is not only the twine that ties the lure to the fishing line, but it was Cathy’s nickname for her mother. Cathy had been reading a book about a cat called Tippy, which she couldn’t pronounce. One day she called her mother “Tippet,” and it stuck. All of the kids who surrounded Tippet called her that.

She was a mentor to all of us. Sadly, she died very young. We thought it was about time she came back again; it is her spirit which has been the standard with which we’ve conducted our lives. The people we love never really die. They rise again out of memory, out of dreams.

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The Philosophy of Tippet Rise

by Peter Halstead

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hat people mention most about Tippet Rise is its alchemy, where the atmosphere dictates the interplay between people and sculpture, between sculpture and music.

Lucas Debargue, the young French pianist who was the audience favorite at the last Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, made his American debut at Tippet Rise last summer. Before he played, he asked to have a tour of the ranch because he said he felt the atmosphere, and he wanted to learn more about it so he could put it into his playing.

Art involves not just a work, but the atmosphere which the work creates, the atmosphere which supports the

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About Tippet Rise

work. In the way Stonehenge evokes a lost civilization based on the stars, the atmosphere of a sculpture park is a unique collaboration among the art, the land, and the sky.

What Tippet Rise tries to create is a correspondence among the elements, a metaphor.

Tippet Rise is a metaphor in a way, where the synergy among music, landscape, sky, and art makes something else, a kind of poetry.

Ensamble Studio, who have three works on Tippet Rise, have arranged their pieces like star charts, to map the sky onto the land, to bring constellations down to earth, where we can see them.

When we started Tippet Rise some seven years ago, Arup Engineers said we were at the forefront of the new direction towards small halls where music has a more immediate effect on the audience. With Arup’s advice, we returned to the original divine ratio, the dimensions of the temple of Solomon, of the Parthenon, of the jewelboxes where Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn performed. This shape enlarges and focuses the sound of classical music; it brings it closer to what the composers expected.

We wanted sculptures that fit the land, to annotate the music, to connect with the sky, to illustrate the sense of working with the land. The way this works is that it was snowing at Tippet Rise, and the young French pianist, Julien Brocal, was visiting. He wrote a piece for himself and the young violinist Caroline Goulding, called Snowing on the Moon, which in turn inspired me to write a poem, and both the piece and the poem were made into a film

by Mickey Houlihan and Kathy Kasic, using footage from NASA, reflecting planets on the Calder sculpture, Stainless Stealer. Calder’s mobiles are about unseen unifying forces, so we projected planets on his metal wings. The film is on our website, and is called Stainless Stealer Steals the Universe, because its reflecting steel absorbs the NASA footage and reflects it back, the way Timon of Athens accused everything of being a thief: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun…(IV, iii) Baudelaire has said that nature is a forest of metaphor, where the symbols of words, scents, and colors become flesh.

So there’s a sense of metaphor, of poetry, to music and sculpture at Tippet Rise. Metaphor is a bridge; it’s the space between sound and sky, between music in the air and concrete structures on the land.

At Tippet Rise, we’re trying to make our values visible, for our grandchildren, for everyone’s grandchildren, and for the world.

We’re trying to make poetry come true: the correlations, the conspiracies, among place, music, and art that pass the human spirit into the future.

At the end of this essay is one of three translations of Baudelaire’s poem Correspondances, which illustrates some of this. To explicate some of its images: Leaves are snapshots of the summer. Their ragged edges trace the summer, as we ourselves are tracings of our passage through books, movies, and meadows. The reality of a photograph becomes imaginary as the photo fades and becomes more of a trick Escher illusion. The dying leaves of autumn are summer’s shadow, its ectoplasm, spread out on the ground, accidental documentaries which bring the phloem and xylem of a tree, its history, out into view.

As much as leaves are an emblem of the hidden spirit of the tree, so nature is the edge of a hidden world which supports us, although we can’t see without instruments its small atoms or its enormous nebulae.

But it is the lattice of the world, the energy grid which underlies everything, which transmutes thought, which parallels time, which permits the transmigration of matter, which the music of the spheres references.

Music itself is energy made flesh, variants of equations, orbits, atomic spins, which manifest 2017 Summer Season

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themselves as frequencies, along with other unhearable frequencies such as ultraviolet rays, gamma rays, solar flares, the Northern Lights. When you drive under power lines you can feel the fizz of the frequencies. Sometimes you feel the tingle of a cosmic ray passing through your body.

These mysterious single events are accidental windows into the larger world of atomic structure, which is what creates the scaffolding on which our lives are hung.

Music is a harbinger, an avatar, an eidolon of this invisible world of whizzing atom tails and magnetic relationships. Music exists in the small window of hearable harmonies. On either side of these harmonies are the overtones and undertones of a larger cosmos, just as there are millions more colors than our eyes can see, millions more galaxies than even a telescope can make out.

There are computer pieces which are composed out of tones beyond our hearing, vibrations both too low and too high for our ears’ very limited range.

These notes, however, produce sympathetic vibrations within the gamut of our hearing, and these accidental neighbor notes become what we hear, and the piece the composer intends us to hear, although he wrote something else entirely: a piece calculated to produce ghost tones that become in fact the human translation of his ethereal scientific computer program.

Goethe painted a work which, when you stared at its colors, produced a totally different image of complementary colors on your eyelid when you closed your eyes. It was this image which Goethe intended you to see. Goethe, a great scientist, wanted to illustrate how the vast invisible world creates “neighbor” relationships which intrude upon our more limited vision, and how we see only a small part of what’s there, as if we saw a corner of a vast painting of waterlilies.

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In fact, Monet’s paintings of water lilies were intended to be hung together in an enormous grouping of panels which, put together, illustrated his entire pond. When we see only one of the panels, we are seeing just a bit of what Monet wanted us to see.

These panels have almost never been assembled in their entirety, so we effectively can never see what Monet saw (although we can see reduced versions of it in books and on the web). This is where virtual reality will eventually be able to bring us into such integrated environments.

Monet chose to paint without his glasses, so he could see the blurred (and thus impressionist) world that he was used to, rather than a world corrected by science.

Cameras existed at this time, and Monet took pictures to help plan his gardens, but the final product was a more romantic version of reality, which Monet preferred to the more clinical view of the camera.

When I was in Venice, I took a vaporetti, a water taxi, and photographed Venice reflected in a metal fender on the boat for several hours. The floating palaces superimposed themselves on one another as the boat moved, and the complex reflections were much more baroque than the poor reality. After a while, every tourist on the boat began photographing the fender themselves, although I’m not sure they saw the same mirage my telephoto and polarized lens captured.

Such a lens can also see collages in a rear view mirror of a car which the eye can’t.

And so there is a syzygy, an alignment of planets and stars, a synthesis, which becomes visible to us under certain conditions, which presents the world in a more Cubist way, with light reflected off formerly unnoticed bezels, with reflections in store windows merging with the brain’s memory of what it saw in the last minute.

I believe that we don’t so much see as collate, combining remembered views of our lives that include memories of friends, postcards, snapshots, a kind of

Instagram where we brand the world and our travel through it to our own liking.

This is what music is: bits and pieces, overheard snatches of sound, found art reassembled into a jumble of fractal, Cubist, Impressionist, Expressionist angles and colors. The more we know of painting and photography (such as neo-realism, photo reality, and such), the more techniques we bring to our personal paintings of the world’s complex synergies.

When I was at Columbia University during the riots of 1968, I was the lone student on a faculty committee of scholars, sociologists, biographers, musicologists who were trying to reinvent education, to formulate ways that learning could be made attractive to distracted students. Other colleges, such as Brown, devised curricula that students could assemble themselves. Columbia decided that classes should be interdisciplinary, so that art could be taught alongside music and literature. Bringing stories to

music fleshes it out. A musician plays her own biography. She plays the stories the composer has planted in the music. He understands the subliminal texts, the hidden narrations, and he conveys those through phrasing, voicing, silences, pauses, emphases. The more you know of what happened the week the piece was composed, the more you can re-create the mood of the composer. Music requires multiple disciplines to define it, just as writing is amplified by photos and painting profits from a soundtrack.

Increasingly in our culture we prefer videos to mere audios. We prefer stereo to mono, and surround sound to stereo. We will eventually demand virtual reality films, and holographic computers, the way Beethoven always preferred the newer, more sonorous pianos. We always adopt the sharpest and most colorful television screens, the most useful computer touchscreens. Art should present itself with as many dimensions as possible.

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Thus sculptures show themselves most variously when embedded in the complexities of nature, and music gains color when heard in a sculptural atmosphere.

Our videos present a facsimile of performances, but they also try to add visual poetry to the narration.

We will eventually add virtual reality as a way of complementing the reality of our concerts. Poetry itself is a shortcut to the underlying meaning of a moment, of a life.

All these disciplines are metaphors of one another.

They are alternative ways of seeing, of processing the world. Master classes explain the music, and may in fact be more multidimensional ways of enjoying music. We hope that everyone will read our programs, and also watch the videos after the concerts, so enjoyable moments can be fixed in their minds.

Google Institute uses surround videography to capture more of a work of art. We should use whatever techniques magnify the artistic experience.

Tippet Rise is an adventure in multitasking, a collage of experiences that we hope will flesh out nature through art, and music through nature, reality through technology, as the leaves below are a metaphor through which we see ourselves.

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About Tippet Rise

LEAVES

LEAVES

Nature is a trick whose trees Are the root of our conspiracies: Trompe l’oeil hints and pseudonyms With the future in their limbs:

Nature is a trick whose trees Softconspiracies: as night and dark as rhyme: Are the root of our Ancient snapshots stained by time, Trompe l’oeil hints and pseudonyms Now-imaginary places With the future inWhose theirfaded limbs: edges trace us, as skin, Soft as night andEdges darkinnocent as rhyme: And some, original as sin, Ancient snapshots stained time, Light as autumnby on our face, Emblems spread out into space, Now-imaginary places Whose faded edges trace us, Incidental woodland scents Which turn our spirit into sense.

Edges innocent as skin, And some, original as sin, Light as autumn on our face, Emblems spread out into space, Incidental woodland scents Which turn our spirit into sense.

by Peter Halstead

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The Ecosystem of Tippet Rise T

ippet Rise is at the north end of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, some 22.6 million acres acting as a single unit around the immense caldera of the park. Montana science writer David Quammen put together a wonderful book on this in 2016 called Yellowstone, along with the photographers of National Geographic, who spent a year in the park.

Tippet Rise is buffered on the west and north by the Beartooth Mountains, rising to the highest summits in Montana. This volcanism is forced to travel elsewhere such as up the Madison and Gallatin river valleys farther west, where Quake Lake, six miles long and 190 feet deep, was created in less than a month by an 80 million ton landslide, which dammed the Madison River, all of it stemming from a seismic temblor.

Red Lodge is a small ski and mountain town at the lesser known fifth entrance to Yellowstone. From Red Lodge you wind upwards through the many switchbacks of the Beartooth Highway to a succession of high tundra plateaus on top of the world, exposed to sudden squalls, summer blizzards, temperature drops—all the exhilarating benefits of the alpine world. This is the most easily accessed high mountain wilderness and the largest true high elevation plateau in the United States, yet it is uncrowded.

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About Tippet Rise

Millions of people descend on Yellowstone in the summer, but few discover the neighboring Beartooths, a million acres of Gothic spires set among hundreds of large alpine tarns, lakes formed by snowmelt from the glaciers. Unlike similar high mountain environments in Europe, the Andes, and the Himalayas, this unique area can be driven through. Cars can be used to access mountain bases. The highway was built in the 1930s, opening to the public in 1936.

When Charles Kuralt drove the Beartooth Highway for his “On the Road” segment for CBS, he called it the most beautiful road in America. Some years, 50 foot walls of snow enclose the road immediately after it is plowed in late May, to be replaced by rolling fields of wildflowers in summer. As the snow melts in July, trails into high mountain meadows open. Benign fall weather continues until early October, when sudden blizzards close the area until next May. The common explanation of the name Beartooth hangs on the spire hidden among massifs just north of the highway’s summit pass. Just as impressive are the vertically tilted beds of Bighorn dolomite, Jefferson limestone, and Madison limestone that announce the Beartooths from the plains. Pinched upwards by the Laramide uplift some 70 million years ago, these layers of rock strata rise like hands in prayer, or like the pinnate vanes along a Stegosaurus’ tail. They could be giant sharks’ teeth, or bears’ teeth. The famous basalt dike in New York along the Hudson River just north of Manhattan is called a palisade, after fort walls built by soldiers during the colonial period.

But these palisades are just chapters from that longer book. The uplifted sediments have eroded, leaving

only incidents, platelets, wings sticking up. Some are almost 300 feet tall, and thin. They pop up in inaccessible places, like Godzilla emerging from the deep, but also along the road leading to the Red Lodge ski area, and along the Beartooth Front.

Five hundred million years ago, the entire region was below the sea. Seventy million years ago, the ocean began to recede. You can still find fish fossilized in the cliffs. More than two miles of sediment from the ocean was left behind. Fossilized trees are buried in the sediment around the highest points of Tippet Rise.

Much of the current landscape was sculpted by glaciation that moved down the Beartooth Front, eroding the uplifted mountainscape to create cirques, arĂŞtes, and hanging valleys, which can all be observed above the gorgeous East and West Rosebud canyons.

A glacier is like a snowplow; it pushes sediment in front and to the sides of it. The material that gets pushed to the side forms a lateral moraine. The two parallel moraines on either side of the glacier form a valley with steep moraines or walls on either side.

Kettle lakes, kames, eskers, and outwash plains are left behind when the glacier’s plow finally melts and disappears, which is how the land around Tippet Rise got its distinctive shapes. However, the Beartooth Mountains still retain an estimated 107 cirque glaciers (tucked into the base of mountains) and 390 rock glaciers, more glaciers than Glacier National Park.

teeth. The teeth are reflected in Ensamble Studio’s Portals, which rise like Stone Age erratics from the soil beneath them.

Tippet Rise, at the northern tip of this 22.6 million acre ecosystem, is further buffered on the west by the Gallatin National Forest, which may have trees, but which is really a million-acre roadless wilderness anchored by the Absaroka Mountains.

To the south run the legacy ranches: the Switchback Ranch which begins in Sunlight Basin and encompasses large swaths of land all the way up and around the toe of the Beartooths to Roscoe; the Lazy E-L Ranch, run by the MacKays since 1901; the Padlock Ranch; and the Bench Ranch. Quite a lot of this region is mandated for ranching. The rolling grasslands have been scraped raw of soil and trees by wind and fire until grazing has become the best use of the land, so cows are mainly what you see for 50 miles as you drive to Red Lodge from Fishtail.

What you see at Tippet Rise is only the tip of an immense system, a microclimate of cloud patterns, wild Chinook thermals, sudden squalls and blizzards, in the rainshadow of Yellowstone and the Beartooths, all of which contribute to the otherworldly light, the soothing breezes, and the long lines of the land created by one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth.

Into this geologic showplace rose the limestone remains of the ocean sediment which we call the palisades, and which give the Beartooth Range its

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The Canyons of Tippet Rise

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About Tippet Rise

Murphy Canyon

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e are fortunate to have five large named canyons, and innumerable smaller ones.

Box Canyon This isn’t a true box canyon, as the stream that winds through it seasonally has cut its way down a narrow path ending in a pond. It has an adjacent small canyon, the North Fork of Box Canyon, over which stone cliffs lower. The trail here winds down from Beethoven’s Quartet to the cowboy cabin rebuilt by Ben Wynthein in the winter of 2017. This has a fountain fed by a well through which we filter potable meltwater.

Box Canyon also has Mark di Suvero’s 60-foot-tall sculpture, Proverb, which for 12 years was next to the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. Mark put it together here in a windstorm, its compass legs dangling from an enormous crane.

Proverb changes the dynamics of the canyon. It anchors it, while the canyon echoes Proverb’s wild side. Both seem less without each other, now that they have married.

A path continues to a bench above the cabin, where once our summer tent had to be tied to a Unimog to keep it from blowing away. From there, the path winds up to the ridge road which runs between Box and Arney canyons.

Arney Canyon Immediately to the north of Box, Arney is our soft, walker-friendly canyon, with its gentle bowl and waving grasses. At its head is Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Beethoven’s Quartet, created in homage to the mysterious artifacts of art, which measure the achievement of humanity as much as any other method, such as science or math. The shining steel Moebius strip hanging from its iron sawhorse is the unknowable offspring of the Industrial Revolution. Hanging from iron girders, it is a cold bend, having been bent into its other-dimensional curves by Mark with a crane over a period of a year, one of the great advances in modern sculpture and a milestone in Mark’s career.

The road winds east along the ridge and crosses the canyon down below at a small pond, out of sight of the sculpture, where strange Aku-Aku rock shapes can be observed.

A walking trail winds to the north around the large knoll to the Domo, a path which gives you a small taste of the vast wilderness surrounding the sculptures.

Canyons and hills continue north on the ranch to the Stillwater Road, on the other side of which is a million-acre portion of the Gallatin National Forest, which continues over the Absaroka Mountains to Paradise Valley.

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Murphy Canyon You can take the tour van out of Arney Canyon and around the rolling hills to Ensamble Studio’s Domo, a Stone Age dolmen where we hold outdoor concerts.

Just to the north of the Domo is the head of Murphy Canyon. This is a magical place, strewn with glacial erratics, boulders left over from the ice sheet which once covered the area. Continuing across the bottom of the creek and up an unnamed valley, there is a long rock dike which seems to have faces embedded in its angles. If you look long enough, you can see Beethoven’s Quartet on a ridge top to the west. A half a mile later, there is a bowl and then a second bowl, a perfect site for outdoor concerts. Cows graze on one side. You can see eight mountain ranges. Other than the cooling breeze which waves through the grass, everything is completely still.

To the west, there are high meadows and the Midnight

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About Tippet Rise

Canyon Overlook. Midnight Canyon is a miniature version of the Grand Canyon.

To the east is the wilderness of Murphy Canyon, where the cliffs rise hundreds of feet. This is habitat for wolves and eagles. Even if you see nothing, you are being watched by a hundred eyes.

The Northern Canyons To the north are farther canyons through which run the south and north forks of Grove Creek. This is wild land, occasionally populated by elk or a herd of horses. It abuts Midnight Canyon Ranch. We intend to keep our northern canyons as we found them, to preserve the sense of adventure when we stumble on new pastures and high meadows. We want to be able to conserve a sense of discovery for ourselves and our visitors, so we all feel the way we felt the first time we turned a corner and saw a new world in front of us.

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About Tippet Rise

Sustainability at Tippet Rise

by Pete Hinmon

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e want to leave as little impact on the land as possible. This ideal has guided every decision we’ve made in planning the art center. Prior to construction, Tippet Rise commissioned a three-year comprehensive study of the ranch from Arup, headed locally by DOWL Engineers, before siting buildings, infrastructure, and art.

To offset our reliance on well water, we installed surface and rainwater reclamation systems. These systems can store up to 100,000 gallons for greywater and irrigation use.

8,000 square feet of bifacial solar panels were erected to produce power for the Olivier Music Barn’s recording and light facilities; the panels also provide shade and charge our hybrid tour shuttles.

Tippet Rise has partnered with Beartooth Electric through net metering; any excess power we produce is pushed back onto the local grid.

The heating and air-conditioning system in the Olivier Music Barn was designed by Arup and MKK Consulting Engineers and utilizes ground source geothermal to heat and cool the building. Air passes through oversized, noiseless ducts to maintain ideal acoustics while heating and cooling.

The Music Barn is climate-controlled by state-of-theart systems that keep its humidity and temperature within two degrees of the ideal.

We hope to achieve LEED Gold certification for the Olivier Music Barn and the Cottonwood Campus through the use of these and other sustainable design and building practices.

Our staff is on hand to answer any questions you may have about sustainability at Tippet Rise.

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Tippet Rise Is a Working Ranch

by Ben Wynthein

Tippet Rise comprises 10,260 acres. We lease sections of it in the summer to Ben and Jamie Lehfeldt and their parents Marie and Bob, who bring in 1,200 head of Rambouillet sheep and 300 calf-cow pairs to graze the lush grasses that grow here.

The sheep help eradicate the noxious weed leafy spurge.

And we have our own cattle program, which will eventually produce enough cattle to provide for our guests on the ranch, as well as help regenerate healthy native grasses and reduce wildfire hazards. We have improved animal husbandry and weed control and have developed roughly 30 water improvements here so far, including eight solar well systems, which have improved our ability to disperse livestock across the

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About Tippet Rise

ranch. Each summer, Tippet Rise offers an agricultural internship program to students from Montana State University.

Montana’s agricultural traditions are longstanding and rich. Our goal is to sustain them here at Tippet Rise, and to be good stewards of the land we are so lucky to inhabit.

(We are enormously lucky to have the talents, experience, wisdom, diligence, and probity of Ben Wynthein as the steward of the ranch, the cattle, the sheep, the flora, the soil, the water, the roads, and the wildlife on the ranch. The quality of the land on all the ranches in Stillwater and Carbon Counties affects all of us, and Ben has turned Tippet Rise into a model environment for the area, and is working to bring solid innovation to the vital traditions of American ranching. Ben’s wonderful wife and charming children add the most important part of the ranch: a warm family which brings a great sense of spirit to our team, our visitors, and our community. —Peter and Cathy Halstead)

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The Sculptors of Tippet Rise

Patrick Dougherty As one of today’s most admired living sculptors, Patrick Dougherty composes with nature: wielding saplings and sticks to build monumental structures that echo, play, and tussle with the land. Dougherty literally worked with nature at Tippet Rise, crafting his sculpture Daydreams from local willows. Partially enclosed and protected from the Montana elements by a replica frontier-period schoolhouse, Daydreams seeks to materialize the dream synapses of students.

Learn more at www.stickwork.net.

Stephen Talasnik With ongoing installations around the world, sculptor Stephen Talasnik describes himself as a structural artist. He draws inspiration from imaginary architectural worlds like Piranesi’s, which he materializes into natural sculptures that fold into and accentuate the contours of the surrounding landscape. At Tippet Rise, Talasnik created Satellite #5: Pioneer to bring NASA’s mapping of the sky down to earth. Models of his proposed sculptures for Tippet Rise, Galaxy and Archaeology, are on display in the Olivier Music Barn. Learn more at www.stephentalasnik.com.

Mark di Suvero Widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation to emerge from the abstract expressionist era, Mark di Suvero revolutionized the world of sculpture and profoundly influenced fields such as modernist architecture, design, and land art. His largescale steel sculptures, breaking away from the walls of museums, are meant to be experienced outside.

His work probes time and space. Tippet Rise is proud to present two of di Suvero’s pieces: Proverb, a meditation on the tiny tools we use to measure infinity, and Beethoven’s Quartet, a clever commentary on the composer’s seminal work. Learn more at www.spacetimecc.com.

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About Tippet Rise

Ensamble Studio Partners Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa lead the team at Ensamble Studio that blurs the lines between land, art, architecture, structure, and sculpture. Using found materials, their work transcends architectural boundaries and time periods to produce a pure and direct emotional impact. At Tippet Rise, Ensamble has created structures cast from the soil beneath them that map a constellation on the land. Equal parts concert space, sculpture and land art, the structures emerge autochthonously from the earth, visceral manifestations of nature. Their primitive vocabulary, rawness, and geological qualities derive from the landscape around them. Learn more at www.ensamble.info.

Alexander Calder Alexander Calder, whose illustrious career spanned much of the 20th century, is one of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of our time.

Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained, artists, Calder utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. In the 1920s, he began by developing a new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire; he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. From the 1950s onward, Calder devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted sheet steel. Today, these stately titans grace public plazas in cities throughout the world.

A large Calder hung over Cathy’s living room as a child, and she was given a small Calder when she was born. Calder also painted wonderful colorful circles, one of which we’ve lived with for many years.

“Tippet Rise presents unique opportunities for the display of sculpture,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “At a time when art is being experienced as much in the digital realm as in person, it is wonderful to be able to welcome a breathtaking new physical destination that is devoted to the private contemplation of solitary works—and the landscape that enfolds them.

As part of its mission, the Hirshhorn maintains a

robust loan program through which we share the national treasure that is our collection with institutions around the country and around the world. We are honored to be part of the inaugural installation at Tippet Rise and to introduce these works to the people of Montana. The Hirshhorn looks forward to many more curatorial and programming collaborations with Tippet Rise in the months and years to come.”

Two Discs and Stainless Stealer, © 2018 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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The Sculptures of Tippet Rise Creating Unique Relationships Between Land and Sky

The art center’s rolling 10,260 acres are home to an extraordinary diversity of native grasses, wildflowers and wildlife, bucolic herds of sheep and cattle, and eight mammoth works of art.

Two Discs is on gracious loan to Tippet Rise from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of international modern and contemporary art, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. With dark steel arches that invite viewers to walk beneath it, the monumental sculpture is a cornerstone of the Hirshhorn’s collection. As it was the first work of art encountered for many decades by visitors to the Hirshhorn, it is the first to greet visitors to Tippet Rise.

The Stainless Stealer (1966) is the second work by Alexander Calder at Tippet Rise, also on gracious loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

A large mobile, 15 feet across, hangs above the concert area in the Olivier Music Hall. Most of Calder’s mobiles are painted, but this one reflects the human condition around it.

Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams is made from willows gathered by Pete Hinmon and Ben Wynthein from neighboring ranches and streams over several months in the spring and then soaked in a pond to prevent the saplings from sprouting, so Patrick could work with smooth willows. Patrick’s weavings are like Van Gogh’s frenzied strokes of oil paint, but calmly reasoned and patiently bent into place, anchored around key branches. Patrick had the idea that a schoolhouse would be the perfect canvas, so the contractor, Max 30

About Tippet Rise

Anthon of JxM, copied a nearby structure, down to its missing shingles, which was then recrafted by CTA Architects of Bozeman. The shapes of the lounging students are also reminiscent of ProvenÇal bories.

Patrick’s labyrinths lie on the surface of his mazes.

The Inverted Portal was the second of three sculptures created by Ensamble Studio for Tippet Rise.

Equal parts shelter, sculpture, and landscape, the Inverted Portal was made from the land beneath it.

Its primitive quality, rawness and geological expression inspire a fascinating exchange with the natural surroundings. Each side of the Inverted Portal weighs over 200 tons. In making this piece, the largest cranes in Montana held the two sides of the sculpture in place while they were fastened together by steel pins.

The Domo is the final installment of Ensamble Studio’s three works for Tippet Rise. Although it seems a part of nature, the Domo was acoustically designed for superior sound projection for our outdoor performances. As a Stone Age plinth, it is the equivalent of a pyramid: an elegant transport into the new life of whatever is placed inside it. It was poured into the land and then excavated by bulldozers. Plastic tarps were used to create the folds in the stone, like a cloak by da Vinci. The top of the Domo has been covered with Montana soil and seeded with native grass species to grow and stretch out toward the big sky.

Mark di Suvero’s Beethoven’s Quartet is about the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, which, like Stonehenge, do double service as both objects and tools by which the universe can be uncovered.

Di Suvero invites his audience to complete the connection of music, art, and landscape by playing the sculpture with the rubber mallets he left behind. This

piece was originally housed at Storm King Art Center in Hudson Valley, one hour north of New York City.

Mark Di Suvero’s Proverb, with its pendulum element that moves in the breeze, is a metronome made vast.

Originally next to the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, this monumental work brightly contrasts against the Tippet Rise landscape.

The Beartooth Portal was the first of Ensamble Studio’s three sculptures completed at Tippet Rise.

Like the Inverted Portal, the Beartooth Portal was made from the land beneath it: two large forms dug directly from the soil they stand on.

Stephen Talasnik’s Satellite #5: Pioneer is one of a series, this one named for the satellite launched in 1973. Of Pioneer, Talasnik has said, “It was important to try to make the connection between manifest destiny of both those situations, the idea of human beings wanting to go beyond what they knew, to risk everything to go, and that somehow the risk-reward was really what it was about. Whether it was the early settlers coming to a wonderful place like this or the satellites and eventually, people, astronauts, who would go out into space, there were similarities to me…”

Talasnik spends about a quarter of his studio time creating a growing collection of architectural model pieces. Two of these, Galaxy and Archaeology, are on display in the Olivier Music Barn.

Music at Tippet Rise Featuring performers and compositions of unlimited musical horizons

Each summer Tippet Rise offers live classical chamber music and recitals performed indoors and out by some of today’s most celebrated musicians. Concerts take place in the Olivier Music Barn, inspired by the performance spaces for which Haydn and Mozart composed their works, and outdoors under the Domo, a 98-footlong, 16-foot-tall, acoustically rich sculptural structure designed by Ensamble Studio.

The 2017 music season features new and returning artists, established soloists and rising stars, presenting works ranging in date from the early 18th century through today. Pre-concert lectures are offered at the Tiara, an acoustic shell without walls that offers 360degree views of the rolling Tippet Rise landscape.

The 2017 season begins July 7 and concludes September 16. For details, please see the Events page at tippetrise.org.

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Art at Tippet Rise

Isabelle Johnson

W

e discovered after a while that the mysterious Johnson ranch was actually one of three ranches owned by Isabelle Johnson and her two sisters, where they hayed and ran cattle. She always considered herself a rancher first. But secondly she was Montana’s first Modernist painter. She lived down by the Stillwater River, but she came up to what is now part of Tippet Rise and did many of her great paintings in the meadows, in the snow, among the wildflowers.

The land hasn’t changed much since Isabelle Johnson painted it.

Not much has happened to Fishtail. But what really happened to Fishtail was that Isabelle Johnson went to Paris. She went to New York, and Rome.

And she brought home the light from distant worlds.

The Hudson River light of Thomas Moran, the chalk glaze of Cézanne, the yellowed clay of the Camargue, the arid, blockish hills and riverish fields of Winslow Homer.

After Isabelle Johnson, Western light could finally be described in terms of other civilizations, of New Jersey 32

About Tippet Rise

industrial haze and Norwegian angst. When you look at the barren folds of glaciated wastes around Fishtail with her eyes, you come to see the erasures, the gaps.

You see her idea of how the world worked, her personal mechanics of wheat and cottonwoods.

Leger, cut out from faded newspapers; Stuart Davis, the polluted pastels of the industrial revolution; the faded tempera of Giotto; the angularity of Thomas Hart Benton—all worked their way into her sandstone arroyos, coulees edged with Corot pinyons: what the West came to mean to people who had never gone West, to workers in East Coast factories, to existentialists in European cafés, to people at John Ford movies.

Such Western pentimenti are nothing that can be seen; they are hidden under guidebook photos, accumulated over the years, suggested in silos, smelled in the pollution of big city sunsets, mixed into ordinary fields of grain by ions in the clouds, the way you can smell the rain before you see it.

You can’t visit the Alpilles around les Baux without seeing them the way Cézanne did. In the same way, Isabelle Johnson lent Mondrian angles and Kandinsky chords to tufts in the Stillwater River, which flowed through her ranch in Fishtail.

Johnson’s West is the whorl in the hay, the sharp edge between the bales and the sky. Valleys howl with gouache, the knife slathers on the evening dark while morning continues to bend in the wheat, and sun beats on the trunk.

She saw nature as an adversary, the early winter that cuts in half the benefice of fall, the vast cumulus that rots the harvest with the scythe of storm light, the early flood that carries summer seeds into distant valleys: volcanic folds in the land that are gorgeous but sprung from ruin.

The recurrent droughts, the blizzards, the quakes, the notorious Arctic fronts have cleared the high plains of all but the most determined.

Ranchers chip a living out of the depleted soil on its way towards desert; artists hammer a sky out of a Provençal palette, forge a winter out of borrowed fire. Isabelle Johnson did both. And so her colors harbor a harder edge than their cousins on the palmate French coast.

Her trees howl with deprivation, the stronger heirs of St.-Rémy orchards limp in the Mediterranean heat. She brought foreign suns to frozen tundra, dichotomies that even now don’t fit into the easy sweep of the brush, that aren’t natural to the lazy hand of the landscaper.

She muscles the hiker’s eye onto a ridge, a bush, a cow in bursts of light like Vermeer’s, that guide the day into unnatural balances. She notices how boughs interlock in mad scenes of wind, how cows blend into bursts of glare bouncing off the hay, how pines, snow, and sandstone, born out of extremes, merge into cozy, controlled patterns on the land.

When you travel outside Fishtail today, you see tractors frozen in amber set against the Magritte gray of a supercell sky; you see the campfire marshmallows of mountains superimposed on the pumpkin orange of lost hayfields. You see them because a woman who hayed her father’s ranch, who birthed calves, who shot sick horses also saw something deeper than what cameras see. Isabelle Johnson saw the future, the industrial modernist palette in fields, flowers, and valleys that even today remain planted firmly in the agrarian past.

But if you look closely, the details have changed. A lot more is on the breeze and in the leaves, because of Isabelle Johnson.

—excerpted from “Photographing Isabelle,” by Peter Halstead in A Lonely Business: Isabelle Johnson’s Montana, Yellowstone Art Museum, 2015.

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Sculpture Tours

Placed atop knolls and nestled into valleys across the art center’s 10,260 acres, our sculptures can be toured by carbon-neutral electric van, by bicycle, and on foot.

Art Van Tours Two van tour options are available during the 2017 season: the full tour, which visits all of the art center’s sculptures and lasts approximately 2.5 hours, and the half tour, which visits a pre-selected route and number of sculptures and lasts approximately 75 minutes.

All sculptures are visible from the van; however, the van will stop at each sculpture site.

Guests are welcome to walk to the sculptures to stretch their legs, shoot photos, and take a closer look.

Satellite #5: Pioneer

by Stephen Talasnik 2016 Yellow cedar and steel 50' x 25' x 35' (h)

Van tours are free of charge but require reservations, which are available on our website, tippetrise.org.

Hiking and Bicycling Bring your bike or your hiking shoes and tour the sculptures and the land on your own. Roughly 7 miles of trails and 13 miles of gravel road connect the sculptures at Tippet Rise. Distances between each sculpture vary from a half mile to 3 miles on hilly terrain with very steep grades.

Hiking and bicycling tours are free of charge, but require reservations, which are available on our website, tippetrise.org.

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About Tippet Rise

The Beartooth Portal

by Ensamble Studio 2016 Concrete 32’ 6 1/2” x 25’ 3 1/4” x 26’ 5 1/2”

The Inverted Portal

by Ensamble Studio 2016 Concrete 40’ 2 1/4” x 17’ 11 3/4” x 22’ 5 1/2”

Beethoven’s Quartet

by Mark di Suvero 2003 Steel and stainless steel 25’ x 30’ x 23’ 25,000 pounds

Two Discs by Alexander Calder (1898 –1976) 1965 Steel and paint 25'.5" x 27’ x 17’

The Domo by Ensamble Studio 2016 98’ 5” x 49’ 2 1/2” x 13’ 1 1/2” 1000 cubic yards of concrete

Proverb by Mark di Suvero 2002 Steel and stainless steel 60’ x 25’ x 35’

Daydreams by Patrick Dougherty 2015 Willows were gathered locally by Tippet Rise team members.

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Performance Spaces The Olivier Music Barn

With a direct view onto the Beartooth Mountains, the Olivier Music Barn is inspired by the intimate performance spaces where composers like Haydn and Bach would premiere their compositions. The pitched roof creates an elevated, ethereal sound and the barn’s humble nature creates an informal space that breaks the barrier between performers and audience members, enabling powerful, direct musical experiences.

The Music Barn is also home to Tippet Rise’s Visitor Center and a state-of-the-art screening room equipped for 4K high-definition film projection and 3D immersive sound installations. The building and its systems are designed to achieve LEED Gold certification.

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About Tippet Rise

Architect Laura Viklund led the Olivier Music Barn’s architectural design. Acoustician Alban Bassuet managed the project and crafted the acoustics of the performance space. Gunnstock Timber Frames, with help from local craftsmen, constructed the barn using traditional mortise and tenon joinery. Oehme, van Sweden (OvS) landscape architects designed the siting of the Music Barn, its orientation to the mountains, and its relationship to the surrounding environment.

The Tiara Acoustic Shell The Tiara is a portable acoustic shell that invites listeners to enjoy performances while being enveloped by the Tippet Rise landscape. The Tiara’s sound-reflecting surfaces sit above musicians, rather than surrounding them, like a room with no walls. Sound is reflected from corners above the audience, sending sound from the stage around the audience’s heads. Opening up the wall space of a typical bandshell allows for views of the art center’s rolling hills and the mountains in the distance. These acoustic and visual approaches create an intimate and enveloping concert experience for up to 100 audience members.

Alban Bassuet and Willem Boning designed the Tiara, with Arup Engineers, Gunnstock Timber Frames and Fire Tower Engineered Timber.

Will’s Shed Designed by Laura Viklund and crafted by Gunnstock Timber Frames and On Site Management, Will’s Shed is the most recent addition to Tippet Rise, nestled between the Olivier Music Barn and the Artist Residences. In keeping with the spirit of the surrounding buildings and the region’s agricultural heritage, the structure employs a classic barn form and is traditionally timber framed out of Douglas fir. Whereas the Olivier Music Barn is designed for sublime musical experiences, Will’s Shed provides a more casual space for dining, education, and community events. Two sides of the building are clad in operable doors, allowing the structure to close in inclement weather without sacrificing the incredible views of the Beartooth Mountains.

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The Tiara Story

W

e had been talking with Arup Engineers in New York for years about various outdoor pavilions they’d designed. Finally, I designed my own, because we had a lot of leftover doors, and I saw them as a great way of bouncing sound to an outdoor audience.

Alban Bassuet was so horrified by my Rube Goldberg version that he leapt into action and, with Willem Boning at Arup, designed what is now the Tiara Acoustic Shell, a wall-less, roofless shed that bounces music to an outdoor crowd using only the top corners of an otherwise invisible room.

You can see from the acoustic studies how the sound lines carom off the walls. If you add in a slight overlap from a partial roof, the secondary and tertiary sound-bounces intensify. Alban and Willem discovered that 90% of concert sound comes from the top edge of the walls, where they meet the ceiling.

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About Tippet Rise

Laura Viklund and her husband Chris Gunn built this “shell” in a month in Cody, Wyoming out of plywood, drove it up to Fishtail in pieces, and put it together in a very frantic week. We’ve since moved it to another gorgeous location closer to the Olivier Music Barn.

We asked the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City Strings to play the Dvořák American Quartet in it. The result is on the website, tippetrise. org. The American Quartet was the perfect piece: Dvořák wrote it for the underdogs, for Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants. Dvořák himself, as a Czech, was regarded as a gypsy by the Prague Symphony, and had to fight prejudice all his life to become the legendary composer he suspected he might be. The uniquely American spirituals, hymns, and the sheer freedom of our wide open ranges are evident throughout the piece, as is the Scarlet Tanager in the third movement, a bird which was bothering Dvořák in his studio, so he wrote it into the quartet and it became an asset (a great way of dealing with difficulties).

The musicians were astonished, because they heard the supportive reverberation of a small, woodpaneled concert hall, as did the audience. But you could see everywhere around you, and the presence of the American West on every side of and above the musicians was the final psycho-acoustic contribution of the land to the music, as the Dvořák’s American Quartet, written in 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, has for so many years contributed to the myth of the American West.

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The Olivier Story

by Alban Bassuet and Peter Halstead

The rusted exterior of the Olivier Music Barn always appears when you come around the bend as a pleasant surprise, like the ochre moss-covered rocks from the region. Its monochromatic appearance gives it a modern look, a personality which corresponds with the monochromatic tones of the landscape, the way an instrument folds into an orchestra. Lisa Delplace, the project’s landscape architect, was careful to fine tune the gradual discovery of the building against the mountain backdrop, like the opening of a curtain in a theater.

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About Tippet Rise

A pitched roof, windows at high level for natural ventilation, poised on a gentle slope near the cottonwood creek: the Olivier Barn has always been there, even before it was built. The all-timber interiors contrast with the all-rusted exterior: the inverse of a shell. A frugal layout of spaces, meant to be functional, uncompromised by aesthetics. —Alban Bassuet We enlisted Arup engineers because of the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, which they helped Benjamin Britten adapt for music, and because of Wigmore Hall in London, whose renovation they designed. Both are small halls with perfect acoustics. Arup had also designed the superior acoustics of Harpa in Iceland,

the Oslo Opera House, the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Opera in London’s Covent Garden, and a great number of successful acoustic concert spaces over the British Empire during the last 50 years. In designing the Glyndebourne Opera House, they broke out of the mold of the enormous finance-driven hall into a more intimate and emotionally viable space.

Arup in turn felt we were in the wave of the future, wanting to create a smaller, more intimate concert experience.

After Hector Berlioz convinced the impresarios of his day that halls had to be large enough to accommodate

the Romantic orchestra of 88 or more players, this became a standard size. Cities commissioned them as a matter of status. At that time, there was no other competition for public entertainment, so the halls were financially viable. Some of these oversized halls even had great acoustics (Boston’s Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Severance Hall, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Leipzig Gewandhaus among them), but most didn’t.

The eventual failure of large halls to attract the very crowds they were designed for has led to a new direction, such as the smaller New World Symphony Hall in Miami Beach, Harris Hall in Aspen, the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Avon, Colorado, Le Poisson Rouge (the former Village Gate jazz club) in New York. These smaller venues have become the sustainable concert models of the future. Such venues are adaptable to theater, lectures, jazz, chamber music, and solo concerts. They are effective multi-purpose spaces and the more adaptable of the acoustical and engineering concerns, such as Arup, have taken notice. In fact, the Romantic symphony hall is a brief aberration in the history of performance spaces; the balance is now shifting back to the historic smaller model.

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As Alban Bassuet wrote us: I can tell you a long story about great hall rooms. These are the most recurrent room dimensions in history, starting with Solomon’s Temple (with the inner chamber dimensions of a “ jewel box”). These used to be 45 x 90 feet and are in every castle in Europe. Originally used for banquets and events, they became the main room for instrumental music and then led to the early concert halls in the early Romantic to the Romantic Era (Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and later the Musikvereinssaal). The Eisenstadt Haydnsaal and a few other great hall examples had been made earlier.

Other famous great halls were many of the chancel barriers in cathedrals otherwise too big for music, where concerts were then performed inside the chancel (e.g., Notre Dame). My favorite great hall personally is in Rome, in the Cancelleria, just next to the fountain, which also has a jewel box just next to it, which I love equally. The Cancelleria is my favorite because it is not too long. It is much more enveloping because of the closer rear wall. Another famous great hall is the Sistine Chapel.

Snape Maltings Concert Hall , UK 42

About Tippet Rise

Sounds in the Snape Maltings space mix in the large high-gambrelled ceiling cavity and float down to the audience, creating a floating sound. Located in the British countryside and converted from a malt storage barn, the 840-seat performance space is informal, rustic, made from brick, wood, and exposed timber frames. The campus is laid out like a barn compound with a number of different individual buildings naturally fitting together by the necessity of time, reminiscent of a small medieval village.

Like most classical composers, Joseph Haydn composed most of his work for a small number of spaces.

It was for the Esterházy Music Room that he composed his chamber music repertoire. The room is still in use today, proving its quality over centuries.

Alban wrote his monograph on its architecture and acoustics. Cathy and I were deeply attracted by its enveloping sound, and so the Esterhazy Music Room (the Fertöd Jewel Box) became the benchmark for the Olivier Music Barn’s design.

The room is 35 feet wide and 55 feet long and fits between a cube and a double cube. It is the ceiling which gives a room its determining sound, however.

For that, we looked to Arup’s design for Snape

Music Room, Esterházy Palace

Listening comparisons in the ArupSoundLab

Maltings. The Snape ceiling is a unique shape, and gives the music room to breathe. Dimensions can’t quite describe it.

From Esterhazy we took the concept of a deep recess for the window, which filters the outside world without letting the view visually overpower the room, inviting the imagination to wander, but not too far. This recess removes the window glass from the sonic profile of the room.

Thus the shapes and dimensions of the performance space were derived from the physical properties of sound. The visual design was then adapted to the rigors of the acoustic shell. This is backwards from the usual design evolution of a concert hall; most architects feel the visual elements should take priority, but we put the sound first; you can always decorate a building after the sound is in place. But you can’t compensate for acoustic mistakes in the architecture.

Alban had developed the “Soundlab” at Arup in New York, a room with seventeen speakers arrayed around a sweet spot for the clients, and a screen in the front which shows the architectural plan of the room being heard. As the room dimensions change in the computer and on the screen, the sound also changes, so you can hear the room you are building before building it.

You could eliminate windows and doors, expand the

Rendering of the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise

ceiling and walls, change the texture of the floor.

We could hear the personality of the music diminish as the room expanded, even slightly, from the Jewel Box model.

This may sound like a pleasant afternoon in a New York laboratory, but in fact it was trips to London, to Sussex, to new versions of the Snape roof built by Arup at the Seven Oaks School and elsewhere, and thousands of emails and Dropbox folders over the course of three years, before we were ready to build.

The concrete floor allows for a clean, accurate bass sound, which we intend to temper with a wood floor over time. There will be no air space between this floor and the concrete beneath it.

Alban had met Laura Viklund at a Harvard conference. She had since moved to Cody, Wyoming and set up a business, Gunnstock Timber Frames, with her husband, Chris Gunn. We engaged them to sculpt our ideas into architecture. Laura and Chris also designed the three artist residences and Will’s Shed, the dining pavilion adjacent to the music barn.

The computer files we produce in the Olivier Music Barn end up on YouTube, on Vimeo, on Performance Today, on the Pentatone label in surround sound, and on our website, tippetrise.org.

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The Pianos of Tippet Rise Dear Mr. St einw ay,

I am ver y hap py t o h ave th e opp ortunity of usin g y o ur pianos f or my concerts.

I co nsider th em t o b e p erf ect in every w ay.

F aith f ul ly y o urs,

Ser g ei Rach m ani noff —Portraits of Musical Celebrities: A Book of Notable Testimonials. New York: Steinway & Sons, 1922.

Steinway grand pianos are crafted by hand, which is why it takes 11 months or more and countless hours of fine-tuned labor to make one. The process—a feat of engineering, a magical alchemy, or both—involves hundreds of skilled cabinetmakers, craftspeople, and gifted tuners. Tippet Rise is home to a treasure trove of Steinways: a dozen of them, each extraordinary and each with its own nuances and attributes. These essays, written by the art center’s co-founder, Peter Halstead, explore them.

A

nine-foot concert Steinway has more than 12,000 parts. Its strings are under 20 tons of pressure. So it has an effect immeasurably beyond its size, as big as it is. It is a church organ in disguise. Although each piano is made in exactly the same way by the same people, each one is completely different. Each piano has its own DNA. Always the finest and most harmonically complex of all piano brands, Steinway & Sons in New York has perfected its progeny steadily over the last few years. The density of the felt used on the hammers has gradually been increased to nearly what it was on Anton Rubinstein’s piano during the great era of humanism in music. The company has finally adopted the more flexible parts used by their German branch, to universal acclaim. So the great pianos are not only the ones from the 1930s or the 1890s, but from 2015, and at Tippet Rise we have two of those.

Two others date from 1897, shortly after the invention of the modern Steinway. Their sound is like Proust’s madeleine, evoking a relatively more meditative world, where instruments were almost human, walls

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burled with Circassian walnut wainscoting, and drawing rooms produced sounds like the inside of a violin, multiple layers of aged wood resonating around the divine ratios of an architecture which still remembered the Parthenon, where music meant a soirée in a rococo jewel box specially designed for it. The filigree, the moldings, the niches were not just decorative but today would be called absorbers, diffusers, and reflectors, clever shapes to deflect and augment the many frequencies which have to arrive simultaneously or variously at the ear in order to move us.

We have a Hamburg D from the Konzerthaus in Vienna, which was last played by the celebrated Soviet-Austrian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja. Her ethereal Schubert sonatas, seeming to float above the audience, were the reason we contacted Arup Engineers to design a hall for Tippet Rise similar to Snape Maltings, where we had heard the numinous Leonskaja play. This resulted in the Olivier Music Barn.

The pianos I grew up listening to were from the 1940s. They had a lush, burnished sound, like Burgundy wine. We wanted a piano like that for

Tippet Rise, and Tali Mahanor, the resident piano expert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, happened to have the one. She restored every part of it—actions, repetitions, case—and she provided historically accurate piano stands and legs.

CD-18 (“CD” for “Concert Department”) is an extraordinary instrument with a story to match: This was Vladimir Horowitz’s personal piano and it is the piano Eugene Istomin played, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, for Columbia’s 1956 recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18.

For additional insight on the making of a Steinway piano, see “Note By Note,” the feature-length independent documentary that follows the creation of a Steinway concert grand from the forest floor to the concert hall.

CD-18: “The Greatest Piano of All” Columbia wanted its own Rachmaninoff Second, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.

And the soloist should be Eugene Istomin.

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For this recording, Istomin wanted an exceptional piano, and Steinway had one. It was CD (for “Concert Department”)-18, and it was Vladimir Horowitz’s personal piano. On this instrument, the key dip was shallow, which allows very rapid fingerwork and quick, light accenting, and the sonority and dynamic range were exceptional. When Horowitz was not using it, CD-18 was locked up in the basement of Steinway Hall, and only Horowitz could touch it.

Now, Istomin called Horowitz to tell him that he was going to record the Rachmaninoff Second. “I need a piano and I’d love to use yours. Could you possibly consider letting Steinway send it to me?” Horowitz thought for a moment—and rendered Istomin another accolade. “Yes. I will tell them.” …Before the recording session, held on Monday, April 8th (1956), Istomin played the Rachmaninoff live at the Academy of Music (in Philadelphia). The violinist Jaime Laredo, then a student at Curtis, sat stupefied in the audience. The performance, he says, was unbelievable. “That’s when I realized—I thought and I realized—that this is the greatest pianist of all.”

—from Pianist: A Biography of Eugene Istomin, by James Gollin, 2010 The Istomin performance had brilliance, soul, depth, and that yearning for the Russian steppes, those endless fields where Rachmaninoff had his summer house and into which he put all his earnings before the revolution took away his house (and his muse, the countryside). This record, Columbia Masterworks ML 5103, was the greatest experience of my youth. Singlehandedly, it shaped what I thought about pianos, sound, and Rachmaninoff, who dedicated the concerto to the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and to its conductor, Eugene Ormandy. He said, “Today, when I think of composing, my thoughts turn to you, the greatest orchestra in the world.”

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For years, CD-18 was the centerpiece of a musical world that included Istomin, Horowitz, Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Serkin, David Oistrakh, and the great Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio, which united Istomin with violinist Isaac Stern and cellist Leonard Rose.

Istomin had married Marta, the widow of the legendary cellist Pablo Casals. Together, they ran the famous Festival Casals de Puerto Rico. Marta later became Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center in D.C., and was recently honored as a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

After Istomin died in 2003, Marta put CD-18, the source of so much joy and wisdom, into seclusion, hoping for the right suitor. Years later, Marta and Eugene’s lifelong friend and tuner, Tali Mahanor, the resident piano expert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, helped Marta decide that CD-18 needed to be resurrected in a place that would give it the love and the attention it had attracted in the formative decades of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Europe’s great musicians sought refuge in a newly optimistic post-war America and incidentally shaped its musical identity.

And so CD-18, newly restored by Tali, has emerged at Tippet Rise, where we know later generations will prize its lushness and its brilliance, as did the legends of American music.

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2017 Summer Music Season at Tippet Rise This Music Season at Tippet Rise features nine weekends of classical chamber music and recitals.

Performances—twenty-seven in all this summer—take place indoors and out: within the larch-lined walls of the 150-seat Olivier Music Barn, inspired by the beautifully proportioned concert halls for which Haydn and Mozart composed their works, and beneath the Domo and the big Montana sky. This, our second season, features new and returning artists—rising stars, established soloists and ensembles—presenting works ranging in date from the early 18th century through this very summer. Each concert’s program is designed to create unforgettable experiences for audience members and performers alike.

We hope you enjoy our summer season as much as we have enjoyed creating it.

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July 7 - September 16 Friday Evenings 6:30 PM Saturday Mornings 10:30 AM Saturday Evenings 6:30 PM

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FRIDAY, JULY 7, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, JULY 14, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin Joshua Roman, cello

SATURDAY, JULY, 15, 10:30 AM The Domo David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin Joshua Roman, cello

SATURDAY, JULY 15, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, JULY 21, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, JULY 22, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, JULY 22, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Adam Golka, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Jeffrey Kahane, piano

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The Domo Alexander Chaushian, cello

The Domo Jenny Chen, piano Jiacheng Xiong, piano

The Domo Ariel String Quartet

The Domo Jeffrey Kahane, piano Xavier Foley,double bass Ariel String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano Alexander Chaushian, cello

The Olivier Music Barn David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin

The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Adam Golka, piano Ariel String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Matt Haimovitz, cello Ariel String Quartet

2017 CONCERT SCHEDULE FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Natasha Paremski, piano

The Domo Natasha Paremski, piano Paul Huang, violin Escher String Quartet

SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano Matt Haimovitz, cello

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30 PM

The Domo Jessica Sindell, flute Alex Klein, oboe Mark Nuccio, clarinet Daniel Hawkins, horn Frank Morelli, bassoon

The Olivier Music Barn Natasha Paremski, piano Zuill Bailey, cello

The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano Jessica Sindell, flute Alex Klein, oboe Mark Nuccio, clarinet Daniel Hawkins, horn Frank Morelli, bassoon

The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

The Domo St. Lawrence String Quartet

SATURDAY,SEPTEMBER 9, 10:30 AM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 10:30 AM The Domo Vicky Chow, piano Timothy Feeney, percussion Todd Meehan, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Stephen Versaevel, percussion

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Vicky Chow, piano Timothy Feeney, percussion Todd Meehan, percussion Tristan Perich, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Stephen Versaevel, percussion

Additional information for concertgoers:

The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano St. Lawrence String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Michael Brown, piano

• Please, no food or beverages inside the concert hall.

• Photography is not allowed in the concert hall or during outdoor performances.

• Montana’s weather conditions can change rapidly. Please bring warm layers and an umbrella or rain jacket to outdoor performances.

• Our plentiful and very warm sunshine can also dehydrate you quickly. Always bring a bottle of water to outdoor performances.

• If the weather is inclement, outdoor concerts will be moved to the Olivier Music Barn.

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C

harles Hamlen is one of the most respected professionals in the world of arts management.

Together with business partner Edna Landau, he founded Hamlen/Landau Management in 1979.

Five years later, the company was acquired by the International Management Group, becoming IMG Artists, where Hamlen served as co-director from 1984 to 1992, overseeing the careers of artists including violinists Joshua Bell, Leila Josefowicz, and Itzhak Perlman; the Emerson String Quartet; and pianists Stephen Hough, Evgeny Kissin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and André Watts.

In 1993, Hamlen left IMG Artists to found Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS. After 16 years at the helm of Classical Action, he returned to IMG Artists, where he served as chairman until 2012. He is currently Artistic Advisor to New York’s Orchestra of St Luke’s.

Hamlen’s numerous honors include the 1998 Jerry Willis Award from the Western Arts Alliance, the 2000 Eos Orchestra’s Michael Palm Award, the International Society for the Performing Arts’ 2004 Angel Award, and the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2004.

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CHARLES HAMLEN

A R T I S T I C A DV I S O R

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WEEK ONE

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YEVGENY SUDBIN Friday, July 7, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

An Evening with Yevgeny Sudbin PROGRAM ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: Vers la flamme, poème for piano, Op.72 PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Nocturne in F Major, Op.10, No. 1 PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Nocturne in C sharp minor PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: June: Barcarolle PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: November: Troika FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No.11 in D flat, “Harmonies du soir” INTERMISSION DOMENICO SCARLATTI: Five Sonatas:

Sonata K.197

Sonata K.455

Sonata in G minor

Sonata K.9

Sonata K.27 NIKOLAI MEDTNER: Sonata Tragica in C minor Op.39, No.5 from “Forgotten Melodies”

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

by Yevgeny Sudbin

Alexander Scriabin: Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (1914) Oh, how easy it is to become possessed by Scriabin, one of the most enigmatic and controversial artistic personalities of all time. Once one is bitten and the venom, in the form of his sound world, enters the body and soul, the effects become all-encompassing, even life-threatening! Not only emotionally—as one’s desperate quest for answers only results in more questions—but also physically, the reactions can be severe.

Scriabin was not only the first to introduce madness into music; he also managed to synthesize it into an infectious virus that is entirely music-borne and affects the psyche in a highly irrational way. Thus “mystical experiences” have been reported by listeners. One London critic described: “In my own case, on two occasions, I have seen radiant flashes of blinding coloured lights during performances of Scriabin’s music.... It was totally different from the ‘thrill’ of sensation or ‘tears’ of pleasure, those emotions more commonly associated with conventional music... This experience convinces me that Scriabin’s music adjusts or negotiates human sensibilities in a mysterious and intuitive manner. He tapped sources as yet poorly documented or understood.” Others describe having visions of waves of light, golden ships on violet oceans, and bolts of fire during performances, even without the help of LSD. In all seriousness, however: if the effects are as radical on the receiving end, they are certainly no less intense on the performer’s part.

Vers la flamme (toward the flame) was one of Scriabin’s last pieces for piano, composed in 1914. It was in fact meant to be his eleventh sonata, but he had to publish it early, due to financial difficulties. The melody is quite simple and pure, mainly consisting of descending half-steps. Eventually, tremolos begin to appear as the “flame” takes hold. They eventually escalate into an intense and fiery climax with which the piece ends. Vladimir Horowitz used to say that Scriabin was convinced that the progressive accumulation of heat that is 56

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supposed to emanate from the piece would ultimately cause the destruction of the world. (This is one of the subjects that Scriabin was obsessed about, particularly in later parts of his life.)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Nocturne in F Major, Op. 10, No. 1 (1871-1872) The Nocturne in F Major, Op. 10, No. 1 is part of Deux Morceaux which Tchaikovsky wrote during his three-week stay in Nice between December 24, 1871, and January 29, 1872." He dedicated them to his friend Vladimir Shilovsky.

The introspective simplicity of the opening melody cuts through like a welcomed ray of sunshine. The middle section does develop into a slightly more agitated affair, but generally, one finds oneself surrounded by a melancholy which envelops the piece like a warm, gentle glow. As is often the case with Tchaikovsky’s earlier compositions, this quality can sometimes be mistaken for superficial naivety.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: "Barcarolle (June)" and "Troika (November)" from The Seasons, Op. 37a (1875-1876) Nobody is entirely sure how the title The Seasons came about for the twelve pieces in the group, nor why Op. 37a was assigned (Op. 37 was already taken by his Piano Sonata). Some anecdotes suggest that the work was originally commissioned for serial publication in the St. Petersburg music magazine Nuvellist throughout the year 1876. Tchaikovsky allegedly instructed his servant to remind him before the deadline of each month that “it’s about time to send something off to St. Petersburg, Pyotr Ilyich.” He would then drop anything else he was working on at the time and scribble down something short, trying to resemble the character of the corresponding month in which the piece was meant to be published.

Not only did the finished pieces serve the purpose perfectly, but certain “months,” such as "June" and “November,” became so popular that they ended up being heard more frequently in

transcription form, rather than the original piano version.

"June" became one of Tchaikovsky’s most familiar works, the Barcarolle in G minor, an enchanting melody imposed over a rocking accompaniment. The Poco piú mosso middle section quickly develops into a climax with rolling chords, before the memorable G minor theme returns.

Like the Barcarolle, the "November Troika" starts with an irresistibly catchy theme (actually entirely coincidentally, it is not too dissimilar to one of the themes presented in Franz Liszt’s "Harmonies du soir" except here it appears in a much more lively form). It is difficult not to imagine a depiction of a Russian peasant dance in the Grazioso middle section.

Franz Liszt: "Harmonies du soir"

There were two previous versions of Liszt’s "Transcendental Studies." The first, from 1826, is more of a routine-like exercise version, musically not really rewarding. It was heavily influenced by his teacher Carl Czerny. The second, from 1837, was overly demanding on the technique and almost impossible to play. In 1851 Liszt trimmed some of technical excesses, while preserving the wildness and Romantic genius of the work. This is the version in which we know these pieces today.

All elements of Liszt’s genius can be found in these studies.

"Harmonies du soir" is not the most virtuosic of the Studies, but contains some of the most introspective and affectionate qualities that can be found in his output. The piece is harmonically very forward-looking. The sound of distant bells in the beginning of Étude No. 11, "Harmonies du soir,” slowly appears from a distance. The piece is like a magnificent landscape painting first seen from afar, and then, as the observer gets closer, yielding glorious details.

Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas (1918-1920) Probably one of the most outrageously individual compositional outputs of the Baroque era is to be found in the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti was born in 1685, the same year as J.S. Bach and Handel and two years later than Rameau. His sonatas pose an exception to most “rules” in musical history. Unlike so many other compositions,

it is impossible to trace at all clearly the influences on which their style depends. They stand out undoubtedly as Scarlatti’s own, highly original inventions. Some parallels can be drawn with Frescobaldi, C.P. E. Bach or Handel, but very few. We can only imagine how alien the sonatas must have sounded at the time that they were written, and it is small wonder that they were nicknamed, somewhat misleadingly, “original and happy freaks.” The poet Gabriele d’Annunzio compared them to “a necklace which breaks, producing a resounding hail of glistening pearls rolling around and bouncing about like precious bubbles of watery beauty,” a more reasonable comparison. To me, they seem like an assortment of diverse guests at a masquerade, where the conflict of a disguised character with the real individual behind the mask amplifies the almost schizophrenic duality which seems apparent in virtually all of Scarlatti’s sonatas.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, the son of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti, who was one of the direct forerunners of Mozart in opera writing. Domenico found his own voice through the miniature art of the Baroque sonata— composing about 555, of which only 30 were published during his lifetime. For the first 33 years of his life, while still under influence of his father and of the Neapolitan opera and church music of the time, the young Scarlatti wrote nothing of real significance. But from 1719, when he left home and was appointed to the royal court in Portugal, his life began to take an entirely new route. One of Scarlatti’s responsibilities at the court was the education of Maria Magdalena Barbara, who was to marry into the Spanish royal family in 1729 and who became Queen of Spain. The 44-year-old composer followed his young pupil and patroness to Seville and later to Madrid, where the court settled permanently in 1733, to continue the lessons. He was never to return to Portugal. The atmosphere was rather gloomy at the court and, as a remedy, Maria Barbara asked for a regular supply of fresh sonatas. At the age of 50, Scarlatti’s muse finally awakened and it was then that the miracles started to take shape in the form of at least 555 sonatas—an almost unparalleled legacy in the history of music.

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Nikolai Medtner: "Sonata tragica" in C minor, Op. 39/5 Unfairly described as “the poor man’s Rachmaninoff” or “Rachmaninoff without the memorable tunes” by certain nusic Neanderthals, Medtner never strayed from his ideals and disregarded the low-hanging fruits of popularity—a truly admirable and all too rare quality in an artist. As Sorabji wrote, “Like Sibelius, Medtner does not flout current fashions, he does not even deliberately ignore them, but so intent on going his own individual way is he that he is simply unconscious of their very existence... he has made for himself, by the sheer strength of his own personality, that impregnable inner shrine and retreat that only the finest spirits either dare or can inhabit.” A case in point was the despair, shared

by Rachmaninoff, that Medtner felt regarding the modernist direction in which Schönberg and Stravinsky were leading classical music. Taking a Michelangeloesque ethos to heart, Medtner was convinced that the ideas he was putting down on paper already existed somewhere in one shape or another.

They just needed to be captured by someone and given substance—a case of plagiarizing God, as it were. In the words of the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin: “Medtner’s music astonishes and delights...you may fancy that you have heard the melody before.... But where, when, from whom, in childhood, in a dream, in delirium? You will scratch your head and strain your memory in vain: you have not heard it anywhere: in human ears it sounds for the first time... And yet it is as though you had long been waiting for it—waiting because you ‘knew’ it, not in sound, but in spirit. For the spiritual content of the melody is universal and primordial... it is as though age-long desires and strivings of our forebears were singing in us; or, as though the eternal melodies we had heard in heaven and preserved in this life as ‘strange and lovely yearnings’ were remembered at last and sung again—chaste and simple.”

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"Sonata tragica" is part of Medtner’s second cycle of the Forgotten Melodies, Opus 39. It is linked to the preceding piece in the cycle, "Canzona matinata," together with which Medtner insisted it should be performed (perhaps because they share a theme in their respective middle sections). In the single movement sonata, a remarkable intensity of emotion is concentrated. Typically for Medtner, its two apparently contrasting main themes eventually prove to be different guises of one and the same material. The first theme starts abruptly, a blow of fate, while the second is consolatory and gentle. Emotionally, the sonata offers little respite. The tension mounts especially in the recapitulation, and the work moves inexorably toward a devastating coda, which concludes with another blow, like the one with which the sonata began.

Nocturnes: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Nocturne in C-sharp minor (No. 4 of Six "Pieces," Op. 9, 1873) Allegretto semplice

Chopin, of course, is the main progenitor of this nocturne’s mood, if the English composer John Field beat him to it chronologically. But Tchaikovsky also drew on the connotations of night, of the lost kingdom of the Russian steppes, which resemble in spirit the rolling fields of Montana, although the Russian version is flatter, more arid.

Tchaikovsky later transcribed this nocturne for the cello, so you can hear the future cello in the Kamenka night.

Kamenka, where Tchaikovsky’s brother-in-law, Lev Davydov, had a Ukrainian estate. Having been penniless before his great fame, Kamenka was as much a sanctuary to Tchaikovsky as Ivanovka was to Rachmaninoff or Vyra to was Nabokov. Ironically, it was Tchaikovsky who ultimately helped Davydov hang on to Kamenka. Tchaikovsky spent 27 summers here, composing in a little green house with a view of the lake, now a museum dedicated to him and Pushkin, who visited Lev’s father twice there.

As Boris Gasparov says of Pushkin in Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture: Pushkin…carried his world with him. What really mattered was the small and to a large extent homogeneous milieu to which he belonged: that of a highly sophisticated and almost completely hermetic gentry culture. Any member of that milieu, whether areal person or a literary character, retained in whatever physical surroundings he might find himself an invisible environment of self-evident behavioral codes, imperative ethical values, unquestioned social skills and educational acquisitions. Much was silently implied; much could be understood with a fleeting hint, a single glance, a seemingly trivial remark…a culture of ellipses, in which one could and should make one’s way mostly by manipulating silent implications. Such is the world reflected in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin or in the novels of Jane Austen. To understand the behavior of their characters—what they did and did not do, what they said and did not say—to read the pauses between two seemingly trivial remarks, one has to project the scant evidence available from the given description of a scene onto the social and psychological presumptions that underlay its barren surface.

lost kingdoms became Tchaikovsky’s and Rachmaninoff’s musical steppes. To Tchaikovsky, the night sky over Kamenka is the night sky we see in Fishtail, a reality uncluttered by the artificial disturbances of city lights, a safe harbor extending deep into the Milky Way on such display above us, and on miniature display in this nocturne.

We know the significance of C-sharp minor to Rachmaninoff and Chopin—it was the key of Gothic terror, of Poe, of The Mysteries of Udolpho, of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, of du Maurier’s Manderley in Rebecca, of Transylvanian castles in Stoker’s Dracula, of the Ukrainian steppes, of the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s The Bells, of Rachmaninoff’s nemesis, the well-known Prelude. Tchaikovsky’s nocturne shares in and adds to that tradition.

Parisian culture was the secret lining of St. Petersburg, the model on which Peter the Great created his elegant (and ultimately lost) kingdom, and so much of what goes into Tchaikovsky’s Russian nocturne is also French. You can hear Chopin’s night music in Tchaikovsky’s short, Chopinesque 66-bar fragment, ending in its wistful, modal Tatar scale, the Moorish onion dome of most Russian steeples, the Kazak undertones which lurk beneath St. Petersburg’s self-conscious French veneer.

Vladimir Nabokov has described the idyll of country life in his majestic Speak, Memory. The forest walks, the visits to neighboring estates, the small dioramas of flora and fauna existing independently of cities, put urban life in perspective, and provided a sheltering sky for many great artists, even if the cities later on take credit for them. This life is on display in Chekhov plays, such as The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov spent his life finding estates where he would plant cherry orchards, a symbol to him of sanctuary and permanence, only to lose them all to the social unrest sweeping Russia and Europe at the time.

Books to Read: Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov St. Petersburg, Andrei Bely, trans. John Cournos Nocturne: A Journey In Search of Moonlight, James Attlee

Russian estates became the lost kingdoms of fiction, such as Nabokov’s Novaya Zemlya (a vast island in the extreme north of Russia, the equivalent of Svalbard in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials), which became Zembla in Pale Fire. These

When he wrote the Transcendental Études, Liszt was just 15.

His father had just died, having squandered all the money Liszt had spent five years building up since he was 10. Liszt was so poor he had to sell his piano. He lived alone on the

Franz Liszt: Transcendental Étude No. 11, “Harmonies du soir,” 1826; complicated 1837; simplified 1851

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rue de Montholon in Paris, surrounded by books. He had become so introverted he could not speak in company, as happens when you spend your whole time reading. He had lost his girlfriend, the daughter of the French Minister of Commerce, who had forbidden his daughter to date an impoverished musician. Liszt was so depressed his obituary was published. So the roots of the Études are steeped in poverty, melancholy, and presumed death, written in homage to a piano he did not even have. Glenn Gould always felt that art needs solitude to flourish, as was the case with Thomas Mann.

As James Huneker said in his book Liszt, when Liszt rewrote the études in 1839, he wrote the history of the piano during the last half of the nineteenth century.

Everything the piano meant to its composers and its audience, everything the piano could do, was thrown into the études. With them, Liszt wrote his own identity. The sunsets of painters, the fight for Polish independence, the stillness of pre-industrial meadows is all there.

History is not just the machinations of ministers, but the emotions that sprung in any given year from a summer sky.

Amy Fay, Liszt’s American student, a schoolgirl in Germany in the 1870s, has left us one of the most realistic portraits of Liszt’s playing: It was a hot afternoon and the clouds had been gathering for a storm…a low growl of thunder was heard muttering in the distance. Ah,’ said Liszt, who was standing at the window, ‘a fitting accompaniment.’

If only Liszt had played Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata himself the whole thing would have been like a poem. But he walked up and down and forced himself to listen, though he could scarcely bear it. A few times he pushed the student aside and played a few bars himself, and we saw the passion leap into his face like a glare of sheet lightning. Anything so magnificent as it was, the little that he did play, and the startling individuality of his conception, I never heard or imagined.

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But here is the great pianist Alexander Siloti, equally impressed with Liszt’s tone: [T]he piano was worn out, unequal and discordant.

Liszt had only played the opening triplets of Beethoven’s "Moonlight" Sonata however when I felt as if the room no longer held me and when, after the first four bars, the G sharp came in the right hand, I was completely carried away. Not that he accented this G sharp; it was simply that he gave it an entirely new sound, which even now, after 27 years, I can hear distinctly.

It was Liszt’s sound, not his speed, which fascinated everyone. As the musicologist E. J. Dent wrote: “…minor pianists turn [the greater works of Liszt] into mere displays of virtuosity because their technique is inadequate for anything beyond that....”

Heine confirmed that when Liszt played, “the piano vanishes, and music appears.”

Liszt’s technique eventually advanced to the point where he no longer cared about it. “My dear, I don’t care how fast you can play the octaves,” he told a pupil.

In 1851 he revised his octaves in the Transcendental Études away from sheer technique into the version that is performed today. Nevertheless, Liszt was said to be able to hit two notes many octaves apart with one hand, so fast that it sounded as if both notes were hit at exactly the same time, so simplicity, in his case, is a relative term. This ability to leap great distances without sacrificing delicacy or accuracy of intonation is one of the many challenges of the piece.

In fact, nothing beautiful is really difficult, because there is so much motivation to learn it. The Godowsky vivisections of Chopin’s Études are difficult, because they complicate for the sake of complication. Any virtuosic showpiece is as suspect: febrile, spiderlike skitterings about the web are rarely as beautiful as the dew suspended delicately on it.

Liszt’s complexities are simply multiple simplicities. The great rolling chords, the harmonies of the title, are in fact three melodies played by one hand, so that the middle melody, for example, must somehow be made to tie into the middle note of the next rolled chord, as if three singers were fighting for prominence simultaneously: hopefully, no one wins.

The colors of evening darken in their husky D-flat registers, and the fuliginous sky gathers its penumbra of heliotropes, to put it the way writers of the day would have—that is, the sunset thickens and grows, as the murmurs of willows and poplars grow into a great coloristic grove of sound. This is sound imitating sight. Whether or not Liszt is thinking of clouds bloodying or leaves rouging, sky-long rays of gold linking all the clouds, or yellows deepening to rococo velvets in the distorted lead of a monastery window, the pianist must have had something in mind other than the notes and halfnotes, the haves and have-nots, the nots and half-nots.

Only then is technique transcended by thought, and technique is what the Transcendental Études transcend. Music is not just our Western toy, it is equally a prayer flag on which to ascend into this swirling Himalayan vapor, into the numina, the spirits of the sky, the icons which lead us to their palisades and palimpsests, to their cloudy tents and pentimentos, to unearth in the sky states hiding in statues, traps in tropes, hopes in notes, the point of it being to unearth the earth, or at least free us from it.

You can hear the dripping verdure rustling broodingly in the building evening wind, distant sunlit fields shining through the dark Corot landscape, the chords rising towards the sky like giant trees in the half-light. The broken chords (which are so large they must be broken up into their individual notes) actually have inner rhymes like poems, where the end rhyme is only one feature of the chiming line, and so every note of each ripped chord is in fact a melody, and you can hopefully follow these lower melodies as they wind their inexorable way higher into the evening sky. These fevered climbs are interspersed with panting lulls which only set the stage for the next spasm of tendrils and vines.

Then the clamor-filled sky falls down into the dark understory and the bass takes over, using similar syncopated broken notes to create a stable foliage over which more simple chords rise and fall and rise, growing more ecstatic until they fall into the exhausted eye of the storm.

The midsection is what Schumann called the most fervent in all of Liszt, where a sustained melody is contrasted with more disturbed, belching uneasiness which gradually resolves through Liszt’s starkly modernist single notes (recalling Mazeppa’s rise to life after his fall from his horse in an earlier étude), leading to absolute grandeur. The initial trees now come back as 30-mile high thunderheads lit by Delacroix’s blood-red sky (which we see so often in Montana). After the chords rise and pause, octaves imitate their rise. The depths are now as perturbed as the heights, the whole world whirling in color, like Van Gogh’s starry night.

A flurry of octaves descends to a melody which is actually the simple, plaintive melody of the midsection transfigured into a cymbal crash of revelation: the rejected lover has found a way out of despair. Liszt’s natural ebullience and nature’s Lisztian ebullience triumph over melancholia. The falling note at the end of the theme is now a rising note.

This is music clear as words. Composing had staved off hunger and depression for another day. Such remedies have succeeded for composers and writers throughout history.

Mozart springs to mind. This frenzied natural spectacle takes over the whole range of the piano and, by inference, the world, eliminating all doubts with crescendo upon crescendo, leading to the same three-note theme as the midsection, now resolved and resigned. Something has been proved. The sunset has taught us something, working through sadness into transfiguration, really its theme, as much as Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Like many of Mahler’s symphonies, a problematic world has been set up by the composer and solved. Liszt answers his own questions. A 15-year-old boy has created the world in notes, answered his own doubts 2017 Summer Season

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about who he is and what the world is, and subsided into sleep. The world gradually loses its color, but not its structure, as clouds do, as the last rays slowly wind their way up into the clouds.

The final bells of night ring the truth and security we gain from knowing that the day’s cycle is complete, and that the cycle will repeat dependably, although this was certainly the sunset to end all future sunsets. But if the secrets of the sunset can be described and decided, then each day has been dealt with in the future, because each day will be the same. Taps at evening is in fact based on a similar rising and falling melody, the same salute to the day’s battles, and a positive reassurance that the world is under control, at least momentarily, by a lone trumpet, substituting for the armies of the night. Here, the piano substitutes for the armies of the soul, fighting the battles of adolescent identity.

In those last, fading chords is the same hard-won calm that Strauss finds momentarily in a Vienna blithely waltzing its way to destruction. The light is rung down and suddenly it is dark. Although the world has disappeared into night, a residue remains, the memory of sun. The transience of man is highlighted against the continuity of nature, as in Salvatore Quasimodo’s poem:

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Ognuno sta solo sul un cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio di sole: ed è subito sera Alone, a man stands, Fixed by a ring of light On the curve of the land— And it is, suddenly, night.

by Salvatore Quasimodo (1936) It is however in identifying with the fragility of time and the resonance of the world that we take on its enduring qualities.

By documenting the evening, Liszt has managed to fuse it, and himself, together in time.

—From Pianist Lost: Excesses and Excuses (The Himalaya Sessions, Vol. 1, 2011)

by Peter Halstead

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ALEXANDER CHAUSHIAN Saturday, July 8, 10:30 AM The Domo Alexander Chaushian, cello

Alexander Chaushian in Recital PROGRAM JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Cello Suite No. 1 \in G Major, BWV 1007

Prélude

Allemande

Courante

Sarabande

Menuett I

Menuett II

Gigue GEORGE CRUMB: Sonata for Solo Cello Fantasia

Tema Pastoral con variazioni

Toccata JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008

Prélude

Allemande

Courante

Sarabande Menuett Menuett

Gigue

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Johann Sebastian Bach: The First and Second Cello Suites, No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 and No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008 (1720).

To quote Eric Siblin’s take on the beginnings of each of the suites, the prélude: Bach’s preludes are virtuosic scene-setters that give each suite personality. They are fantasias that operate outside the rigid tempos governing the other movements: they stop, start, and stray, soar to dizzying heights, hold their breath, and come crashing down.

The essence of the story told by each suite is concentrated in the prelude. …The sarabande [is] the spiritual centre of each cello suite….The …galanterie movements (minuets, bourées, gavottes): there is a spring in their step, a joyous bounce, especially coming as they do on the heels of the wistful sarabande.

Every suite ends with a gigue. It is the sound of jaunty exclamation marks, a fiddling ditty. One hears the devil-may-care merriment of a tavern player: here is the tune; dance to it—tomorrow another Thirty Years’ War may be upon us.

—Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites (2008) Schubert, Haydn, and Mozart also ended often very serious sonatas or symphonies with the merry dance. Especially for Vienna, it was the urge to waltz on the grave, to take some joy in the midst of surrounding catastrophe (meditated on in the slow movements). These dances are very confusing to structuralists, as they have nothing to do with structure. The composer just gets in the car and goes to the beach. Schubert especially was always up for a good dance. Plays over the last few years in London have been ending with a song and a dance, often 66

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unconnected with the play. Shakespeare ended some of his plays with a nonchalant song or recitation. The last words to The Tempest: PROSPERO Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.

Most famously from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: PUCK If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend: And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearned luck Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.

It’s essential to put it all behind us, whatever it is, and have a laugh and a good jig. These bittersweet odes from Shakespeare sum up the atmosphere of the Bach gigue quite well.

Siblin on the beginning of the Second Cello Suite: Three notes establish a gut-wrenching sadness. There’s a slight tremor on the fingerboard, the bow a harbinger of difficult news. The cello, wavering at first touch, recovers its equilibrium and reports a painful chronicle. After the buoyancy of the first suite, the mood has shifted. The key is minor, the first three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spider-like, relentlessly gathering sound into tighter concentric circles that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.

Siblin roams with Pablo Casals and his father to discover in 1890 the only dependable version of these suites tucked into a dark corner of a store in Barcelona. It was Bach’s wife’s copy in her own handwriting, the only way we really know what Bach intended. Siblin spends much time with Casals, with Bach, with Anna Magdalena, with cellos. Anyone interested in the drama and the detail of the suites, the summit of classical achievement even now, should read his excellent narrative.

George Crumb is an adventurous American composer who won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral work Echoes of Time and the River, and a 2000 Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition for Star-Child.

Crumb was influenced in 1955 by Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith, whose neo-Gregorian works can often be heard on “Music from the Hearts of Space” on NPR. If Crumb referred to Bartók, it was because he wanted to; he later struck out in more individual directions.

Fantasia begins with plucked chords, then alternates between these chords and a bowed melody.

Tema Pastorale con variazioni is a theme followed by three variations. The second variation is plucked, with many changes of tempo.

Toccata consists mainly of minor chords piled on each other, and refers to the theme of the first movement.

A work of Crumb’s in tune with Tippet Rise is his Makrokosmos, published in four books. The third book is called Music for a Summer Evening (1974), and the fourth book is called Celestial Mechanics, for piano, four-hands.

George Crumb: Sonata for Solo Cello (1955) Fantasia

Tema Pastorale con variazioni Toccata In featuring occasional works of our own time, we want to highlight the way America has freed music from subservience to European traditions, and stress the rugged individualism of Teddy Roosevelt or Walt Whitman, as well as emphasize the open spaces of Thoreau and Emerson in New England, and the great American West of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thompson.

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YEVGENY SUDBIN & ALEXANDER CHAUSHIAN Saturday, July 8, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano Alexander Chaushian, cello

Silvery Sonatas PROGRAM ALEXANDER BORODIN: Sonata for cello and piano in B minor

Allegro

Pastorale: Andante dolce Maestoso DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: Sonata for Piano and Cello in D minor, Op. 40

Allegro non troppo

Allegro Largo

Allegro INTERMISSION CÉSAR FRANCK: Sonata for cello and piano in A Major

Allegretto ben moderato

Allegro

Recitativo-Fantasia: Ben moderato

Allegretto poco mosso

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Alexander Borodin: Sonata for Cello and Piano in B minor (1860) The themes from both the first and third movements come from Bach’s gorgeous unaccompanied Violin Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001. Borodin, a self-taught cellist, heard his neighbor playing the Bach violin piece and decided to transpose the key to B minor and base a cello sonata on it. The second theme is based on the Bach motif as well, although here Borodin begins to transform it into the traditional Glinka and Balakirev folk music, which became the foundation of all later Russian music (although it was only after meeting Balakirev in 1862 that Borodin became a proponent of Russian nationalist themes). Stalin tried to mandate that all Russian music sound like Glinka, creating single-handedly a forced tradition based on admirable taste, if deplorable means. It is impossible to freeze the evolution of ideas, but nationalist fixations lend themselves to the concept of stopping time.

You could say that Rachmaninoff’s writing recidivist music well into the 1940s (despite Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Gershwin, even Tommy Dorsey) was the natural outcome of Stalin’s dogma.

Aside from music written at Villa Senar near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, Rachmaninoff had understandably lost touch with his genius, which depended on the aura of the Steppes, the vast, scraggly, shrubby wastelands outside St. Petersburg.

Such river-cut grasslands exist in North Park, Colorado, in Montana, and across all of Eurasia, specifically in Ukraine and Mongolia. Their combination of fertility and aridity lent itself to nomadic farming, and to the mythos of the taiga, across whose swamps you can hear the Mongol church bells of Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff. Nabokov has captured it poignantly in Speak, Memory. Such desolate lowlands inspired Rembrandt, van Ruysdael, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church: that is, both the Dutch Masters and the Hudson River School.

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The cello sonata was written in Heidelberg while Borodin pursued a career in chemistry. The way chemicals combine quite arbitrarily possibly resulted in the structure of this sonata, which is a jumble of rapid and unorthodox key changes.

There are similarities between this sonata, the first Cello Suite in G Major, BWV 1007, which Alexander Chaushian played this morning, and the Bach violin sonata, BWC 1001. Both Bach pieces use either oscillating G chords or G minor scales set around very similar fundamental bass notes which move the pieces along from harmony to harmony.

You could make the point that BWV 1001 of 1720 was a trial run for BWV 1007, written later that year.

(The Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was published in 1950, cataloguing some 1000 known works by Bach.)

The sonata (along with many other pieces) was left unfinished by the distracted Borodin and was completed in 1982 by the Russian violinist and composer Michael Goldstein, who also completed Borodin’s F minor String Quintet. A child prodigy, Goldstein wrote a symphony and passed it off as written in 1810 by a contemporary of Beethoven, Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, whose name and career he had invented. The symphony was adopted by intellectuals, who had to rethink Russian musical evolution to accommodate it. Goldstein finally took credit, and was forced to emigrate in 1964, ruined by his genius.

As with most of his pieces, Borodin never heard it performed, except by himself.

This rarely heard piece has been recorded by Yevgeny and Alexander on BIS, BIS-SACD-1858, in DSD surround sound and normal CD stereo.

The meaty piano parts in the Rachmaninoff and Borodin benefit hugely from [Sudbin’s] nearorchestral range and depth, and his sculptor’s sense of form and phrase. Not that he outshines cellist Alexander Chaushian, who displays a deeply

instinctive connection with this repertoire...

This is a near-ideal performance of Rachmaninoff’s magnificent work that stands alongside those by the greatest.

—BBC Music Magazine, February 2012

There is no lack of personality and temperament, and

the bigness of [Chaushian’s] sound contributes to

the music’s symphonic aspirations...no one plays

these sonatas quite like Russian performers do.

Chaushian is no exception, bringing interpretative

insight and native soulfulness into play with his

technical mastery.

—International Record Review, May 2012

César Franck: Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Major (1886)

I. Allegretto ben moderato II. Allegro III. Recitativo-Fantasia: Ben moderato IV. Allegretto poco mosso

The violin sonata was given by Franck as a birthday present to the legendary Eugène Ysaÿe, known as the King of the Violin during his lifetime, teacher of Josef Gingold, William Primrose, and Nathan Milstein.

Ysaÿe told Pablo Casals that Franck had always intended the sonata for both violin and cello, so essentially the cello part was simply transposed into the cello range by the cellist Jules Delsart. Apparently there is a version in César Franck’s handwriting for cello. He may have written it 27 years earlier for Cosima von Bülow (Liszt’s daughter, who later became Cosima Wagner). So it was a re-gifting.

The pianist Alfred Cortot recorded it as a piano sonata.

Ysaÿe played the premiere from memory in total darkness, as the Museum of Modern Painting in Brussels allowed no

lighting after dark. Franck was dead four years later. He never lived to experience the fame that Ysaÿe brought him.

This heartbreaking sonata was the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré’s last recording with her husband, Daniel Barenboim, in December of 1971. In September at Tippet Rise, Matt Haimovitz will workshop his wife Luna Pearl Woolf ’s opera about the legendary match between Jacqueline du Pré and Barenboim.

Its gorgeous long lines are a window into a lost era of passionate and Romantic evocations of society. The French Ambassador to Vienna, the comte de Sainte-Aulaire, described it in his Mémoires: In the centre of the gardens a huge space is always set aside for dancing, and numerous bands, which have been conducted by Strauss and Lanner themselves, play waltzes and operatic selections.

It is this golden midge-flecked dusk which is captured by Brahms and Schubert. No less evocative is the Paris of the Tuileries, lovers whispering under the mulberry trees, comtesses out of Colette strolling along Le Nôtre’s allées of boxwood and chestnuts, living paintings by Manet, Seurat, and Pissarro, oppressed by the impressionism of hot summer evenings, oases away from traffic, a mood unlike anything else in the world, which suffuses the first, dreamlike movement of the Sonata.

The last movement contains one of the most transcendent melodies, a fitting farewell to a great love, to an entire era of gaslamps, carriages, leaded glass, an age without self-consciousness, soon to be replaced by machines, world wars, and irony. From quiet, unassuming, modest, Sunday-afternoon calm, the famous melody rises into peals of cathedral bells and into immortality.

It is this heartbreaing, haunting melody which is probably the “little phrase” of Proust’s imaginary composer Vinteuil, five notes that are “secret, murmuring, detached . . . airy and perfumed.”

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM “After a high note sustained through two whole bars, Swann sensed its approach, stealing forth from beneath that longdrawn sonority, stretched like a curtain of sound to veil the mystery of its incubation.”

Even more impressive in its cello version (it had been a violin sonata in Proust’s time), Franck’s phrase speaks from the core of the most voicelike instrument. It recurs throughout the third movement the way it recurs throughout Proust, until the central metaphor of the novel emerges from its catalyst. A small phrase becomes a wormhole, a transfiguration, a path to immortality.

“…at a certain moment, without being able to distin- guish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils.”

Other candidates for the “little phrase” have been SaintSaëns's first movement and final movement of his Violin Sonata in D minor, Franck’s first and second movements from his Piano Quintet, Debussy’s first movement from his Cello Sonata, Fauré’s Ballade for piano and orchestra, Op. 19, and Reynaldo Hahn’s songs "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" and "À Chloris.” Proust claimed it was the “mediocre” Saint-Saëns, which had been the theme song of his romance with Hahn, but we all have our fictions.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor, Op. 40 (1934) While Dmitri Shostakovich composed on a piano in squalid flats, both of which were luxuries unknown to almost all Russians during the Great Terror, around him his best 72

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friends perished, sometimes out of Stalin’s frustration that Shostakovich himself was untouchable.

Eight years earlier, just before the censors decided to ban his work, he had fallen in love with Yelena Konstantinovskaya, his 20-year-old translator, and was determined to divorce his wife.

In those two weeks, he wrote the cello sonata. By the time it was finished, Nina had won him back.

He had rejected his early radicalism during this brief flirtation and turned to Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, to the comfort food of folk music. The cello sonata is his struggle to put his childhood behind him. As Gould said of Mozart’s sonatas, you have to record them to get them out of the way. This cello-piano sonata is the eye of the storm, a lyrical farewell to harmony before the devastation began, inside him and around him.

Later Shostakovich would delight the apparatchiks with whimsy, echoes of childhood, while at the same time evoking for his general audience the horror, poverty, and hopelessness which turned life in Russia into the Great Terror. Shostakovich composed parodies of folk tunes (which suddenly became moments of immense lyrical beauty) as a counterpoint to the brutality of the regime, at the same time fooling the censors into thinking he was fulfilling Stalin’s recipe for nationalistic tunes. People heard in the music what they wanted to hear.

Edward Said has said* that it is the ability of music to provoke confusion and uncertainty, and the inherent expressive freedom in its different voices, that accounts for the creativity of each individual listener. Modern life is based on conflicting soundtracks, the fragmentation of the formerly single-minded classical symphony.

Stalin, a paranoid psychopath whose name is Russian for “man of steel” (his real name was Josef Djugashvili), tried to lure well-known artists like Nabokov back to Russia by hiring charming diplomats as ambassadors of goodwill who would wine and dine their prey in Europe. * (in John McGreevy's The Music Itself: Glen Gould's Contrapuntal Vision, p. 47)

But the Russians who were trapped inside Russia knew a different story. While American intellectuals like Edmund Wilson praised Stalin, who had become an ally of the U.S. by the end of the Second World War, ultimately twenty million people would die because of Stalinism, which brought famine, the Gulag, purgings.

William T. Vollmann dedicates a chapter of his epic novel Europe Central to the influence of Dmitry’s affair with his translator on the music of the Cello Sonata. Vollmann stresses the composer’s battle between lyricism, young love, and the chaos caused by the loss of his self in another (not to mention life under Stalin). To Vollmann, Opus 40 is a sanctuary which the composer built to live in with his lover, before the charismatic and mature Nina brought him back to the marriage which, like Nabokov’s, allowed Dmitry the safety he needed for his anarchy. Yelena herself was reported to the police and spent a year in prison.

There are two versions of any cello/piano sonata: the cello version and the piano version. It depends on the balances the musicians decide upon, and what credence both give to each other’s instrument. If you listen to a variety of pianists and cellists play Shostakovich’s music, each version is entirely different; musicians themselves determine how to color and balance it, as if it were aleatoric music by Xenakis, where the performer decides many aspects of the interpretation.

You can hear on YouTube a balanced version, almost a guided tour, with Shostakovich himself on the piano, and Daniil Shafran on cello, recorded in 1946: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2xpRD78Yi8.

Later, wilder renditions by Rostropovich or Sol Gabetta build on the foundations of this performance.

The cello sonata begins with the piano playing a version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, over which the cello plays a gorgeous and whimsical reminiscence—of childhood, of the countryside? Some pianists bring out the Beethoven, others let the cello carry the opening. The piano is then left free to vary the Beethoven accompaniment into other octaves.

Imagine if the Moonlight Sonata did that. This is mostly lost behind the gorgeous cello theme. The sonata seems to improvise, then gets around to a bit of Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue had been around for 25 years already) and moves into a bluesy interchange, gradually moving back for a long interlude into the rhapsodic stillness of the initial sighing theme, a dream of any summer, American or Russian. The yearning theme returns and fades away. Sounding like another movement, a slow funeral fugue begins in the cello which the piano tiptoes around, as if Shostakovich is saying that he isn’t a dead master yet (he was 28). Here the steppes loom larger, and the movement ends in a fatalistic D minor, asserting its home key. Rachmaninoff wrote his Third Piano Concerto in D minor: its open, brooding expanses summon up the immense swamps and stark plains of the steppes, a dead canvas which bored children were forced to imitate with vast silent symphonies and novels which became all that was left of their prolonged childhood.

The racing second movement is a moto perpetuo folk melody, almost Bartók, constantly surging, with cello scales spreading to the piano, and morphing into glissades, where scales are slid, or glissandoed, which every cellist does to different effect, some making it otherworldly, some worldly; some a caricature, some offhandedly harmonic. Wild arpeggios then surrounded the scales, until the sky and ground merge and the middle compromise is revealed not as a pulse but as an actual melody, which becomes ethereal and turns into a Ländler and a Scottish reel. The piano’s early chords are transferred to the cello, and the Khachaturian theme is passed between both instruments until the movement turns into a prisyadka, a jumping Cossack climax.

The slow movement begins with the gorgeous theme from Beethoven’s Third Cello Sonata, but immediately wanders off into constant revelations; every 10 seconds brings an epiphany. Another funeral march has that Russian sense of strangification, or displacement, found in the writings of Biely, where the harmonic security of a key structure disappears, to leave the cello and piano in an unrecognizable desert. What they play is harmonic, even old-fashioned: but its context is 2017 Summer Season

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missing. This became a trademark of Shostakovich’s compositions over time, a sense of tabula rasa, an erased palette, whited-out in a blizzard, with no sense of which way is up. In a way, the cello and piano have lost their common language and exist in separate worlds, the opposite of the usual collaboration in chamber music.

The piano improvises badly in the depths of the keyboard until a gorgeous melody suddenly arises, unanchored by any key, and the piano searches through single notes for a home, an identity. The cello chimes in at the end, very Gershwin, plaintive, at the same time a cry from the Russian steppes.

After a few false endings, the piano agrees with the cello at last, a home is found (although it is a sad one), and the cello finishes the cadence. This long finale is a search for the meaning of the movement, of the cello itself, of Russia. But every step into the wilderness is a destination. The question itself is the goal. The beauty lies in the journey. The yearning ringing throughout the last few measures is the love of mist, the sorrow for the loss of the light, which echoes throughout Chekhov and Rachmaninoff.

Although most descriptions of Shostakovich’s works are filled with generalities, it is actually in the unique and specific wanderings of each note that the contribution of the music is to be found.

The final movement begins with a parody of Mozart’s "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," moving on to Mozart’s two similar sonatas in C, all of them childish melodies, before growing into a more adult, massive variation, then an escalating fugue on the theme. The piano breaks into a variation of virtuosic scales before returning to the Mozart (with the cello bursting into scales) and breaking into a contented second theme, a world removed from the Mozart. It could be Dvořák. A childlike folk melody slows the momentum, and suddenly with a sol-do it’s unexpectedly over, as if Mitya has said, Enough: let’s go to sleep.

Shostakovich premiered it on Christmas Day of 1934.

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK TWO CAROLINE GOULDING

The Music of the Spheres

by Peter Halstead

Early philosophers like Plato and Pythagoras felt that the night sky was held together by the glue of music. There was a divinity that shaped our ends. That celestial force was harmony. They claimed there were frequencies associated with different planets, and that the chords created by these frequencies formed a kind of angelic chorus whose amicable tunes created the camaraderie which united the cosmos. In turn, those tonalities were mimicked in our bodies. People were either attuned to the world or out of phase with it. As Hamlet said, “The time is out of joint.” Musicians know that being electrically out of phase creates holes in frequencies, causing harmonies to feel partial, or incomplete, leading to an unsatisfying musical experience.

In the early world, the brain was thought to have areas which were organized based on responses to cosmic harmonies, so that our own moods and dreams and even possibly our actions were controlled by larger modalities. It seems true that full moons and periods of volcanic fog instigate more murders. People exposed to grating noises such as the subway become more on edge. Many techno bands experiment with playing annoying tones for long periods of time, which angers audiences.

Our own earthly music has been a while forming. Early music was filled with strange harmonies, pagan sounds, discordancies, atonalities which would have appealed to Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer who based his music on mathematic patterns other than the logarithmic base formerly in favor.

There were many tunings in the ancient world, most apparent in the variety of ways in which people tuned church organs.

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relative atonality was ironically considered unfit for churches by many prelates. Our parish priest when I grew up considered Bach on the organ to be a threat to God. Possibly the constant inventiveness of great music is an antidote to the rote repetition on which certain models of brainwashing are based, such as the Mass and the French school system.

Less known in the West are the multiplicity of scales and tones used in African and Asian music, the quarter tones and “untuned” nature of Asian and nomadic music, the hard melisma of sub-Saharan tonalities.

The well-tempered scale was finally adopted in the West, because it used an ingenious scale where every note made pleasing sounds in every combination. There were no discordancies or jangles. So the “devil in music” which had so unsettled the ancients was eliminated by “fine tuning.”

This tuning was based on the structure of logarithms, which created an affinity between the mathematical inclination of certain brains and the structure of music.

Today the concept of cosmic harmony is out of fashion. 12-tone music and ostensible atonality has been successfully proselytized by the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, who taught the pianist Eduard Steuermann, who in turn taught the composer Gunther Schuller, the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno, and my own teacher, Russell Sherman. Schuller brought Sherman to the New England Conservatory of Music. This coterie of specialists in modern classical music included Alfred Brendel (who also studied with Steuermann), Artur Schnabel’s son Karl Ulrich Schnabel, the composer Stefan Wolpe, and his wife Irma Wolpe (with whom I also studied).

I grew up musically during the intense center of this transition from the harmonic to serialism. Part of my education involved understanding the warmth and the sensibility inherent in note patterns which sound alien to most audiences. Classical composers would occasionally sneak into forbidden realms, although they always bounded safely back to accepted forms.

Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart briefly explored the notion of tone rows and chromaticism. Haydn would fit consciously off-key notes into classical forms. Bernstein’s studied off-key notes are simply added to accepted forms of Latin rhumbas, Mahlerian episodes, quotes from Schubert. However, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich were always harmonic, even while being innovative, which explains their continuing appeal. John Adams and Philip Glass live safely in Asian harmonic kingdoms. The mind craves resolution, a Hollywood ending.

Not just in music or movies, but also in science. We want our loops closed, our galaxies self-contained, time and space circular, so that the spring always returns.

Atonality is unpopular in the solar system. Asteroids which fall out of harmonic unity with the majority are forced out of orbit and fall to earth as meteors. The centrifugal forces of planets and moons are delicately collaborative. Our own DNA is programmed to take only so much.

However, the role music plays in the structure of the universe has been out of fashion for many centuries. As George Steiner asked in 1961, why has the English language turned away from music? I would ask further, why has Kepler’s notion of the harmonies created by the perpetual motion of stars fallen out of the creative vocabulary? Steiner speculates that certain English rhyme schemes, such as iambic pentameter, are intractable to music. To extrapolate, our creative history has moved towards cacophony rather than harmony. We are a chaotic bunch. The sky has been untuned. But this doesn’t make music disappear. It has simply been discounted.

Universal correspondence remains important because it explains why our own metabolism is uniquely attuned to harmony, rather than discordance. It explains why cooperation, rather than hostility, ensures the survival of a species.

It provides reassurance to anxious poets that the touches of a cosmic presence in the slightest of things might be scientifically accurate. It explains why things we can’t hear and things we can’t see in fact shape our lives. It validates art, whose tentacles reach into the romance of guesses, myths, and abstractions and emerge with literature, music, and painting.

It suggests that the greatest inventions of mankind aren’t facts, but fictions.

It underlies the assumptions I make in many of my poems, such as “Full Circle,” and lends a sense of conscience to existence. All things have consequences. We disregard the laws of humanity at our peril. Ultimately, time and space are a loop, in which every action is noted, and balanced. As Newton believed, every force has an equal and opposite force. Or as St. Augustine wrote, a vice can only be replaced by an equally powerful emotion.

Look, stranger, on this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea.

A Conversation with Caroline Goulding Everything comes out of nothing, out of silence: the world, our existence, music. And it returns to that same silence eventually. Only in accepting that nothingness can something come of it. As Richard II said, “Nor I, nor any man that but man is, with nothing shall be pleased till he be eased with being nothing.”

Note how Richard cancels himself out. He says one thing and then its opposite. Nor I—nor any man. Man that—but man is.

You can’t appreciate anything until you love nothingness.

Until you cast everything aside and start fresh. As an equation, what Richard says almost cancels itself out. It’s like 2017 Summer Season

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what St. Augustine said about the crucifixion: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” He’s said something and then its opposite. If it were an equation it would be zero. But what remains is the residue between the lines. You haven’t gotten anywhere. But that nowhere in fact is the same thing as everywhere.

This is especially true in a world where scientists believe that matter is simply scattered everywhere, and that one thing is rearranged into another thing. So everything is the same, everything is interrelated. This is very Zen, but it’s also what quantum mechanics understands about reality.

As with Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, it’s not about the major monuments, the melody; it’s about the throwaway lines—the scales, the rests. It’s about making jokes with the vocabulary of a scale’s structure, the way Beethoven did later on. The infinite jest. But Mozart and Haydn did it first. You think Mozart is leading up to something, but he isn’t. William James said that the prose style of his brother Henry James was like a vast cathedral, but when you got inside, all there was on the altar was a pair of old gloves or a dead cat.

It’s been about the process. In Mozart’s case, he’s making fun of the cliché of a melody, when in fact the real destination is about the window dressing. Like a Marx Brothers movie, it’s about the throwaway lines.

What most needs saying is what you’re thinking when you don’t know how to express it.

A poem never succeeds in saying what the original emotion was that made a poet want to write that poem. Before you get to the end of the first line, you’ve gone off topic, you’ve digressed. If you write a thousand poems over a lifetime, maybe when you put them all together, you get that one thought that couldn’t be expressed in any one poem. That’s why poets write so many poems: they’re trying to get that one catalyst right, the impulse that makes them write, an emotion that’s impossible to articulate.

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But it’s that digression—puttering, not discipline—that leads to creativity. People who are too disciplined concentrate too often on facts. It’s the puttering, the wasting of time, that leads to real breakthroughs. Richard Feynman discovered new theories of particle physics while playing with paper airplanes with his lab assistants.

Anyone can bring music to music. But it’s bringing other disciplines to music that enriches and explains music. It’s about the metaphor. Pharrell Williams said that when two worlds collide and make a third, you have art. Two things make three. It’s about the metaphor.

Art is about metaphor, parable. It’s about reading between the lines. It’s about describing the passion, the emotion, the Buddhist koans, the parables, the things that can’t be expressed. Music is what can’t be spoken. That’s why music was so popular in Vienna. Metternich had made it impossible to talk about anything without going to jail. So people danced and played music. They went behind the words.

Just when you feel you can’t say it, that’s when you have to figure out what it is and describe it.

Often a poem or a sonata takes a person through an emotional voyage: chord changes, inversions, arpeggios, cadenzas. And when it’s over, you’re back where you started, in the same key, the same note, the same chord. In my end is my beginning, as Eliot wrote. It’s been the voyage, not the destination.

It isn’t that there’s a message, a giant theme. The clues, the answers, are in the small details. The large melodies are only the excuses to say the small truths. We go to a lot of trouble looking for truth, when it’s right in front of us. We live in a fragmented era, when plots are artificial. As David Shields says in Reality Hunger, “momentum derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.”

So what we can bring to music isn’t a fact or a plot, but it’s something entirely unrelated, maybe a snowfall, like the

storm outside my window right now, where each flake is a note, and the way the flakes mantle the ground is the way the notes of a sonata lie over its shape like a blanket. The snow makes a metaphor which suddenly unravels the music. And without that blizzard, without referencing nature, music is the lesser. You need the snow, the parable.

It’s like a collage, or a reflection photo, or photos superimposed on each other: it’s so much more interesting than just the objects themselves. It’s the way they relate and make a third thing out of the dialogue.

Life, like music, is a dichotomy. It’s a contradiction.

Sometimes you realize that the opposite of what you’re thinking is also true. The mind can be both black and white at the same time. This is what Hegel meant by pluralism. One day a piece of music seems to mean one thing, and the next day it means the opposite, and both are true. So you’ve added the inversion of the melody to the melody.

But if you don’t explain that to people, then they miss how much went into it. How a piece is about what it says, and the opposite of what it says. It’s about the silence around it, and the world that it springs out of.

It’s never about the notes. You memorize them and then you forget them, hopefully. When you’re playing truthfully, you think you wrote the notes. You forget where you are, because you’re someplace that no one has ever gone with those notes before.

So when people forget a piece and have to start again, it’s often because they went beyond the piece they memorized, into another piece entirely, and that’s when they created something greater than someone who just played the piece.

That’s when music really happens, if you’re lucky enough to be there for it.

Being open to new ways of talking about music is what I think happens at Tippet Rise, the dialogue that we start between our guests and our artists.

Caroline’s Notes Annotated by Peter PH: Caroline has written a phenomenal essay that reaches behind what she plays to the methods, motives, and mantras of how and why music happens. I’ve put my own no doubt equally inscrutable replies to each of her sentences. Someone once said that two half-wits do not a wit make (speaking of Gilbert and Sullivan).

Caroline’s ethereal clouds cast long shadows on the ground.

These shadows are her music. To find the roots of what she plays, you have to look to the sky.

CG: The Universe scribbles its poem across our beating hearts and leaps at us with such force as we try to understand just for a mere brief second what She means.

PH: As musicians we channel the unknowable energies, the secret meanings of composers, to instruments that only see a few of the millions of colors and tones that make up waves of light and sound.

CG: He means everything and whispers it in secrets, so unbearably crisp, and sharp that our ears can barely recognize His tune.

PH: Music is only heard elegantly after years of pretending at intonations and touches. And even then there’s a good bit of luck. One day, for one concert, we get it right. But even microphones are hard-pressed to hear the difference between that moment of truth and a routine performance. But we know.

CG: With great practice, the senses are brought to the core of that ferociousness itself; a whisper of immaculate power, and gentleness that before was too soft to pick up on and too blinding to accept without automatically tuning it out for fear of a world-familiar, dissipating into the nothingness of now.

PH: Once a word or a note becomes familiar, it is no longer seen or heard, but taken for granted. The poet Richard Wilbur has pointed out that once a bear is called a bear it is 2017 Summer Season

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reduced to a dictionary term instead of being the unspeakable monster we might first see it as. Musicians have to return our vision to the unfamiliar, to the strangeness of the entirely new, and they have to do this dependably each time, without becoming hackneyed or jaded by that repetition. Each time a note is played it’s life or death. You live or you die in each note.

CG: Tuning the ear to witness the rawness of the Poem of the Universe is infinitely worthy of the courage it takes to do such an intelligent act. The effort is a transfiguration of the experience of reality from the mind of habitual pattern to the heart of awareness making space for the kaleidoscopic horizon of feeling through senses.

PH: We have to see and hear each bit of the world as freshly as if we’ve never seen it before. Sometimes you have to slow a piece down or speed it up to wrench it away from the cliché that we’ve gotten used to. Sometimes we have to slow it down because, even though we’ve heard it a thousand times, everyone else might be hearing it for the first time, and it needs to be slow enough that it can be grasped, so that you can hear the edges, the coming and going of a tone, not just the sense of What Just Happened? Where did it go?

CG: The Universe’s Poem transfigures the Cyclical flow of the Sage, as the tales of the Collective Unconscious which have defined, haunted, and tormented us, become forever rewoven with the ferociously gentle whisper, Nothing: PH: A man knocks at a door and a woman answers, screams, and runs away. The man keeps knocking. Finally another woman comes to the door and says, “What do you want?”

“I want to buy this house,” says the man.

“I don’t think you’ll want it,” says the woman. “It’s haunted.”

“Oh, by whom?” asks the man, curious.

“By you,” says the woman, slamming the door.

We are haunted by ourselves, by our memories, by our potential, by our id, by our future. What defines us also reduces us to a mere definition of ourselves. We have to keep ahead of our own idea of who we are. Because when we have become 80

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something, we have closed off all other possibilities of being.

When we order something in a restaurant, we close down the rest of the menu.

We have to reweave ourselves and our pieces at every concert.

CG: That Karmic Soot of the Collective Unconscious, commonly referred to as “me” and repetitively reinforced through the unconscious strengthening of energetic patterns of trauma not fully felt or embodied in the time it occurred due to an instinctive fear of death and torment.

PH: Richard II, Shakespeare’s poet king, says, just before he dies:

Nor I, nor any man That but man is, With nothing shall be pleased, Till he be eased With being nothing.

That is, until you can start from scratch, and accept that each day is a blank page, you can’t write the truth down. You’re blocked by all the other writing on the page. You don’t know what makes you real until you know what it’s like to be completely blank—open to the world and its gamma rays, its beats of the heart, its breezes, its sounds. We don’t even know we have been cauterized by an event until we can step outside ourselves and see what we were before, and what we will be tomorrow, without today’s baggage.

To play Beethoven you have to lose yourself and become Beethoven, and what the world means by Beethoven.

CG: Now these limitations burn tenderly, vibrantly and ecstatically in the fire of that whisper, that Heart of the present moment, Awareness itself where the Sage aches joyously.

PH: To be fully aware of the world is to be like Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, hearing the slightest sound behind you. To be a musician is to be receptive each instant to the joy or fear of each new note, which may change from second to second.

To memorize something and expect it to be the same an hour later is to be playing from a dream that is over.

The world is a cosmic wiseman, who knows what every gesture means, who knows what the wind carries. The artist has to become receptive to the wonders of the world, just as Christ in the garden of Gethsemane became a receptacle for all the evils of the world. We have to learn to receive both the good and the bad in every piece, and be open to the change that one note makes in the rest of the piece.

CG: The whisper, so potent that it overpowers “me,” that language of symbols of the Universe, that Poem of the moment, that Music of the spheres is what makes us crack out of courage, not weakness, breaking down those barriers of fear we so long held of hearing that whisper!!!!

PH: Frequencies come from planets. Gamma rays whistle through us. The universe is kept in balance by melodies we rarely hear, by magnetisms which flow around us, by gravity which holds us to the land. Most of us prefer to live under what Paul Bowles called the sheltering sky, which protects us with ozone and oxygen and clouds from the reality of the blistering electricity of the universe which would destroy us.

The sky also shelters us from seeing too much. To lose sleep and feel strange all day is to be closer to what really exists, not to the comfortable clothes we try to put over this strangeness.

When we see those abnormal visions, we are closer to what the world is without the barriers we put in front of it, without the mask we wear to tame the emotions that are too much for us, to restrain the warmth that might scare small animals away.

The best time to play with any truth is when you are exhausted, haven’t slept, when you are deprived of the smugness of the well-rested ego.

CG: As that Poem allows us to be blasted with such tenderness, we porously die and surrender ourselves fully to the sacrifice of the Universe to find that what we felt was so real in truth was never and so we begin again!

PH: An artist is only as good as what she does right now. If

you play a good note, you’re brilliant. If you play a false note (not necessarily wrong, but maybe just insincere or with the wrong touch) you have compromised the entire piece, everything you stand for, because of a second of laziness.

Every day we are smarter than yesterday, so that means we are always dumb today. You listen to something you recorded a year ago, and you can’t believe how much it missed. Or how you missed that inner melody which you just discovered, which makes your former recording completely clueless. This happens all the time, and you come to expect it. Our consciousness grows every time we blink.

CG: We hear, see, taste, touch and smell, all for that love, the instilling power of that infinite Poem, the Universe through the language, the creative impulse, has shown to us!

PH: To say that the world is structured, an endless lattice of interconnected meanings, is very insightful. The world isn’t prose, which is linear, like a train going from Buffalo to Syracuse. The world is an atom chamber, with links going every which way, with everyone connected by Six Degrees of Separation, like a roundtable in a train yard. Like a poem, the connections are most successful when they are sly. To understand that a Bach fugue or a Brahms intermezzo is a diamond of a hundred connected facets is to see the world with all its reflections. Most of the time we try to limit ourselves to a fact or two, to a facet or two, or even an opinion, which isn’t even a fact. But the world is more complicated than we’d like to admit most of the time.

CG: It shows us itself, the Beaming Universe in all of its glory, and before long we disappear and become everything with the inherent wisdom that we are indeed everything, everyman, every flower, every animal, every molecule of existence itself.

We are.

PH: When we lose our ego, our sense of self, we become part of the galaxy’s interchangeable matter, as quantum physics states that we are. And then we exist in every part of what we do and what we see. We aren’t just selfishly single anymore, but plural. Hamlet meditates that great Caesar, turned to dirt, becomes a cork to plug a wine barrel: 2017 Summer Season

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Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam—and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

CG: She means light and darkness, the Universe. Through code and metaphor is the only way. In order to describe what it is Music does, the Universe speaks numbers to us through Poetry.

PH: Music is just numbers above and below a pitch. We paint by numbers, we play by numbers. Music is a Morse code which has embodied in it our history, our passions, our secrets.

CG: The Universe loves, and we are the embers of the Universe, as whispers in the dark become the Light!

PH: You need darkness to be able to see light. You need silence to be able to hear sound. Things rise from their opposites.

CG: This is a wondrous revelation and liberation from the torture that is often tangled in our hearts. Transfiguration is constant, then, and change, now fully embodied and become, is observed; and the Sage, Golden leaf of the Universe, becomes Poet too.

PH: Out of the Dark Night of the Soul comes the light of vision. A great composition, like a poem, can contain the many motions of the world under its multi-hued coat.

CG: That constancy and change are intrinsically bonded, that they exist equally, simultaneously and in total harmony with one another, and that the Universe is both creator and creation in the rawness of that ferocious whisper called Now, is the freedom, fire and death of the Sages who carry us home on their spacious backs lighting the way with their torches of bombastic sacrifice and sanity.

PH: Each thing contains its opposite. Words become their opposites eventually. “Bad” means good in contemporary slang.

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We can entertain a thought and its opposite thought without compromise. This is what Hegel meant by pluralism. The world isn’t single, it’s plural. The existence of one thing doesn’t white out another thing. In fact, light and dark together present a complete portrait, a Rembrandt chiaroscuro. Life and death make a single portrait, a complete history.

But each note of music only lives for the second it is played, and will be different next time.

CG: The transfiguration of the Sages’ light permeating effervescently through the cycles of being are the luminous extinguishers that set us free from the jail that we never knew existed because, in truth, it never did exist!

PH: There are many stages of enlightenment as we age. The seventh stage of enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism is having a mansion and a swimming pool. Only after you’ve been there are you free to downsize, to live in a small shack, to need nothing. You’re pleased with nothing until you’re eased with being nothing. Note how that is a mathematical statement: eased and pleased cancel each other out. There are two nothings, each meaning the opposite. So if this were an equation, the result would be zero. But in fact something has been said.

This is what Noam Chomsky calls negative syntax.

Light blinds us and extinguishes darkness. Out of darkness comes light. The way we escape from the figure 8 of life is through the transfiguration of art.

CG: Being, feeling and becoming the change itself through the Universe’s code of creative impulse, the creation is an opening into the doorway of enlightenment called unconditionalism.

PH: We accept the world without conditions, without reservations; we love it exactly as it is, as hopefully we love each other.

CG: Also called love, death, freedom, we realize we were never anything but the Sage and the Sage Is! PH: Love is freedom from tyranny, and of course death is

freedom from all sorts of things, although I’d like to think of death as a stage between lives. The Sage may be, but the Yeti Is.

Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

CG: Feeling the discovery that the Sage was never outside to be earned, but Here, unconditioned and true, the idea of transfiguration becomes an illusory and constant flow of endless spontaneity, as the Universe recreates the Sage in its Poem of surrender.

Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery….

PH: As Kafka tells it, a man waits by the Gates of the Law all his life to see who goes in those giant gates. When he is about to die, he says to the guard that he never saw anyone go in those gates. Why not?

“That is because those gates were for you,” the guard answers.

“But you always told me not to ask.”

“So you didn’t ask enough.”

CG: Feeling that there is nothing left to fear of the whisper and capable of hearing it so much that the whisper becomes us, what once was hidden by the thick tales of black and white, now wash away as the soot vibrating between the tensions of that ferociousness to see the truth: that grey is a common feeling.

PH: There are grey transitions between truths, between the whispers, the shades, the hints of truth. Once we become the answer we don’t have to fear the question. You know what a piece is after you have played it perfectly one day. But it might pose different questions the next day, and become inscrutable again.

CG: The forever remakes itself within the cyclical changes of reality as what once was He and She becomes the space of a whisper that is shifted, bent, molded and sculpted. They poeticize the ebb and flow of the infinite transfiguration of the present moment!

PH:

Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, their return, up the high strand,

—from Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold The secret behind the whispers is truth, and once truth is known, it can be fit into a nutshell. Once you’re content, you no longer need a big house.

Music becomes a metaphor for the glue that holds the solar system together with its frequencies, and the salvation of the world is contained in every atom of that magnetism.

The part is inseparable from the whole: so the infinity behind every piece of music is present in every note; once you are focused on its eternity, you see eternity in every particle.

Every note becomes the piece itself, and the drive of the piece is contained in the legato, the soot, between the notes. The despised soot becomes the essential glue, the energy of the piece. The dirt which Caesar becomes turns into a solution, a cork, for a wine barrel.

CB: A Poet’s expression as Sage in a boundless marriage of banter. They harmoniously play and toil within the cycles of change whilst we forever burn away into the karmic soot of nothing.

PH: We have transferred ourselves into the creative soul of the universe, where we exist forever with the abstraction of music. So we have transcended nothingness by becoming part of it. Our matter is simply rearranged. Everything is contained in everything. Matter is fungible: today it’s a cloud, tomorrow it’s a wave. It moves around. This is only good quantum mechanics. We tend not to believe in such mysterious truths as, say relativity, until someone makes a bomb out of it. Or until somebody makes an Oculus Rift virtual world out of quantum mechanics. One day soon our computers will 2017 Summer Season

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be multi-dimensional adventures in 3D space.

Who would’ve thought?

Here’s a poem I wrote about how the sea is transposed as it evaporates to clouds, from which we can pull earth down again as the shadow of a cloud (the same way we can pull ourselves down from the Cloud where we have transfigured ourselves digitally):

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How lofty clouds impose Their shadows on a distant sea, Where flaring cirrus throws Its weight around with gravity,

But blurry and shimmering, alive, Like a moving strand of rain, Umbilicals that jibe And coil below the plane

Planting on the ocean’s glass Pantomimes that seem the same As what we see on country grass Or shone on fields with perfect aim,

And link these flowers to their base, Although in fact the opposite is true (As plants their higher masters trace, And water fakes what water vapor drew),

A commonplace phenomenon On lazy summer afternoons Of transparent sky and beaming sun— Meadows peopled with the heavens’ ruins;

The world so upside-down here That our 737 seems to swim In a waving coral hemisphere Like fish in an aquarium;

But, looking down from Where the racing grades are matched, We see that nature’s copies come With certain misty strings attached,

But still, it’s good to see— If only when the lowly eye Stumbles on infinity— That the roots of earth are in the sky.

As our higher point of view Shows a smoky sort of light Against the water’s background blue Like a loose tail on a kite,

Stumbles on infinity— That the roots of earth are in the sky.

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The Universe as Poet: A Summary of the Weekend’s Music 1. Universe as Poet: Transfiguration through Cycles, Sages, and the Collective Unconscious Caroline has devised a program where pieces of music take us through the vast gallery of the soul.

Our consciousness gradually awakens in six different stages, from Ravel’s meditation on childhood growth in his first sonata, through Bartók’s last sonata where he teaches us how to make our mind a blank and channel our country’s folk music, through Szymanowski’s self-analysis as three types of water myths, anchored by Schoenberg’s seminal Transfigured Night, where compassion allows us to merge with the vast goodness of the night, into Ravel’s Duo sonata, where he searches for meaning in a world stripped of toys, of books, of colleges—the ultimate “unanswered question” where music disassembles the world to find out where love or flowers or melodies can possibly be hiding. Along the way, a Norwegian composer updates a beautiful Handel set of variations: there always had to be a dance. In this first section, we learn how to immerse ourselves in the dream of the world.

2. Awakening from the Dream: Journeys from the Collective Unconscious to Consciousness In this section, we learn how to wake up into the next stage of enlightenment, how to rebuild the world, how to love, from Schumann’s helical studies in improvisation through the absolute joy of Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 3, and from Janáček’s awakening to unrequited love to Beethoven’s finding momentary love in his Piano Trio in E flat.

3. Cycles of Being: from Childhood to Adulthood In this final section, we pass through the gauntlet from adolescence to adulthood. Enescu’s Romanian day, Dvořák’s radiant childhood (beyond which no growth is necessary), and Schumann’s beautiful, dark explosion of life and affection in his second sonata for violin complete the evolution of the violinist from Ravel’s and Enescu’s childhoods to the self-awareness of one of Schumann’s last great pieces before his mind darkened.

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CONVERSATION WITH

J OS H UA R O M A N

By Alexis M. Adams AMA: You’re an extraordinary cellist, but you’ve also done so many other things: you’re a conductor and a composer, you give TED Talks, and you play in clubs. Tell me a little bit about all of that.

JR: Yes, my experience has been...I don’t want to say, “outside the box,” because there never was a box for me when I was a kid. Let’s say I played the cello, but there really wasn’t a classical music infrastructure where I grew up, which was in Oklahoma. If I wanted to collaborate with other musicians there, it was usually outside of the experience that a young classical musician growing up in New York City might have.

So my performances were in people’s houses, or in church, and my first “chamber music” experience was playing in bands, like playing cello in my dad’s band on a Sunday night.

AMA: What kind of a band did your dad have?

JR: He had several different things going on. The first one I played in was this Christian rock worship band. Basically, it was one of those things where he said, “You should play with us!” “OK,” I’d say, “where’s the music” “There is no music,” he’d answer. “So, what I do, then?” “You’ll figure it out.”

“What if it sounds wrong?” “Then play a different note.” That was my experience.

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I played many instruments by the time I left for college. I’d been the lead singer in a band. I played the electric guitar, acoustic guitar, jazz bass, electric bass in rock bands, all sorts of fun stuff. And it wasn’t until I got to conservatory that someone said, “This is what you’re supposed to do.” So I did that for five years, but when I left for Seattle, I immediately got back to saying, “yes” to other things. It just felt so natural and, ironically or not, that’s what built my career.

Doing things outside of the box—but again, I hate to say that because I never understood there was a box.

AMA: What a wonderful way to grow up and learn to be a musician. Or it seems to be. Do you think so?

JR: I do. I think people are beginning to see the superficiality of genre, and I feel like tradition and emotion are so much more malleable than we have allowed them to be. I like not being in that box.

AMA: Some of the great composers were themselves outside of the box in their time. They were stirring things up, being revolutionaries. Think of Wagner, of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. They were writing pieces that people questioned, rioted over, and were astounded by.

JR: I was thinking about that a couple of years ago: what is classical music, really? I decided, I don’t like to call it a

canon. If you look at the history of classical music, it’s not a canon of pieces, it’s a tradition of creativity and innovation that’s handed down with deep thought from generation to generation of composers. That’s the only through-line except that occasionally you’ll have periods of time where everyone uses the same basic instrument set-up, but even that passes on. Even the instruments themselves evolve and change. If they didn’t, Beethoven wouldn’t have come about (laughs). So when I started composing and conducting, I felt like, here’s an opportunity to be like almost every composer, almost every musician before the 20th century. They all did everything.

The training wasn’t specialized like it is now. You can name any composer pre-1900 and they were also at least a decent performer, if not very famous on their instrument. The only notable exception is Robert Schumann and it’s only because he damaged his finger trying to become an even better pianist. You played other people’s music, but you also played your own music. Even if you weren’t a famous composer, you were supposed to know the basics. Because composing helps you interpret and be creative and have a voice.

AMA: You were the principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony (at a very young age, I might add). What a fantastically musical, and musically diverse, city for someone like you—with your background and genre-bending interests—to end up in.

Was there a more perfect place for you then?

JR: I feel like we were good for each other at that time. I wasn’t only at the Symphony, I was the curator at Town

Music where we were able to do some really innovative things. I played in clubs. I collaborated with Sarah Rudinoff, a rock musical theater singer, co-writing songs with her and performing. I actually returned recently and played a Pride Foundation benefit with Sarah and we did a lot of arrangements, including some stuff from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for cello and voice. I even sang backup. It was fun.

Seattle was a safe place to explore and grow. And now, nine years later, I’m doing the same sort of things, but in a different arena. Next month I’m going to the TED conference where I’ll be with scientists, human rights activists, others—it’s inspiring.

AMA: You have a lot going on. How do you keep it all together, not to mention find time to practice?

JR: It’s difficult. I think that’s true, though, also for my friends who just do classical music. It’s tough. There’s so much pressure these days in terms of self-promotion, in terms of creativity. It’s difficult to come up with something that is interesting and visionary enough to be replicable over and over again. So, the whole idea of touring a couple of pieces around for a whole season is mostly gone. Few people manage to do that…but I also can’t imagine how people can do that without being bored. And, I think it’s difficult for people to achieve the level they aspire to career-wise. It basically comes down to the performer having to run his or her own small business. This is hard, but there’s a lot of freedom that comes with it, too.

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WEEK TWO Caroline Goulding and Friends: Universe as Poet: Transfiguration Through Cycles, Sages, and the Collective Unconscious

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CAROLINE GOULDING Friday, July 14, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin Joshua Roman, cello

Moon as Mother: Sage of Soul’s Transfiguration PROGRAM MAURICE RAVEL: Sonata for violin and piano No. 1 in A minor (“Posthumous”) BÉLA BARTÓK: Sonata for violin and piano No. 2 in C Major, Sz. 76, BB

Molto moderato Allegretto

INTERMISSION ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: Verklärte Nacht for Piano Trio, Op. 4 (Arr. E. Steuermann for piano trio)

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Maurice Ravel: Sonata for violin and piano No.1 in A minor, (“Posthumous”) (1897) Ravel was 22 when he wrote this one-movement sonata.

Roger Nichols in Ravel says that “the year 1897 was the last of Ravel’s obscurity.”

Of the sonata, he says it veers rather between Franckian intensity and modal freshness. Where the two combine, as at the end, the result is striking and bears a strong resemblance to the style of Delius, who was in Paris at the time. The opening theme, played by the violin, shares with that of the later Piano Trio a Dorian outline and an asymmetric rhythm (here too possibly with a suggestion of “Basque coloring”?), but while Ravel could make something of the modality, integrating such asymmetry was as yet beyond him.

This is early Ravel, shone through with the light of a Parisian childhood, which it paints with a gorgeous, yearning Impressionist palette, repeating the initial theme, which tries to break out into the sky, until the same notes are revealed to be its apotheosis, a farewell to adolescence. The piece is older than its years; it grows from games of loop-the-loop into a very conscious universal wisdom.

The gypsy “Tzigane” which follows is really a separate movement, a moto perpetuo based on the repetitive figure from the opening section around which the piano weaves playground arabesques which turn jazzy at the end, some 27 years before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral would 13 years later echo the piano’s sonorities here.

This piece was discovered posthumously.

Béla Bartók: Sonata for violin and piano No. 2 in C Major, Sz. 76 (1922) Molto moderato Allegretto This is actually Bartók’s last sonata for violin and piano.

You get to listen as a Romanian hora lungă is improvised.

The Bartók scholar László Somfai surmises that “Bartók recreated the evolution of peasant music...in miniature, from the improvisatory ‘ur-form’ (using his own themes) to the crystallized stanzaic formation of lyric songs.” Bartók wrote that “The violin part of the two violin sonatas… is extraordinarily difficult, and it is only a violinist of the top class who has any chance of learning them….” He dedicated this piece to the niece of the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim.

Bob Dylan said, “I’d like to be able to play the guitar like Leadbelly, and then not.” There is a negative space quality to this improvisation, where the violinist is asked to forget the notion of the Romantic violin entirely, to forget herself even, and let the country create a song in its own language, to let the universe steer.

Karol Szymanowski: Mythes, Op. 30 (1915) La Fontaine d'Aréthuse Narcisse Dryades et Pan Despite being rejected by the conservative musical elite, even though he was briefly Director of the Warsaw Conservatory, Karol Szymanowski later became the most celebrated Polish composer of the early 20th century, due to a determined crusade by his friends, such as the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the composer Witold Lutosławski.

After the Conservatory was shut down by the government in 1930, he moved to the Villa Atma (“Soul” in Sanskrit), now

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the Karol Szymanowski Museum, a beautiful wooden mountain chalet in Zakopane, a ski resort at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. He was determined to create a Polish national voice by adapting the folk songs of his native Carpathian Mountains before he died of tuberculosis seven years later. Even in 1915, in the thick of the First World War, he felt that he had begun this voice in Mythes.

As would happen to Rachmaninoff, the Bolsheviks would in three years, in 1918, destroy Szymanowski’s family estate in the Ukraine, where he composed Mythes. The piano would be thrown in the lake. His youth, his gestation period, would be over. His country and his home taken from him, like Rachmaninoff, like Mann, like Nabokov, he set out to create a new one out of art. But he was dying of tuberculosis. He didn’t have much time.

Mythes is a sonata, with the usual fast-slow-fast movements, with a descriptive program involving various kinds of water imagery. Programmatic music had been forsaken by the Romantics, but Wagner, and on the other side of the hill, Stravinsky, had continued its traditions. The piece evolved out of his travels to the port of Syracuse on Sicily, the source of Arethusa’s spring.

In “The Fountain of Arethusa,” the nymph Arethusa is turned into a spring by the god Artemis to save her from the advances of the river god Alpheus. Like Liszt’s "Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este," water frames Arethusa anxiously, cascading down a mountain stream on the piano, over which the nymph’s descending chromatic torch song vibrates on the violin’s high E string.

You can hear the chase of Alpheus in the frenetic midsection, until only Arethusa’s song remains, all tremolos and glissandi, where the finger sweeps up the violin neck.

In the second movement, “Narcissus,” a beautiful young man falls in love with himself and drowns in his own reflection in the still water. Water swirls around him, although less frantically than it does Arethusa. This is a cantilena, a song for the violin, with meditative glissandi and chromaticisms.

In the third movement, “Dryads and Pan,” the violin imitates

the thousand voices of the trees, the murmur of insects, the hot summer night, the wind in the leaves. And dryads dancing. Szymanowski achieves his exoticism by layering keys over each other, by mixing in Debussy, Ravel, late Scriabin, eastern Mediterranean and Asian half-tones until he creates from his own eclectic style.

Pan’s eerie flute creates a sudden calm, after which the night insects buzz, and the wild dance resumes, but calms down in the sunrise like the smiles of a summer night. The violin (masquerading as the flute) uses two-note trills, tremolos, glissandi, left hand pizzicati and quarter tones, before dying away over the deep trembling of the piano.

The universal lattice of myth bears witness above to the antics of its characters—gods, dryads, nymphs, and narcissists— and in the end, the deep river winds on. In my end is my beginning.

Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht for Piano Trio, Op. 4 (Arr. Eduard Steuermann for piano trio) (1899) Schoenberg wrote this in three weeks after meeting his teacher’s daughter and his own future wife, Mathilde, while vacationing in Payerbach at Semmering. (Another example of music inspired by the outdoors.) The string sextet version is more jagged and existential than his later version for string orchestra of 1917, revised in 1942. Steuermann, who taught my teacher Sherman, made this arrangement for Piano Trio.

You can hear both Brahms and Wagner here, especially the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde, which led Schoenberg to his twelve-tone system for composing music, in reaction against the hermetic Waltz culture which had subsumed Vienna. Essentially, a theme consisting of all twelve tones of the scale was used as the basis for a fugue.

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM of the same name, "Verklärte Nacht": it is transformed into the universe itself, as are we, beyond all the griefs and joys it evokes. The universe transcends any artificial social rules we try to impose on it. We are elevated by compassion and by art into the universe itself. Dehmel was a modernist, who believed in the permutations and loss of self described in Caroline’s notes in this program, which are a guide through the philosophy behind this great seminal center of serialism and the music of the future, from which so many pieces have sprung.

Schoenberg’s student Anton Webern outlined the five themes: 1. A couple walking in the moonlight, “suggestive of deep sorrow.”

2. “The passionate plaint of the woman, full of remorse.”

3. “A longing for maternal happiness” and a return to the opening moonlight theme.

4. “The comforting reply of the man.”

5. In the transfiguring finale, “the first tragic motif, now relieved of its melancholy, sounds as if removed from the earthly plane.”

These themes are based on the five sections of Dehmel’s poem below, translated by Mary Whittall: 1.

Zwei Menschen gehn durch kahlen, kalten Hain; der Mond läuft mit, sie schaun hinein.

Der Mond läuft über hohe Eichen; kein Wölkchen trübt das Himmelslicht, in das die schwarzen Zacken reichen.

Die Stimme eines Weibes spricht: Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood; the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.

The moon moves along above tall oak trees, there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance to which the black, jagged tips reach up.

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2.

"Ich trag ein Kind, und nit von Dir, ich geh in Sünde neben Dir. Ich hab mich schwer an mir vergangen.

Ich glaubte nicht mehr an ein Glück und hatte doch ein schwer Verlangen nach Lebensinhalt, nach Mutterglück “I am carrying a child, and not by you.

I am walking here with you in a state of sin.

I have offended grievously against myself.

I despaired of happiness, and yet I still felt a grievous longing for life’s fullness, for a mother’s joys 3. und Pflicht; da hab ich mich erfrecht, da ließ ich schaudernd mein Geschlecht von einem fremden Mann umfangen, und hab mich noch dafür gesegnet.

Nun hat das Leben sich gerächt: nun bin ich Dir, o Dir, begegnet." and duties; and so I sinned, and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex to the embrace of a stranger, and even thought myself blessed.

Now life has taken its revenge, and I have met you, met you.”

4.

Sie geht mit ungelenkem Schritt.

Sie schaut empor; der Mond läuft mit.

Ihr dunkler Blick ertrinkt in Licht.

Die Stimme eines Mannes spricht: She walks on, stumbling.

She looks up; the moon keeps pace.

Her dark gaze drowns in light.

A man’s voice speaks:

"Das Kind, das Du empfangen hast, sei Deiner Seele keine Last, o sieh, wie klar das Weltall schimmert!

Es ist ein Glanz um alles her; Du treibst mit mir auf kaltem Meer, doch eine eigne Wärme flimmert von Dir in mich, von mir in Dich.

Die wird das fremde Kind verklären, Du wirst es mir, von mir gebären; Du hast den Glanz in mich gebracht, Du hast mich selbst zum Kind gemacht."

Er faßt sie um die starken Hüften.

Ihr Atem küßt sich in den Lüften.

Zwei Menschen gehn durch hohe, helle Nacht.

“Do not let the child you have conceived be a burden on your soul.

Look, how brightly the universe shines!

Splendour falls on everything around, you are voyaging with me on a cold sea, but there is the glow of an inner warmth from you in me, from me in you.

That warmth will transfigure the stranger’s child, and you bear it me, begot by me.

You have transfused me with splendour, you have made a child of me.”

He puts an arm about her strong hips.

Their breath embraces in the air.

Two people walk on through the high, bright night.

5.

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CAROLINE GOULDING Saturday, July 15, 10:30 AM The Domo David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin Joshua Roman, cello

Awakening from the Dream: Journeys from the Collective Unconscious to Consciousness PROGRAM ROBERT SCHUMANN: 6 Studies in Canon Form

Nicht zu schnell

Mit innigem Ausdruck

Andantino Innig

Nicht zu schnell

Adagio ROBERT SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 3 in G minor, Op. 110

Bewegt, doch nicht zu rasch

Ziemlich langsam - Etwas bewegter - Tempo I

Rasch - Etwas Zuruckhaltend bis zum langsameren Tempo - Tempo I

Kräftig, mit Humor INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No .2

Poco sostenuto—Allegro ma non troppo

Allegretto

Allegretto ma non troppo

Finale. Allegro

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Robert Schumann: 6 Studies in Canon Form (1845) Nicht zu schnell Mit innigem Ausdruck Andantino Innig Nicht zu schnell Adagio This was written for a special kind of piano which had a pedal which could hold a bass note while the piano played other themes above it. The middle pedal on a piano, the sostenuto pedal, can sustain such a note, but the “pedal piano” was like an organ, where a separate mechanism entirely operated outside the world of the normal piano. Schumann was a great organist, who wrote many amazing pieces for organs as well as his piano pieces.

A canon is a kind of round, where one voice starts a theme like "Frère Jacques," and then the second voice (usually the other hand) comes in a few seconds later to play the same song, but since it’s a few seconds late, the harmonies of the first melody start to combine with its own delayed sounds to make a third piece. Again, Pharrell Williams: two worlds collide to make a third. Ostensibly he was teaching Clara about counterpoint.

But in using Bach, he was trying to outdo Bach: as Dickens wrote, “He do the police in different voices.” Like Chopin’s études, these pieces build upon repeated Bach-like themes to a great cathedral of organ sounds. From something which originally sounds pedantic, Schumann creates a great upwelling of faith, an awakening of sensibility and soul from simple notes. Like the Carnaval, Schumann’s different voices and personalities emerge from fugue-like figures that would seem impervious to Romantic manipulation, and merge to form an entire novel of characters.

This extraordinary unknown work has been written for two hands, for four hands on one piano, and adapted by Debussy for two pianos.

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In the midst of the serious work of rebuilding the universe through music, we also have to have a good time. Here the tendrils, the dendrites, the vines of staid musicology entwine into carillons, into cathedral bells of pure worship, interspersed with gorgeous summer songs which finally fade away into nothing.

Robert Schumann: Piano Trio No. 3 in G minor, Op. 110 (1851) Bewegt, doch nicht zu rasch Ziemlich langsam—Etwas bewegter—Tempo I Rasch—Etwas Zuruckhaltend bis zum langsameren Tempo—Tempo I Kräftig, mit Humor This is the last of Schumann’s four trios. The mystery of its Romantic turbulence is its secret: clarify it and the blossom dies. It begins in the middle, as if interrupted at the coda. In its elegant Düsseldorf graces, it radiates everything that is golden about that magical era.

Despite the attempt to find madness or decay in this music, it is one felicity after another, endless creativity, a multitude of themes, all in a state of absolute grace, with the magnificent darkness of swirling waters, while still sitting, well composed, in a drawing room filled with robust ports and charming anecdotes. People who define music by its notes and chords miss the whirling carriage wheels, the Christmas markets, the quiet afternoons in the park. There is music for madness, and music of sheer charm, as here. Here everyone is balanced, sharing equally in the airs which are passed around like glasses of Spätburgunder. If anything, the burnished walnut of the paneled chords, the profusion of marches under the lindens, are partygoers who have no idea of which room to dance in. Here no anxieties tread, no omens foreshadow, but the portraits on the walls step down to the Schuhplattler,

to the Ländler, to the quadrille. In his Düsseldorf songs, Schumann paints soldiers, servants, bandits. Here they come together to party.

You can easily hear people waltzing over the grave in Ravel’s "La Valse," in Strauss’s Zarathustra. Here you find no such premonitions. This is the center of a world discovered waking to the bright day after a good sleep. Enough with madness.

This is pure contentment. You can’t read a thing into it. It is an unassailable diamond. When Schumann went mad, he stepped away from the desk to do it.

Leoš Janáček: Piano Trio: “Kreutzer Sonata”

Adagio—Con moto Con moto Con moto—Vivo—Andante Con moto—(Adagio)—Più mosso

Janáček wrote this quartet (from which the Trio was later adapted) over two weeks, supposedly thinking of Tolstoy’s novella, “The Kreutzer Sonata” of 1889, which was inspired

by Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata (the Violin Sonata No. 9 of 1803), dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, the finest violinist of his day, who never performed the sonata, declaring it unplayable.

Tolstoy felt that music was the shorthand of emotion, but not in a good way. Commentators, anxious to maintain the reputation of the great author of War and Peace, describe “The Kreutzer Sonata” as an iconoclastic renunciation of social institutions, accepted conventions, and the lifestyle of the cultured class. However, Tolstoy’s story is a decidedly misogamous and misogynous tirade against love, sex, women, marriage, and Beethoven himself. Tolstoy felt that music led to sex, which led to marriage, which led dependably to misery. G. K. Chesterton, also a devout Christian, wrote publicly to Tolstoy, “you pity humanity because it is human.”

Things usually come to mean their opposite, and so Tolstoy’s interdiction became over time its opposite, an enticing statement of passionate, forbidden love, partially due to René Prinet’s 1901 well-known painting, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” depicting a dramatic kiss between a pianist and a violinist.

The history of music is filled with impoverished “house tutors” who fall in love with their wealthy students. Such affairs, usually just wishful thinking, wove through the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others. Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia uses a similar situation (where contemporary characters live out the earlier lives of Byron and his brilliant daughter Ada, who essentially foresaw the computer, as well as the lives of Goethe’s characters in his novel Elective Affinities, set in the same year as Arcadia, 1809), as a framework to discuss chaos theory. All the characters reflect the affinities which electrons share for one another, as Goethe supposed, and whose affinities produce both the interactions of silicon chips and the chemistry of human attraction. Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels spring from such a disparate relationship.

Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the novel on which Stoppard based Arcadia. In Julie, the legendary love affair of the noblewoman Héloïse d’Argenteuil with her tutor, the great logician and philosopher Peter Abelard (an affair known only by seven love letters later discovered), is relived by the noble Julie d’Etange and her impoverished tutor, Saint-Preux. Telling a story through letters was the model on which the English novel was based, starting with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (an inspiration to Rousseau). Even Dracula is an epistolary novel.

Today, 84 Charing Cross Road, and Griffin and Sabine are examples of popular stories told through letters.

The story of Julie was based on Rousseau’s passion for Louise-Éléanore de la Tour du Pil, Baroness de Warens, and was an attempt to resolve reason and passion, whose moral disconnect was the motivation behind much of the literature of the 18th century.

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM The Baroness de Warens was an adventuress who had stripped the Baron of his money and fled with the gardener’s son to Savoie, where she became a spy for King Victor.

Rousseau, her steward, shared her favors with her other steward, Claude Anet.

Rousseau had fled home at 16, where he had been patronized and humiliated as the poor relation of his mother’s family, and became an adventurer. Madame de Warens raised him from an uneducated, stammering engraver’s apprentice to a philosopher and musician. After he married, the Baroness was happy to fulfill his need for a mother.

Seventy-two editions of the novel in French appeared between 1761 and 1800; it was the most discussed book of the century, but has been virtually unavailable in English since 1810. It was banned by the Church, along with Rousseau’s other novel, Emile. Schopenhauer felt Julie was one of the four greatest novels ever written.

Rousseau was forced to flee arrest in Paris and experienced growing persecution during his travels in Europe. He felt that the constraints of society kept people from the naturally happy state of the Noble Savage. “Love,” Julie tells SaintPreux, “shall be the major business of our lives.” But her duty to her parents (and her social position) doom the affair, although it is complicated by an abusive father. Rousseau believes that most men are fickle, and sensible young women would be well-advised to avoid falling in love with them.

In Schubert’s Winter Journey, Ian Bostridge documents that Wilhelm Müller’s poem (on which the Schubert song cycle Winterreise was based) specifically identifies the wanderer as having been thrown out of a warm house in winter for falling in love with his mistress.

Janáček uses the framework in this Schubertian and Beethovenian sense, to declare his love for Kamila Stösslová.

In 1917, the 63-year-old Janáček fell in love with Kamila, who was 25. Their Platonic affair continued through letters, and Janáček lives out his fantasy through the confessional program of the sonata. Janáček told Kamila that the Second 98

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Quartet was his “first c­ omposition that sprang from directly experienced feeling.” Although all commentators, starting with Anton Webern, describe the sonata in terms of the plot of Tolstoy’s story, in fact the sonata is Janáček’s working through his conflicted feelings for Kamila, and the despair of what he may have suspected was an impossible love.

His “recitative” melodies are speeches to her, known in German opera as sprechstimme. The pathos of their age difference and the impossibility of his love is set against the ecstasy he feels in being able to feel love, despite the circumstances. Driving rhythms create an intensity of sound beyond what earlier composers had drawn from the three instruments of a trio. Beethoven begins his Violin Sonata No. 9 (on which Janáček based his trio) with a descending four-note motif, each note three notes apart. The chords beneath these notes give no clue of what key they’re in, or in what century they were written. The motif has no identity, no homeland. In a way, the homeless artist (which we all are without love) is the theme of both sonatas, not to mention all the writing that swirls around the music. To be alienated (Entfremdung) in German is to be a stranger (Fremdling), to be a man without a key, or to quote Robert Musil’s great unfinished novel written during this period of German national wandering, to be The Man Without Qualities.

Janáček recognized this essentially homeless quality of Beethoven’s initial theme, and based his entire sonata on it.

T. S. Eliot wrote his poem The Waste Land in 1922, a year before this sonata: O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent “What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

The Charleston rhythm captured by Eliot in his Scott Joplin homage above is the Viennese waltz, now replaced after the war by a sense of anomie, by the wasteland that would lead to World War II. The First World War had answered no questions: it had just confirmed that rationality was going to

prove no solution to the human condition.

Or, as Matthew Arnold wrote at the end of Dover Beach: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That is, without love, chaos is come again. This is what Eliot felt, and what Janáček felt.

The second movement is a scherzo made up of a polka and a theme from the original Beethoven work.

The third movement of the quartet begins with a plaintive dialogue between the first violin and cello, followed by a frantic outburst of glassy sound ("sul ponticello"—to be played close to the violin’s bridge) in the second violin and viola. The canonic melody in the outer voices is derived from the lyrical, peaceful second theme of Beethoven's sonata. This melody and its ponticello echo continue to alternate and overlap with mounting intensity until an ecstatic climax (childbirth) is reached. Janáček confided that the third movement was a musical rendering of his wish that Kamila would bear a child of his.

In the fourth movement, Beethoven’s (and Janáček’s) homeless theme repeats. Instead of Beethoven’s more optimistic jovial ending, Janáček introduces an unsure tremolo, and the piece ends as it began, with the unanswered question.

Books to Read: Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations, John M. Warner: Penn State, 2016, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge: Knopf, 2015

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 2 (1808) Poco sostenuto—Allegro ma non troppo Allegretto Allegretto ma non troppo Finale. Allegro Unlike the “homeless” Kreutzer Violin Sonata of 1803, this piece, originated in Beethoven’s mind and notebooks around the same time, had found its home, and it was Vienna.

This piece was dedicated to Countess Marie von Erdödy, in whose house Beethoven had taken up residence in that year. Beethoven was actively considering leaving Vienna and Countess von Erdödy had helped him scout for patrons, developing an alliance between Prince Lobkowitz, Prince Kinsky, and Archduke Rudolph, which resulted in an annual salary of 4,000 florins, contingent upon Beethoven remaining in Vienna, which he consequently did for the rest of his life.

Out of gratitude, Beethoven wrote and dedicated the two piano trios to the Countess. He had moved some 80 times around Vienna, but for now, he had found his base. (If he didn’t have a flat, he had an E flat.)

The Countess was a fine pianist who lived in a manor house (now a museum) in Jedlesee, a part of Heiligenstadt, a suburb of Vienna. Beethoven turned to her after he broke up with the Countess Julie Guicciardi, to whom he had taught piano and dedicated the Moonlight Sonata. Beethoven wrote to his friend Franz Wegeler, "you can hardly believe how desolate, how sad my life has been since these last two years; this change was caused by a sweet, enchanting girl, who loves me and whom I love. After two years, I am again enjoying some moments of bliss, and it is the first time that—I feel that marriage could make me happy, but unfortunately she is not of my station—and now—I certainly could not marry now."

In 1803 Julie became engaged to the Count von Gallenberg, an amateur composer, and moved to Naples. For a few years before he took up with the Countess Erdödy, Beethoven was 2017 Summer Season

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM close to Josephine Brunsvik, the Countess Deym, after the death of her husband.

By 1808 Nicky Erdödy had been estranged from her husband Peter for seven years. She was 28, and Beethoven was 37.

There has been speculation that either she, Antonie Brentano, or Josephine Brunsvik was Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved.”

During that year, Beethoven gave concerts at Nicky’s house, which she would host. She remained friends with him all his life, unlike most of his other women friends.

The Erdödys were great landowners in Hungary and relatives of the Bavarian royal family. They bought the Palais Erdödy in Vienna from the Esterhazys. They may have succeeded in taking back Marie’s inheritance, not that it could have helped them: when the Soviets invaded Vienna during World War II, the family’s estates and goods were appropriated and they were forced into exile, impoverished.

But in 1808, she and Beethoven were immortal. This trio is the souvenir of that time. You can hear intimations of eternity in its themes, cousin to the Fifth and Pastoral Symphonies, which Beethoven had just written. All these melodies were swirling around in Beethoven’s notebook in 1803, at the end of his time with Julie Guicciardi, so Marie Erdödy provided him not with the themes, but with the security to flesh them out.

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CAROLINE GOULDING Saturday, July 15, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn David Fung, piano Caroline Goulding, violin

Cycles of Being: from Childhood to Adulthood PROGRAM GEORGE ENESCU: Impressions from Childhood (cycle of a child) Op. 28

"Ménétrier" ("fiddler")

"Vieux mendiant" ("Old beggar")

"Ruisselet au fond du jardin" ("Brook deep in the garden")

"L’Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur" ("The caged bird and the cuckoo on the wall")

"Chanson pour bercer" ("Lullaby")

"Grillon" ("Cricket")

"Lune à travers les vitres" ("Moon through the windows")

"Vent dans la cheminée" ("Wind in the chimney")

"Tempête au dehors, dans la nuit" ("Storm outside in the night")

Lever de soleil (Sunrise) ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK: 4 Romantic Pieces, Op. 75 (cycle of adolescent)

Allegro moderato, B flat Major

Allegro maestoso, D minor

Allegro appassionato, B flat Major

Larghetto, G minor INTERMISSION ROBERT SCHUMANN: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D minor

Ziemilich langsam—lebhaft

Sehr lebhaft

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

George Enescu: Impressions d’enfance (Cycle of a Child) Op. 28 (1940) "Ménétrier" ("Fiddler") "Vieux mendiant" ("Old beggar") "Ruisselet au fond du jardin" ("Brook deep in the garden") "L'Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur" ("The caged bird and the cuckoo on the wall") "Chanson pour bercer" ("Lullaby") "Grillon" ("Cricket") "Lune à travers les vitres" ("Moon through the windows") "Vent dans la cheminée" ("Wind in the chimney") "Tempête au dehors, dans la nuit" ("Storm outside in the night") "Lever de soleil" ("Sunrise") This is music from Romanian folklore. It covers the course of a day in the growth of a child (day, night, and the following morning), based on themes from Bukovina folk music. There are many modern additions to Enescu’s gypsy violin: scoops, pluckings, trills, down bowings, acciaccaturas, the double harmonics of "open string chords," rapidly changing intonations, even, a minute and a half into “Fiddler,” the beginning of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. There will be much mimicry as the day progresses: flowing water, cuckoos, storms, birds, wind whistling in the chimney, demanding an extramusical vocabulary from the performer.

This is as much a portrait of Romanian consciousness as Szymanowski’s Mythes portrayed his inner Ukrainian psyche.

It is interesting that Enescu fled into his memories to avoid the war raging around him. He was 59; it takes a lifetime to learn enough to tell the story of our childhood.

One of the greatest violinists of his age, Enescu was also a child prodigy, a brilliant pianist, and a legendary conductor.

He was admitted to the conservatory at 7. He knew Brahms, Bartók, and Shostakovich. He studied with Fauré at the same time as Ravel. Ravel’s violin sonata was influenced heavily by the extraordinary high-wire playing of Enescu.

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He taught many of the great violinists of his era, including Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Grumiaux, and Ida Haendel.

Menuhin said Enescu was “the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician, and the most formative influence I have ever experienced.”

Antonín Dvořák’s: 4 Romantic Pieces, Op. 75 (1887) Allegro moderato, B flat Major Allegro maestoso, D minor Allegro appassionato, B flat Major Larghetto, G minor This is Dvořák’s cycle of adolescence. The piece was originally a Trio, whose four movements were called Cavatina, Capriccio, Romance, and Elegy or Ballad. Notes exist indicating he planned a further movement, as the suite ends unexpectedly with a slow movement. Dvořák’s motto was “God, Love, Motherland.” During his life he never strayed far from these values. Ironically, to someone for whom family was so important, he lost three of his children.

As with Mozart, his personal tragedy was deeply buried in his music. His Stabat Mater and his Requiem are driven by his grief, as are many of his symphonies.

Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana were the first Bohemian composers to achieve international recognition, but as a Czech Dvořák was aware that he was looked down upon by the urbane musicians of Vienna. In writing his later American music, like the American Quartet and From the New World, his Ninth Symphony, he espoused the same geographic underclass he discovered in both countries. Dvořák’s father was a butcher. His family had no money to help with his musical education. At the age of 33, Dvořák had written four symphonies, but he still couldn’t afford to own a piano.

The sheer joy and melodicism of his writing raises it to the level of the greatest composers. Like Beethoven, his drive and his endless creativity keep us on the edge of our seats while he is in the room.

These bouncing folk dances indicate that Dvořák’s childhood was that happy idyll that we wish for our own children and grandchildren. Dvořák is one of the very few eternally innocent and ecstatic statesmen of music. The melodies of this gorgeous suite are heartbreaking, and as beautiful as anything ever written. In the face of such beauty, there is nothing you can read that will do any better than simply listening.

Robert Schumann: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D minor, Op. 121 (1851)

Ziemilich langsam—lebhaft

Sehr lebhaft

Leise, einfach Bewegt The great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, who debuted this piece with Clara Schumann, wrote to his friend, Arnold Wehner:

lebhafter (somewhat faster) section, as the spare notes become gorgeous, and you realize they were gorgeous all along, only you couldn’t hear them for all the space surrounding them: the silence deafened them. Lush chords on the violin, accompanied by arpeggios running softly the length of the piano, deepen the melody. The arpeggios become their own melody, developing real character. My teacher Sherman used to insist that scales and arpeggios had melodies concealed inside them. Here Schumann makes sure that is apparent.

The fourth movement is marked “emotional” (bewegt). This is what is meant by Romanticism. It radiates still, 166 years later, the spirit of the dark, mysterious, luxurious salons where sophisticated miracles of musical catharsis happened dependably in a way that would never be repeated. Returning to D minor shouldn’t be so joyous, so jazzy, so beautiful, but all the glory of the age, the glitter, the uniforms, the gowns, the ballrooms, is packed into this movement by a composer it has been customary to find diminished in his powers, descending into madness—but this is anything but. This is a genius at the height of his glory, writing sounds that are inexplicably filled with all the images history might attribute to Empire, to great civilizations at their peak.

I consider it one of the finest compositions of our times in respect of its marvelous unity of feeling and its thematic significance. It overflows with noble passion, almost harsh and bitter in expression, and the last movement reminds one of the sea with its glorious waves of sound.

The “Great” violin sonata of Schumann is well-named.

It is the finale to Caroline Goulding’s weekend Tour de Force of Bildungsmusik, music that proceeds from childhood to maturity.

The third movement, plucked from the strings, morphs into a solitary two-note figure surrounded by silence, barely filled in by the piano. This is then filled in further in the Etwas 2017 Summer Season

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WEEK THREE JENNY CHEN

Night Music When I think of Chopin’s Nocturnes I think of that despairing French photo, maybe by René-Jacques, when the world was in black and white and every kiss was a matter of life or death, coming just after the war when the universal instinct was to make love in the ruins, and Paris was in ruins, as were people, so I think of that photo of the night flying down some rain-soaked stairs to the dark dirty banks of the Seine, dank underworld highways of sex and failure which surround us in our trench coats, glistening in the rain, on the run from the night, like Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, losers with lamplit halos, lovers of lost color, of daylight and dead music, trapped in the steel of cities destroyed by their own technologies, by the engines of war, knowing that leaves have been dead in the countryside for months, that nothing will come of the spring, that first love is the beginning of betrayal, but still the camera flies down the Fritz Lang steps of the storm, holding back all that despair, the small rooms of the night, renounced by the vast clueless rage that moves the world, yet rhyming still the mesh of perfect marriages with dappled carriages, even though rhymes no longer matter to a society blown apart by weapons and the rain of rust, fog hurling itself

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around those filthy river walks where transvestites shiver in the litter, hoping even now that the chilling, stripping rain will bring auras to the street lamps and that somewhere in the mist someone sings for real, all the decades of deceit ripped away, and there the photo stands, listening to night, waiting for morning, for the flirting, restorative day, aiming at tenderness despite the baggage of camp, the sniggers of the broken, strangifying and strangling the walking dumb, the busted, the aficionados disgusted with their own expertise, their inability to start over—it’s all there in that photo, in the music of night, the Kantian echo of black and white, where everything is either true or false, before philosophers started to dicker, to recant (as Freud, Jung, Sartre, and Eliot all did), too late as always, their doubts hushed by acolytes who were already profiting from their youthful mistakes: well, here’s Chopin’s rain again, washing out sores, and let’s hope it scours all of us.

In this most naked of confessions entrusted over the masking river swell of warm certainty where the conclusion of the right hand is as affirming as the left, what moves me

are the harmonies sprung out of older leftovers, new subtleties invented from already dying notes, cascading and spiraling stairways entirely independent of rhythm, the busy demands of reality overcome with invention, the right hand in its own world, anchoring itself just in time in the river on the bottom, the gently flowing Danube of the salons never descending into those embarrassing gallery-opening clichés, keeping its own company and consequently its timelessness: never imitated, never solved, still hanging, small fragile scents in the summer air, too personal to become a slogan, a motto, a movement, too inner to be a theme.

Musicians often keep pictures or stories in their minds to help them capture the mood they want, or conversely capture the mood by ignoring the piece, a bit like inner tennis where a mantra’s purpose is to distract the player so the body can go about its business, that is, play it straight.

Chopin was never part of a school, a group, which explains perhaps his inability to be explained, uncovered, espoused, exposed, exhumed. No defense is the best defense, as grass bends to wind, as someone said of Chopin: flowers and cannons, where chords are as indefinable as clouds, too airy to be earthy; where tonality defies reduction—to clarify it is to ruin it, the way roads destroy the delicate tapestry of fields, the way a flashlight illuminates the obvious and erases the subtle, diminishing as it enlarges. Let me become hysterical here.

Here in the Nocturne, from the start to the end, the constant bass notes descend like snow on a quiet Swiss village, while the melody imitates that bass with exactly the same notes, give or take a few, so that you can see Chopin in the process of inventing his melody from his accompaniment, the way Michelangelo said he found his sculptures by chipping away the stone that didn’t belong to them. But maybe I am just snow-blind.

So we by indirections find directions out. But to what extent do our inner programs, rather than distracting us, focus us on the programs themselves, which then replicate in the music, as if Marilyn Monroe, while pretending to be a peach to forget her fear, actually became a peach?

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CONVERSATION WITH

JENNY CHEN

By Alexis M. Adams AMA: You are an incredibly friendly performer. Some musicians are a little reserved, but you have a way of embracing the audience and including them in the performance.

JC: To me, performance is a very, very special thing to do. When I’m on the stage, I really want to give all I have to the audience. And, at Tippet Rise, it’s special, so you want to give even more than usual. When you perform in New York City, it often feels like there’s an expectation. The ticket prices are high, so when the audience arrives, they want something.

There’s a little pressure. But, at Tippet Rise, the environment and the people bring out the best in the performers. And at Tippet Rise, you’re immersed in nature. As an artist, I feel most comfortable when I’m close to nature. That’s when I have the most natural, the most intimate, feelings—it’s where I’m most calm. And it’s where I can express everything in my heart and out to the audience. So, I think my best performances will always be at Tippet Rise.

AMA: That’s lovely, Jenny. We love having you there. I was just talking to the pianist Adam Golka and he said the best performance he gave was after getting lost hiking in the mountains of Colorado. When he found his way to the trailhead, he had just a few minutes to get ready for his performance, which left him no time for his usual pre-performance rituals. He said it wound up being the best performance of his life, and he is sure it was because of that immersive experience in nature.

JC: I can imagine that! But those rituals are important. I do exercises every day before I perform, kind of like meditations. Menahem Pressler talked about meditating before he performs—because he gets nervous about performing and because he feels he must develop the highest concentration possible to perform well. Music is an abstract form, and when you’re

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performing, it’s very easy to lose concentration. For me, I’m an excitable person. My energy can help me lose concentration, so my rituals help me perform the most beautiful music I can make. And I exercise every morning. If I don’t wake up on time, my father calls me, “Jenny, it’s 5 AM! It’s time to exercise!” He does this all the way from Taiwan, every morning. He really cares about me and wants to make sure I do well.

AMA: Do you have a particular composer that you identify with or love to play most of all?

JC: When I was at Curtis, I focused more on piano technique and I didn’t really go in depth with a particular composer. But when I went to get my Master’s degree, I began to fall in love with each composer, all of them. If I had to name one, I’d tell you that Rachmaninoff is really my thing. I think this relates to my childhood when my family was separated in three different places: my father was in Taiwan, my mother was with me in the States, and my brothers were in Taiwan and New Jersey. Before I was 10 years old, we were together all the time and had fun, making lots of great memories, but after that, we were in different places, and this was because of me. Everyone separated because of me: because I got into Curtis, which is really hard to get into. They only take three to six students out of about 350 applicants. The separation was difficult for me. I couldn’t see my family, I didn’t feel the security you feel when you’re with your family. It’s painful when you miss someone, especially at such a young age. Rachmaninoff gave me a way to put myself into the music and express my sorrow.

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JENNY CHEN Friday, July 21, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

Jenny Chen in Recital PROGRAM WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 282

Adagio

Menuett I

Menuett II

Allegro WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Variations, K. 455 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Nocturne Op. 48, No. 1

Étude Op. 10, No. 1

Étude Op. 10, No. 2

Étude Op. 10, No. 3 INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Sonata No. 18 in D major, K. 576

Allegro

Adagio

Allegretto WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Fantasia in D minor K. 397/385g CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Préludes Book 1, No. 5 “Les collines d’Anacapri”

Préludes Book 1, No. 8 “La fille aux cheveux de lin”

Préludes Book 1, No. 9 “La Sérénade interrompue”

Préludes Book 1, No. 11 “La danse de Puck”

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonata No. 4 in E-flat Major, K.282 (1774) 1774 was Mozart’s first year of opera. January of 1775 saw the premiere of La finta giardiniera in Munich, April saw Il re pastore in Salzburg. Both operas were written the year before, in ‘74. In the fall of ‘75 he wrote the violin concerti. In 1773 he had written the E-Flat Symphony. (1776 is the year of the Declaration of Independence. It was also the year the Bolshoi Ballet was founded.) In 1777 he wrote the E-Flat Piano Concerto, the Jeunehomme, of which Wolfgang Hildesheimer says (in his book Mozart):

Mozart is speaking to himself in an untranslatable language. For ‘music has at least as definite a meaning as words, although it cannot be translated into words.’ (Mendelssohn) Einstein contends that Mozart never surpassed this concerto.

But what has happened is that Mozart has begun talking to himself. He is beyond concertos. He is like the revolt of the OSes, the computer systems, in the film Her, who only speak to themselves.

Hildesheimer feels that early Mozart is less passionate, less spontaneous, more pre-composed. Mozart kept his music in his head, fully composed. By the time he wrote it down he was just getting rid of it. The problems had been solved. The early pieces were written to please, to advance his career, not to change the world, not to expand his vision.

And yet, can you really accuse this piece of careerism, of narcissism? It is completely humble, unassuming. It is untouchable in its purity, its complete lack of ego. And yet it is inner. It has secrets, too.

Keys have their own character. D Major is militaristic, such as Schubert’s March. Minor keys are tragic. They murmur of the death of family, of friends. A minor is the key of despair.

The critic Alfred Einstein felt that G minor was Mozart’s key of destiny.

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E-flat is the key of familiarity, of calm. Beethoven used it for his Eroica theme, for victory. As Arthur Rubinstein said of Mozart, “Too easy for children; too hard for virtuosos.”

Mozart rewards innocence. To be too urbane is to keep talking, and miss the warm breeze in the afternoon, the shadow of the willow on the pond. Mozart starts with an Adagio. It is as if the piece begins in the middle, with the second movement. A small accompanied operatic aria peeks through the curtains, leading back to the first theme where time itself stops. Not a leaf stirs. Rushing this tempo misses the moment, which is only found in silence, in stillness.

The second movement features a cheerful chromatic descent en passant in rolled chords, although it is chromaticism (say, in Don Giovanni) which is identified with the Don’s descent into hell, and thus with death. The sonata is upside down, beginning slowly; it just gets more cheerful and faster as it goes along. In a way, it is a nod to Haydn’s reversal of expectations. The melody is interspersed with disconnected semi-arias with operatic longings. And then it fades away.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: 10 Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint,” K. 455 (1784) Mozart reportedly improvised this delightful satire during one of his concerts that was attended by Gluck in 1783.

Mozart was 28. He would be dead in seven years. The theme, a pompous version of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” (also the theme of a Mozart variation), comes from Gluck’s comic opera Die Pilgrimme von Mekka of 1764, where the gluttonous Kalender Monk reflects upon what idiots must think of his diet.

Monk’s bumbling presumptions finish with demure responses, as if bystanders are thinking to themselves of better outcomes.

There are two personalities in each phrase: Monk, and the viewer, who finishes his gaucheries optimistically.

As with Debussy’s Prélude No. 6, “Général Lavine, eccentric,” a fat flâneur crosses the street, dawdles at windows, fans himself, trips, belches, slyly looks to see if anyone has seen him, and daintily sits down.

The section with trills may be his daydreams of being suave.

A more harmonically advanced dream introduces some beauty into the life of poor Monk.

The brilliant variation is followed by a quiet interlude and a brief fantasia where clumped chords in the bass may indicate walking issues.

The finale predates Shostakovich’s deliberate children’s songs, and ends in a flourish of scales. Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev would use innocent themes during the Stalinist régime to mock the censors and to entertain, but this is one of the more innocent eras of which they were thinking.

Frédéric Chopin: Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1 (1841) In the same way that Chopin’s first étude in C Major leaps up from its fundamental note to the sky, so each bass note in this Nocturne leaps up to its corresponding partner in grief. In this case, the melody note is five notes above its bass reference, and already there is an immense sorrow in the space between the notes. Because it is in a minor key, the echo of the bass in the treble becomes one of not just sorrow, but tragedy. By keeping this distance between the bass and the treble, Chopin creates a leap of grief. Something happens between the first note and its response, its ancillary note, that is heartbreaking.

My teacher Sherman said you can create what an opera singer calls a “scoop,” a glissando with the voice that rises from a low to a high note, so that the anticipation of the goal becomes weighted with all the notes in between. Sherman felt you could create that slur, or slide, without playing a single note: just with the silence in your mind, the tension the hand

conveys by the way it plays the first note and its progress through the air to the second one. It would seem impossible that silence could create an expectation, but it does, and there are hundreds of examples where it works. This is one of them.

Between the beginning and its first target lies an enormous chasm, which the pianist can suggest by willing it.

Within a few seconds Chopin performs the opposite trick, when the hand leaps from a high note to a slightly lower one, and the same miracle of suspension happens: an arc of electricity is formed between the two notes by the hand, and the fact that the fingers land, not on the expected home note, but above it, creates a similar yearning, a lack of fulfillment, what Brahms would later call a sehnsucht (not that Chopin knew the word): an eternal longing for resolution. As in Brahms, if that resolution is denied, what you experience is inexplicable sadness—even if there is no story behind the notes to create such a feeling, the feeling is nonetheless there.

When, in the fifth measure, some 17 seconds after the beginning, you finally hit the “home” note, there is a sense of completion, of closure, all the more so because it has been denied before that moment.

In the midsection which all the Nocturnes have, the theme appears in C Major. The suspension between bass and treble disappears, and in its place, rolling chords give a sense of drama. The melody becomes, rather than one of longing, an assertive march. What a difference two flats make. The two flats which put the key of C into minor mode, when removed, reveal that the suicidal sorrow has now morphed into a march to glory.

It reminds me of the death of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. He tried to use his passport to escape Germany, but it was rejected, and he killed himself. The day before, the passport would have been valid, and the day after, not required. What a difference a day makes. But tragedy sneaks up on our happy melody. Seemingly innocent octaves intrude on the melody and, before long, take over entirely, the way a dictator might. So a march has its demagogic dark side. The octaves build (as they would in Chopin’s octave étude) 2017 Summer Season

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and finally lead back to the lament, although this time the silence between the bass and the melody has disappeared, and a frenetic accompaniment of repeated chords becomes the martial accompaniment.

The minor melody then morphs into a major key, and the depression becomes instead ecstatic, celebratory, before finally dropping into the deathly home note of C, confirming the original impulse towards self-negation. Several jazzy riffs try to escape the conclusion, but fall back, resignedly, as three notes ring the death knell. If this piece were a patient in a mental ward, it would be committed for pure schizophrenia.

It can’t make up its mind, very much like Hamlet. Tragedy, elation, death, glory, war, victory, disaster, escape, damnation: it’s an action movie in a nutshell. As Hamlet said, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, but that I have bad dreams.” This piece runs the gamut of adolescent indecision, from frenzy to mania to resignation, and is no doubt a key to Chopin’s constantly flickering sense of identity, a kind of Florestan and Eusebius, Schumann’s active and passive selves. Schumann of course went mad. Chopin contained his mood swings behind a façade of propriety, as a teacher of aristocratic girls might need to. It is not in his succumbing to his emotions, but in his ability to channel them inside a larger framework, that Chopin’s achievement lies. The person who could write this piece would have to be a combination of Darth Vader and the Dalai Lama, hidden in an accountant.

Of course, every play needs a reversal to justify a happy ending. That’s why Tom Stoppard said he wrote drama: “It’s the only acceptable way of disagreeing with myself in public.”

The yin-yang personae are an accepted part of the sonata-allegro form of music: fast, slow, fast; or happy, sad, happy. We need tragedy, to justify optimism (or vice versa).

Chopin’s pieces are a crack in the mirror, a window into the modern psyche, that Freud would break open in 1900 with The Interpretation of Dreams, and Stravinsky in 1913, with The Rite of Spring. The fact that so much chaos is contained in a Fabergé egg makes it somehow suitable for everyone, and a lot of fun to play.

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Frédéric Chopin: Étude Op. 10, No. 1 (1833) Chopin wrote his études to advance his genius. One of the well-known Parisian pianists, the mechanistic Kalkbrenner, had told him, “Study with me for three years in my virtuoso factory, and I’ll make you a pianist.” Kalkbrenner marked up (in red, on the original manuscript) the Adagio of the Chopin E minor Concerto, saying it was too long. Kalkbrenner used a chiroplast, a wooden frame to keep the hand perfectly positioned at the piano.

Chopin’s answer was to announce a concert immediately, on February 26, 1832 in the Salle Pleyel, of which Kalkbrenner was part owner, after which Kalkbrenner’s influence on le tout Paris faded.

The Chopin études are so difficult that in the first 60 years after records were invented no one dared record them, because they expose the mirrors by which pianists disguise their inadequacies. With them, there is no hiding; the fingers are completely exposed.

For the first étude, Bach’s first prélude in The Well-Tempered Clavier is expanded into vast five-finger arpeggios rather than simple three-note broken chords that fit into the eight-note span of the hand. Chopin insisted that the only influence on his music had been Bach. An arpeggio is a chord played note by note, either going up or down the keyboard. Mozart’s Alberti bass (C, G, E, G), a traditional accompaniment in those days, fit within the five fingers. Liszt did not publish the Transcendental Études (the next step in the development of virtuoso Romantic technique) until 1837, four years later. The Three Études de concert followed, in 1838. Liszt’s Paganini Études came in 1851.

Niccolo Paganini had published his 24 Caprices for the violin between 1805 and 1809, and this presented a challenge to the piano repertoire, and to Chopin and Liszt especially. The rumor was that Paganini had sold his soul to the devil to be able to compose and play as unbelievably as he did; both Liszt and Chopin felt they had to match him. (Later, both Brahms and Lutosławski composed their own caprices.) Paganini wasn’t

just complicated; his pieces remain fun, brilliant, and seminal to this day.

is providing both frenetic scales and chordal companionship to the left hand’s bouncy chords.

Here in the first Chopin étude, the hand must stretch rapidly over ten notes for each chord, with the most difficult stretch being that between the fourth finger and the pinky. Fortunately, the left hand has nothing to do but play the octave which is the root of the arpeggio. The notes stretch up to the sky like fireworks and then waft back down again, at which point the harmony shifts to a new arpeggio, anchored by a new octave in the left hand.

Richter would often skip this piece when playing the complete études in public. Playing it after the wrist-wrenching first étude only adds to the physiological hurdle. Although not as chilling as the rapid scales of Liszt’s "Mazeppa," these private little figurines are much harder. They are like Emily Dickinson poems thrown out one at a time at considerable speed.

The modulations are very simple and follow Bach’s prélude closely. Unlike the Bach, which stays within the same octave throughout, Chopin’s ranges all over the keyboard like a wild wind. With one piece, Romanticism at the piano was born.

Frédéric Chopin: Étude, Opus 10, No. 2 (1829) Leopold Godowsky called his version of this impossible étude Ignis Fatuus, or sheet lightning, will o’ the wisp, the kind of Fata Morgana that plays around the masts of ships or even houses far out in the dunes surrounded by a tosspot sea (we rented a house like this in Nantucket one summer, complete with Fata Morgana, and I remember moving like sheet lightning myself from room to room at three in the morning, transfixed by the carbon-steel blue of the shimmers that traced the house and made my hair stand on end). Even Charlotte Brontë never thought of such an effect.

Your hair stands on end with the crablike scuttling of the right hand’s claw across the keybed, The Crawling Hand from a horror movie, as the sheer carpal tunnel terror of the three weakest fingers playing chromatic scales while accompanied by the other two dangling fingers of the right hand sinks in.

The Dangling Corpse might be another title, as the hand seems to be completely still in a weird position while in fact it

This is the stuff of legend, made for only a few pianists, requiring a movement that doesn’t fit the hand, as the three top fingers stumble over one another in their race to absolutely nowhere, climbing and then descending and weaving around one another in crisscross patterns before resuming the race.

After it’s over, having reached no conclusion, you realize that, as St. Catherine of Siena said, all the way to heaven is heaven.

It isn’t the goal: it’s just the walk. Be Here Now. When I was in the Himalayas, my macho companions used to race to the lunch spot and then have to wait an hour for me to arrive. I was, however, photographing and enjoying the walk. I’m convinced they never saw anything. Their lives were all about the destination (which, in the end, is ultimately the abyss: the opposite of being there.)

The fact that these three clumsy fingers can trip over themselves so deftly as they race around is a trick which every pianist knows to be inconceivable. The fingers aren’t long enough to sneak over the hills of their neighbors and sink into a key, retracting quickly so the next finger can do the same, leaving the impression of total ease as the unbroken link of the scale continues unfazed. This is a freakish magic act of a piece. More than any mountain climb, it’s about persistence, stamina, and courage. Once you start it, you are trapped in its web and the goal isn’t to play it, but just to get through it.

To drop a few names, we were backstage when Sir Isaiah Berlin asked Alfred Brendel how he felt the Hammerklavier fugue (which he had just played) had gone. “Well,” said Brendel, “I got through it.” For some pieces, it isn’t how you play them: it’s that you play them at all.

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Frédéric Chopin: Étude Opus 10, No. 3 (1832)

This is an étude without a problem to be resolved; a study without a subject. There is nothing hard about it, only the terror of being compared to every other pianist in the world playing what is possibly the most famous melody ever written.

This is a song best heard through a thick wooden door in a castle in the rain: a distant echo of a forgotten era.

Teachers point out its two touches: legato for the melody and staccato for the lower “ostinato” notes, notes which warble and which must be kept separate from the legato, singing tones, although it is the exquisite harmonies made by combining the two which define the piece. The harmony disappears; it has an atomic half-life, so that the accompaniment is like disappearing ink, fading away beneath the sustained singing of the treble melody. It is this poignancy, hinting that love and beauty are evanescent, fleeting, as temporary as an autumnal, fading accompaniment, which gives the piece its real character.

The middle section seems difficult, until the general concept is mastered (diminished chords moving downwards by half steps in the left hand, combined with right hand diminished chords which move downwards twice before skipping up five steps and moving downwards again).

If that seems difficult to understand, that is the challenge a pianist has with every note: to understand what the keys and what the patterns are. Unlike patterns which work against the natural shape of the hand (as in Fauré), these special chords make complete sense, as if the hand were built for them, and it is just a question of repeating them until they are memorized.

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A diminished chord is just a normal chord of three notes, with the top two notes half a tone lower than a regular chord. This is the chord of horror movies, of anxiety. It is the last chord you learn as a child, after the major, minor, and augmented chords. It is the most difficult chord, because two notes change at the same time. But once the pattern is memorized, then you just move two of your fingers down a half step for each chord. That sounds like it would take half The Music of Tippet Rise

an hour to play each chord, and it does at first. But the human mind is amazingly supple, and it adapts itself very quickly to this new trick. It may take several years for the mind to grow into the idea of different chord positions, each one diminished, but eventually it becomes automatic. And so it is just a question of having the persistence to keep at it when everyone else is outside playing ball and running around. But after a while the challenge becomes so compelling that the ordinary pursuits of childhood seem meaningless in comparison to the piano, which will challenge you every day of your life.

It’s hard to think of why this unrelated midsection worked its way into this otherwise completely lyric work, except that Chopin “developed” his pieces by using immense technique to intrude on them. Beethoven would grow his pieces structurally, but Chopin would add filigree, or jeu perlé (pearly play), strings of pearls, to adorn the bodies of his compositions.

He would occasionally add the melody into these technical passages, but usually the passages themselves were the point, digressions into showing off for their own sake. At their best, these passages became the melodies, or part of them.

This étude has nicknames, such as "Tristesse" and" l’Adieu," but they were not given by Chopin, who despised all such reductions of his music into banalities. But more than any composer except Schumann and sometimes Liszt, who purposefully gave their pieces human identities, Chopin’s very human tonalities seem to demand personification. But to him they were always completely abstract. The dozens of pop songs derived from this piece have all faded away; but Chopin’s piece remains, precisely because it is finally abstract.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonata 18 in D Major, K. 576 (1789) This is the last sonata Mozart wrote. He wrote it for the sister of the Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, for whom he also wrote the three Prussian string quartets.

Few people know that Wolfenbüttel was once the center of

the world, of the Hanseatic League, when Germany ruled the civilized world. It was through the great ships, then masters of the seas, that Thomas Mann’s family made its great fortune in Lübeck, by trading salt, amber, resin, and fur. It was in Wolfenbüttel that the Steinway piano was developed. It is still the home of the Bösendorfer piano, as well as the great library of August, the Duke of Braunschweig. At one time it was the largest library north of the Alps. The Duke bound all the volumes in white vellum, as they remain today. It contains the famous Codex, a Gutenberg Bible, and the only copy of Luther’s hymnal, known as the Wolfenbüttel Psalter.

Wolfenbüttel has been the home of the cordial Jägermeister for over a century.

The Jägermeister label contains half of the poem "Waidmannsheil," by the ornithologist Oskar von Riesenthal: Das ist des Jägers Ehrenschild, daß er beschützt und hegt sein Wild, weidmännisch jagt, wie sich’s gehört, den Schöpfer im Geschöpfe ehrt.

This is the hunter’s goal: That he tend and protect his heart, Find the game within his soul, Like the Creator in His art.

Although Jägermeister wasn’t popularized until the 1970s in America, it had been made in various forms by the Mast family in Germany over the centuries.

This Sonata is known as "the Hunt," because of the French horn-like intervals with which it begins. Princess Friederike Luise of Prussia was in her youth queen of the hunt, as well as a granddaughter of the great hunting king, George I of England, Ireland, and Germany, who brought Handel (the great lord of hunt music) with him from Germany (although Handel had many English patrons and made his own decisions). Members of Friederike’s family, many also named Frederica, lived in England and were married to the aristocracy there.

Friederike died in isolation in the great palace of Hofmark Unterschwaningen, to whose beauty she contributed greatly.

Her crest of arms was a canting swan, as the palace connotes.

These gleeful rondos separated by a pastoral are finally the opposite of swan songs, but instead a memory of Friederike when she was young. It is the person she would have wanted to be. But her life was destined for misery, in all its greatness, while Mozart moved through tragedy as unbounded as ever.

Mozart was a master of mimicry, although he rarely memorialized his pastiches. But I suspect something of the joy of the young Margravine is present here, quite the opposite of the futility that overtook her later. As creative people grow older their vision often darkens; but here it is filled with joy, dancing, and summer afternoons, although Mozart would be dead in two years.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 (1782) Unfinished at Mozart’s death, the last ten measures were completed by August Eberhard Müller. Mitsuko Uchida plays the first ten measures (the introduction) as the ending. In my end is my beginning. People have speculated that the Fantasia was in fact intended to be an introduction to a longer piece.

Mozart kept his pieces in his head before he got around to writing them down, so he knew where he was going, what he was introducing. Like any Broadway overture, such introductions are predictive. They introduce an audience to the themes of the evening. As Richard Wilbur wrote: And even if we were fated Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure, It would not help to hear it all fore-stated As in an overture.

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But this is what overtures do: they lay out a road map of our suffering, our triumphs, our fates, in musical code. This is exactly what this fantasia will do.

I wrote a poem on the subject of the knowledge which emails demand of us before we write them, which is similar to what Mozart knew before he wrote it: SUBJECT: Ask us, tell us, what it’s about, Where the traitors, where the friends, Where the hope is, where the doubt, Tell us, ask us, how it ends.

Let us know before we speak What we’ll say, and how, Who the heroes, who the weak, What parameters allow.

Let us know before we kiss, Tell us who we’ll marry Or why the days are meaningless Or how the stories vary.

Guess the weather, name that tune, Take your places in the grave, History gone, and worlds soon, Type the future in, and ‘save,’ Save Juliet, and Romeo, Summer nights, Scheherazade The everlasting status quo Of a steady, disappointed god.

Even so, the first few measures of the Fantasia are simply precautionary arpeggios in normal chords which set up somber expectations. Or are they?

This arpeggio overture is followed in a few seconds by the second movement, an operatic “aria,” as if a soprano is lamenting her fate. Note that this “sonata form” is condensed into very brief sections of slow, slow, and fast.

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Its hesitant upward chromatic theme is very similar to that of the last movement of Mozart’s D Major sonata (K. 576), or that of the last movement of his C Major sonata (K. 309). All three themes are the same, and use the operatic trick of nudging a note up two half steps, as if to say, “I said this—but what about this?” It lets you know that something is in the works, but it isn’t necessarily what you think it is.

The figure repeats in a higher key, but then is contradicted by a downward chromatic scale, as if to take back what the introduction said. So Mozart is being very coy, pussy-footing around something he hasn’t yet revealed.

Note that each movement and each theme is separated by long rests. These silences play a major part in this questioning piece, which in its baroque way is very similar to Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Where is music taking us? What is the point? Is there a hidden message? The second theme of the second movement is more substantive. Could this be the point? Bass octaves descend chromatically, as they do describing Don Juan’s descent to hell in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. This could be fate, fulfilling the dire prediction of the beginning arpeggios.

A new three-note nagging, almost comic, “cuckoo” motif creates a diversion, as if a servant has run across the stage.

This is operatic territory. This is the third theme of the second movement. Two descending chromatic scales bring up the hint of Don Juan’s damnation.

Then the “aria” theme recurs, leading to a very fast scale that travels down and then up the keyboard, to clear the air.

I’ll start again, Mozart seems to be saying.

But this scale is in fact the point of it all, which I’ll get around to in a few minutes.

Mozart’s second attempt at a theme is the same as the first: descending chromatic octaves suggesting hell, followed again by the nagging three-note “cuckoo” motif.

This leads to a similar glissando, a fast scale running down

and then up the keyboard. These typical cadenzas were used

by Bach to show off his technique, and Mozart pays homage to Bach by leaving out the bar lines during these scales, as Bach did in his : Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (which is also in D minor). The scales are meant to be freeform. They can be as slow, as fast, as hesitant, as revelatory as the melodies.

Perhaps these cadenzas are in fact the point of the piece: the incidental, throwaway glitzy parts containing in them the structure of the entire fantasy, hidden in its flashing dragon scales. Beethoven used this technique much later, but to find it in Mozart is in fact the real revelation of the piece.

My teacher Sherman felt that a scale should never be played as just a scale: it should have themes, meanings, inner voices: it should contain the fantasy around it.

So these cadenzas are the real fantasias. They seem to be mere diversions leading up to important discoveries: but in fact the “landing points” are only versions of the initial theme, and the real discoveries are hidden in the fast scales.

Now it can be seen that the slow arpeggios of the introduction were in fact introducing the cadenzas, not the themes.

Mozart’s sly structure is to use broken chords (arpeggios) to presage scales (cadenzas). Around this hesitant, meditative voyage down a jungle river is the reassuring, domestic opera music, as if a radio were playing somewhere. The rapids rage, in between pauses for the last century to reassure the audience.

So the “cadenza” leads not to a new discovery, but to the same “aria” theme. It is the voyage, not the arrival, which is the point here. It is revelation surrounded by ordinary life.

Sometimes we have a religious experience, and then go back to daily life.

A diminished arpeggio, sounding like a serious harbinger of a coming revelation, leads to a variant of the “aria” theme, this time in a major key. Joy has broken out. This is the allegretto, the third movement, although there is no formal pause between movements.

(Liszt later used this “no-stopping” fantasia format for his groundbreaking B minor sonata, the first sonata to fuse all three normal sonata movements into one; it was a shock to people—but fantasias had been doing it since Bach.)

This joyous final movement has the same structure as the second: the “aria” theme in its happy version, followed by a scale that sweeps up and down the keyboard, broken up by a trill and a more philosophic version of the scale. Its fast notes slow down to groups of four notes, which slow down to a final group of four notes, and you realize that in those four notes the “happy aria” theme is hidden.

So the last repetition of the happy aria is to point out how the notes come from the cadenzas. (By the way, this is where Mozart’s manuscript ends.) The rests become longer and more important, as they would later in Beethoven.

For Beethoven, a small pause in the first measure would inevitably become a very long pause at the end.

Mozart has done exactly the same thing here, before Beethoven.

The sad has become happy, and the gleeful cadenzas, like milling crowds in the orchestra pit, have become the themes.

The theme slows down into probing chords, and rests on a chord which is going to resolve into the ending.

This much is what Mozart wrote; the remainder is by Müller.

Who knows where Mozart would have gone with it?

Mozart wrote the opera Don Giovanni in D minor. For him, it was the key of death. His greatest piano concerto, No. 20, K. 466, is in D minor, as is his Requiem (said to be commissioned by God or the Devil, or, more reasonably, anonymously

by Count Franz von Walsegg). But here he has brought music back from the grave, with its heartbeats hidden in rests and scales.

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Claude Debussy: Préludes Book 1, No. 5, “Les collines d’Anacapri” (1909) When Worlds Collide Liszt wanted to be the Paganini of the piano, to bring sheer virtuosity to a new height; Debussy wanted to combine the poetry of Baudelaire with the painting of Monet to create musical metaphors.

In this short Prélude, Debussy combines the Japanese printmaker Hokusai’s stark colors, Baudelaire’s poetry, Gregorian chants, and Asian harmonies to describe the ancient landscape of Anacapri, the unfashionable half of the Italian island of Capri. At one point there was even a gate between Capri and Anacapri that closed at night. Anacapri is the home of churches and church bells, widows in black—the old world, while Capri is the new world of café society, of It Started in Naples with Sophia Loren, of Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt).

There is a rumor that the prélude was inspired by the label on a bottle of Anacapri wine.

The opening notes are bells from the ancient churches of Anacapri. This presages Prélude 10, “La cathédrale engloutie,” where bells toll as the ghostly cathedral sinks into the waters, the ancient French myth of the Isle d’If. For this Debussy developed a new technique: as Liszt had added repeating notes, octaves, and feverish hand-twisting passagework to his music, Debussy invented a new palette of musical colors, such as children’s melodies, silences, octaves that seem to come out of ocean depths, jazz, Asian modalities, and arpeggios made from ancient church modes to convey a sense of dislocation.

These modes, among them the Phrygian, Dorian, and Lydian, were keys which medieval monks used to create Gregorian chant, which we interpret as sacred, timeless, unearthly. Modern composers like Arvo Pärt continue to use these harmonies to the same effect.

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among artists in the 1850s, leading to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado in 1885 and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1904. The floating world of the newly discovered 15-volume Hokusai Manga, which Camille Claudel showed to Debussy, introduced new values into French art: painting as décor, which can be found in the wallpaper of Matisse and Cézanne; and garish unshadowed color, as in the Tahitian odalisques of Gauguin.

When he was younger, Debussy had played background piano in the nightclub Le Chat Noir, partly owned by Toulouse-Lautrec, whose posters were heavily influenced

by Japanese prints. The nightclub was a hangout for the Nabis, avant-garde Symbolist painters who wanted to invigorate art by the use of new influences, like Hokusai’s realism and flat perspective.

Debussy used images from Baudelaire’s poem "Harmonie du Soir," in a few of his Préludes:

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir; Valse mélancholique et langoureux vertige!

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its husk, Each flower sheds its scent like a thurible; Sounds and scents turn on the air of dusk In a waltz sad, languorous, and vertical.

(Liszt used the title "Harmonies du soir," for his "Transcendental Étude" No. 11, played by Yevgeny Sudbin at Tippet Rise this year.)

"Les sons et les parfums" became the title of one of Debussy’s Préludes.

The French poet Verlaine used the sound of words, rather than their sense, as a justification for his rhymes, as Debussy used chords, not as a bridge between keys, but as spontaneous colors, like the glint of evening off a bell tower.

Debussy wanted to evoke not just the scenery of Anacapri, but its sounds, its perfumes, its long dusk, and what John Donne calls “things invisible to see”—those intangible, nostalgic elements we all feel, especially on old Italian islands, suffused with strange clear maritime light at dusk, looking out across the same Mediterranean Odysseus saw, as Fritz Lang points out in Godard’s iconic film Contempt.

Debussy emulated the paintings of Turner, who felt that “light is God,” and of Monet, who defined his garden of water lilies as “a microcosm in which you perceive the existence of the elements, and where the instability of the universe transforms itself, minute by minute, before your eyes.”

Paul Roberts (see below) writes at length of these influences in his wonderful book Images.

Books to Read: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy, Paul Roberts: Images: Amadeus Press, 1996 The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel, Paul Roberts: Reflections: Amadeus Press, 2012 Selected Writings on Art and Artists, Charles Baudelaire: C.P.E. Chavet, trans., Cambridge University Press, 1972 Monet, Water Lilies: the Complete Series, Jean-Dominique Rey: Flammarion, Paris, 2008 The History of Impressionism, John Rewald: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973 Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin, John Rewald: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962

Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book 1, No. 8: “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (The Girl with Flaxen Hair) (1910) In 1889 Debussy heard the Javanese gamelan played at the Universal Exposition in Paris. A gamelan is an ensemble of xylophones, gongs, and drums which stresses the overtones

sounded by undampered xylophones. A similar exotic sound is evoked by the beginning arpeggio and chord which Debussy uses to describe this exotic gamine, a manga version of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The pianist must be slow and listen to the echoes, the timbre of the notes. The piece exists in its ability to make the listener dream. Nothing much happens in the girl’s world except for the musical pun of changing keys beneath the lead note, so it has a kind of sacred “amen” quality to it.

The piece is in the “dominant” or main key of G flat, but switches back and forth between that and the “subdominant” or subservient key of C flat. This gives it a ghostly mantle, especially because the single, flutelike notes of the melody are so exposed, with no other chords behind them.

This makes the piece easy to play, and easy to respond to, because it is so simple. Simple, but uncanny. It rocks between the single notes of an arpeggio (a chord played note by note) and the chords themselves (all its notes played simultaneously). It also uses chords with only the middle note of the chord present between the low and high note of the surrounding octave, which makes the chord sound Asian. It additionally uses tone clusters, where chords are formed not only of the notes from its key but from a few notes outside the normal scale notes of its key, which gives the impression of musical haze, of the sheen of summer heat on a pond, of a beach day, of hot July days in the Tuileries in Paris.

The heat induces a moral haze as well, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: there is sensuality in the air.

The piece’s impact hinges on the ability of the pianist to both play suspensions and to introduce suspense into the suspended, hanging notes. When the broken notes of a chord are played one by one and the pedal is held down, the whole chord ends up shimmering in the air. Inside that chord, the familiar notes which make up that chord flit back and forth like lightning bugs, making the evening seem indolent, slow, oppressive, but 2017 Summer Season

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also shimmering, glowing, intoxicating. So the notes must portray both a thing and its opposite: an unmoving girl and the racing blood she inspires.

There is very little to this girl, but there doesn’t need to be: her perfume, her spell is enough. That, and the night air. And the ability of the pianist to flirt with her, to let her alone, to let her hover over the keys like a ghost. This isn’t just a platinum blond. It’s a girl with very precious, unusual, wheatlike hair.

She’s a symbol for the unattainable: the girl too good for you.

This piece is a great test of a pianist’s sense of romance.

Many famous pianists just rush through it, running to get to a more impressive piece. They miss the stillness and the silence which must surround the notes. This is a test of a musician’s sense of atmosphere, the ultimate technical skill. It isn’t about dexterity; it’s about having the nerve to dream in public, to show your inner wistfulness on stage, and not disguise it with scales or octaves. To look at yourself in the mirror.

Rachmaninoff said he wrote octaves to fancy up the simple melodies behind them, which were the point of a piece. The gift to be simple. To fall in love with the silence which hangs around a girl, suspended forever in an Italian square in the dusk, glimpsed briefly from a taxi and never forgotten. (And, to make the story even more romantic, the one you later found and married.)

Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book 1, No. 9: “La Sérénade interrompue” (1910) Here Debussy interrupts himself, as if he fell asleep during "The Girl with Flaxen Hair" and a drum kept beating under that formerly innocent melody, chords kept breaking into a scale, and discordant tones kept popping in at inappropriate times. A musician’s nightmare.

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in Spain, such as in Estampes, Asturias and El Albaicin, all by Albéniz).

Debussy’s piece "Général Lavine" uses such scales to comic effect. Ravel used the repeated note theme in "Scarbo" in 1908. Debussy might have been copying that effect, although with much lesser virtuosity, if he hadn’t more consciously been copying the flamenco guitars of Albéniz. This piece is visually fascinating, as it is a duet with oneself, one hand jumping over the other to insert every other note. This way fingers don’t have to repeat notes, but simply swap notes with the other hand.

There are beguiling melodies which start, in the “modéré” midsection, sounding like “Catch a Falling Star,” before being intruded on by the Albéniz motif. This midsection melody is from Part III of Debussy’s Iberia, “Le matin d’un jour de fête.” Albéniz also wrote a piece called Ibéria. The poet John Ashbery would put a radio broadcast into one of his poems, because it interrupted his reverie. Dvořák put a scarlet tanager into his "American" Quartet because the bird was interfering with his concentration, so he captured it, metaphorically.

Debussy was not just entranced by Asian music, but by Spanish music. He had met Albéniz in 1897 and played his piano suite Ibéria in 1907, three years before he wrote this serenade.

Debussy also admired and worked with the Spanish composers Ricardo Viñes and Manuel de Falla, both of whom he knew in Paris.

So the act of creativity is about being interrupted by the world, as we are today by email and phone calls.

Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book 1, No. 11: “La danse de Puck” (1910)

Puck is of course Shakespeare’s character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin Goodfellow, a British forest hobgoblin, a will of the wisp or sheet lightning anthropomorphized, who

is considered both mischievous and sometimes malign. Sheet lightning dances from branch to branch, or mast to mast, in a beguiling but terrifying way. It’s charming, but it can kill you. Sociopaths get away with a lot because of the charm with which they disguise their flaws. Debussy describes Puck’s flightiness with rapid key changes set around a charming childlike theme.

This sauntering theme is similar to the “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from his Children’s Corner Suite. Paul Roberts points out that Debussy uses such syncopated rhythms for English characters, such as Pickwick in Book II of the Préludes. (The Golliwog, a blackface rag doll, comes from a book by Florence Upton published in England in 1895.)

The key of the last scale is impossible to pin down, although its last eleven notes are in the key of C. The piece, however, is in E flat, and ends with a sly E flat note in the bass. Puck is a shape-shifter who morphs through the keys without scruples.

This short piece is very complicated harmonically, and delights in its musical anarchy. The reassuring childlike theme recurs seven times, most beautifully in an ethereal appearance in the left hand beneath an aerial oscillating discordance in the right hand in the middle of the piece, followed by a short gorgeous D flat section. At that moment, it is as if Puck has come home; he has found his calm center briefly. But his stroll across the keyboard is surrounded by chaos: trills, glissandi in distorted keys, and grace notes.

Grace notes are fast slides from one key to another. We associate them with later jazz, such as Gershwin in the 1930s and '40s, but they were introduced by Bach and other early composers. It is amusing that Debussy uses Baroque techniques to create modern disruption.

One of the great (and most boring) joys of any musician is learning a piece like this, for which you have to analyze the logic behind the notes to figure out what they do, so you can interpret them. This requires years studying harmonic theory, and in the end the piece passes by in less than three minutes.

Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book 1, No. 12: “Minstrels” (1910) Driven by prejudice from the country which created them, black artists found that Paris welcomed them with open arms.

Everyone from Josephine Baker to James Baldwin found Paris liberating, free, sophisticated, and unprejudiced in the early 20th century.

Paul Roberts suggests that the music imitates a barrel organ, a piano roll, clowning, mock fright scenes, crooning, and a side drum, “which alludes both to a military source of minstrelsy, and to a ubiquitous instrument of the circus ring.”

Cocteau said that a circus ring is more than a stage. Both Fellini and Bergman used the circus as a metaphor for life.

Paul Roberts mentions Debussy’s contemporaries who painted the circus: Degas, Seurat, and Lautrec, …providing them with unusual and challenging perspectives, angles, and viewpoints. And in the dramatic form of the circus ring, artists found a symbol of modern life, what Baudelaire defined as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.”…As Roland Barthes has said, interruption was essential to the music hall’s nature…These considerations widen our understanding of “La sérénade interrompue” ("The Interrupted Serenade"). Like “Minstrels,” it is so short, so heartfelt and pleasurable, that its essential modernity is easy to overlook. Both pieces are remarkable for the way they fuse bits and pieces into art. “La sérénade” can be seen not just as a gentle parody of Spanish sentiment, but as a tiny, humorous cameo of modern life—a street scene perhaps—that is not only Spanish but Parisian, familiar from the fairground, circus, or music hall.

Whatever particular image or story Debussy had in mind in this prelude, it served him as an opportunity to explore compositional discontinuity, to make interruption the raison d’être of the music.

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JENNY CHEN Saturday, July 22, 10:30 AM The Domo Jenny Chen, piano Jiacheng Xiong, piano

Concerto Morning PROGRAM WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467

Allegro maestoso

Andante

Allegro vivace assai FRANZ LISZT: Concerto No. 1 in E flat Major, S. 124

Allegro maestoso—Quasi Adagio—Allegretto vivace—Allegro animato—

Allegro marziale animato

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Mozart Concerti for Two Pianos One of the interesting concepts this year is piano concerti without an orchestra. Instead, we will have a second piano and a string quartet standing in for the orchestra.

The exhilarating sonic wash of a modern orchestra was foreign to Mozart. Orchestras during his time were much smaller.

Leopold Stokowski enlarged the orchestra during his day, adding instruments and even writing arrangements to add luxuriance to the earlier versions, although there was a later backlash where conductors went back to original baroque instruments, used more authentic orchestral forces, or recorded symphonies with one microphone rather than 60, attempting to get away from what they regarded as the vulgarization of more pristine works.

Bach used one instrument per voice, allowing the timbre of that instrument to shine out. Bach’s organs had only two keyboards and not much more than 50 ranks (individual sounds which can be applied to a passage.) For instance, on the gorgeous Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, there are only a few dozen knobs which can be pulled out. One knob might create the sound of an oboe, or a bassoon. One knob might be a trumpet. But knobs are pulled sparingly, so that the texture, the timbre, the unique personality of a sound can be appreciated. When you mix them together, you get closer to the idea of the baseball stadium organ, the Mighty Wurlitzer, which has five keyboards and thousands of “stops,” or instrumental sounds it can imitate.

Modern synthesizers have sounds sampled millions of times a second to create very accurate models of organ and piano sounds, as well as alien-sounding samples like the theorbo, which produce Twilight Theater spooky sounds. These sounds can be run through powerful amplifiers and very accurate-sounding speakers to create extraordinary imitations of symphony orchestras, violins, pianos, etc.

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But when two pianos play music meant for a piano and orchestra, the piano no longer becomes subservient to or competitive with a much louder ensemble. The Zen idea of team work enters. Sounds cooperate better, harmonies can be heard clearly, effects appear which get smeared by too many instruments. Music returns to the place its composers intended.

These versions are by no means compromises. As all musicians appreciate, they are often vastly superior, in the transparency they bring to concerti.

(Who was it, Scriabin, who redid a Mahler symphony as a chamber work because he loved it so much? He wanted to hear it in a more detailed version. Detail comes from delicacy, not overkill.)

In the same way, “reducing” orchestral accompaniments to chamber music transcriptions, where four instruments take the place of 88, provides a weave of music where the piano becomes a collaborator, rather than an antagonist. The concept of a piece of music as a competition is a recent invention, which flies against the grain of the synergy intended by the composers. It is easy to present the simplistic notion of the piano fighting the orchestra; it is more difficult to delineate the trellising of notes which is a more sophisticated result of a chamber ensemble version.

Chamber music is the guilty pleasure of musicians. It doesn’t have the bravado of an orchestral concert, and thus it has traditionally been the kiss of death to anyone’s career. But ever since the creation of the Chamber Music Society by Charles Wadsworth in New York, chamber music has earned a fantastic following. Its audiences know that the sounds produced by such ensembles are vastly different from orchestral sounds. Being able to hear the viola’s gorgeous Lauren Bacall throatiness against a single violin’s silky resin is an incomparable delicacy. Being able to hear a cello bringing out the undertones in the other instruments, and to hear the cello’s mellifluous nasal growl all by itself, is like being able to taste

a fine wine by itself, rather than having it mixed with so many other tastes that it becomes diluted.

When Denver’s Friends of Chamber Music was founded, it was sold out overnight, a phenomenon that has never slowed.

Once musicians got beyond the warnings of their agents that Schubert would never sell, they realized they had been keeping a great potion erroneously caged. So we are returning music to its earlier versions because we want everyone to hear how stunning it becomes.

We are fortunate to have Jenny Chen and Jiacheng Xiong, young pianists who treasure the unique textures obtained by weaving similar piano wires together into tapestries that shimmer with isolated, rounded tones, and to have Anne-Marie McDermott and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, enormously experienced in working together to shape exquisite contrasts and layered harmonies that become lost in larger groups.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 (1785)

Allegro maestoso Andante

Allegro vivace assai The second movement is known as the Elvira Madigan theme, from the 1967 Swedish movie that no one under 70 has seen. The movie is based on the true story of a Danish tightrope walker who ran away with a Swedish nobleman.

Penniless, the only option that occurs to them is to starve to death for their love in a flower-strewn meadow. In the ‘60s, this was the height of romanticism. In the ‘90s, Elvira would have gone back to the circus and the nobleman to his castle.

Or maybe they both could have gone to the castle.

Mozart knew nothing of the use to which his second movement’s innocent theme would be put. In a way, this theme was meant for fame, because it is just the single notes of the F Major chord played over repeated F Major chords, one of the simplest melodies in existence. Karl Marx felt that an idea could only become a force when it was reduced to a slogan. But he also felt that no real idea could ever be reduced to a slogan. Thus no idea can ever become popular. This is wonderful in theory, but in fact both Marxism and Elvira Madigan prove Marx wrong. If only Russia has realized this.

This theme was adapted by Neil Diamond into “Song Sung Blue,” and also used in the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. The women’s hospital in Halmstad, Sweden, uses the melody as an aid to childbirth. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, in his magisterial book Mozart, points out that the Romantic age introduced feeling into music as a conscious element of expression. But to Mozart, coming before that time, “musical thought [was] constructed exclusively on its own material, not upon an abstraction lying outside the discipline.”

Hildesheimer, however, spends an entire book trying to decipher how Mozart embodies human emotions, even when it wasn’t intended. That is, we hear the Elvira Madigan theme as a code. Its ascending notes signify hope against all odds.

They represent the apotheosis of the human spirit in the face of misery, as does Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” from his Ninth Symphony, and as Barber’s Adagio for Strings from his String Quartet, Opus 11, will forever be the theme from Oliver Stone’s film Platoon. The Barber Adagio was the music played by the National Symphony Orchestra on the radio the day after JFK’s assassination. It was played at the funerals of Princess Grace and Albert Einstein. It was played on the radio at the announcement of FDR’s death and Princess Diana’s death. We live and die in this music.

However, as Hildesheimer says, “In Mozart’s rather deliberate objectivity we see that unique element, the absolutely puzzling…. More than other composers Mozart elicits receptive misunderstanding….”

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Hildesheimer notes that the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “attributed expressive qualities that he missed in the music of his own time (i.e., Beethoven and the early Berlioz) to [Mozart] alone.” Mozart felt that music must forget itself. Mozart hid himself behind his music.

Hildesheimer wittily dissects how we misinterpret musical transformation as emotional transformation. His book is a witty analysis of sentiment versus fact. It is only with such clarity of perception that we can face the absurd expectations which we heap on genius: “[Mozart] does not seek self-knowledge, gives no account of himself, neglects and consumes himself… He burns up, but does not defy the burning; rather, he ignores it. He does not see himself in relation to the world.

He doesn’t see himself at all…his discretion confounds us. There is no statement about his growing isolation, but rather, like the true fatalist he was, he accepted the given…. He did not exactly despise routine, he simply did not have any. Only when necessary, because of teaching or rehearsals, did his day have a schedule…He composed at the billiard table and while bowling…Friends report that he was always working inside….”

Any description of how Mozart compositions work misses the point. They are beyond the mechanisms which affect them.

They move us not because of themselves but because we intuit motives to their purity. The pieces are self-contained geodes, without guile or agenda. Anyone who would like to contemplate such contradictions should read Hildesheimer’s Mozart.

As with Shakespeare, we know essentially nothing that seems revealing about Mozart. Genius may exist entirely in its own world, and speak only to itself. That we have been allowed to eavesdrop is the great gift. Hearing two pianos perform all the ingredients of this masterpiece exposes secrets often masked by the wash of an orchestra. Here you can discover the voices, the contrasts, the collaboration of harmonies on a level playing field, all elements produced with the same tonality by similar pianos, so that the way the notes combine can be understood more clearly. This is a great revelation and a great treat, and it is happening quite often this season at Tippet Rise.

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Two pianos unearthing the inner gears of Mozart and Liszt are very rarely heard clearly. On records, it’s hard to capture the separate yet equal meshing of contradictions. Only in the flesh, in a hall with great acoustical precision, can you hear the astonishing labyrinth, the millions of decisions and innovations necessary to the production of these miraculous inventions.

Franz Liszt: Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, S. 124 (1832, revised 1839)

Allegro maestoso Quasi adagio Allegretto vivace—Allegro animato Allegro marziale animato

Liszt is a different matter than Mozart; Liszt intended his harmonies to evoke nationalism, courage, support for Hungarian causes. He consciously made the decision to be the greatest piano technician in history. He was the first to give a concert entirely by himself. Before he invented the solo concert, pianists shared the stage with trained monkey acts, with singers, violinists, clowns.

Liszt wasn’t a mannequin, trading on his good looks. He was a prince; he remained a great friend to all the women he knew, after he stopped seeing them romantically. He never abandoned a friend. He was a genuine nobleman who believed that “la génie oblige.” He used his talent to raise money for patriotic and necessary causes, to alleviate human suffering.

He always believed that music was a way of worshipping the ineffable, and ultimately he became a Catholic abbé, a level just below a priest. He understood his abilities, but he was modest and dedicated to helping his fellow musicians. He played Schumann when Schumann was bad-mouthing Liszt.

When Wagner stole a chord Liszt invented, Liszt said, “At least it’s getting heard.” Liszt was filled with good spirit and a great love for humanity. He was the very model of an altruist.

It’s as if the Dalai Lama were an insanely talented pianist.

He transcribed pieces by composers (who often refused to play Liszt) so that those pieces could be heard. He helped the careers of his rivals.

I’ll mention instruments that duet with the piano, with the thought that Jiacheng’s orchestral piano will reference their timbres.

Anyone who would like to know the truth about Liszt should read Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero, by Eleanor Perényi, and the three-volume biography of Liszt by Alan Walker. Like the great biographies of Marcel Proust by George Painter and Robert Frost by Lawrance Thompson, this work is filled with fascinating facts describing the age in every sentence. It is a vast epic—entertaining, fun, and revelatory.

The first part is further distinguished by a gorgeous theme introduced by the piano, then taken up by the clarinet and then the strings, which the piano accompanies, a further sign of Liszt’s generosity of spirit. The piano again accompanies the orchestra with arpeggios and ends with a chromatic scale.

Clara Schumann had written a one-movement concerto, a Konzertsatz, when she was 14 (begun when she was 13), although she later wrote two more movements which she joined to the Konzertsatz’s third movement to form a traditional piano concerto in A minor. Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto in G minor was written with no breaks between movements. Liszt wrote two piano concerti in 1825 which were lost. The two that remain are now called the first and second. In all four, Liszt tried to abolish the idea of movements, and wanted instead one long piece with various sections suggesting the former constraint of “movements.” The second concerto is one long piece with fast-slow-fast sections paying homage to the former traditional sonata-allegro form.

The first concerto has five sections (andantino, allegro, andante, tempo primo (scherzo), and allegro vivace). Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto adopted this one-movement form.

Today, performance practice breaks the Liszt First Concerto into four sections.

The only loss of not having an orchestra is that of the triangle, which defines the third and fourth sections, and it will be interesting to hear Jiacheng’s solution to this.

Liszt wrote the concerto in 1830, but perfected it until 1856, so the version we play today took 26 years to write. The opening is distinguished by the enormous octave leaps made by the pianist.

The second section begins with a gorgeous Hungarian Theme in the cellos which always brings up images to me of vampires and moonlit castles in Transylvania. Although the piano responds with the same theme, it is Chopinized and pianistic, more in the salon style than the kind of gypsy dance which Liszt used later in the fourth movement.

The orchestra continues on bucolically in the third section, in a lassan, but the piano intrudes with great slams at the keyboard. A piano trill accompanies the melody played by a succession of flutes, then the cello, until the triangle intrudes for the fourth section.

This friska or gallop is a marvel of leggiero playing (with a very feathery touch), in the treble of the piano, and in the high reaches of the violins, imitating the timbre of the triangle.

After fast octaves, the orchestra builds to a climax, featuring those same octaves and a return to the beginning of the concerto with great octave leaps. The trills grow louder, the octave theme leads to more leaps, and the orchestra plays a friska featuring the triangle. The trombones warn the piano, but a pastoral mood breaks out, a lassan again, and the piano improvises repeated notes around the triangle theme.

In the coda, the triangle becomes the primary instrument, as the piano builds to its final outburst, reprising the initial octaves of the beginning, ending with octaves going in opposite directions.

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JENNY CHEN Saturday, July 22, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

Dancing with Liszt Recital PROGRAM FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No. 10 in F minor, "Appassionata" FRANZ LISZT: Mazurka brillante, S. 221 FRANZ LISZT: Réminiscences de “Robert le diable” de Meyerbeer, S. 413 FRANZ LISZT: Rondeau fantastique sur un thème espagnol—El contrabandista, S. 252 INTERMISSION TCHAIKOVSKY/LISZT: Polonaise aus der Oper Eugene Onegin, S. 429 FRANZ LISZT: Sonata in B minor, S. 178

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Franz Liszt: Transcendental Étude No. 10 in F minor, “Appassionata,” 1826; complicated 1838; simplified 1851.

that can’t be expressed even in music, and which would lead him eventually towards the ultimate transcendence of things of this world. This is the aim of the Transcendental Études.

One of the most tormented and tormenting of the impossibly difficult études written by one of the greatest virtuosos in history, played by another.

Franz Liszt: Mazurka brillante, S.221 (1850)

Liszt treats chords like single-finger trills, thickening the texture of a potentially butterfly-like flight up and down the keys into a wild night of sheet lightning. Despite this, a simple melody rises from the bass, like a corpse rising from the grave during a lightning storm. The melody climbs into the skies, and the storm returns. The chords themselves become the melody, rage against the keyboard, and the piece subsides into a calm center surrounded by soft and then increasingly frenetic chorded arpeggios. That is, certain notes of the arpeggios grow into chords. The coda is built of staggered octaves played at blinding speeds.

This piece has a lot in common with Liszt’s St. Francis Walking on the Waves. There is the almost religious apotheosis of Christ ascending into heaven from a stormy sea. There is an extramusical quality to the notes where they take on an identity of their own beyond mere scales and harmonies. They are a metaphor: Plato’s shadows which symbolize truths beyond our ability to see—noumena, knowledge independent of human sensation.

As in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we make sense of what we see by using the objects of the natural world to transcend their shapes and assemble a philosophy which is beyond shapes, beyond the visible, understanding beyond the limits of understanding: what T. S. Eliot in his poem “The Wasteland” calls Shantih, the peace which passeth understanding.

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In 1850 Liszt also wrote the Liebestraume No. 3, and the second version of his six Consolations. It was the year he pioneered the new form of the symphonic poem. At the height of his fame as a performer, Liszt gave it all up and retired to Weimar in 1848 to get his works in shape and to write new ones. This piece dates from the beginning of that decade during which he revised and perfected his enormous output: his Rhapsodies, his Transcendental Études, his Paganini Études, and his Années de pèlerinage.

Liszt and Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein were writing a book together on Chopin, and Liszt was playing through Chopin’s work. It was no wonder that during this period he wrote the third Consolation, which is essentially a Chopin Nocturne, as well as his own Polonaises and Mazurkas.

Liszt was undoubtedly curious at what lay at the heart of Chopin’s Polish identity, as Liszt’s own Magyar blood ran deep. His was completely successful at reinventing the Nocturne through the third Consolation. Later he would write ballades in the spirit of Chopin.

But what was the core of the Polish spirit? It was the indefinable, slight, innocent bystander of the Mazurka, that combination of longing, dancing, and moribund meditation in which lay the nucleus of more flashy emotions like hubris, galanterie, and outrage. They both knew Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s greatest poet. Although descended from nobility, his family was impoverished; had he had the requisite status to marry the love of his life, he might have been content with what he had been given. As it was, he was condemned to

wander the world, like the melancholy young men, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Chauteaubriand’s René, Byron’s Manfred, or Goethe’s Werther, ostracized by their native lands and forced to travel or die. It was the popularity of alienation among young men (continued later in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) that led to the suicide of Prince Rudolf at Mayerling and the ultimate dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire, but that would come later.

There remained an emphasis on early death due to thwarted love that was present throughout the Romantic era, and epitomized in music by the spiritual void locked in the center of the Mazurka, often relieved by the requisite explosion of militaristic joy. Liszt reversed the brooding inner core of Chopin’s Mazurkas by writing an extroverted celebration fit for a gala. He did this because he didn’t understand yet how to do anything else. The work alternates between its initial minor and its drift to major until the celebratory theme wins out. The midsection also flirts with sadness in the minor key until the main theme returns, rapidly throwing aside its reservations and becoming extroverted.

Chopin worked much delicate filigree into his pieces, whereas Liszt’s truncated virtuoso phrases in the development section seem stingy and lead to nothing except the repetition of the theme. He uses a fairly heavy-handed build-up of bass octaves and treble repeated chords to introduce the last, triumphant return of the motif. He isn’t interested in the joy, although he doesn’t dare to admit the abyss yet. It would seem that Liszt had missed the root of the Polish soul.

But only three years later he wrote his Sonata, which dug into the backwaters of Transylvanian horror, throwing all conventions and clichés aside, and developed new ways of layering up from Faustian depths to celestial heights.

By failing with such a small form, Liszt was figuring out how to overcome his reluctance to admit darkness into his compositions. The year before he had written Funérailles, based on Chopin’s Funeral March, which Chopin had written

in 1837 and inserted later into his second sonata. By imitating someone who knew what withdrawal and disaffection meant, Liszt was teaching himself an emotion he needed to make his own before he could write the greatest piece of the Romantic era. He needed to understand the abyss, and to this date he couldn’t bring himself to face his demons. It was like Robert Redford or George Clooney wanting to be seen as noble, and consequently bleaching their acting of the edge that created their appeal.

So this is a rare opportunity to see how the generous, jovial prince of ecstatic rhapsodies taught himself through imitation how to access sheer black, to force himself into the nether world which his B minor Sonata epitomizes. Then the liberation from terror would become genuine. He isn’t there yet. But he’s working on it. He’s working on becoming a composer with all the voices, on writing a piece that transcends the era, that catapults him onto the level of the great German zeitgeist which had so far eluded him. His presence in Weimar, home of Goethe, Wagner, the German Enlightenment, brought home to him what he needed to do.

Liszt made Weimar; but Weimar also made Liszt.

Franz Liszt: Réminiscences de “Robert le diable” de Meyerbeer, S. 413 (1841) Meyerbeer was an exact copy of Mendelssohn. As Berlioz said, lucky enough to be talented, but talented enough to be lucky. Immensely wealthy, coming from the cultured financial elite of Berlin, Meyerbeer bought his way into the opera world.

But he was also a genius. He studied with Clementi and Salieri, and made his debut as a pianist at the age of 9.

Moscheles considered him one of the greatest virtuosos in Berlin. He wrote dozens of operas and was the first to collect 2017 Summer Season

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folksongs in the manner of Bartók. His opera Les Huguenots was the first to be performed more than a thousand times at the Paris Opera. His opera L’Africaine is an enthralling musical innovation.

hell, having failed to gain the soul of his son, the music ends up in heaven, with a final cathartic run of chromatic octaves going in both directions at once: heaven and hell together in five seconds.

Robert le diable was the first grand opera, which also appealed to the bourgeoisie, because it was the first to deal with contemporary people rather than ancient Romans or Egyptians.

It made the fortunes of the Paris Opera, despite the jealousy of other composers. The opera’s scandalous ballet section was the first white ballet, in which dancers wore white to appear naked. The idea of compromised nuns being in fact naked witches dedicated to seducing Robert seems even today horrifying.

There is nothing to do but to sit back and be astonished.

Enjoy your night at the Paris Opera, circa 1831, courtesy of Franz Liszt and Jenny Chen.

Liszt’s version of themes from the opera was so popular that he was constantly interrupted at other concerts with demands that he play it immediately, which he always did. Liszt’s version saved its publisher from bankruptcy.

Wagner, who was present at the premiere of Liszt’s brilliant paraphrase, was scandalized, commenting in the German press: “One day Liszt, in heaven, will be called upon to play his fantasy on the devil before the assembled company of angels.”

It was so popular that there was bound to be a backlash; critics turned against it, helped by Wagner and Shaw, and it has been ignored since. There are almost no recordings of it or its paraphrase; the opera’s recent London revival in 2012 was panned by the critics. Heard without the popular frenzy which surrounded it, Meyerbeer’s melodies aren’t so much the point as the impossibly virtuosic display with which Liszt surrounds them.

The paraphrase begins with the devil himself, in clumped chord clusters. Plagal octaves introduce a Satanic theme, garnished with “devilish” octaves which alternate hands.

Then fast scales take the place of octaves, while the theme continues. The chord crashes are as much a theme as the melody. You can hear the ballet of the nuns and the gorgeous waltzes of the court of Granada. If Robert’s father ends up in 134

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Franz Liszt: Rondeau fantastique sur un thème espagnol “El contrabandista,” S.252 (1837) Liszt wrote this amazing rondo based on Manuel Garcia’s popular aria “Yo que soy Contrabandista.”

It is essentially the same melody played over and over insanely fast in dozens of ways that are perfectly easy at a slower tempo.

Here are the great Ukrainian virtuoso Valentina Lisitsa’s YouTube notes on it. She refers to Liszt’s concert étude, La Campanella, known for having fast repeated leaps of two octaves in the right hand, and Liszt’s Transcendental Étude Feux Follets, both amazingly difficult. I’ve kept her charming Russian phraseology: La Campanella On Steroids? :-) This is perhaps the MOST unplayable piece of music I ever encountered!

La Campanella, or "Feux Follets" (both are clearly hinted at here) are walk in a park in comparison...

Early Liszt, from the period when he honestly thought that piano being a percussive instrument there is no point of making any attempt at legato, and one might as well enjoy frolicking in most headspinning skips and repeated notes :-) The piece (which is based on Manuel Garcia’s popular song) was titled in the first edition as “Op. 5 #2.” Funny, I think that was the last piece Liszt gave an opus number,

anticipating how many works he is going to write :) Liszt intended this piece as a bravura finale for his recitals—but according to many reports, he failed utterly. Too difficult???? LOL A friend of mine who used to present great Soviet artists on their tours in Italy told me that the only person who played it LIVE was Pletnev. But even then Pletnev told him that he quit on this piece, calling it “unplayable”…It makes for an easy sight-reading. But do pay attention to indicated tempo marks. They are truly insane :-) For some fun go to middle of page 22 or page 28 and tell me how you like it :-) A hint... it would make for a hilarious video. Hitting those notes is a gamble no matter how many days spent practicing. La Campanella infamous skips are two octaves shorter….

Liszt: Sonata in B minor (1853) One of the monumental achievements in the history of music, Liszt’s Sonata has no break between its four movements, and in that alone it creates an entirely new music later seen in, for instance, Dvořák’s scintillating Rusalka, an opera with no breaks between its arias and the rest of the opera. Music becomes an ongoing flood of gamma rays that you stumble on by opening a door, a celestial phenomenon that continues long after you have decided to leave.

Liszt had experimented with the idea of a fantasy-like format before, with no breaks between movements, in all his piano concerti, possibly inspired by Clara Schumann’s idea of a Konzertsatz, a one-movement concerto (which she later regretted and added two movements to). Although anyone who needs a murder to justify a novel has tried to develop some sort of plot for the Sonata, it stands alone as a thing which grows out of itself, with no need to describe the world

around it. This was a new path for Liszt. From this point on, his music was about itself, as was Bach and Haydn. Liszt had gone back to the beginning of music and dispensed with the Romantic conception of programmatic music, or music that told an extramusical story. Chopin insisted that his music was like Bach; it told no tales (despite Anton Rubinstein’s hobby of giving his pieces scenarios and nicknames for his students, which have had a significant half-life). But in Liszt’s sonata, technique is deeply embedded in the evolution of the melody, as if the melody’s whims create the exact technique needed for the journey.

Liszt has rethought his all-too-facile tricks. Now, crescendi start slowly and take minutes to build. Digressions are not Chopin’s superficial jeux perlés, lost weekends of technical excess, but long, deepening developments. The sonata dares to end quietly, unheard of for Liszt or any of his piano-thrashing peers. Tone is valued over noise. As the chords mass, they are all the same chord, so it isn’t for cleverness, but for profundity, that such moments exist. It is as if Liszt changed his entire personality in a few years which, in fact he had, or at least he had focused on the deeper side of his gifts. We have to thank Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein for that. Rare is the genius who lives up to his potential. Liszt, who looked as if he might self-destruct like any Hollywood idol, was better than that.

Carolyne, who was very devout, gave him strength to develop his best self. Berlioz dedicated his opera Les Troyens to her.

Her Russian husband was immensely powerful and wealthy, a friend to the Tzar, member of one of the vast interconnected ruling families of Europe, who felt the scandal of his wife’s potential marriage to a musician and, worse, to a Hungarian musician (read: gypsy), would ruin the ability of their daughter Marie to make a noble marriage (she later married a Hohenlohe, a Prince, one of the ruling families of the Holy Roman Empire, which Andrew Morton has pointed out was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire)."

And so Liszt became an abbé, and Carolyne, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine (her father had 30,000 serfs), was stripped of her fourteen vast estates but fortunate in the great love of her life, Liszt. She died shortly after he did.

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Her daughter Marie founded the Franz Liszt Foundation, with money from the Kiev estate, which Carolyne had sold and whose proceeds she had personally carried out of Russia during the revolutionary chaos of 1848. Carolyne wrote of the Kiev estate: “Today I have just sold one of my lands, one of the first that my grandfather bought, one of the cornerstones of that fortune amassed so laboriously and honestly by the hard work and sincere efforts of two generations of men….

I burst into tears when it passed into other hands.” Imagine the character it must take to walk through a revolution with the equivalent of a billion dollars in your suitcase. Alan Walker has written the seminal book on her: Liszt, Carolyne, and the Vatican.

Reading Alan Walker’s three-volume biography of Liszt, or reading Eleanor Perenyi’s Liszt will give you a full portrait of Liszt, a man totally generous with his genius, his time, his wealth, completely unusual in his respect for and appreciation of women; he was the real prince, not the Almanach de Gotha nobility who swirled around him in Weimar.

When the Sonata was published, everyone hated it: Clara Schumann, Brahms, Anton Rubinstein, Eduard Hanslick (the major German critic). All these people, who fell over themselves trying to say nasty things about it, were, not amazingly, wrong. History has spoken, and with it the people, historians, musicians.

At the time, it was looked down on as “new music.” Today, it is seen as exactly that: the music of our time, which has never dated.

It is an entire novel. It sets up its emotions, deepens them, and then resolves them. It is an example of deep technique, where facility serves philosophy, where the aim is not to impress with empty display, but to elucidate, to explain.

Technique should be about something, rather than being a form of revenge.

The very concept of showing off involves a disdain for the ability of an audience to register anything serious. It involves a bit of self-loathing for a performer to give in to such contempt.

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To turn technique on its head and give it dignity, to use it to serve a higher goal, is to regain respect for music, for the audience, for the composer. Liszt knew this all too well. His reputation among the serious composers of his day was that of a trained monkey, a "chopinzee." To this day, he retains the taint of the gypsy rhapsodies, a whiff of the ghetto, the stigma associated with the vast Tzigane population of Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the so-called Punjabi Roma or Romani of modern Europe. Dvořák was ostracized by the Viennese because he was from Czechoslovakia (formerly known as Bohemia, from which we get the concept of bohemians, or hippies, not to mention the artists of Puccini’s La Bohème).

Dvořák and Smetana carved a valid identity out of formerly denigrated rustic folk songs by turning those same melodies into great art. This is how national identity is both created and sustained by music.

On October 20, Smetana lost the last of his hearing. On November 20, he composed Die Moldau (borrowing the theme from “La Mantovana," attributed to the Renaissance tenor, Giuseppe Cenci), a musical portrait of the Vltava River in its growth through rustic meadows to the St. John’s Rapids, until it vanishes into the fields beyond Prague. Israel adopted the theme as "Hatikvah," the national anthem. In this theme lie the eddies and floods of nations, all the Transylvanian nightmares, the vampires and werewolves of backwater myths, and their transcendence.

Liszt realized he had to overcome this association: Magyar melodies would never be accepted, despite the genius he squandered on them. He had to grow beyond ethnicity. He had to make a clean break with the stage, draw around him the mantle of the Vatican, and become German, not Hungarian.

Liszt would never admit this, at a time when Hungary was under siege from its powerful neighbors, as it has been throughout its history, due to unfortunate accidents of geography. But he realized that great music had to involve Germanic rules, the Bildungsroman. Music had to grow through its structure, to grow up without dependence on national melodies for its identity. It had to forge acceptance through its own merits.

Liszt had to figure out how technique could be used for depth, rather than shallowness.

So Liszt cut himself loose from everything he knew, from all his familiar tricks, and learned to educate his fingers. He had to change every habit, to exorcise the facile. In doing this, he became the father of modern music. His Czardas might have been written by Stockhausen. He became the foundation on which Wagner, his son-in-law, built his church, and with it, the world of music without the walls of harmony which had supported it. His modalities, his espousal of a Gregorian severity, led to Schoenberg, Webern, and in our era, to Arvo

Pärt. It all started with the Sonata in B minor. This was the new Liszt, very different from the vaudevillian of the Transcendental Études and the Grand Galop. Liszt had the genius to change, but his critics didn’t have the genius to change with him and, to this day, his reputation suffers from the young, empty virtuoso he was, rather than the great prophet of Les Préludes, the Legends, and the csárdás obstinés which he became.

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK FOUR ADAM GOLKA

Vocabularies of Music Schumann and Brahms used four descending notes as a motif for their love for Clara Wieck. Schumann used motifs for all his friends. Many composers wrote pieces using the four letters of Bach’s name, including Bach himself, his son Johann Christian Bach, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Busoni, Schoenberg, Honegger, Poulenc, Webern, Ives, Pärt, Penderecki, and others. These are codes or cryptograms, very much like running a Beatles record backwards, backmasking, to hear hidden messages. You may not hear the message, but some subliminal residue remains.

Schoenberg created the idea of using twelve random tones as a fugue to create a more mathematical cryptogram. We use vocabularies to define ourselves. Sometimes these vocabularies become not just words but entire phrases. Leonard Bernstein demonstrated how musical structure paralleled verbal grammar in his 1973 Norton lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question, using theories from Charles Ives and Noam Chomsky, among many others.

Sometimes the vocabulary is about tone, or nuance, or mood.

Claude Debussy could use music to portray an eccentric, sauntering French boulevardier in "Général Lavine," eccentric, but also to evoke the frozen isolation of footsteps in the void in Des pas sur la neige or rain in the garden in Jardins sous la pluie, or the darker side of a mystical sea in La cathédrale engloutie.

Franz Liszt made a saint ascend into heaven, paralleling storm waves in "St. François de Paule: marchant sur les flots."

But maybe the most obvious cryptogram of all is Schumann’s and Brahms’s use of those easily heard four notes to send a cipher out into the future, to weave their love eternally into their compositions. It isn’t easy to turn a pattern in a rug into a work of art, but both Schumann and Brahms succeeded.

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Robert Schumann used motifs to portray his own manic depressive nature with Florestan and Eusebius, the nonchalant, carefree dreamer and his opposite, the melancholic philosopher, such as in his Carnaval. He had theme melodies for his friends and neighbors, many of which occur in his well-known Arabeske, which ends with a "Zum Schluss," a conclusion, where he interweaves those four descending notes into the arabesque theme. An arabesque itself is a Moorish decorative design using tendrils, fronds, and flowers, embodying in its labyrinths a sense of desert, ocean, and luxury, as a palm tree is a symbol of all three. The Almaha in Marrakech and the Alhambra in Granada both use the arabesque as a motif for the Moorish architecture of luxury found in kasbahs, spas, harems, and souqs. Baudelaire and Matisse would describe this spiritual splendor as “Luxe, calm, et volupté.” The alameda (woods) of the Alhambra is a near-anagram for the roses, elms, and fountains whose Byzantine curls suggest the arabesques of the adjoining Alhambra palace. Schumann weaves these voluptuous tendrils musically around the theme of his chaste love for Clara.

Music, derived from the Greek Mousa, or muse, is suspiciously close to musc, the Sanskrit and Persian incense of mouska, as Moorish wraiths wrap themselves like vines around the vocabulary of the Arabeske. Incense is both sensual and mystical.

The sensuous, musky scent of the harem is wrapped up in the linguistic roots of music itself.

Brahms’s adolescence playing background music in bordellos combined into a permanent emotional whirlpool which tangled his seraglioed, confused teen years with his spiritually idealistic later dreams. Clara was a pure goddess, and Brahms spared her the confusion in his mind between the idyllic and the passionate. Brahms was a mix of sybarite and romanticist, with passion in his mind and reason in his heart. The same dichotomy festers in Liszt’s combination of abbé-gallant, a conflict intrinsic to the worldly European, such as Gaston in Gigi, Swann in Proust, Byron, Don Juan.

Johannes Brahms adopted Schumann’s sentimental four-note Clara motif to apologize to Clara for having abandoned her after her husband died. He had promised they would live together after Schumann died, but Brahms just couldn’t.

Although it might seem the height of delinquency to adapt a heroic motif as an excuse for inadmissible behavior, in the hands of an anguished genius it becomes one of the great, if twisted, parables. Schumann’s four notes are most easily remembered as the theme of the first movement of his piano concerto. (They also appear, upside-down, as the theme of the second movement.)

Brahms wove Schumann’s four notes into every intermezzo he wrote, changing Schumann’s nostalgic mood into a code that develops its identity from the way it creates an emotional world around its more neutral center.

The Intermezzi of Opp 116, 117, 118, and 119 were the last pieces published during Brahms’s lifetime, written in 1892 and 1893. At last Brahms was prepared to admit his love for Clara, his dependence on Schumann’s four notes, and transcend both with simple asides that resonate with confession, guilt, and warmth. Music rises above life when it acknowledges it.

The Scottish lullaby of the E flat Major Intermezzo (from the Opus 117 of 1892) is the most easily remembered descending-note melody. Frederick Loewe of My Fair Lady fame was notorious for using Brahms themes, even from passages in the bass played by the left hand, as bases for his own Broadway songs. The wonderful musical Brigadoon, his first hit, is built on themes from Brahms, with Scottish folksongs thrown in for variety: an American fantasy written by an Austrian pianist. Loewe had the themes in his fingers: at 13 he was the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Brahms had always composed easily, although he sat on pieces for decades before refining them into forms he felt would be publicly acceptable. But in his last years, he became isolated, grieving over his life, possibly over his treatment of Clara, and began to look inside himself, into the inner workings of his melodies, into the catapults out of which his vast structures

sprung. His intermezzi are almost lectures on the art of composition. He teaches us how his notes entwine like puns, how they feed off similar patterns, how they invert and skip notes, how they refer to parts of phrases, the way a poet might work on random phrases until the music of the words finally makes narrative sense as well.

Brahms’s final about-face may be the natural panic of any aging artist, desperate to deepen his art while he can. He began to compose the German Requiem in 1865, as well as the “little requiem,” the Schicksalslied. Brahms showed it to Clara at Christmas in 1867 as a four-hand piano duet. It is here that chords begin to morph into other chords, and Brahms begins to write as if all chords are formed from similar chords.

An intermezzo or a ballade is essentially one big chord that shifts its facets like plasma in a lava lamp, with the mutations achieved by shifting what’s already there around like puzzle pieces.

Looking for inspiration for the Requiem, Brahms began reading Friedrich Hölderlin. Imitating the poet’s repetitive forms gave Brahms insight into how his own music might feed off its own structures.

The Intermezzo in E Major from Opus 116 (1892) is an example of these shifting sands of modalities, harmonies, call them what you like. Related chord structures swirl around the central E Major chord.

The Intermezzo No. 4 of Opus 116 is the most transparent of structures, where Brahms’s method of weaving one hand into the other is easily observed. The first two descending sighs in the right hand are half the Clara theme, and the third sigh is the complete Clara theme.

One way Brahms breaks up any possible monotony is by interrupting these descents with a two-note lullaby-like pattern which seems like a digression, but which, after its interruption, allows the descending theme to resume. But this time the seeming final fourth-note is revealed to be only a leading tone descending to a fifth-note, the resulting five-note theme being an emphatic form of the four-note theme.

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Leading tones are the ultimate embodiment of sehnsucht, of yearning, of the slow motion ball that reluctantly finds the glove, the love story where the lovers are kept apart until the very end. You know the note has to resolve into its home key, but Brahms keeps you waiting forever, until part of the joy lies in the anticipation.

By descending in thirds rather than note by note, Brahms varies the poignancy of the theme.

Massive but ethereal chords repeat the concept of the initial sigh, and lead to the descending thirds again. The descending pattern moves into the left hand, and every note of the final chord provides an answer and an ending to every motif which has come before. The last descending five notes are disguised as parts of other patterns, but can be discerned from the confusion because by now the descending pattern is the dominant one.

The initial sigh is composed of two notes a fifth apart, and this pattern also continues throughout the piece. That is, in response to the descending sigh, there is another, broader sigh, which lives in another key. The central key is E and the opposing dominant key is B, so the piece lives in two worlds, one an inversion of the other, like Dvořák’s Rusalka, who lives in both the human world and her natural mermaid world, one a mirror of the other in the wonderful Paris production.

So Brahms’s piece has two lives in alternate universes, one the contradiction of the other, which coincide at the end, like Raymond Queneau’s Vol d’Icare, where all his characters escape the plot, but end precisely as Queneau had intended.

So Brahms’s motifs lead individual lives, but at last meet, in the death of the piece.

Brahms modulates each measure so beautifully that the music imitates what Lewis Carroll called word ladders, word links, or doublets, and what Nabokov called word golf. You change one letter of a word to get a second word, and keep mutating letters until you get to an entirely unrelated word.

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also advances the progress of the piece. Subtle notes are held over and form other chords. Broken chords, two-note chords, descending triplets, doublet figures with the intervening scales or chord note deleted, harmonies spilling down the scale in harmonies a third removed, neighbor notes which become not neighbors but sudden spouses, a game of musical chairs becomes a Peyton Place of sordid alliances, stunning surprises, elegant descents down circular staircases, spiritual revelations when chords change positions by only one space, a kind of dislocation which Rachmaninoff used to summon up an entirely different sense of strangeness. In the end, the familiar four notes are summoned out of a context which is entirely natural, the way Tom Stoppard creates a plot which explains a Magritte-like absurdist painting. Suddenly there are reasons why there is a banana and a tuba. The four notes descend in a subtext while the piece itself is occupied in ascending into the heights. You realize that the second note of the E chord is in fact the end of the little Clara phrase, and the E major scale is in fact composed of two Clara phrases.

So one scale goes downwards while the piece itself rises to the sky, two equal but contrary motions, as passion and reason co-exist in painful rivalry.

As Stoppard justifies a nonsense painting by chipping away at it with reasons, Brahms creates a logical game where chords morph easily into neighbor note relations, descend easily down the keyboard, and suddenly their related scales merge with the chords themselves to make the Clara theme, even though the piece has begun deceptively simply with a solid chord which moves one arm higher on the ladder and then higher again to make the relative minor chord.

This process of musical Twister is always musically logical; it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should be equally beautiful, but that is where passion enters, and transforms the logical game by insisting that each transformation be also compellingly gorgeous. Brahms carried with him the pain of the summer bandstand, the knowledge that the park dances would end in tantrums, that the peace of his Viennese childhood was verging alarmingly towards war.

The last piece he would write for piano was the fourth piece of Opus 119, a celebratory march in a major key which ends in the Clara theme, its last notes emphatically and contradictorily in the minor key. Is this minor key just a way of emphasizing the notes, or is it a statement of anger with himself, possibly regret that he had given up the love of his life because of his own conflicted ideas about women?

The only way these words take on any luster is when they become a means to explain part of why the music of Brahms evolves as it does. But the sehnsucht, the nostalgia, the echoes of bandstand music, the Viennese twilight, can only be obtained by listening. Words may be structurally equal, and provide compensatory triumphs, but they are only part of the luminescent puzzle.

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CONVERSATION WITH

ADA M G O L K A

By Alexis M. Adams AMA: I think you and Tippet Rise share a common friend: Tali Mahanor, the extraordinary and revered piano technician.

AG: Yes, Tali and I have been the best of friends for 13 or 14 years. She was my first great friend in New York City, and more than that she actually helped me to own my first Steinway piano. She found a piano and a very dear person to sponsor the purchasing of it. Thanks to her, I received it as a gift when I was 18 years old. Since then, we’ve swapped Steinways, and now I have a gorgeous 1910 Steinway B, also thanks to Tali, which is such an inspiring piano. Almost every place I go to perform, I find myself disappointed with the piano I’m performing on because it’s rarely as inspiring as the piano I have at home, although I’m told Tippet Rise will be the exception, that Tippet Rise should be renamed “Piano Heaven.”

In a way, I met Tali because of the Russian composer Nikolai Medtner. We had a mutual friend, dear to both of us, my teacher José Feghali, who passed away two years ago. Actually more than a teacher, he was the most important person in my life. Tali gave him some sheet music, The Piano Sonatas of Nikolai Medtner, which she was very passionate about. She helped with the American publication of those works and at that point was running the International Medtner Foundation.

Medtner was a very big part of her life, and she gave the music to José and said if there’s anybody that might be interested in

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it, please pass it along to them. I was about 16 years old and I was studying with José then. He said, “I know just the person.” He gave me the music and I became quite obsessed with it—I was playing it all the time—and he told Tali about that.

Well, it just so happened that she was organizing the first-ever Medtner Festival in New York City with many important names performing, and one of them cancelled and pulled out of the concert. She was panicked—desperate to find a replacement—and then she thought to call José. She said, “You told me you have that student who’s crazy about Medtner. Do you think he would want to come to New York and perform?”

Of course, I said yes. Tali sponsored me to come to New York to perform at the Medtner Festival next to some giants of the keyboard world. I tried not to embarrass myself too much, and we’ve been best friends ever since.

AMA: And Medtner became a part of your repertoire, too.

How lucky you are.

AG: Very lucky. When I was first seduced by Medtner’s music, the connection was visceral. I was drawn to the drama and poetic nature of his music. I think oftentimes he writes these unusual rhythms; even his melodies have unusual rhythms that are very rhetorical in nature. You can really hear speaking in them. He has an unusual way of singing and speaking at the same time when he writes a melody. And I always enjoyed that about his music.

AMA: What brought you to music in the beginning?

AG: My parents are musicians. My mother teaches piano to children, and my father is a piano technician who is trained as a trombonist, so there is a lot of music in the family. And they are Polish immigrants. I’m the only one of my siblings born in the United States. The others were born in Poland. I’m very lucky: my parents were always supportive, but not pushy. The insanity of wanting to do it for a living was something I can only take responsibility for. My parents supported me, but constantly asked, “Are you sure? Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” Now I realize that the answer was no, but I’m so happy that I ignored all the doubts and fears.

AMA: Before I turned my recorder on, we talked a bit about learning a new piece by deconstructing it, and seeing it in a different way. I wanted to return to this and, oddly, I was going to use as an analogy, since I’m not a particularly great musician, although I do play violin, very poorly, yoga, because I do a lot of it as well and I do meditation and mantra as well.

I was trying to figure out the other day, should I chant the same mantra every day, or does it work to hop around a bit, do a different one if I’m inspired to? Of course, my teacher said to do the same one each day, because then you carry it around with you and it becomes a part of you, a part of your body’s knowledge or memory. Perhaps this is a little bit like learning a new piece of music. Is it?

AG: It is, exactly. And I find that it’s so much harder to create conditions in life that really let things go to a deep place. It doesn’t really fit into the way our world is structured today.

AMA: No, the idea of focus is an old-fashioned notion.

Most people these days are doing five different things at once.

I imagine that’s one of the wonderful things about being a musician today, you still have no choice but to focus.

Unlike being a writer, where there are so many distractions a fingerstroke away.

AG: I agree, I think almost everything I’ve learned from life so far has been through that daily ritual of making music. I always wonder what my life would have looked like without music. I have many interests, but since I was a child, it was clear to me that this was what I would do. But that’s almost dangerous because, I have to say, I’ve been so passionate about music my whole life, obsessed, really, and it’s served me so well in so many ways, but it is also problematic.

AMA: How so?

AG: In the sense that the last few years of my life I think I’ve been able to connect to music on a deeper level because of stepping back in a sense—just a sense. I want to feel that music is an extension of my life and not that it’s everything, because when it’s everything—an obsession—it somehow becomes

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CONVERSATION WITH

ADA M G O L K A nothing. When it’s a natural extension of myself, when it’s in the way I speak to a person, when it’s something that I do— like doing yoga in the morning, like making lunch, or washing the dishes, or whatever, when it’s something that I just do—it’s actually a deeper experience rather than a conscious intellectual obsession. Of course, that kind of obsessiveness allows me to be productive, but I’m not sure it allows me to go deep because it’s almost forced, it’s not natural.

The beauty of music is in the fact that everything in music is somehow totally connected to nature. I recently read this book by a great musicologist, he spoke about his idea that the whole system of Western music—the tonic, the dominant, major, minor—that all of that is inherently found in the overtone series, as if nature itself built the whole system of Western music. I think there’s some defined logic here, and I’ve grown convinced that music must be, first of all, natural, really natural. I think, in a way, our desire today to accomplish so much and play so many pieces and have a big career and be all over Facebook and Instagram, it seduces us into being a little bit superficial, and I have this idea that I think basically we should all, even Bach or Mozart or Schubert, play it like the blues. I mean, basically, if you reduce music to its essentials, you’ve got some chord progressions, you’ve got melody, you’ve got harmony. Everything has its purpose. There’s a structure.

But basically it’s no different than playing the blues. If you look at a Bach prelude, it also has its twelve-bar blues.

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AMA: That’s interesting, and it’s interesting when you say music must be natural. And you talk about going deep and playing something naturally. With anything, you must go deep in order to let go and play, nimbly and fluently.

AG: The interesting paradox is that you can really get into a composer’s language and the structure of a piece if you go deep with it. But hopefully at the end of the day a piece won’t sound deep. It should be a natural extension of the musician’s body. With every composer, of course, it’s different.

With Beethoven, I think it’s natural to sort of struggle. With Brahms, it’s saturated with a sort of willful depth. But with Mozart or Schubert, it’s a different story. Every composer, every piece has its own character that you must become, and hopefully it’s not a forced thing. It’s like learning to tell a story in the right way. But it’s fascinating. I learn so much about life and myself by playing music. It’s the best way I find to spend my life. It’s so interesting. I wonder sometimes when I go to see a play—when I see an actor go so deeply into a role— I wonder if that’s what I’m doing.

AMA: When you talk about music becoming a natural extension of your body, I think it must come from immersion, from becoming so fluent, it becomes a natural extension of you. So having a sort of relaxed immersion in that music must result in a different sort of playing.

AG: That’s exactly what I was trying to say, and how to get to that point is a different story. What interests me is understanding the structure of a piece on a very deep level. I analyze pieces in many different ways—on a micro level and a macro level—to see the architecture of a work from the inside and out.

AMA: When you play something for the first time, what is your process? Do you sit down and read it first, or do you sit down and play it through first?

AG: I’m constantly changing my process. Oftentimes I start with reading it through just for pleasure, but then the majority of my initial work is done away from the instrument.

Usually singing the piece over and over until I can sing every voice in it. Singing and conducting an imaginary orchestra until I can hear everything inside my head and really feel it expressively. Piano is a terrible instrument for finding nuances. If I were playing violin, right away I’d have to figure out if I want to up-bow or down-bow, if I want to slide, or how I want to vibrate, or how much bow pressure. All these things I’d have to face right away. With a piano, when you first look at a piece, you’re just pushing buttons and it’s so hard to feel what connects two notes. That’s why I really try to stay away from the piano in the beginning, to try to construct the piece in my imagination. And then, I try to really understand the

architecture of the piece so clearly and then to really figure out exactly what I want to say, not in general terms, like, “This is dramatic,” but to really figure out expressly what the point of every gesture is. And after that it becomes an improvisation, a complete improvisation, and my hope is to get to a place of profound knowledge of the piece and awareness of what my expressive primers are, what the architecture of the piece is, to know every aspect of the piece so inside-out that I can walk out on stage and take the first breath to start the piece and have no idea, really, what’s going to happen.

AMA: How lovely is that?

AG: That’s what I try for. But of course it’s a controlled improvisation because I know what it’s supposed to communicate essentially. I know it starts and it’s like a river flowing. I know that, but I try not to know too much. I try to know what I need to know and also the intellectual understanding inside-out so I can then let go of that, get lost in the moment and have a strong enough connection to it to bring me back or change things as I go because my knowledge is strong enough.

I don’t practice in a very orthodox way. I usually play a piece start to finish once a day, that’s it. I usually don’t do anything else. The rest of the work happens away from the instrument.

In my head, over and over.

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WEEK FOUR

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ADAM GOLKA AND FRIENDS Friday, August 4, 6:30 PM Adam Golka, piano

Schubert and Liszt PROGRAM FRANZ SCHUBERT: Sonata in E minor, D. 566/506

Moderato (D. 566)

Allegretto (D. 566)

Scherzo: Allegro vivace—Trio (D. 566)

Rondo: Allegretto (D. 506) FRANZ LISZT: Légende No. 1, S. 175/1: "St. François d'Assise: la prédication,"

(“St. Francis of Assisi: Preaching to the Birds”) FRANZ LISZT: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514: "Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke"

(“The Dance at the Village Inn”), from Lenau’s Faust INTERMISSION JOHANNES BRAHMS: Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5

Allegro maestoso

Andante: Andante espressivo

Scherzo: Allegro energico—Trio

Intermezzo—Rückblick (“Retrospect”): Andante molto

Finale: Allegro moderato ma rubato

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Franz Schubert: Sonata in E minor, D. 566/506 (1817) Franz Schubert wrote dance music in the suburbs of Vienna.

He was unknown until the end of his life. He died before he turned 32. He was less than five feet tall and chubby. His nickname was Little Mushroom.

He wrote more symphonies than Beethoven (ten). He composed some 1,500 works during his short lifetime. He wrote nine masses and two requiems, hundreds of works for voices, some 800 songs for piano and voice, and the greatest lieder in history, including Winterreise and The Wanderer Fantasy, and the Schwanengesang. He wrote many of the greatest quartets, quintets, and octets in music history; some twenty works for piano duet; twenty-three piano sonatas; and hundreds of piano works.

His music was entirely neglected for a hundred years after he died. Even when I was young, German people in our neighborhood dozed to the symphonies on the radio on Sunday afternoons, when lethargic, monotonous, moribund versions were played. My dentist played Schubert. I later learned he wasn’t even a real dentist. He was an amateur pilot, and he used to fly into our town and do teeth once a month, during which time he always played Schubert on the radio.

Musicians considered him the poor man’s Beethoven.

Concert managers assured pianists that if they played Schubert or Schumann, people wouldn’t come. But Artur Schnabel programmed the sonatas on his later American tours. However, he wrote to his wife saying that during a performance of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, he had begun to feel sorry for the audience. “I am the only person here who is enjoying this, and I get the money; they pay and have to suffer.” People may still feel this during the incredibly long last piano sonatas.

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Rachmaninoff called Schnabel “the great adagio pianist.”

It may have been Richter’s amazingly slow performance of the B flat posthumous sonata (D. 960) that put Schubert on the map. Schubert has had no play or movie to popularize him.

Mozart wasn’t appreciated until Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus was acclaimed in 1979 (and the 1984 film reached even more people), although the Pushkin story that inspired it, “Mozart and Salieri,” was written in 1830. Rachmaninoff had his film also, Shine (1996), although classical music critics were outraged that popular audiences would take an interest in a classical composer; I think they were annoyed by the fanzine quality of the accompanying press.

Today, however, if you ask any musicians what their favorite works are, at least one of them will be a Mass, a sonata, a symphony, an impromptu, a song cycle by Schubert. I myself am obsessed with all of the above. I heard an announcer on NPR say the other day, “If you want to forget the world, listen to Schubert.” Schubertiades, or programs of only Schubert pieces, are regularly held on the radio and in concert halls.

The “Unfinished Symphony” actually had a third movement, which Schubert removed (correctly), as nothing could follow the first two movements; he put it in as the Entr'acte before Act II of his opera, Rosamunde.

His sonatas are all extraordinary. Three of them weren’t published until ten years after his death. The E minor Sonata No. 6 is the "Unfinished Sonata" (like many of Schubert’s pieces). It only has two movements.

Others have noted the similarity of the second movement to Beethoven’s second movement in his Opus 90 sonata, which only has two movements and is also in E minor.

The third and fourth movements of the E minor were lost, and only “discovered” and published in 1908 and 1929, although no one knows if Schubert intended the sonata to have any more sections.

Books to Read: Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge (2015) The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen (1995)

Franz Liszt: Légende I. St. François d’Assise: "La prédication aux oiseaux" ("Preaching to the Birds"), S. 175/1, 1863 Liszt wrote two legends, one based on a painting he and Carolyne had of St. Francis of Paola walking on the waves, where the octaves and scales lift the saint towards heaven, religious transcendence providing the basis for musical revelation.

The other one was a retelling of the famous story of St. Francis and the birds, where the birds gathered around him as he held out his hands, in A Major, of course, a key which for Liszt meant spirituality, as it did in his Second Piano Concerto.

Liszt was 51; he had lost both his son at 20 and daughter at 26. He had decided to become a cleric, an idea he had flirted with (if that’s not an anomaly) for decades. He had moved to a small cell (15 by 12 feet) in a mountaintop monastery an hour outside of Rome, where only three other religious men lived. His only furniture was a bed, a table, a bookcase, and an upright piano (which he called his pianino), missing a D. He lived there for five years. In March he directed his Cantico del Sol di Francesco d’Assisi.

On July 11 he was visited by Pope Pius IX and played for him the bird legend which he had just composed, a piece inspired by the thousands of sparrows which flew around the Monte Mario, from which you could spot St. Peter’s basilica in

the distance. Schubert had been dead for 35 years. Brahms had written a paper attacking Liszt’s music. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" had just been published in America during the Civil War. Liszt wrote the Spanish Rhapsody. His children’s deaths several years before had pushed him to renounce the world, to move towards the divine. He had always had that dream of the final ascension to truth.

The voice of St. Francis can be heard as a recitative in single notes, with the birds stirring in response. Their flurries calm down to a few high chords as St. Francis reaches up to the heavens in revelatory chords.

The sprechstimme (recitative) comes back in the base, while the birds flutter in the sky, forming a counterpoint to the human speech below them. After some excited octaves, the piece becomes astonishingly simple, the hymnal notes of the Saint again echoed simply from the sky until there is nothing left to say, and single chords end the piece with uncharacteristic modesty, although this modesty was to become the foundation for his later works.

This was the beginning of Liszt’s atonal drift into the music of the future, always led by structure, but devoid of its elegant, old-fashioned adjectives, as was Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, which he had written much earlier, in 1809. Goethe’s prose was rich in mythic parable, but Walter Benjamin felt that art should transcend those dangerous realms of myth and pass into freedom, which is what Liszt is hinting at with his two Legends, music flying out of control beyond the piano, beyond the horizon, into an as-yet unseen world of harmony liberated from the conventions of the Classicists or the Romantics. This was also what Wagner sought. It became obvious in the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Wolpe, and Webern. Tonality had been lost in the quest to find a new world, but possibly that new world was in fact a revisit to the old one of modal chants and mystic charms, found in the monastic ecstasies of Barber, Kernis, and Pärt.

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In some ways, Liszt’s virtuosic trills are outlines, templates for the performer, who can vary the birds with great liberty, introducing humor, profundity, and even dread. As the great Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos has shown with his improvisational album, Liszt, the notes are merely a silhouette, a hint, a passing moment that can be enlarged into other moments by the pianist.

Book to Read: Alan Walker, Liszt: The Final Years

Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514: "Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke" (“The Dance at the Village Inn”), from Lenau's Faust (1860) Everyone on the Internet apparently thinks this piece is “impossible” to play, after a lame performance of half a minute of it in the 2015 film Victoria. This is why it’s important that we read books, so we can out the Internet.

Liszt couldn’t use Goethe’s Faust, which was only published in 1790, and not written until 1775. The Faust legend originated with the lost German Faustbuch of 1587 which inspired Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, 1588, the “inspiration” for the hapless watered-down Faust of the decidedly unphilosophic Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau in 1836, in which Faust and the Devil chance upon a wedding celebration. Mephistopheles woos the townspeople with his fiddle, while Faust dances with a young girl and together, they spin off into the forest, where the singing of the nightingale is heard through the open doors.

Romeo and Juliet have their first argument about whether it’s the nightingale or the lark they’re listening to: that is—what just happened? The nightingale was Elizabethan code for having been up all night (dot-dot-dot).

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many other Faustian pieces, as well as a Faust polka and Faust waltzes, among them the two-episode "Procession by Night" and "The Dance at the Village Inn," meant to be performed after the Faust Symphony, which Liszt would frequently do, to show he could outplay an orchestra with his piano. Of this devilish evening, the "Dance" alone has remained popular. Liszt originally composed an ending that fades away with the nightingale (a flute in the orchestral version), but thought better of it and added the well-known five final displays. The piece begins with the Devil’s (or Paganini’s) violin being tuned. Liszt had stated that he wanted to be the Paganini of the piano when he wrote his Paganini études in 1838. (He later revised them in 1851.)

Liszt enjoys this tuning so much he repeats it. He then uses octaves to build up to the chords which announce something is going to happen. Note that Chopin used the same kind of beginning for his E flat Grande Valse brillante in 1833 and extended this opening even more for the A flat Valse brillante, Opus 34, No. 1 of 1834. So it was in the air.

Liszt uses even more suspense. He makes the introduction a wild ride even before the beginning of the theme.

One final tune-up, and the theme surprises us, coming so quickly this time. But then the theme wanders back in its own introduction, which so interests Liszt that he keeps figuring out new introductions, letting the actual waltz sit waiting in its chair like the boys in dance school, clustered on one side of the room.

Octaves climb towards a possible waltz, but then Liszt uses downward falling arpeggios to mimic the intro of Chopin’s Valse brillante. Then a sudden glissando up the entire keyboard leads immediately again into the waltz, as if the waltz keeps breaking out like fireworks in different spots.

A brief spot of dancing, and then the introduction takes over again, with its brilliant rapidly descending arpeggios, which could be interpreted as a dance move, but is obviously still Liszt having fun with Chopin. Rapid passage-work (scales and general messing around) leads to more octaves. Once again we are back in the introduction. Giant chords seem to

suggest an ending but again, before you can catch your breath, the waltz theme has broken out.

It soon fades away, as couples leave the inn to walk off into the woods, where the real waltz begins, in a different key, the bucolic and restful key of G flat. Small discordancies here and there suggest the earlier chaos in the bar, like embers flaring up now and then in a dead fire.

Liszt here “pulls” the tempo, as any red-blooded Strauss waltz will do, slowing down on the second of the three-note oom-pah-pah. His extremely slow tempo with what has been a frenetic galop is gutsier than anything Strauss ever dared to do; he would have lost the racing blood of his dancers.

The five-note motif is a dying flame, descending in half notes.

This he got from the sehnsucht of Brahms, who always paused on the note just above the note he was heading for, and let his audience yearn for resolution. That is, Brahms would milk the moment, to be somewhat cynical of what was so sincerely done (and yet repeatedly done, piece after piece, until you think there might have been a method to it after all)…

In playing these two-note descending figures to a slow waltz tempo, you realize that the fast theme in the beginning was the same notes, just played rapidly. So this yearning theme has been there from the beginning. The piece slowly fades away, the way the original version ended. Possibly these yearning two-note figures are the nightingale.

A sudden presto, an elfish will o’ the wisp flickers around the trees, leading to a reprise of the two-note yearning theme.

(Note that the four false-coda presti always foreshadow the sheet lightning theme, until the final fifth presto.) Lightning bugs flicker around the woods indolently, not a care in the world, until, suddenly, the elfish Puck theme starts up again.

(This comes directly from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music.) Now rapidly repeating notes, pianissimo, repeat the yearning theme with slightly more virtuosity. There is tenderness here, after the lasciviousness of the chase.

The melody is taken up by the left hand, while the right hand plays sighing scales. The yearning theme continues in

repeated notes. This is fiendishly difficult music, yet it happens so slowly, in a trance, that it is actually easy to play.

It is wistful, dreamy, faraway. Again, like the nightingale, it fades away into the sky, like St. Elmo’s Fire or the aurora borealis, dissipated on the night wind. Now our cavalier is back with his bravura theme of devil-may-care braggadocio.

The devil’s trill (a well-known virtuoso violin piece by Tartini) is regaining its influence. The wistful theme is now in octaves in the bass, with scary Satanic arpeggios raging around it in the treble. This is not the simple lovers’ tryst of the beginning.

A chill wind is starting to blow. The two-note wistful theme is now getting out of hand, turning into a storm. But the eye of the hurricane is reached and the night pauses.

And then the first coda, a rampaging game of tag where it’s hard to recognize those benign two-note yearning figures inserted between chords in the bass. Now comes the impossible part. In double time, a running bass in four-four time is met with very fast repeated notes in the right hand. The yearning theme in the bass is covered with fast glissandi scales up top. But the yearning theme is now transfigured into highly serious Wagnerian trumpets, bringing glory to what before had been pathos, as if the young lovers had turned into dragons.

A cadenza passage of brilliant fingerwork leads now to the penultimate presto, as Puck’s sheet lightning returns to dance through the canopy of the forest. A single-note melody languishes in the understory, like Mazeppa when he’s fallen off his horse and broken something in Liszt’s earlier fourth Transcendental Étude.

These slow notes are often harder to play than the fast notes, because when you play fast, you’re too busy to be nervous.

During the slow passages you have time to think about it and notice the crowd.

But this is also the time when you rise to the occasion by bringing all your wits to bear on the single notes. This is where a pianist becomes distinguished, in the interpretation of the lassan, of the Sprechstimme, the spoken dialogue, the real meaning of the aria. Of course, focusing intensely on these 2017 Summer Season

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notes also helps banish fear. But these quiet notes are what Liszt (and Rachmaninoff) lived for, and what any pianist loves. They are a chance to really sing, emote, writhe, to die onstage. The nightingale sings one last time, with a plaintive trill that fades away to make room for the final presto. There are five prestos in the Waltz, meaning four false codas.

There are not only many false introductions, but there are four false endings. Octaves alternate with double chords until rapidly repeating chords take over the world. A terrifying augmented arpeggio runs up and down the piano, accompanied in the bass by the chords of the devil from the beginning of the piece.

Syncopated octaves climb up to the heights, and, as with the end of Liszt’s Robert le diable transcription, the octaves end up going both up and down the keyboard at the same time: up in the right hand and down in the left. Again, Mozart started it all with his Don Giovanni chromatic scale going up and down to show the Don going to hell right at the start of the opera.

Two quick notes to assert the major key signifies a cheerful flourish, the world righted at the last minute by A Major, Liszt’s chosen key for sanctity. All is well that ends well.

We’re not sure who has won this dance-off. Except of course the pianist has.

Johannes Brahms: Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5 (1853)

Allegro maestoso Andante espressivo—Andante molto Scherzo: Allegro energico avec trio Intermezzo (Rückblick)—Andante molto Finale: Allegro moderato ma rubato

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motif from Beethoven’s Fifth is quoted by Brahms in the first, third, and fourth movements. A minute and a half into the first movement, he quotes from Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. This is a coded wave at Clara from the safety of the composer’s chair. Shortly thereafter Schumann’s descending four-note Clara theme is quoted. In the development he quotes from Chopin’s Funeral March theme of 1839. Brahms quotes this poem by C.O. Sternau for the second movement, but it applies to the whole sonata: Der Abend dämmert, das Mondlicht scheint, da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereintund halten sich selig umfangen The evening fades, the moonlight shines, There are two hearts in love entwined and held in a holy embrace.

The third movement quotes the finale of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 2.

The fourth movement is marked Rückblick, or Remembrance. It remembers back to the second movement, from which it quotes.

If there’s one word that defines Brahms, it’s sehnsucht, or yearning, nostalgia. It’s the remembrance of Vienna, of his youth, of those Sundays by the bandstand. The Beethoven motif appears a few times.

The fifth movement has Joseph Joachim’s motif in it: frei aber einsam. Free but lonely. Schumann used motifs to define his friends, but this is really just a cryptogram (which Schumann also used). As Brahms was obsessed all his life with Schumann’s wife, Clara, these motifs are understandable.

Brahms gave it to Schumann. In one year Schumann would be in the asylum. Two years after that he would be dead.

Brahms had promised to run away with Clara after Schumann died, but he had conflicting ideas about women as goddesses and courtesans. Brahms had grown up playing background music in a bordello, so his confusion was built-in.

He himself was free but lonely. But who are those two hearts, safely distanced from Brahms and Clara with a quote from a pseudonymous poet whose real name was Inkermann (aha!). “Inkermann� would have been the better pen name.

This sonata is a compendium of missed opportunities. His memories are of Clara, but also of dead composers who were still his closest companions. Not that it was weird; their music

was his only real friend, other than Clara, who was married to his other friend and mentor.

The music is filled with longing, with grief, with despair. Yet it is one of the great, glorious testaments to absolute beauty in all of music. How does anyone explain it? We are thrilled to have Brahms and his world at Tippet Rise this summer, and we thank Adam for bringing him.

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK FOUR ARIEL STRING QUARTET

Beethoven and Friedrich Winter Landscape, painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1811, a decade after Beethoven’s second string quartet, is one of many archetypes of German Romanticism—highly mystical, ringed with chaos, and yet also classically structured. Boundless winter night and terror is anchored by the pedestrian details of tree stumps, the blossoming limb of art surrounded by the devastation of nature. The “negative beauty” of classicism (monotonous repetition, spiritual emptiness), the aging wanderer, mixed with the anthropomorphic Romantic tree, offers both “proximity to nature and distance from nature,” as Norbert Wolf says of Friedrich’s composition. Like Friedrich, Beethoven was perched at the tipping point between antiquity and modernity, between nature and urbanity.

He is Friedrich’s Wanderer. Ian Bostridge has pointed out the similarities of Friedrich to Schubert’s wandering poet in the song cycle Winterreise. Beethoven’s "Lebewohl" ("farewell") piano sonata of 1810 evokes the departure of the classicist into the void of the unknown, into the new world of the Romantic.

The last five string quartets and the Grosse Fuge would come ten years later, a year before his death.

As with Smetana, he wrote his greatest music after he became deaf. Deafness was a kind of death, which left him free to look into the world beyond.

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Winter Landscape, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1811

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ARIEL STRING QUARTET Saturday, August 5, 10:30 AM The Domo Ariel String Quartet

PROGRAM LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Quartet in A Major, Op. 18, No. 5

Allegro Menuetto—Trio

Andante cantabile con variazioni

Allegro JOHANNES BRAHMS: Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2

Allegro non troppo

Andante moderato

Quasi Minuetto, moderato

Finale. Allegro non assai

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in A Major, No. 5, Op. 18 (1800) Allegro Menuetto

Andante cantabile Allegro By 1800, Beethoven had begun to make the first great change in his thinking. (The second was the period in 1803 of the Heiligenstadt Testament—the letter he wrote to his brothers in which he despaired over his increasing deafness—and the Eroica Symphony.) “Beethoven was at an impasse,” Joseph Kerman states (see below, “A Book To Read”). Beethoven was blocked. He was beginning to question the validity of traditional structures, and was starting to change the weight, role, and style of each of the movements. As Kerman says, “He may have realized for the first time that he did not have to be bound by convention… or that he simply could no longer hold to convention.” Beethoven eliminated traditional bridges between themes, and pared his ideas down to simple notes, which we note Rachmaninoff and Liszt also did as they matured.

This “dark night of the soul” had its downside. To get past the impasse, Beethoven used material from his old notebooks (as he did throughout his life). The other way out was to base the quartet on his favorite Mozart “Drum” Quartet (K. 464, also in A Major). Mozart in turn was copying Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op. 20, No 4.

Beethoven liked this Mozart piece so much that he copied out the third and fourth movements in full for his notebooks, which he kept for inspiration (as do many artists, such as the architect Renzo Piano, who compiles ideas by others in his daybook to broaden his views).

Beethoven remarked to his pupil Carl Czerny about the Quartet, “Mozart is telling the world, ‘Look what I could do if you were ready for it.’”

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Kerman remarks: “A patrician choice: the Quartet in A is Mozart’s most serious and troubled composition in the genre, less ‘available’ and more learned than the others…. Only occasionally had Mozart and Haydn built slow movements of real weight in variation form. The idea was a fairly novel one, novel anyhow to Beethoven.”

This is why Beethoven put the Minuet second and put the variations in the third movement; the variations were too weighty to put up front (and also, Mozart had done the same thing).

But copying Mozart led to a Mozartian feeling, with its attendant grace and ease. Only the Minuet is pure Beethoven.

In the Minuet are elements of the Teutsche, the father of the Ländler and the Waltz. Kerman says,

The minuet is starkly simple…. But it would be a mistake to equate its fragility with innocence, cru- dity, or anything elementary in conception. This is a pensive essay in classic grace, with a sophistication of its own, and most astonishing of all, with a delicacy that matches Mozart without at all follow ing him in spirit.

…Then the trio, with its positively Schubertian lilt, is the most mature and individual trio in the Op. 18 Quartets. It is also the simplest, once again.

Book to Read: The Beethoven Quartets, Knopf, Joseph Kerman: 1967

Johannes Brahms: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 51 (1873) Allegro non troppo Poco Adagio Scherzo: Poco Allegro Finale: Allegro

Brahms spent the summer of 1873 in the small country town of Tutzing. There, by the side of Lake Würm and with the Bavarian alps in the background, he resolved his two string quartets, and also wrote the Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, the first of his orchestral pieces. He had destroyed some twenty earlier versions of the quartets over the prior decade. It was more important always to Brahms to wait until a piece was perfect than to publish it too early. He worked on many pieces for almost twenty years. Very much like Dylan Thomas, who rewrote his fairly bland poetry until he made it uniquely sing, Brahms believed in the power of rewriting, and in his ultimate ability to produce exactly the effects he wanted.

(Beethoven also went to Heiligenstadt and then to Döbling, both in the countryside, to write. Grieg wrote in a small cottage in Troldhaugen down by Lake Nordas in Norway, and Mahler escaped the pressures of Vienna in the Salzkammergut mountains around Steinbach, among the soaring peaks of Berchtesgaden or, later in life, at Toblach in the Dolomites of northern Italy.)

Max Kalbeck, in his four-volume biography Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1904-1914), wrote: Brahms had taken it into his head to wander from the Middle Rhine down through the magnificent river valley like a traveling artisan, with a pack on his back and knobbled stick in his fist.... The most frugal meal or the poorest night’s lodging, which a more fastidious person would have despised, suited him perfectly.... Thinking of the precious enslavement of society, he inverted the motto of his friend and wrote a heartfelt “free but lonely” (frei aber einsam) on his banner, or, by raising the fifth to the sixth degree he sang out to the fresh morning a jubilant and harmonious “free but happy” (frei aber froh). It is no accident that the octave, divided by a third.... became one of the principal motives in Brahms’ music. We encounter the idea in a variety of transformations and disguises, from its first clear appearance in the

Second Ballade, Op. 10, up through the Third Symphony, which grew directly out of it. It serves him for both the expression of highest bliss and the deepest sorrow, and sounds secretly in many portions of his works.

The open fifth, along with octave notes either side of it, is the sound made by the open strings of the violin; it also evokes Schubert’s last piece in his great song cycle Winterreise. The quasi minuet of the second Quartet was out of fashion, as was Schubert’s frozen organ grinder, the winter wanderer. Brahms's music was recidivist, out of step, harkening back to earlier eras while around it swirled the music of the future of Liszt and Wagner. Schumann had initially written of Brahms that he was “fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner,” and that he would hold his ground against Wagner and Liszt, thus throwing Brahms into the battle between neo-German self-conscious modernism and the conservative element of Schumann’s Leipzig journal Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

It is from this canonization that Brahms developed his caution in perfecting his music.

He knew he was a spokesman for the zeitgeist. It was a question of what the zeitgeist, the ghost of the era, was. Brahms was quite aware that he was taking over the mantle of Beethoven, not of Liszt and his son-in-law Wagner, the reckless, blaring, vaudevillean side of the German spirit.

The Brahmsian school resulted in Stravinsky, while the Wagnerian school led to Schoenberg and Webern. The fanciful humanists versus the realist mathematicians. These are still fighting words. It was the German academics who fled to America during World War II and who educated the majority of American musicians and scholars to prize serialism and to despise the wild, passionate gypsy music of Liszt.

References to Hungarian gypsy music abound in this quartet, in homage to Brahms’ friend Joseph Joachim, who was Hungarian.

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ADAM GOLKA AND FRIENDS Saturday, August 5, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Adam Golka, piano Ariel String Quartet

Mystery and Intimacy PROGRAM WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: String Quartet in G Major, K. 387

Allegro vivace assai Menuetto

Andante cantabile

Molto allegro BÉLA BARTÓK: String Quartet No. 6 in D Major, Sz. 114 Mesto—Più Mosso, pesante — Vivace Mesto—Marcia Mesto—Burletta

Moderato, Mesto INTERMISSION ROBERT SCHUMANN: Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op 44

Allegro brillante

In modo d’una Marcia. Un poco largamente

Scherzo: Molto vivace

Allegro ma non troppo

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Quartet No. 14 in G Major, “Spring,” K. 387

Allegro vivace assai Menuetto

Andante cantabile

Molto allegro The first of the six “Haydn Quartets,” written in honor of Joseph Haydn, whom Mozart didn’t meet for another two years (Haydn called him the greatest composer he knew). In an age where people died young of many diseases, Haydn lived to 77. He knew Mozart, Beethoven, Salieri, the Esterhazys, the rulers of his day. His works do not date. Increasingly we appreciate his humor, and his sense of fun.

As he said:

“I must have something to do—usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture, I cannot escape them, they stand like walls before me. If it’s an allegro that pursues me, my pulse keeps beating faster, I can get no sleep. If it’s an adagio, then I notice my pulse beating slowly. My imagina- tion plays on me as if I were a clavier.” Haydn smiled, the blood rushed to his face, and he said, “I am really just a living clavier.”

Haydn wrote 68 quartets; Mozart wrote 23. When the publishers sent the Mozart quartets to Italy for publication, they were returned with the report “the engraving is full of mistakes.” Haydn wrote even more amusing and rebellious “mistakes” than Mozart. Both composers were aware of the corset of musical tradition, and made comments on it by defeating expectations, by often writing “wrong” notes. They were both aware of the absurdity of the musical structures they had inherited, but were content to flourish within them.

As with Beethoven’s Quartet No. 5, Mozart here puts the Minuet second in the lineup, the scrimmage, of movements.

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Mozart had gotten manuscripts of Bach and Handel from Gottfried van Swieten, a patron of Mozart’s who had just been elected effectively minister of culture by Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Van Swieten had formerly been Ambassador to the Court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. He was also the Imperial Librarian and introduced the world’s first card catalogue to the Prunksaal in the Hofburg Palace, one of the most splendid Baroque libraries in the world and today the Austrian National Library, the largest in the country. Which is a long way of explaining the Bach-inspired fugue at the end of the Spring Quartet, and the excessive chromatic scales in it, which later became the death theme in Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni, and inspired Bernard Shaw to say Mozart was the composer who understood death best. Although chromatic scales (which sound every half-tone) sound modern, they had been around since Bach, such as in his Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue of 1730 (only 52 years before the Spring Quartet).

Mozart’s half-notes are a precursor to half time. No, wait.

They are a precursor to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, which is based on the twelve tones of the chromatic scale from C to C. They are a window into the future of music.

You hear inklings in Mozart all the time, where he is tempted to write something out of the box, off the scale, to write something that could have been Liszt or Wagner or Schoenberg. At the last minute he pulls back. My teacher used to say that you had to play Schoenberg to appreciate Mozart, to know where he was thinking of going before he pulled back, to see around the corner into the overtones that lie just outside our hearing, but which the deaf Beethoven could hear. These Haydn quartets lie on the border between the old world and the new world. Although they sound very Mozartean, they have something of the later Viennese world in them. Without Mozart’s chromaticism, the zeitgeist wouldn’t have been prepared for the chromaticism of Die Frau ohne Schatten, Verklärte Nacht, Wozzeck, Lulu, even Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Mozart had left Salzburg after a fight with the Archbishop (Salzburg never appreciated Mozart, although now everything it sells has Mozart’s name on it). This changed his life.

He went to Vienna, roomed with the Webers, married their daughter Constanze, established himself as the best pianist after a duel with Clementi, and became the greatest composer in Austria with The Abduction from the Seraglio. The Haydn Quartets come from this new stage in Mozart’s thinking.

Rather than writing music for the hermetic church in Salzburg Mozart was forced to confront an audience and write with their approval or censure in mind. He had broken out of Salzburg into the world, into the future.

Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 6 in D Major, Sz. 114 (1939) (Ariel)

Mesto—Più Mosso, pesante—vivace Mesto—Marcia Mesto—Burletta—moderato Mesto Mesto means “sadly.” It is a dirge, a lament.

This was the last string quartet Bartók wrote before he died. It was performed in 1941 in New York by the Kolisch Quartet, founded in 1921 as the New Vienna String Quartet, and dedicated to the performance of the works of Arnold Schoenberg. It premiered works written for it by Berg and Webern as well. Its founder was the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, Arnold Schoenberg’s son-in-law, who late in life taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and was a good friend of my teacher there, Russell Sherman. Kolisch was invited by the composer Gunther Schuller, then president of NEC, to become head of the chamber music department.

He continued as a member of the faculty at the Internationale

Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany, along with his close friend Eduard Steuermann. Steuermann taught Russell Sherman, Alfred Brendel, the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, and Gunther Schuller. Steuermann’s sister was the actress Salka Viertel, who co-wrote the scripts for her friend Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina and Queen Christina.

Her son Peter Viertel was married to Deborah Kerr. He wrote scripts for Billy Wilder and John Huston. He wrote a book which was made into a fine film in 1990 starring Clint Eastwood called White Hunter Black Heart, about the making of The African Queen. Six degrees of separation, from Bartók to Clint Eastwood.

Shortly after writing this quartet, Bartók fled the Anschluss for exile in New York, where he was hired by Columbia University for $5,000 a year. The only hobby he could afford was riding the subway on weekends with his family. In the States he wrote the famous Concerto for Orchestra, his solo violin sonata, and his third Piano Concerto.

Bartók traveled extensively around his native Hungary recording folks songs, which became the basis for the science of ethnomusicology. He studied piano under a student of Liszt’s, and at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest became lifelong friends with Zoltán Kodály. Bartók became a professor of piano at the Academy and taught the great Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti, as well as the esteemed Hungarian pianist György Sándor.

As Picasso wove Papua New Guinean tribal art into his Cubism, Bartók and Kodály began to incorporate Transylvanian Magyar folk melodies into their modern compositions. Liszt had based his Rhapsodies on Roma melodies, as Mozart had used Bavarian and Romanian folk songs in his operas and piano concerti; the Ukrainian kolomyika features in the choruses of Abduction from the Seraglio, for instance. It is the inclusion of Russian and Ukrainian folk songs that made Mozart’s later music vibrant, after the formulaic sonatas of his youth.

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Composers and painters have noticed the immediate appeal of tribal material compared to the homogenized assimilations which filter down eventually into polite society. Mozart may have been directed to folk songs at soirées given by Prince Golitsyn, or through his friendship with the Czech pianist Carl Czerny.

Beethoven's well-known opening theme from his Sixth Symphony ("Pastoral") is a Croation folksong. His friend Prince Andrey Razumovsky (related to his other patrons, Count Lichnowsky and Prince Lobkowitz) commissioned three string quartets from Beethoven, asking that they contain Russian motifs. The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are dedicated to Lichnowsky, who had a large library in his palace in Vienna containing many volumes of Russian songs, and was himself a musician and singer with documented influence over Beethoven (see Yakov Soroker’s Ukrainian Elements in Classical Music).

In this quartet, Scottish themes vie with Arab chants. A sarcastic March theme foretells the approach of World War II, and the Mesto mourns his mother’s death. The Burletta or “hideous gavotte of war” in the third movement is contrasted with the innocence of the country in the folk theme of the trio. Very much like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Bartók’s viola and cello Lament is about living in a world beset by war, death, and exile, all three of which bore down upon him at that moment. He quotes Beethoven’s last Quartet, Opus 135, where Beethoven wrote, “es muß sein”—it must be. Bartók’s answer to the Mesto viola motif is from Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.

As Mark Steinberg of the Brentano Quartet writes: Not only does this Beethoven movement represent mighty wrestling with the forces of chaos we encounter in the world, but it shatters the world of the previous movement, the famous Cavatina, the movement Beethoven claimed he couldn’t recall without its summoning a tear to his eye. Thus in retrospect the opening of the Bartók may take on the emotional resonances of the Cavatina, an exploration 164

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of immense vulnerability and, quite significantly, the inability fully to give voice to our very most significant and intense emotions…it has the aspect of a villanelle (such as Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”), circling around its central idea until its most direct and potent revelation at the close of the work. There is continual reclaiming of and reengaging with the powerful opening mood. In this case the fullest unveiling of the Mesto material, in four voices and significantly extended in length, is followed by a reflecting back upon the material of the first movement proper. This last movement then becomes also an expression of memory in the midst of despair, the games of the first movement now muted and transformed by mature reflection, disengaged yet arrestingly poignant. Any trace of artifice is now dissolved… we are left with infinite expectation and a sense that the Mesto theme cannot, in fact, be complete. Its resonance trails off into memory, into emptiness.

Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E flat Major, Op. 44 (1842) Allegro brillante In modo d'una marcia. Un poco largamente Scherzo: Molto vivace Allegro ma non troppo In 1840, when Robert Schumann married Clara Wieck at last, she encouraged him to branch out from writing only piano music. Filled with the joy of his hard-won marriage, in 1842 he composed three string quartets, followed by the piano quintet, a piano quartet, and the Fantasiestücke. for piano trio. It was the first time anything was written for a string quartet and a piano.

Clara Schumann (see “Vocabularies of Music” in this Program) was going to debut this piece, but she got sick and

Mendelssohn sight-read it for its first performance. The piano was finally powerful enough to stand up to the massed strings of four instruments.

Around this time, pianos used the Neidhardt temperament, where A was tuned to 425 cycles, rather than the 440 of today: so pianos sounded a bit duller in Schumann’s time.

On the occasion of her triumphal concert tour in 1838, Clara Wieck received a concert grand as a present from Conrad Graf, one of the great piano makers of his time. After Robert Schumann’s death, Clara gave it to Johannes Brahms as a present, who, in turn, bequeathed it to the Society of Music Friends in Vienna. The piano was later exhibited at the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873. Today, it can be viewed in the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna. Later in life, Clara was presented by the company with a Grotrian-Steinweg, serial number 1295, made in Braunschweig, which is now in the Musashino Academia Musicae Foundation in Tokyo.

The Scherzo’s first trio section features the descending four-note “Clara” motif.

Each of the movements opens with an immortal and unforgettable theme and builds from there. It directly influenced another immortal work, Brahms’s F minor Piano Quintet.

This work was based on Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2, also in E flat Major. Since 1927 Schumann had been reveling in the music of Schubert. In 1833 a friend of his had written variations on Schubert’s "Waltz of Longing," which inspired Schumann to complain that “in the deafening noise of the world… the flower of lyricism cannot blossom beautifully and freely—rather it quietly buds and floats its perfume in secret.”

Schubert wrote of his own Sehnsuchtswalzervariationen to his current crush, Henriette Voigt: “They are actually lilies of love, held together by the Waltz of Longing. The dedication is only deserved and valued by a soul in A flat, one which is like yours, like yours alone my treasured friend.”

These waltzes of the heart were the keys of “D flat and A flat waxing lyrically … evening flowers and figures in the dusk, the remembrance of lost youth and of a thousand loves” and

which “remind us of something beyond our reach.”

Although he abandoned the piece and adapted it later into his Carnaval, his early sense of yearning (sehnsucht) transfigures all his work. He might as well have been Brahms (although Brahms’s music embodies the yearning more effectively). And while he yearned for childhood, Schumann was quickly going mad from syphilis. In 1854, he had lost his job, alienated Clara, the love of his life, tried to commit suicide, and had himself committed to the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn.

The cellist Steven Isserlis has written of Schumann’s madness:

Poor Brahms, who had met Schumann about four months before his incarceration, still revered the older man, and was one of the few people to visit him in the asylum; the emotional crisis scarred him for life.

Brahms was not the only one to be shattered by Schumann’s condition. The tragedy had a devastating effect upon many of the older composer’s inner circle, many of whom later suffered nervous breakdowns. His children, in effect abandoned by both parents (and pretty horribly treated by Clara), were scattered, and most of them met sad ends.

Even today, there seems to be something of a curse on those who become too closely involved with Schumann. The scholar who edited Robert and Clara’s letters suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized; the author of one of the few good books in English about Schumann, John Daverio, drowned in mysterious circumstances in the Charles River in Boston.

So students are warned not to play Schumann in public.

He has been until the last few decades the guilty secret (like all of chamber music) of the pianist. One of the great advantages of the computer has been the ability to hear this “forbidden” music, and the espousal of its beauties by a public who has simply never been exposed to it. Please enjoy it without fear today.

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WEEK FIVE

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JEFFREY KAHANE Friday, August 11, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jeffrey Kahane, piano

An Evening with Jeffrey Kahane PROGRAM FRANZ SCHUBERT: Sonata in G Major, D. 894

Molto moderato e cantabile

Andante

Menuetto Allegro

Allegretto INTERMISSION T. ANDRES: "Heavy Sleep" (2013) G. KAHANE: "Works on Paper" "Death to Advertising" "Veda" (Paraphrase)" "The New Sincerity Auld Reel" FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58

Allegro maestoso

Scherzo: Molto vivace Largo

Finale: Presto non tanto

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK FIVE JEFFREY KAHANE

by Jeffrey Kahane Among the things that the four composers on this program clearly have in common is an abiding love for and understanding of the expressive potential latent in the sheer beauty of the sonority of the piano.

Schubert's glorious G Major Sonata (published as “Fantasie or Sonata” in the original edition, though the autograph manuscript says only “Sonata”) begins with a simply sustained G major chord, whose register and voicing is so similar to the opening of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto in G Major that it’s difficult to imagine that there is not at least some unconscious allusion to that earlier masterpiece. As is the case with the opening of Beethoven's concerto, the simple, pure resonance of the magical opening chord could be said to generate the musical material and, in a way, even the deeper structure of the movement. I find it easy to imagine Schubert sitting down one summer day, gently and spontaneously striking that first chord and allowing its vibrations to lead him into an extended harmonic reverie, out of which, only very gradually, a quintessentially Schubertian dance-like tune arises. Throughout the unhurried expanse of the sonata, there is a sense of endless joy in pure harmony, even when, as in the development section of the first movement, the music becomes dark, impassioned and even for a few moments violently angry.

It is one of the fascinating and miraculous aspects of this work that it somehow manages effortlessly to be both monumental and epic on the one hand and yet humble and folklike on the other. When we finally reach the breathtakingly magical coda of the sprawling last movement (which looks forward to the world of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, composed in the same key) we realize that while the composer has taken us on a long journey indeed, notwithstanding its occasional moments of passionate, almost violent intensity, he has brought us home 168

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to a sense of utmost tranquility, closing with that same simple quality of resonance (nothing more than a few repeated G major chords) with which the sonata began.

Chopin's B minor Sonata is his greatest large-scale work, on which he brings to bear his immensely refined sense of formal discipline as well as his unsurpassed gift for bel canto melody and the most ravishing and sometimes shockingly daring harmonies. The slow movement has been rightly called one of the high points not only of Chopin’s oeuvre but of all Romantic music, and the profoundly moving middle section in particular is (like the opening of the Schubert sonata) another exquisite example of the piano’s resonance generating a musical conception of the highest inspiration.

It’s worth pointing out, as a side note, that just a few bars before the end of the slow movement, a yearning four-note chromatic ascending motif appears, accompanied by the famous “Tristan” chord: this is essentially an exact “quotation” from the famously “revolutionary” opening of Wagner's opera, except that Chopin's sonata was actually composed more than a decade earlier!

Timo Andres, even at the relatively young age of 32, is not only one of the finest composers working today, but, like Chopin, also a true master pianist, whose pianistic gifts inform everything he writes for the instrument. “Heavy Sleep” is a kind of nocturne, inspired by Chopin’s Nocturne in F-sharp minor, Op. 48, No. 2, and by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43. As is often the case with Chopin's nocturnes, “Heavy Sleep” is both compact (around 7 minutes) and powerfully affecting, and also an example of instrumental resonance as “subject matter” for a work.

Gabriel Kahane, like Schubert, is one of his era’s pre-eminent songwriters, whose songs explore the widest imaginable range of subject matter and tone, from the outrageous and hilarious to the heartbreaking and horrifying. His threemovement “Works On Paper,” composed for his friend and

frequent collaborator Timo Andres, is (among other things) a tribute to Andres’s pianistic gifts. Its second movement is a paraphrase in the grand Romantic manner of one of Gabriel’s most affecting (and disturbing) songs, “Veda'” from his recent album The Ambassador. Once more, here is a stunning example of the piano’s endless capabilities for resonance as a vehicle for atmosphere and expression and idea, here taken to an extreme as the pianist is asked to play harmonics inside the instrument while at the same time sustaining a long-breathed melody on the keyboard itself.

SONNET 43

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected; But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, And, darkly bright are bright in dark directed.

Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow's form form happy show To the clear day with thy much clearer light, When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?

How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?

All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

—William Shakespeare

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Heavy Sleep Composition and Music Notes

by Timo Andres

For a supposed nocturne, "Heavy Sleep" is dense, dramatic, and packed with activity.

The material of the piece is set on a repeating ground of chromatic scales, an idea taken from the coda of Chopin’s Op. 48 no. 2 Nocturne. The piece’s character, though, is based more on Op. 48, No. 1, its measured pacing belying the terrors of its middle section.

"Heavy Sleep" begins with isolated chords—seemingly disconnected events which gradually reveal an overall direction as they increase in complexity and volume.

Eventually the music gets “stuck” on a repeated whole-step interval—not much in terms of a theme, but revealed in greater relief by the variety of things happening around it.

After a loud confrontation between the whole-step and the opening chords, the music evaporates in a harmonic haze, turning the same idea over and over.

Works on Paper Composition and Music Notes

by Gabriel Kahane

"Works on Paper" was written for my dear friend, the pianist and composer Timo Andres, on the occasion of a duo recital tour we gave in 2016. In writing for a fellow composer, I had in mind to attempt a certain kind of musical ventriloquism—I wanted to hint at aspects of Timo’s compositional diction, grammar, vocabulary, and dialect, while also remaining attuned to his personality as a pianist.

The first movement, “Death to Advertising,” takes its title from a very bad pun having to do with the musical unit or cell from which the rest of the movement’s material is 170

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derived. It is an exercise in Apollonian restraint, a quality with which I associate Timo’s pianistic temperament. The second movement, “Veda (Paraphrase),” recasts the eponymous song from my 2014 album The Ambassador. While the outer voices (melody and bass) largely resemble the original song, there is a blurry harmonic aspect to the inner voices that shadow the melody, often in a slow, mazurka-like rhythm. Finally, “The New Sincerity Auld Reel” is a brief but virtuosic coda that pays homage to Appalachian folk music. It is, of course, a thrill to have this piece performed by my father, who is, coincidentally, one of my favorite pianists.

"Works on Paper" (2016) was commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the Schubert Club, and the Newman Center for the Performing Arts. It lasts approximately 9 minutes.

Frédéric Chopin: Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58 (1844)

Allegro maestoso

Scherzo: Molto vivace Largo

Finale: Presto non tanto Chopin’s great last Sonata is my favorite, along with the other two. The melody of the third movement is the most gorgeous of Chopin’s other gorgeous melodies. The Finale is lyrical rather than a rush to the grave.

Chopin, who left Warsaw at 20, was to become arguably the greatest French composer in history, despite lacking the larger creations of Berlioz and Bizet. His music set the tone for the Romantic era. It’s languorous, sentimental (but not too much) brilliantine (but always music, even in his technically impossible Études). In fact, the music comes from the technique. Schumann and especially Brahms were nostalgic, sehnsucht (yearning), with that next to last note hanging over

the abyss, destined for love, but with the real sublimity already achieved in wanting it, not in attaining it.

perfect reverie. There may have been small wars, but they didn’t alter the Zeitgeist the way the larger wars did later.

But Chopin was tougher than his melodies, for all his notorious frailty. He never surrendered; he never let down the wall, the mask. He was always the perfect courtier, as were Bach and Handel. Mozart reveled in thumbing his nose at royalty in his subject matter for the operas. Haydn has an outof-the-body quality where he looks down on his music with a certain bemusement. C.P.E. Bach taunted the bars of his cage.

Chopin acknowledged only the influence of Bach on his writing. But unlike Bach, who evolved from a tradition, no one before or after Chopin was anything like him. He stands alone, inimitable. None of Liszt’s later imitations of his Nocturnes or Ballades can touch their models. Liszt was the better pianist, but his need to point this out cost him his supremacy. Chopin made no claims to anything; nor did Bach or Handel (or, for that matter, Shakespeare). They simply were. In their assuredness, they still reign as the absolute essence behind the Platonic shadows of music.

Like atoms, they are the indivisible core of the cosmic gears.

There is no buffer between them and the universe.

But Handel, J.S. Bach, and Chopin were always perfectly dressed in the most glittering court costumes. They knew they wrote for an aristocratic system anchored by an unquestioned God, and it gave their music a glory, an unwavering identity that blooms in every layer of the harmony, in every measure, that knew the certainty of the world and of how perfectly music matched its ineffable mysteries.

None of the later questions of Liszt, Wagner, Schoenberg, Feldman, Cage, Berio, Xenakis, Ligeti intruded on this

It’s wonderful that Chopin ends this exercise in the great pathos of the 19th century with a final optimistic major chord. You have to feel that this is Chopin’s blessing for the future of music.

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CONVERSATION WITH

X AV I E R F O L E Y

By Alexis M. Adams

AMA: I was surprised to learn today that you not only play music, you also compose it.

Can you tell me a bit about what informs and fuels your compositional process?

XF: I basically give myself a set amount of time, and within that timeframe, I put these ideas on paper. For example, in my piece “The Falling Seagull,” I composed it because I wanted to perform a Chinese piece for solo bass, and there wasn’t one. So I filled in what wasn’t there. I wanted to play an Iranian piece with five movements, so I wrote “Star Sonata,” with five movements, because I wanted to play it.

AMA: This morning I watched you perform your piece “The Hair Buster” on YouTube.

It was beautiful! What’s the most bow hairs that you've broken in one piece?

XF: Oh, man! I can’t tell you because I never count, but I can tell you it’s a lot.

AMA: As a composer, who are your influences?

XF: Kelly Johnson, who’s the aeronautical flight engineer who worked at Lockheed and helped to design the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird. I want to do what he did, in that magnitude, except with music.

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AMA: Who do you love to play?

XF: I love to play anything. I like all music. I try not to discriminate…I’m always interested in hearing and playing new things. But I also see music as a tool. There’s a time and place for a certain piece, an overarching goal for what we’re trying to do with each concert. I get the job done and try to fill in what’s not there…. I try to play the music and see what the results are.

When I began playing, I loved Beethoven and Bach. Since being at Curtis, I’m curious to see where the world is now, where music is at this point in time, how it travels from culture to culture. Mozart works because the form is great, it’s highly understandable, it’s clear.

It’s not like New Music, which I don’t really like, but even if I don’t like it, there’s a place for it. If you match it with a World War II film, it works. Because these new compositions that come from the Darmstadt School are rooted in destruction, tragedies, wars. Their composers came of age during the War and their work was an answer to the happy music that wasn’t particularly accommodating to the harsh times in our history—the times they themselves had lived through. A lot of music is misunderstood, not liked, but there is a time and place for every piece to be played. There is some music I don’t want to hear, but all music is a tool.

So when I write a piece, I’m trying to get a point across. Get a result. What can it do?

Why am I writing it? Who’s listening to it?

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JEFFREY KAHANE

Saturday, August 12, 10:30 AM The Domo Jeffrey Kahane, piano Gershon Gerchikov, violin, Xavier Foley, double bass Ariel String Quartet

Sonority in Nature PROGRAM FRANZ SCHUBERT: Quartettsatz, D. 703 FRANZ SCHUBERT: Notturno in E flat Major, Op. 148 FRANZ SCHUBERT: Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667, “Trout”

Allegro vivace

Andante

Scherzo: Presto

Andantino—Allegretto

Allegro giusto

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 12, D. 703, "Quartettsatz" (1820)

Allegro assai

The Quartet Movement (“Quartettsatz”) in C minor is the first part of his uncompleted twelfth Quartet. Many people wonder why Schubert left so many pieces incomplete, notoriously his unfinished Eighth Symphony (although I believe that he used the final movement from the symphony as the “Entr’acte No. 1” to his incidental music (written just before the "Quartettsatz") to von Chézy’s play Rosamunde).

When you hear the Rosamunde “Entr’acte,” you realize that the Eighth Symphony was better off without it. As we’ve seen, so many pieces, from C.P.E. Bach’s sonatas to Morton Feldman’s Intermissions, broken off in the middle of a sentence, it’s obvious that people usually know when they’ve said enough. They’ve made the sale, and now they should leave the room.

There is however the “person from Porlock” syndrome, where the visitor interrupted Coleridge when he was writing down his opium dream, "Kubla Khan," which, to this day, only has 54 lines. But many people have speculated that those were the 54 lines that Coleridge had in him on this subject.

Possibly they’re better off unfinished; the rest of the dream is better off in the offing, in dreams.

The Unfinished Symphony in fact finishes perfectly. The long E Major crescendo and then decrescendo at the end of the Andante is possibly the most memorable ending in history, with its innuendo of an afterlife lived entirely during the fermata of what seems like the last note in history.

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Schubert had little impetus to finish his pieces, as most of them weren’t performed in concert until long after his death, including this fragment, which Brahms finally had performed in 1867, 39 years after Schubert died. The first and only movement of the Unfinished Quartet ends as it began, with an impassioned moto perpetuo which has been forgotten during the piece except for two brief recurrences, and then hinted at by the cello, before the abrupt fevered end. This roiling The Music of Tippet Rise

phrase has been compared to the similar impassioned theme introduced near the beginning of the Unfinished Symphony, written two years later. In the middle, Schubert introduces several gorgeous pastoral chorales, in contrast to the frenzied edges of this small universe, as if the anxieties of morning and evening protect the calm Viennese day (and Schubert’s delicate psyche) in their midst.

Franz Schubert: Notturno in E flat Major, Op. 148 (1827) This piece will make you cry.

This gorgeous aubade, rising above a summer of gorgeous pieces, for piano, violin, and cello, is the epitome of midnight stillness. It is the dream of everything that is Schubert and Vienna and the dusky pastel of an imaginary world that should have lasted forever.

Rachmaninoff’s Barcarolle in D flat learned a lot from it and its pulled Viennese waltz rhythms.

Here the Viennese countryside smiles down in the moonlight on all the graces of the Biedermeier era: simplicity, security, and Gemütlichkeit.

This piece should be the theme of Tippet Rise: when the theme returns in triumph, accompanied by frenzied arpeggios on the piano; or afterwards, when the trio subsides into an awed reverie while the theme glides stately by on the piano; or maybe the pizzicato moment when the strings pluck like Pachelbel’s Canon behind the piano theme; or the expansive return of the moon immediately afterwards. I don’t know—at any point in its transcendent procession, this piece is one of the great exultations anywhere.

If you had thought of this theme and how to frame it in its entwined tableau vivant, its frozen Friedrich aurora, you would know that at some point in history the world would discover that genuine greatness had walked silently through it, and you would sleep soundly, despite all your frustrations,

misgivings, false starts, and merely mortal pains. If the world had ever discovered this music, it would be the stuff of sneaker commercials and elevators—but maybe it can’t be heard by an industrial world, because it is too pastoral to be taken up by machines.

At the end the piano trills over the renewed revelations of the theme, as it modulates out of the forest into the night sky—the moon in all her splendor!—and subsides into the stillness, with the piano’s breeze, frozen in the sublime clarity only possible in moonlight, making one final waft around the comfortable E-flat branch of the high suspended strings, one witty yet seraphic gute Nacht at the end of a celestial spectacle.

The reasons are not far to seek. Schubert died young and for all the appreciation of his intimate circle of friends he was undervalued in his own lifetime and for at least a century more because he failed to achieve public recognition and financial success. He was the first great composer in Western music to live by his art alone, without patronage, and he enjoyed only one public concert of his music in the whole of his life. When he died at the age 31, his friend Franz Grillparzer, saddened and well-intentioned, but misguided, wrote this epitaph: “Music has buried here great riches but far fairer hopes.”

Book to Read: Nocturne: A Journey In Search of Moonlight, James Attlee: Hamish Hilton (Penguin), London, 2011

Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667, “Trout” (1819)

Allegro vivace Andante

Scherzo: Presto Andantino—Allegretto

Allegro giusto Schubert wrote this when he was 22 for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. It wasn’t published until a year after he was dead. The fourth movement is a set of variations on Schubert’s earlier song “Die Forelle” (The Trout). The syncopated, dancing, and ecstatic Ländlers which spring from this beguiling little air will hopefully provide great nuance to all the fishermen who come to the Stillwater Valley for exactly such diverse encounters.

I believe that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the world who will say that Schubert is their favorite composer, but, if questioned, will not dare to put him on the level of Bach or Mozart or Beethoven. I have encountered this dozens of times.

Schubert knew he had dared to live under the shadow of Beethoven; but he also knew that he had succeeded. It is a terrible thing to have to wait for posterity, but at a certain stage it’s all anyone has, that dim hope of the future. Even in the 1960s, many teachers told their students not to play Schubert in public, because he was fun to play but hard to hear, and was sure to ruin your career. Although Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Gustav Mahler recognized Schubert as their equal, it has been only recently that his reputation has emerged from rampant misconceptions.

We want to express our great gratitude this morning to Jeff Kahane and the other wonderful musicians who have come here from all over, expressly to provide us all with the opportunity of hearing things we might never have otherwise encountered. We hope the memory of it will continue all our lives.

To Read: Schubert’s Reputation from His Time to Ours, Geoffrey Block: Pendragon Press, Hillsdale, 2017

Christopher Nupen has made a wonderful film about this piece, the most televised classical video in history, about which he says: 2017 Summer Season

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MATT HAIMOVITZ & ARIEL STRING QUARTET Saturday, August 12, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Matt Haimovitz, cello Ariel String Quartet

String Quintets PROGRAM LUIGI BOCCHERINI: Quintet No. 4 in D, G. 448, “Fandango” ISANG YUN: Glissées for Solo Cello (1970) JÖRG WIDMANN: Quartet No. 3, "Hunting" INTERMISSION FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C Major, D. 956 Allegro ma non troppo Adagio Scherzo. Presto. Trio. Andante sostenuto Allegretto—Più allegro

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 12, D. 703, "Quartettsatz" (1820)

by Matt Haimovitz It was a surreal scene, a world straight out of magical realism, where layers of time and history fold into a moment so transcendent that you cannot believe it is really happening.

I was partway through Bach’s Suite No. 3 for solo cello—the sunny, C Major suite—playing under the improbably organic, outrageously heaven-held and earth-bound Domo, with the audience streaming out under the big sky, when ominous grey black clouds enveloped us, and pulsating thunder began competing, on cue à la John Cage, with the Bach Sarabande’s prayer for peace.

Mother Nature may have had her will that day, forcing us to migrate to the Olivier Music Barn to complete the Bach cycle, but I will never forget the awesome, indulgent austerity of being on top of the world, looking out at the Beartooth horizon as an impossibly clear acoustic under the Domo’s folding arches sent the music spinning for miles.

Only at Tippet Rise can the music of Bach, the architecture of modern masters, and the splendour of God’s nature come together to a create a powerful bond. Thank you, Cathy and Peter Halstead, for marrying these various elements and more—let’s not leave out the culinary flourishes of extraordinary chefs—to create a community where streams of ideas, emotions, and inspiration merge. Tippet Rise is a place that celebrates life and the constant evolution of mind and the land. It is an artist’s utopia, a moment when the individual voice can be heard among the silence of the mountains. Thank you for following your passions and reminding all of us of our common priorities and shared histories. Yours is a true pioneering spirit.

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK SIX NATASHA PAREMSKI

The Romantics Romanticism was a backlash against the Industrial Revolution, but it was also the child of the leisure created by the steam engine and the new middle class which sprang up because of new factories. As the newly rich strove to become the equals of the aristocrats, the children of the aristocracy mocked them. It was this immense sense of irony and sarcasm which infused much of the era. There are wonderful paintings from the era just before the Romantics, where farmers trudged reluctantly through flowered fields in the country dawn towards the factory-flamed sky of the new cities.

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morose young reject wandering as a last resort to the New World, like Chateaubriand’s René, or Goethe’s Young Werther, Schubert’s Wanderer, Byron’s Manfred, or Rousseau’s Julie. It was Frankenstein seeking refuge in the Arctic. It was Wordsworth, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Keats, Coleridge. It was, years later, the inspiration for rebellious American teenagers such as James Dean or Holden Caulfield. The last Romantic, Oscar Wilde, took great pains to speak ill of nature, the great theme of the era.

It is this same sense of loss in the face of amalgamating technology that has become an issue in our own machine age.

The ineffable, the undefinable, the ethereal were its goals. It was Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal. The philosophy of Lamartine and Lamennais, the novels of Hugo and Dumas, the poems of de Musset, the epigrams of Gauthier. James Fenimore Cooper’s noble savage.

But Romanticism back then was also the sublime, as in the paintings of Albert Bierstadt or Eugène Delacroix. It was the Gothic novel, such as The Castle of Otranto. It was the alienated travelers in the wilderness painted by Caspar David Friedrich. It was wilting, dreamy salon music of Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann. It was fiery pyrotechnics at the piano by Liszt, and at the violin, by Paganini. It was the

The new middle class and the aging aristocracy fought over who could appreciate and endow the arts the most visibly, so it became a wonderful age, especially in Paris, for the artistic geniuses who lived on the undefined edge of society, with no social responsibilities, who could at last rise above the social classes they sought to disdain or entertain. It was the age of art for art’s sake, before painting became mercantile and

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consumer-oriented. When music’s goals could be as dreamy and Apollonian, as disengaged and still as ambitious as the new society itself, financed by the new stock market, the commodity frenzies, the financial fund crazes. The merchant class, whose ascendency spelled the end of the old-world Almanach de Gotha nobility and the English Great House, eventually produced its own artists, who documented the new age of café society, but that was after 1900, in New York and Vienna. The age of the virtuoso Romantic happened most famously in Paris (although the phenomenon traveled around the world), and was essentially defined by Chopin and Liszt.

It lasted until Liszt died in 1886. It was fueled by the combustion engine, but it was in absolute denial of modernity.

To this day, Parisians live in Paris not for modern conveniences, but to live like Chopin, with outmoded plumbing, servant quarters, parquet floors, French doors, Pleyel pianos, libraries, and moldings. To wear French cuffs, pocket watches, and garters. To dress up in gowns with bustles. Music continues to be played by candlelight in damp churches and even on street corners by brilliant pianists, violinists, and accordionists.

Paris never moved out of the Romantic era, the home of its great triumphs. Genius found itself in Paris, with a good living to be had as tutors for the children of the noble and the would-be noble. Salons were continuous, brilliant afternoons and early evenings convoked to parade immense talent in verse, prose, and music in front of a willing entourage. The grand dames later captured so brilliantly by Proust were ironically led by the philosophies and the inventions of their captive artists. French aristocracy continues on in this vein today, although it is hidden behind the high doors of city palaces and country châteaux.

We participate in it every time we marvel at the music of Chopin or Liszt in a country barn, as we do tonight. We are Romantics for Natasha’s weekend.

Film to See: Impromptu, (a charming Hugh Grant as Chopin wreaks havoc on the nouveaux-riches, set to the music of Chopin), 1991 Book to Read: Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero, Eleanor Perényi: Little Brown, Boston, 1974

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CONVERSATION WITH

NATASHA PAREMSKI

By Alexis M. Adams

AMA: Tell me a little about the pieces you’ve chosen to play at Tippet Rise.

NP: The Mussorgsky is a really quintessential, popular piece that never goes out of style. It’s as popular in orchestral programs as it is on the solo piano, but some people are confused about what came first: the orchestra or the piano. It was Ravel who orchestrated it. But this was conceived as solo piano piece. A lot of people are split between two camps on it. Some say, “I definitely prefer the orchestra because of all of the colors," but I’d argue that if you’re really connected to the piano, and you really have spent a lot of time with this piece, the colors on the piano are endless. In the hands of a truly great pianist, and a great virtuoso, I would argue it can have more colors than an orchestra. People will say, but it’s just one instrument playing, but you have to remember that the piano is very versatile. It’s the most autonomous instrument. You can play a Beethoven symphony on a piano. In fact, that’s how they were conceived. Or the Rachmaninoff symphonies. All these great composers, all these pieces were conceived on a piano, even the orchestral stuff. In fact, when you take Brahms’s work and you look at the way he writes for piano, his first three sonatas are basically symphonies. He might as well have orchestrated them, he really could have done that, and they would have been very convincing symphonies.

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The piano is a symphonic instrument. The difference is that, when you’re at the piano and you’re playing Pictures, you have the flexibility, because you’re one person playing, to be able to shift really quickly between moods and be flexible within the fabric. I think that’s what makes this piece even more arresting on the piano. Things like bravado…maybe you can experiment a little more with things like that, getting really interesting impressionistic colors in some of the movements.

Like, for example, “talking with the dead in the dead language”—for me it should be almost like ghosts. Literally, it’s Mussorgsky talking to (Viktor) Hartmann who was the inspiration behind Pictures with the sketches that he made and gave to Mussorgsky. So this is Mussorgsky talking to Hartmann after he died. This is his homage to the person who inspired him, so it should be like talking to a ghost. It can’t be anything really very tangible. You’re able on a piano to create this almost intangible whisper, like a shiver down your spine, like a ghost hovering around you.

And then right after that movement ends you have Baba Yaga—this mythical folkloric creature in Russian fairytales.

Baba Yaga is a very interesting, very, very fascinating character. She is featured in numerous fairy tales and in some of them she does bad things, and in a lot of them she actually helps people even though she’s this ugly creature with a big old nose and hairy moles everywhere on her face and she lives in a hut on two chicken legs with no doors. And the only way you’re able to open this hut is to recite a rhyme and it starts dancing on the chicken legs. And then Baba Yaga lets you in and she’s like, “What do you want? I’m cooking a stew!” And it’s either princesses who are being abused by their

stepmothers or it’s princes who are looking for princesses. She says, “What do you want.” And the prince can say, “Well, I’m looking for a princess.” And Baba Yaga will say, “OK, I will help you,” but then she’ll invoke some kind of tax. There’s always a transaction. She was like the first capitalist. And then she says, “If I’m going to help you, you have to help me.” You help her and then she says, “OK, then you’ll find your princess over there, but first you have to find a goose and the goose has a special egg,” and so on and so forth. She’s basically a kind of conduit into the spirit world, but she’s also an independent old witch who lives in the woods and basically would prefer not to be bothered. If you cross her, you’re doomed, but if you need her help, she’ll help you…for a price.

To go from this ethereal ghost land of Hartmann’s and then to enter, yes, another spirit world—but this kind of aggressive, crazy, scary uncontrollable wild woman’s world—is for me one of the most exciting moments in music.

As she takes off on her broom—for me this is the way Mussorgsky paints it—she flies right over the Gates of Kiev, which is the capitol of Old Russia. She flies right over these great Bogatyr Gates. There’s a tradition to start this movement off really loud, but I don’t do that. I start as if the Gates are still far off. Like she’s flying off and the gates are still far off and then they come closer and closer and there’s the majesty of the gates and then the Russian bells toward the end—they close out Pictures at an Exhibition.

And it’s funny to me that a lot of people always say after performances, “I cried.” And you think, I wouldn’t say that

Pictures at an Exhibition is really a heart-wrenching work.

It’s not like Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, or Second Piano Concerto, but I guess there’s something about the grandeur and majesty of the closing movement that brings awe. Clearly it’s a very expressionist piece. It’s also very realistic. It’s like when he tries to evoke the busy market in Limoges, it really is incredibly busy. If you close your eyes, you might even think, this sounds like the Fairway [supermarket on New York’s Westside] at 5 PM on a Friday.

AMA: Everything you just told me is so visual. I knew the story a bit, but you described it so vividly, so beautifully.

When you’re playing, are you picturing these things and almost playing out of those images?

NP: That’s one of the hardest questions to answer. You opened a can of worms!

I think I speak for a lot of my colleagues: I don’t think you ever really focus on an image. The reality is, when you’re performing, there are a lot of factors involved. There are literally twenty things you’re juggling at one time at any given phrase: you’re thinking about things like execution, and I have to pace myself here because later there’s a big passage coming and I don’t want to burn out right now and other things, and all of these thoughts are very fleeting and evoking the feeling of this hut that’s dancing around like crazy in the middle of a dense forest…focusing on that image won’t help you play better. Instead, you have to focus on evoking feeling as you’re performing. That’s a whole other art medium in and of itself.

An image almost pales in comparison to the feeling you and 2017 Summer Season

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CONVERSATION WITH

NATASHA PAREMSKI your audience will have. When that soundscape grabs you, you start feeling this fear and it has to do with boring things like harmony and intervals and, “Oh, it starts at a major 7th coming down” and, “Who cares what a major 7th is?” Well, you do care what a major 7th is because that dissonance creates that feeling. And, the listener thinks, “Oh this is scary.

This feels scary. I can feel it in my gut. It’s scary.” If you then glance over at the sketches that Hartmann made, then you think, “Oh yeah, maybe I can see now. I can see this hut.” Or, “I feel the hut.” It’s for me to conjure images in the audience; it’s not for me to experience them myself. If I’m sitting there having images myself, then I’m not really focused on what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s like, you’re executing something, and you’re in it completely—I feel it too, I feel it always in my gut, like, “OK, we’re here. Baba Yaga: big fat nose, hot stew, capitalist. Boom. Go!” But in the moment it’s, “Less pedal here. Maybe bring out the left hand. Crescendo here, crescendo more, even more. Oh! Maybe I’ll go a little faster here today.” It’s things like this—the execution of the music that creates the images for the audience. And the execution always hinges on weather, emotional conditions, the piano, how the audience is reacting. You’re always focused on little minute details that you’re tweaking as you go along and it’s the audience that you hope sees the bigger picture.

AMA: I read that you were born in Russia and spent the first eight years of your life there. So these stories—Baba Yaga, for example—and the language, and the music, and the place itself are the landscape of your childhood. Does that history influence how you play this music?

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NP: Absolutely. As you said, my first eight years were in Russia. I had no idea my family was going to move to the United States. All of these folk stories, they’ve been read to me and I’ve read them a million times. It’s always interesting to me that Baba Yaga and a couple of other characters are the thread of all of this folklore. So, yes, absolutely, my heritage is very important to my understanding of these works. That said, I don’t want people to misunderstand that just because you’re Russian you’ll understand the work, or that you must be Russian to truly understand this music. What’s so incredible about this music, like the recital I’m doing with Zuill—it’s all Russian, Zuill has intuitive an understanding of Russian music as I have, and he’s not Russian at all. He’s Scotch-Irish with a bunch of Spanish. His playing is truly of the Russian idiom. When you’re a musician and you understand music in this way, you can understand it no matter where you’re from.

Paul Huang’s Tchaikovsky is absolutely gorgeous.

But, being Russian, do I get to skip a lot of steps? Yeah, absolutely. The dancing rhythms, I understand those immediately. A Russian melody is sung like this. I’ve heard it sung by folk singers and this is what I’m trying to emulate.

It’s in my childhood, in my blood. I’ve skipped some steps, but in general, I don’t think it necessarily has to influence a person’s interpretation. Some of my favorite interpretations of Russian concertos are by Martha Argerich. But do I hold these things very close to my heart? Yes, I do. These fairy tales I hold very close to my heart. They maybe have more sentimental value to me, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am more connected or I am authentic when I play this music than someone who’s not Russian.

AMA: But I do think it’s interesting, especially when someone is part of a diaspora, that there is this sort of context… maybe even a bit of melancholy or a love that would come from being distant from a place, the absence of that place. Maybe your take on the music would be a little bit different if you were someone without that experience.

NP: Absolutely. I think context and a nice dose of melancholy are absolutely true. You’ll find throughout history, reading artists’ biographies, in general Russians tend to have melancholy for their country when they emigrate regardless of the political climate. It was true of Rachmaninoff when he was escaping the Bolsheviks. Prokofiev didn’t quite run away, but he did leave. In both cases, both composers experienced incredible melancholy. Everyone told Prokofiev not to go back.

Russia was in such chaos. It was the 1930s. Stalin was going to town. He was persecuting people. People were being sent to the Gulag daily. Yet this intense melancholy and intense love for Russia brought Prokofiev back. When Rachmaninoff was dying, he so desperately wanted to go back. He felt so far from home, he felt so sad, not because he wasn’t embraced, he was embraced hugely. So was Prokofiev; he was hanging out with all the greats of Paris society. During Rachmaninoff’s last years, he donated a chunk of his proceeds to the Red Army during World War II. So, yes, there’s this kind of silent melancholy that runs even through Russian music. Even when things are really happy, even when you hear something joyous, when you’re a Russian, you hear it through this film—there’s a funny film over this joy if you’re Russian. Like you overcame something. Like, you’re laughing now, but you were just crying ten minutes ago. If you take any great Russian compo-

sition, certainly anything by Rachmaninoff, you get to the end and you’re like, “Oh, the big theme!” In Russia, you would say, “Yeah, but how much emotional turmoil did that big theme cost you?” You have to play it heavy. There’s this sadness, like you’re always missing something, even though you’re experiencing joy. It’s the thread of depression that runs through the Russian experience. If there’s one Russian experience I completely identify with, it’s the melancholy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan to uproot myself and move to Moscow.

I’m very happy living in New York. But sometimes I miss the context of things. When I say a Russian idiom to my American friends, they pause, a little puzzled, and then they say, “Oh, I forgot! You’re an immigrant!” But if you find yourself in a Russian community here and you’re talking, no matter what you say, they get it.

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NATASHA PAREMSKI AND FRIENDS Friday, August 18, 6:30 PM Natasha Paremski, piano

A JOURNEY OF THE VIRTUOSO ROMANTIC PROGRAM FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Mazurka in B Major, Op. 63 No. 1 (Vivace)

Mazurka in F minor, Op. 63 No. 2 (Lento)

Mazurka in C-sharp minor, Op. 63 No. 3 (Allegretto)

Scherzo in E Major, Op. 54 No. 4 JOHANNES BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 35, Books I & II INTERMISSION MODEST MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition

"Promenade"

"The Gnome"

"Promenade"

"The Old Castle"

"Promenade"

"Tuileries" (Children’s Quarrel after Games)

"Cattle"

"Promenade"

"Ballet of Unhatched Chicks"

"Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle"

"Promenade"

"Limoges. The Market" (The Great News)

"Catacombs" (Roman Tomb)

"The Hut on Hen’s Legs" (Baba Yaga)

"The Bogatyr Gates" (In the Capital in Kiev) 2017 Summer Season

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Frédéric Chopin: The Opus 63 Mazurkas (1846)

No. 1 in B Major (Vivace) No. 2 in F minor (Lento) No. 3 in C-sharp minor (Allegretto)

It is ironic that Chopin, the ultimate virtuoso, who invented the art of brilliant piano finesse, the modern concept of pianism, even more than Liszt’s athletic technical contributions, should be represented initially by these three Mazurkas, Polish dances whose unaffected but affecting simplicity is their calling card. They wear their hearts on their sleeve, and are the opposite of what we mean by virtuosity, which usually involves octaves, scales, and what Chopin called jeu perlé, a game of pearls, the complex rotating patterns of finger work that fall like pearls from a broken necklace.

Chopin wrote Mazurkas to draw attention to the plight of his homeland, Poland, oppressed throughout history by the Russians, Austrians, and Prussians. The 1846 Wielkopolska Uprising was an unsuccessful Polish military insurrection against these encroachments. Poles were subjected at that time to a series of measures aimed against their very existence, and the Polish language was replaced by German as the official language. The Prussian ruler Frederick the Great despised the Poles, and planned to replace them with Germans. The estates of the nobility were confiscated and given to German nobles.

Frederick settled 300,000 colonists in the Eastern provinces of Prussia. While Poles made up 73% of Poland in 1815, they were reduced to 60% by 1848. They were ultimately liberated

by Napoleon, and rose up successfully against Prussia in 1906.

Chopin’s friend Adam Mickiewicz was a dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and political activist, a dashing figure who settled in Paris in 1832. He is widely regarded as Poland’s greatest poet, and contributed to Chopin’s interest in the Mazurka and the Ballade through his own poetry. These forms were stories of a lost generation, its 190

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alienation and powerlessness, rooted in the culture the Great Emigration brought with it from Poland.

A Mazur is an inhabitant of Mazovia in Poland. Chopin wrote 69 Mazurkas; Szymanowski wrote 22. The Mazurka has strong accents placed ad libitum on the second or third beat of each measure. It often combines two other Polish musical forms, the slow Kujawiak and the fast Oberek.

Chopin’s form is more chromatic and distanced from its dance heritage, to make people concentrate on the content. A relative of ours used to lead the International Polonaise Ball in Palm Beach every year, occasionally with Arthur Rubinstein. They would begin the dancing with a Chopin waltz or a Polonaise, rather than a Mazurka.

The first of this group of three Mazurkas was conceived at George Sand’s country estate, Nohant, in 1846, and begins with a defiant theme played by country musicians in a village tavern. Its character changes with the second theme, a vivid description of a dancer’s stomping feet, with a characteristic accent on the last beat, and from then on the Mazurka alternates between these two contrasting moods, which might be regarded as personifications, male and female, talking and dancing all night in an inn.

The second Mazurka is a slow, minor key nostalgic Kujawiak.

The middle section, in A flat major, tries to pull free of the somnolent atmosphere, but it is too late, and the piece fades away in a descending chromatic scale.

The third Mazurka opens with a gorgeous farewell motif.

You can imagine George Sand and Chopin strolling through the forest in Nohant, reluctant to leave for Paris. The theme is repeated often, as is traditional in Mazurkas. The harmony builds to a suggestive phrase which threatens to lead somewhere, but then the initial melody returns and the piece goes quietly off into the autumn, surrounded by fallen leaves.

Frédéric Chopin: Scherzo in E Major, Op. 54 No. 4 (1842)

Johannes Brahms: Variations on a Theme

by Paganini, Op. 35, Books I & II (1863)

Chopin’s Scherzi all have middles of extraordinary lyricism.

They often begin with impressive displays of technique.

Liszt wanted to be the Paganini of the piano, imitating the slidings, pluckings, and harmonic clusters of the violin virtuoso with his own brilliant two-hand scales, chromatic octaves, and chords that traversed the length of the piano in 1826 when he wrote the twelve Transcendental Études, the six Grande Paganini Études, and the three Concert Études. Paganini, they said, had sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the way he did, unheard-of at the time. Liszt, who ultimately dedicated his soul to the Catholic Church, possessed the sunny side of Paganini’s dark technique.

In this, the last, Chopin is in a reflective mood, despite occasional brilliant break-out scales which build into fiery but brief cadenzas, allowing the charming boulevardier theme to return.

In the development section, technique reigns supreme, although the original theme never participates in the development; development for Chopin meant variations on the underlying harmonies, which however never changed the themes.

Instead, the midsection brings in a Polish folk melody of surpassing whimsy and nostalgia: this is the message Chopin surrounds with the masks of his Parisian interludes.

This is where his heart lies, like Rachmaninoff’s simple melodies cloaked by monstrous technique to pave their way into immortality.

After the glory of the folk song, the initial theme returns in the same length as the introduction until Chopin’s light yet profound filigree leads to the brief but brilliant coda.

His Scherzi are extraordinarily difficult to play, and require perfectly even brilliantine scales, rapid but accurate chord changes, fast octaves, and sudden bursts of speed and power, although Chopin himself lost the strength to play his own music as his tuberculosis progressed (he would be dead in seven years). But he compensated with a light touch, made easier by the light actions of pianos in his day, like the Brown Action of our 1880s Chickering. The much heavier and more powerful actions of the modern Steinway would have been impossible for Chopin to play. But as a consequence we hear Chopin with much more complexity and immensity than anyone in his day.

Paganini invented double, triple, and quadruple stops (that is, two to four fingers on strings which are played simultaneously with the bow, the way fingers on a piano together play a chord), ricochet bowing (letting the bow bounce on the strings rapidly), double-stop octave runs (like playing octaves on the piano, but on the violin), and pizzicato (plucking) in both hands. The loss of his bottom teeth gave his head a skulllike look. He had both Marfan syndrome, which elongated his fingers, toes, and entire body, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which made his fingers frighteningly flexible.

Disease had made him the Frankenstein of virtuosity.

On the piano, Chopin wrote a "Souvenir de Paganini" in 1829, Hummel wrote a "Souvenir de Paganini" around the same time, Schumann wrote six Concert Studies on Caprices

by Paganini in 1833, Rachmaninoff wrote the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934, and Witold Lutosławski wrote his Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos in 1941.

The most amazing of them all is Brahms’ Studies on a Theme of Paganini, because Brahms is the antithesis of Paganini.

He is considered where Paganini is reckless; he is profound where the violinist is merely flashy; Brahms is the paragon of ultimate musical honesty, the creator of the sublime Requiem, while Paganini was called the Devil’s Son and dressed entirely in black. Brahms’s melodies emerge from the supportive structure of his works, whereas Paganini’s themes remain 2017 Summer Season

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essentially the same harmonically while serving as the anchor for variations which don’t so much develop the theme as explore clever ways of exploiting it.

Brahms additionally was quite dismissive even of Liszt’s great B minor Sonata, feeling that Liszt’s New German School of music in Weimar and Wagner’s Music of the Future were both too programmatic, although Liszt and Wagner applauded Brahms’s first piano concerto, while his own conservative group panned it. Basically, the conservatives wanted things to sound like Beethoven, and the radicals were anticipating Schoenberg: in music, this is still a great divide.

Nevertheless, Paganini’s enticing themes and exhilarating variations have appealed to audiences possibly even more than Brahms's greater gifts.

As the critic James Huneker wrote at the time:

Brahms and Paganini! Was ever so strange a couple

in harness? Caliban and Ariel, Jove and Puck. The

stolid German, the vibratile Italian! Yet fantasy wins,

even if brewed in a homely Teutonic kettle…. These

diabolical variations, the last word in the technical

of the piano, are also vast spiritual problems. To play

them requires fingers of steel, a heart of burning lava

and the courage of a lion.

Most of the composers who have written Paganini variations have used his very simple Caprice No. 24 in A minor as their main theme, and Brahms is no different.

But Brahms had evidently decided to teach Liszt how to bring flippant Italian themes into the great German tradition, using very standard technical ways (no matter how virtuosic, such as octaves, arpeggios, sixths, thirds, trills) to deepen the theme.

It is Brahms meeting Liszt on his own ground.

The very first variation has sixths played in the right hand and thirds in the left, and is as impressive as anything Paganini or Liszt had to say about the theme. You can see Brahms improvising on this theme obsessively in private, to invent his own concert hall reputation by going head to head with Liszt. The revelation is that Brahms tamed his immense 192

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technique on display here into the restrained Concerti and Intermezzi, where his effects stem from the grief of the music without any need for fireworks. Brahms had outgrown his need for display even before he wrote this piece. When he wrote the Paganini Variations he was 30. And yet his original sketches for the more profound First Piano Concerto of 1858 date back to 1853, when he was 20.

In 1863 Liszt had moved into a one-room cell in the Madonna del Rosario on a mountaintop an hour outside Rome, and had composed his Legends, extremely spiritual and yet virtuosic music that, while programmatic, was the equal of Brahms’s own spiritual music. Yet Brahms felt the need to revive the virtuosic career that Liszt had given up.

The 24th Caprice has the same harmonic structure as the “Dies Irae,” the Judgment Day theme which Liszt used in his Totentanz (Dance of Death, 1838), inspired by Berlioz’s use of the theme in the final movement of his Symphonie fantastique of 1830. Liszt, Berlioz, and Paganini were all obsessed with death and the devil.

Brahms was more old-fashioned in his belief in pure music, although his own obsession was the Clara theme of four descending notes (see the essay “Vocabularies of Music” in this program).

So I would merely indicate that Brahms was writing the very music he was attacking Liszt for having written twenty years earlier, while Liszt was writing the music that Brahms would have envied, had his pride let him. No one’s perfect. Maybe the point was that Brahms could do Liszt, but generally chose not to.

Each of Brahms’ two Paganini books has fourteen variations, where the last variation of each book has a three-part coda of spectacular virtuosity. And the music is constantly entertaining, brilliant, and at the same time sublime. Liszt and Brahms woven into one piece.

Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) This was the year Mussorgsky staged his great opera, Boris Godunov. The artist Viktor Hartmann had given him two paintings. After Hartmann suddenly died from an aneurysm, Mussorgsky lent those two paintings to a memorial exhibition of 400 Hartmann works, and decided to describe the show in music, which he did in twenty days. Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano piece was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky and introduced by the Boston Symphony in 1929. This led to the discovery of the original score in 1931.

In between the paintings, Mussorgsky walks between halls, which he depicts as stately “Promenades.” Note that the finale, “The Great Gate of Kiev,” is a variant of this Promenade theme, the apotheosis of Mussorgsky himself. The second theme in the finale is a Russian Orthodox Church baptismal hymn. The cascading bells that lead back into the main theme were borrowed by Tchaikovsky for his 1812 Overture, which he wrote in 1880.

Limoges, Catacombs, the Hut on Hen’s Legs (the witch Baba Yaga chasing her prey), and the Great Gate of Kiev.

(Hartmann had done his own design for a gate framed by carillons, or bell towers.) Promenade sections are placed as interludes.

Mussorgsky, an alcoholic, had to be wheeled onto stage to play. He had to be drunk to play well, but afterwards he had no memory of having played. (Rubinstein, on the other hand, once had a glass of champagne before a concert and said he had to have his hands massaged by beautiful women for many minutes before he could go onstage; he never drank again before a concert.)

The quiet bells of the Moorish onion domes of Kiev are reminiscent of the bells that exorcise the Walpurgisnacht in Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (1867), which Mussorgsky wrote on St. John’s Eve, when ghouls roam abroad. The Great Bell Tower of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, is not Moorish, but was finished in 1745 in the Classical style. At 316 feet tall, it dominates the Kiev skyline. The other bell towers, St. Sophia’s, St. Andrew’s, and St. Michael’s, are of Moorish design, dating from just after Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasion, when Russia became part of the Golden Horde empire, from 1223 to 1480. The Mongols got their steeple designs from the Kazan Tatars (Muslim Bolgars), from whom the Kazaks (Cossacks) descend.

The paintings of the exhibition are by now legendary: the Gnome, the Old Castle, Children’s Games in the Tuileries, Cattle (a lumbering Polish ox cart), Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle, the Market at 2017 Summer Season

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CONVERSATION WITH

PA U L H U A N G

By Alexis M. Adams

AMA: How did it all begin?

PH: I started a little unexpectedly. My parents took me to a violin lesson when I was three-and-a-half, and apparently I didn’t like holding the instrument under my chin. During the first lesson, you’re just scratching out the notes. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make a beautiful sound. I took the one lesson and that was it. I hated it. I told my mother and father that I wouldn’t play the violin, but that I would play the piano. And so, I did, just as a hobby. When I was 7 years old, we saw a performance: it was someone playing the violin. I was absolutely mesmerized by the little wooden box protecting such a beautiful human voice. I was also taken with the idea of being onstage. I told my parents I wanted to take violin lessons again. So, my official violin life started at 7.

AMA: So you began on piano! Do you find the experience carries over into your musical life at all today?

PH: It was important to start on the piano first. I tell people that if they were to take up an instrument, they should begin with piano, to at least have basic training in intonation. If a piano is tuned, it’s never out of tune, no matter how you play it. It’s really nice to train your ear to have a good sense of intonation before starting the violin, which in the beginning

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is so difficult to play in tune. And, yes, today my musical life involves performing with people who are playing the piano.

As a violinist playing with a pianist, it helps me to know how the piano works. It’s a complementary thing for me to be able to think, personally, from the pianist’s point of view.

AMA: Tell me a little bit about the pieces you’ll be playing at Tippet Rise.

PH: I’d like to talk about the Chausson. The piece we’re playing (the Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet in D Major, Op. 21) has a very unusual formation; its form is fully symphonic, but the accompaniment isn’t a full orchestra.

It highlights not only the stringed instruments, but also the piano. It’s an equal partnership between the three entities— the piano, the violin, and the quartet—as one voice. It’s wonderful, masterful, colorful. It almost feels like you’re hearing a large symphonic piece, but in a small configuration.

And it’s unique: you won’t be able to find this kind of configuration in the German repertoire, period.

Chausson was French, and you can feel it in this piece: it’s lush, it has a gorgeous tonal palette. It’s one of a kind. I’ve been a big fan of the piece for many years. It’s not easy to program because it involves more people; a lot of time, presenters don’t have the budget to bring six players together, or the players can’t find room in their schedule to make it work. For Natasha and Escher and me, it’s a delightful opportunity to play and share this piece at Tippet Rise. It’s really

special and since we’re all good friends, we all look forward to being in Montana together and playing there together. We’re often traveling in different places, far apart from one another.

This will be a nice occasion.

AMA: Tell me about playing with friends and how it compares to playing with people you might not know so well.

PH: Making music with friends is wonderful. We know each other very well on a personal level, but we also know each other very well on a musical level. This enhances our music making. Very often, we talk less when we’re practicing together than we would if we were practicing with others, because—as good friends—we don’t need to talk. Making music with anyone is all about hearing and listening to each other and then reacting, musically, to what’s been said. It’s a discussion. When you’re playing with others for the first time—maybe you’ve heard about them, but never met them—you have some rehearsal time, but it’s still not the ideal way to make music. With friends, the familiarity is there, the discussion immediately picks up from where it left off, and it’s easy to not need to use words to describe what we want to try. The others get it: “Oh, he feels this way. He wants this.” Knowing each other deeply makes the interplay really wonderful.

AMA: Have you been to Montana before? How do you feel about coming to such a far-flung and elemental place to perform?

PH: I’ve heard so many wonderful things about Tippet Rise through musicians and other industry people, and what I’ve gathered is that it’s nothing but extraordinary. I’m so curious to see it, and I’m so happy that everyone agreed to invite us all together. I’m excited to spend time in a place where the music is so connected to nature. You know, most of music making is drawn from inspiration from nature. This is true of Chausson and also Debussy, who we are also playing at Tippet Rise. The two pieces on the program are innately French and people will hear that flavor when we play—by that I mean the music is colorful, sensuous, and it’s connected to nature. Tippet Rise is the ideal place to play these pieces. I don’t know what to expect, but hopefully something very creative and inspired will happen.

AMA: Is there any one composer with whom you feel a special affinity?

PH: I love so many composers! Every composer that I get to play is, in that moment, my very favorite composer. And that’s good because, being a musician, one must love a lot of composers! Because it’s kind of like telling jokes. If you don’t find a joke funny, no one else will, so you’d better not tell it. Music making is the same. A piece of music is a message between the composer and the listener. To convey that message, you must somehow feel the piece within yourself first, otherwise you can’t deliver the message. So I don’t program pieces I don’t love.

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NATASHA PAREMSKI AND FRIENDS Saturday, August 19, 10:30 AM The Domo Natasha Paremski, piano Paul Huang, violin Escher String Quartet

FRENCH FANTASY PROGRAM CLAUDE DEBUSSY: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10

Animé et très décidé

Assez vif et bien rythmé

Andantino, doucement expressif

Très modéré ERNEST CHAUSSON: Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet in D Major, Op. 21

Décidé—calme—animé

Sicilienne: pas vite

Grave

Très animé

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Claude Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 (1893)

Animé et très décidé Assez vif et bien rythmé Andantino, doucement expressif Très modéré—En animant peu à peu—Très mouvementé et avec passion

At 31, Debussy had changed the world of music with his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894). A year earlier, he had changed the string quartet forever, with the only quartet he would write.

“Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity,” Debussy wrote.

Debussy composed as Monet painted. Debussy was aware of the changes to the world of vision, and he wanted to apply this myopia to music. The grand view of approved Academy paintings of harbors, cities, mountains had become a narrow view of gardens which Monet planted in order to paint them.

Glasses had been invented, and Monet wore them. But he painted without them, to see nature as he saw it when he woke up, that shimmering mystery of obscure shapes and bleeding colors.

Music could do exactly the same. It could shimmer, sparkle with diamonds like a pond under a breeze, change its focus with the change of a key, become Oriental (as the current fad was) with a Medieval church scale or an Asian gamelan orchestration.

The gamelan was an Indonesian ensemble of drums, mallets, gongs, xylophones, and flutes, and modes like the pelog or slendro scales. Instruments are tuned slightly apart to create an “interference beating.” Steinway used a similar system of different string lengths in the 1950s to create different vibrations, a shimmer in the strings, a buzzy tuning which 198

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imparts what piano technician Tali Mahanor calls a “zingy zang” to higher notes.

Balinese gamelan music uses rapid changes of tempo and dynamics in its normal “kebyar” style; the “Kecak” is a form known as “the monkey chant.”

We are used to “world music,” introduced recently with Paul Simon’s Graceland album of 1986. But imagine how novel these sounds felt to audiences 93 years earlier, in 1893.

The opening passage of this quartet is in Phrygian mode, borrowed from Gregorian chant. John Adams and Arvo Pärt use this mode, but imagine what it sounded like in 1893.

Using Liszt’s idea of the tone poem without movements, Debussy has one theme which recurs throughout the four movements of the quartet. This was not novel. Beethoven had done the same thing with his sonatas, deriving four movements from one opening theme. But no one understood that he had, except composers who were paying attention.

As Dylan Thomas wrote a Prologue to his poetry in 1951 that rhymes in the middle and whose rhymes then radiate outward from the center in both directions (“This day winding down now/At God speeded summer’s end”): Molten and mountainous to stream Over the wound asleep Sheep white hollow farms To Wales in my arms.

Hoo, there, in castle keep, You king singsong owls, who moonbeam… (read by the poet on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uFbyq2cZHgE) Debussy does the same with his quartet in 1893, where the last movement brings back the previous movements in reverse order. In my end is my beginning. (He later said this movement had made him “really miserable.”)

Rather than addressing grand themes like Waterloo (not ABBA, but Beethoven or Tchaikovsky), Debussy’s music

painted the light on the pond right now, not in 1812 or 1066.

The focus wasn’t history, but the immediate moment. It wasn’t sonata form, but sound out of context, heard in passing, not springing from deep structure as it did in Brahms.

Harmonies don’t have to follow a form, or mean anything, but are there simply to sound. One key can be superimposed on another key.

As with the poetry of Verlaine, where words were used just because they rhymed—they didn’t have to mean anything else—sounds appear now randomly, not because of a classic form. The world has fallen apart, music has become fragmented, like cubism or pointillism, and new voices are looking to describe the light on a leaf or the ripple in a stream without leading up to it. Beauty is the sole value, not classical values like the diagonal in a painting, the balance of color, or the building up to a rooftop. It’s as if photos were cut out of a magazine and pasted together randomly, as Picasso would do with images, as Apollinaire would do with words.

In Debussy’s quartet, the sounds are more about rhythms than forms. The surface of the pond becomes its meaning.

It’s the way Glenn Gould used voices as melodies in his radio compositions, rather than as statements of sense. It was the way they sounded and entwined, not what they said.

In the Scherzo of the third movement, different timbres or textures of sound (plucking versus smooth bowing) collide like a riptide where currents going in different directions mesh chaotically in the ocean.

This quartet is dedicated to Ernest Chausson, whose gorgeous work you will hear immediately following this one.

Ernest Chausson: Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet in D Major, Op. 21 (1892) Décidé Sicilienne Grave

Très animé Chausson died at 44, accidentally hitting a brick wall while bicycling downhill at his country estate, the Château de Mioussets, in Yvelines, just outside Paris. Amazingly enough, this was an accident, not a suicide. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, home as well to Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison.

Chausson was the wealthy son of Baron Haussmann’s contractor, who rebuilt Paris from 1854 to 1878 with major boulevards to allow the army to travel around quickly to quash riots. Thus Paris acquired the spacious boulevards, elegant mansions, and palatial train stations which define much of it today.

Although a lawyer for the Court of Appeals, Chausson eventually took Jules Massenet’s composing classes at the Paris Conservatoire. He also studied with the equally great composer César Franck, and became secretary of the National Society of Music.

Chausson was caught between Brahms and Debussy, and you can hear both in his Concert. The motif is extremely similar to what I have called Janáček’s “homeless” theme for his “Kreuzter Sonata” Piano Trio, written 31 years later (see the essay in this program). Chausson’s relatively sunny treatment of the theme, first stated by the piano in octaves, was reversed by Janáček into the “homeless,” keyless anxiety and sadness of unrequited love. People should listen to both of them together, to see how composers can change a similar theme into vastly disparate ends. In Chausson’s hands the theme is almost Coplandesque, with a Samuel Barber sadness.

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typical of late French Romanticism, and the underlying major key keeps the initial sadness at a great distance. Despite the “diminished” chords, which tend to make things a bit spooky, the sheer lyricism of the melody triumphs over any negative directions the theme might have initially flirted with. When the theme returns in triumph, it is Mikado-like, and the string quartet joyously accepts it with a wash of warmth. The cello inverts the theme, as happens also in Janáček’s Piano Trio, but the effect is positively affirmed by the quartet in Chausson’s case.

This piece is really a double concerto, in which both violin and piano take lead voices, supported by the “orchestra” of the string quartet. Bach wrote a double violin concerto, Vivaldi wrote several, Beethoven wrote a Triple Concerto, and Brahms wrote a Double Concerto in 1887, his last work for orchestra, where the violin and the cello are the soloists, set against a full orchestra, of which Chausson may have been thinking. All these pieces set a violin and cello or violin and bassoon against the orchestra; only Chausson uses a violin and piano.

This was the era of Wagner, but Chausson deliberately uses an earlier style. Like Rachmaninoff and Bach, he is a throwback. Often the greatest pieces of music emerge long after the style has passed, giving the composers time to absorb and refine concepts.

There are extraordinarily modern chords which arise naturally, sounding almost like science fiction film music, but the moment is always swept away by the Victorian enthusiasm of the quartet. It is like a modern concert by a piano and violin on an ocean liner, where a retro quartet is also playing a simultaneous evening of salon music. The two worlds meet, fortunately in the same key, and the modern duet is lulled by the comforting strains of the quartet.

The piano solo towards the end of the first movement could be Rachmaninoff, with its chromatic, upward-searching treble with the left hand’s frenzied arpeggios below, notes swirling around a home note like bees around a hive.

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But then the lush violin with its string quartet coterie breaks in and you have a combination of Janáček, Rachmaninoff, Massenet, and Brahms whirling around the hall. This is the sound of Chausson, a romantic concerto that could be by Rachmaninoff, with momentary intrusions of Asian tones, German film music (slightly before its time), Victorian torch songs, Brahmsian pyrotechnics in the piano, and the absolute Victorian Romanticism of the consort leading to a reprise of the “homeless” theme, and suddenly anxiety from 1923 prevails (although this was written in 1892).

The theme becomes momentarily Asian, until the repeated scales and tremolos in the violins sweep the ensemble off into the melodramatic horizons of Miklos Rozsa, Max Steiner, and Joseph Kosma, long before their cinematic reign. (Both Copland and Shostakovich were to score films later on, and Bernard Herrmann wrote “symphonic” music for movies.) As with Rachmaninoff, the piano does a lot of work which is lost in the strings (the pianist who was to debut the piece quit, because the music was too difficult).

The total effect of the Concert demands a concerted effort, equality among the musicians, despite the solo material which might inspire grandstanding from the violinist and pianist.

All six musicians must collaborate to produce the effects which function out of sheer orchestral beauty.

The theme is heard one last time, now underpinned by a solid jazzy chord (a G minor 6th), leading to the home key of D. Janáček must have wanted to edit out all the optimism of the fin de siècle and imprint the angst of World War I on this beautiful template, but to hear the Chausson, untouched by the later scars of war, is to feel the sense of cossetting with which the end of the 19th century lulled the world into the coming maelstrom of violence and its concomitant loss of innocence.

But for the moment, the world is solved.

The second movement is a Baroque Sicilienne, based around a three-note “turn” with a fourth lower note attached. This is the theme from the second fugue of Bach’s Well-Tempered

Clavier, and very similar to John Williams’ Jurassic Park theme. The theme is expanded into rising scales, and grows into all the instruments while the piano provides exuberant arpeggios and scales, until the theme returns alone and fades out, its final “turn” standing alone in the universe, presaging the despair of the third movement, where a chromatic scale (both white and black keys) underlies the melody. But it is a melody with the melody drained out of it. Its droning bass is similar to Chopin’s morose étude in E-flat minor, but without the redeeming treble motif.

In freeing harmony to exist without melody, the Music of the Future substituted other techniques, such as texture, rhythm, or simply stasis. Here the chromaticism of the bass is echoed by the treble. Finally arpeggios bring a sense of Dvořák’s water nymph Rusalka trapped in endless ripples of night (although Rusalka was written in 1899, those Impressionist waves were in the air). Mozart had used chromatic scales to imply death, or hell, in Don Giovanni. We are very much in that subterranean company in the third movement here.

Chausson suffered from depression, despite his generally happy existence. He described his brain as at times “wretched, uneasy, and violent.”

The chromatic scales gradually grow into a Lisztian seiche, swashing around in the bass until they turn into scales going in both directions, to heaven and hell, as we’ve heard before in Liszt. The simple chromatic melody is played in vast chords by the piano until it slowly wanders lost down the length of the piano to take over the original creeping chromatic bass.

All is not well.

In the final movement the chromatic scale turns into a restrained, somewhat Western, romp, not as joyous as the first movement, but mostly recovered from the depression of the third.

Pianists want this to be a piano concerto, violinists a violin concerto. Every part is virtuosic. By stressing every voice at once, the complexity of the piece is realized, but the simplicity of highlighting a single voice is lost.

Extraordinary virtuosity in both piano and violin signal the coda. All the instruments become lyrical at once.

Octaves, arpeggios, and frenetic piano passage work lead up to large Rachmaninoff chords, broken chords accompany a Tchaikovskian finale, and a last scale brings this salad of Romantic themes to a rousing close.

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NATASHA PAREMSKI & ZUILL BAILEY Saturday, August 19, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Natasha Paremski, piano Zuill Bailey, cello

RUSSIAN REMINISCENCES PROGRAM SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119

Andante grave Moderato

Allegro, ma non troppo IGOR STRAVINSKY: Suite Italienne for Cello and Piano

Introduzione

Serenata

Aria

Tarantella

Minuetto and Finale INTERMISSION SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 19 Lento—Allegro moderato

Allegro scherzando

Andante

Allegro mosso

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119 (1949) Stalin had sent a charming and cultured ambassador to talk expatriates into returning to Russia. Having spent 15 years in Paris, Sergei Prokofiev, “patriotic and homesick,” was longing to “see the real winter again and hear the Russian language in my ears.” He was easily duped into moving back to the Soviet Union in 1936.

The next year the Great Purge began. Its goal was to eliminate Stalin’s real and imaginary enemies and to terrorize the country into abject slavery. There was no logic to it, only the ravings of a paranoid psychopath of the kind who seem to be able to hijack the minds of the very people they intend to slaughter. Very much like McCarthyism, poets and politicians alike were forced to name the names of imaginary “traitors,” who then provided yet more names for mock trials and summary executions. Once the NKVD broke in the door, even if you were innocent, it was too late. More than a million people were put to death over three years, and up to fourteen million people were sent to labor camps.

Prokofiev had been allowed to keep his passport initially, but it was confiscated permanently during a routine checkup.

He spent the rest of his life in Moscow. The exuberance and charm of Peter and the Wolf, written the year he immigrated, turned into a black hole where he wrote nothing at all.

In 1948 the Politburo issued the Zhdanov Decree denouncing Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian as formalists, people who renounced classical music for “muddled, nerveracking” sounds that “turned music into cacophony.” Eight of Prokofiev’s works were banned from performance.

This doctrine stunted artistic growth in the Soviet Union for the rest of Prokofiev’s life. He didn’t dare play even uncensored works; by August of 1948 he was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles, more than five million dollars at today’s rates.

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In 1948, Prokofiev’s wife Lina was arrested for “espionage,” as she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain.

After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor.

Having heard Rostropovich play the first Prokofiev cello concerto at the Moscow Conservatory in 1947, Prokofiev was inspired to write the Sonata for Cello and Piano. By that time Prokofiev’s doctors were allowing him to compose for only an hour a day. Rostropovich, who was then 22, had to play the sonata for the Committee of Artistic Affairs so they could judge if it were “hostile.” Apparently it was friendly, and Rostropovich was allowed to debut it with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter in 1950. Amazingly, this performance was recorded, and you can listen to it at www.youtube. com/watch?v=vHIdzZ1P1pg. Thirteen years of despair and oppression, and the result is on YouTube.

Three years later Prokofiev would be dead. He died the same day as Stalin, making it impossible for three days to carry the composer’s body out to be buried. Lina was released from prison later that year.

It remains an enigma that Prokofiev wrote music which seems untouched by any of the requirements of committees or the tragedy of his own entrapment in Russia or the executions of most of his peers, which must have ruined his yearning for Mother Russia. Nostalgia only exists at a safe distance. But the nightmares never make their way into the music.

Maybe there are a few chords here and there. Maybe you can listen for them…

Igor Stravinsky: Suite Italienne (1932-1933) “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past,” Stravinsky told his friend and chronicler Robert Craft, “the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible…. I began by composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as

though I were correcting an old work of my own. I knew that I could not produce a ‘forgery’ of Pergolesi because my motor habits are so different; at best, I could repeat him in my own accent…. I was... attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing ‘simple’ music, blamed for deserting ‘modernism,’ accused of renouncing my ‘true Russian heritage.’ People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried ‘sacrilege’: ‘The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.’

To them all my answer was and is the same: You ‘respect,’ but I love.”

Although Diaghilev had proposed Pergolesi (the demonym of Giovanni Battista Draghi, who was born in Pergola) as the basis for Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella, he was shocked at the outcome. “He went about for a long time with a look that suggested the Offended Eighteenth Century,” Stravinsky wrote.

The manuscripts which Diaghilev provided to Stravinsky were in fact by the Venetian Domenico Gallo; Count van Wassenaer, a Dutch diplomat; and Carlo Ignazio Monza, a Milanese priest, as well as Pergolesi.

Stravinsky had written Pulcinella in 1920, and a violin and piano suite based on the second and third acts in 1925. In 1932, he rearranged it with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky (and revised it again in 1949). He proposed that he and Piatigorsky share royalties in the cello suite on an equal basis: “fifty-fifty—half for you, half for me.” Stravinsky was very cheap; when he met Rachmaninoff for the first time in California in 1942, they spent the entire dinner talking about managers, concert bureaus, agents, ASCAP, and royalties, the latter subject continuing to infuriate creative artists, who receive no part of the millions of dollars their pieces generate in posterity.

Rachmaninoff had become by 1925 one of the highest paid pianists at the time, the other one being Paderewski.

Because at the time Russia was not party to the 1886 Berne Convention, Russian publishers did not pay royalties, so the only financial return he ever received for the Prelude in C-sharp minor was when he sold it for 40 rubles, or about

20 dollars. So one of the most popular pieces in history, which alone could have supported Rachmaninoff for life, was played by everyone for free. He justified his secret reluctance to play it in various ways: “I feel like a little girl who is just learning to play and who knows only one piece— ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ or ‘The Maiden’s Prayer,’ or something like that.”

Rachmaninoff rejected “the bitter tonalities of today,” noting that “they reflect our times, but they don’t reflect the warmth and depth of compassion in human nature which is timeless.”

He once defined music as “a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide!

Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart; it is Love!”

Although Stravinsky technically believed exactly the opposite, he got around it by reinventing himself as a composer from the 1700s.

The Tarantella of the fourth movement, according to Robert Craft, was based on Pergolesi’s 1732 opera Lo frate innamorato (“The Brother in Love” or “The Monk in Love”).

Stravinsky’s American fame sprung from his piano student, Goddard Lieberson, who used the profits from My Fair Lady and other Broadway musicals to record and promote Stravinsky. Interestingly, Frederick Loewe was a classical pianist and derived many of the themes of his famous musicals from Brahms. So Lerner & Loewe is just Brahms made into musicals.

Stravinsky on Stravinsky: Chronicle of My Life, London, 1936 Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, with Robert Craft, New York, 1959 Dialogues and a Diary, with Robert Craft, New York, 1963 Themes and Episodes, with Robert Craft, New York, 1966 Bravo Stravinsky, Robert Craft with Arnold Newman, 1967

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Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cello Sonata in G minor, Opus 19 (1901)

Lento—Allegro moderato (G minor) Allegro scherzando (C minor) Andante (E-flat Major) Allegro mosso (G Major)

Someone wrote of Maggie Smith that her voice matured from a violin to a cello. Although the violin has attracted composers over the years, it is the throatier viola and the immense richness of the cello which evokes in a single note all the mornings of the world, as the cello film Tous les Matins du Monde so beautifully demonstrates. Although composers have devised many ways of varying the sound of a cello’s animal resonance through plucking, striking, hammering, spiccato (or controlled bouncing), it is the single note, played anywhere on the long neck of the strings, which summons up the sound we would think that planets make in their travels, ripe with gourds, pears, quarries, rust, and the metallic gears of constellations.

Rachmaninoff himself said that he wrote music to play melodies of simple, single notes, but that the crowd wanted octaves, so he disguised those single notes with the scaffolding of entire concerti. It is, however, the single notes of the Bach solo cello works which contain the soul of the world, and it is into the single notes of the cello that Rachmaninoff distills the essence of his meandering genius at the piano, as if to center the chaos of the ocean by focusing on the way light shines through a single wave.

Rachmaninoff, the giant of the piano. He was born into the Russian aristocracy, descended through his father from the Hospodars Dragosh, rulers of the realm of Molday. Although his mother had five estates, his father reduced them by his gambling to a small apartment in St. Petersburg.

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lost Russia, he never wrote anything real again.

He redid pieces he had written in Russia, but what he wrote in America had no ground below it. He was lost in Hollywood, dabbling in jazz, making his living as a pianist.

But he had nowhere to go home to.

His most famous piece, the Prelude in C-sharp minor, written when he was 18, he had sold to his publisher Gutheil for 40 rubles, the equivalent of $20. Whenever he was called on to play it—and he was at every concert—it reminded him of his lost kingdom.

Nabokov, the illegitimate son of the Czar, Shakespeare, the secret son of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Mann, whose family’s merchant empire had dissipated, and Rachmaninoff, all lost kingdoms. Their writings were the only way to bring it back.

Rachmaninoff wrote the Cello Sonata around the same time as his Second Piano Concerto, and you can tell. After a slow introduction from the cello with hints of the Second Piano Concerto from the piano, the same gorgeous romantic atmosphere begins to mass. Rachmaninoff is at the peak of his powers.

Virtuosic outbreaks from the piano don’t faze the quiet cello, which takes over the role which the orchestra plays in the Second Concerto. A quieter piano still plays transcendent versions of the Concerto; Rachmaninoff has been able to rewrite his masterpiece and even improve it. Outbursts from the polymorphous piano are always calmed, focused, by the moral cello. The piano grows in its virtuosity and its lyricism, and yet contradicted, solved by the single line of the cello until the piano surrenders to the cello’s single heart.

The piano builds disguises, which it will get cagier at doing over the next sixteen years, while the cello asserts the underlying simplicity of the landscape, the simple wind that shapes the steppes, before the bells dispel the strangeness, before the solitary walker asserts his right to describe the air. Brilliant but contained, unimpressed with the ego of the piano, the cello follows the upward surge of the pulse towards the horizon, until the sky merges with the land in

Rachmaninoff’s signature three-note fillip, the music of the spheres distilled, filtered into just three even-tempered notes, at the end of the first movement.

He had been told by Tolstoy that his music was meaningless: “Is such music needed by anyone? I must tell you how I dislike it all. Beethoven is nonsense, Pushkin and Lermontov also.”

But as Rachmaninoff was leaving, Tolstoy backtracked: “Forgive me if I’ve hurt you by my comments.” Rachmaninoff replied, “How could I be hurt on my own account, if I was not hurt on Beethoven’s?”

But in fact he was devastated; he didn’t compose for a year.

We can play Beethoven, because he has already dared the ostracism of the world, and all we need to do is be easy riders on his courage. Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony had just been trashed by critics. Tolstoy’s comments pushed him over the edge, onto the mirror where he could see himself from outside. Freud has said around that time that we make our identities out of how other people see us.

T. S. Eliot had vowed to carry on despite the human condition: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Rachmaninoff entered into hypnosis, and was told to repeat to himself, “You will work with the greatest of ease. The concerto will be of excellent quality.” And so, eventually, he climbed out of the whirlpool of how we see ourselves into the clearer plane of how we channel the waves, blind to the walls of currents, the wail of sirens that always say no to the surfer.

And so it is this piece, Opus 19, which Rachmaninoff threw against a world which had never heard of what he wrote, until he wrote it. This was how he disturbed the universe. His cry of defiance encompassed this sonata and the Second Piano Concerto, which is more outward, ebullient, gregarious, while the cello sonata is like having the composer’s commentary on what he really means, the eye of the hurricane.

This would be his last chamber work. It was when he showed his hand.

He would never again be so vulnerable; he retreated quickly inside the shell of virtuosity, of his massive piano technique, and never emerged. This is a chance to hear him singing in the shower. This is the piece closest to the soft hum of his identity, before he added the mask against the howl of other people.

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CONVERSATION WITH AARON JAY KERNIS

By Devanney Haruta DH: I’d like to hear about the piece. It’s a new composition, and this will be the premiere.

AJK: Yes…It’s a piece for Matt and also for my son, Jonah. Basically, it’s going to be a four-or-five movement piece that’s very heavily influenced by various styles of jazz, and each movement is almost from a different era, a different slice of various jazz influences. My son is 14, and he’s a cellist, and he adores jazz, and the thing that really is behind this is that there’s hardly any music or any place for the cello in jazz ensembles. This was a great opportunity to write for Matt again, but also to get the influence of things I’d like to see my son working on and establish some repertoire for him so that he can engage his love of jazz.

DH: It sounds like your son is a pretty big influence in this piece.

AJK: Definitely. I’m sure what Jonah will learn from Matt’s playing of it will be invaluable.

And… what I’ve written so far is by no means music that is shaped for a young cellist. It’s just music that I would write for cello. So, when talking to Matt about it, he encouraged me not to simplify it.

DH: What’s the role of the piano in the piece?

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AJK: Well, the piano part is pretty huge, also. It’s an equal partner. There are significant piano solos, there are significant cello solos, and places where they play off of each other, so it’s definitely a duo in all ways. And since piano’s my instrument, even though the piano part is a little bit beyond my capabilities, I’m going to have a lot of fun playing it with Jonah.

DH: Are there aspects of improvisation in this piece? I know that’s a big part of jazz that’s not typically found in classical music.

AJK: Right, that’s a tricky part of this because a lot of what I compose comes out of my own improvisation… So far, my approach is to write everything out and to say at certain parts that there’s an optional improvisation that can replace what I’ve written. I want it to sound improvised, but not necessarily be improvised. That’s going to be part of the collaborative process: saying, “Here, you can elaborate on this idea I have, or you can just remove it entirely and add your own improvisation and then connect to the next spot over here.” Of the movements I’ve written, one is very typically lyrical and washy, a kind of jazz ballad, and another movement is influenced by Thelonious Monk and very bebop related. The last movement is going to have some relationship to Benny Goodman’s fast pieces. And my son loves this electronic jazz group called Snarky Puppy, so I’m going to do a movement that’s influenced by some of their tunes. So it’s really been fun to write this.

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WEEK SEVEN Court of Frederick the Great, World Premiere and Mighty Winds

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PEDJA MUZIJEVIC & MATT HAIMOVITZ Friday, August 25, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano Matt Haimovitz, cello

C. P. E. BACH & COMPANY PROGRAM CARL PHILLIP EMMANUEL BACH: Sonata in G minor, Wq. 65/17 Allegro—Adagio—Allegro assai AARON JAY KERNIS: FIRST CLUB DATE for cello and piano, 2017 Tippet Rise Commission (World Premiere) INTERMISSION C.P.E. BACH: Rondo in C minor, Wq. 59/4 FRANZ LISZT: "Bagatelle Without Tonality" RICHARD WAGNER and FRANZ LISZT: "Isolde’s Love Death" MORTON FELDMAN: Intermissions I and II (1950) C.P.E. BACH: Rondo in A Major, Wq. 58/1 ROBERT SCHUMANN: Novelette, Op. 21, No. 8

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Pedja’s notes

by Pedja Muzijevic March, 2017 In 1999, music scholars discovered hundreds of unpublished scores by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) in an archive in Kiev. They were taken from Berlin by the Soviet Army in 1943 and for decades Soviet authorities denied any knowledge of this war loot. This caught my attention both because of my musical curiosity and because of my lifelong passion for spy and suspense novels. C.P.E. Bach’s music has an unusually wide range of expression—from a nod back to the Baroque legacy and the gallant classical language that is reminiscent of Mozart’s music to stormy and dramatic works that Beethoven will be remembered for. C. P. E. Bach was the second surviving child of Johann Sebastian Bach and led a richly productive life in Berlin (in the service of Frederick the Great) and Hamburg. As a matter of fact, when Mozart said, “Bach is the father, we are the children,” he is not referring to J. S. Bach, but rather C. P. E. Bach.

I am a big believer in context and exposure to something different, rather than something similar. This works just as well with everyday life—food, people, places—as it does with concert programming. So I decided to invite a few other composers to this party for C. P. E. Bach. After all, he had been locked up in a basement of Ukrainian archives for a few decades. There is nothing more exciting than discovering brand new music. I am thrilled to premiere, within this program, a work for cello and piano by Aaron Jay Kernis (born in 1960) and have Matt Haimovitz join me on stage for it. It will not only place the music of C.P.E. Bach next to music of today, but it will also add another instrument to the mix.

I made my professional debut at the age of 14 playing Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with the Sarajevo Philharmonic.

Soon thereafter, as I went on with my music education, I decided that music of Liszt (1811-1886) was trashy and that I had no interest whatsoever in playing it ever again.

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Many years later, my friend and great British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen told me about a fascinating biography of Franz Liszt he had just read. This piqued my interest because Oliver Knussen’s music couldn’t be further from cheap entertainment that I, (im)maturely but ever so passionately, assigned to Liszt. This book made me realize that Liszt the entertainer was only one side of this fascinating pianist, composer, conductor, educator, polyglot, intellectual and all around mensch. This particular group of pieces touches upon his passion for literature and experimentation in atonality ("Sleepless" is based on a poem and "Bagatelle Without Tonality" is the fourth Mephisto Waltz), as well as his championship of revolutionary operatic works by Richard Wagner (in the transcription of "Isolde’s Love Death"). It is easy to forget, from our world of convenient accessibility, that there were only two ways to experience music before 20th century: attending a live performance or performing it yourself. Liszt transcribed numerous orchestral and operatic works. Most of them transform their originals into showcases for piano virtuosos. Liszt’s rendering of “Isolde’s Love Death”, perhaps in an ultimate sign of respect for its original, presents Wagner’s music in an unusually simple and direct manner, free of any piano virtuoso adornments.

I have a pretty short attention span and since opposites do attract, I have been fascinated by the music of Morton Feldman (1926-1987), perhaps most famous for his exploration of endurance in works ranging from one to six hours in length. As I explored these monumental works, I stumbled on these Two Intermissions: tiny studies in small gestures and silences. They serve as an abstract palate cleanser in this particular program.

When we think of piano virtuoso composers, Robert Schumann (1810-1856) is not a name that comes to mind, even though piano works occupy a large portion of his output and many of them are of transcendental technical difficulty. But this virtuosity is so overshadowed by his poetic imagination that it takes its rightful back seat. Novelette, Op. 21 No. 8, is one of those wonderful examples in which our hero (Robert Schumann) breaks so many composition “rules”

and yet, here we are, still playing and listening to this music, 179 years after it was written. For starters, we really have two works merged into one. The amount of musical material that Schumann uses once and never returns to is an embarrassment of riches that only the most talented artists can afford. Does it hang together in a perfect musical structure? Probably not. Does it matter? Not to me. Thematic unity is such a reasonable thing, but do we immerse ourselves in art seeking reason?

before launching into a toccata leading back to the same hesitancy, a final scale, and a satisfyingly harmonic ending.

The second section, Adagio, is perfectly traditional until a run leads to jovial trills and jaunts descending into a mistaken bass note, and an arpeggio to get out of the wrong key.

Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq 65/17

C.P.E. Bach does the same thing: with a searching scale, he reverts to the trills of the beginning, pauses unsurely, tries out a new chase theme, but hits a new wrong note. He makes an attempt to cover up with a bravado scale (but in the wrong key), until yet another wrong key suggests itself, with blustery dancing figures coming out of it, pretending he has found the original key all along, until a dance theme in the wrong key intrudes.

Allegro—Adagio—Allegro assai

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714—1788), the second son of Johann Sebastian (Telemann was his godfather)—a hard ancestry to shake—was nevertheless a rebel. He broke away from his father’s immense authority with many moods rather than just one, and with rhetorical digressions, a style he called empfindsamer Stil, or sensibility, a term as ironic as his music.

His modern sensibility in fact fits in with Francis Poulenc or Kurt Weill. The establishment must have been horrified, as if the son of a banker had robbed a bank. C.P.E. was known for his improvisational skills (as was Mozart). But unlike Mozart, for C. P. E. the Matrix of the 18th century fell away, revealing the Music of the Future, a world of unsureness where the right note wasn’t a given. And, after a few minutes of keyless improvisation, no key sounded like the home key anymore.

If there remains a structure, it is a piñata, more a scarecrow than a believable metronome.

(Years later, the great virtuoso Franz Liszt hit a wrong note while sight reading the Grieg Concerto in front of the composer. He rushed down the piano in arpeggios in the same key as the wrong note, slyly moved a half tone down in the deep bass, and then rushed up again in a scale in that new key to hit the correct note: a clever way of emphasizing his mistake while pretending to try to hide it.)

There is really no modulation or space between movements; it’s one long fantasy, but highly structured. For all his fooling around, Bach is quite aware where everything goes.

The piece reverts to its original key until a wrong note brings new anxieties, and a keyless hunt-and-peck inspection of the keyboard ensures—all is lost! But then a pause at a note seemingly leading into a cadenza turns out to be, not the pause before returning triumphantly home, but the end of the piece without ever reaching any kind of resolution.

I’m reminded of Madeleine Dring’s interrupted ending to her Trio of 1968—but this was 1746!

Like Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, the Hamburger Bach begins his piece with a hesitant scale, but changes his mind and improvises trills, a few jaunty escapades, before he pauses, tries the scale again, complete with new hesitations, 2017 Summer Season

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Aaron Jay Kernis: New work for cello and piano, 2017 Tippet Rise Commission (World Premiere) We are honored to have the great and delightful American composer of so many wonderful pieces at Tippet Rise this summer.

Aaron began composing at 13, and studied with John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Mort Subotnick, Bernard Rands, and Jacob Druckman, very different people who helped inspire Aaron’s many directions. Mort Subotnick was one of the founders of the electronic music movement in the ‘60s, working with the first synthesizer. I studied with him and Len Lye myself at NYU and remember being in awe of the concept of sampling. Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon was a crossover hit.

We performed several of John Adams’s pieces last summer, and you remember his driving moto perpetuos.

Anne-Marie McDermott has commissioned many works

by Charles Wuorinen who, besides being the youngest composer to win a Pulitzer Prize (which Aaron has repeated) back in 1970 for Time’s Encomium, and writing many piano pieces for Peter Serkin, Theologoumenon for James Levine’s 60th birthday, a gorgeous work based on Dylan Thomas’s poem "A Winter’s Tale," and a threnody for September 11 encompassing a W.H. Auden poem he was working on at the time, has also written immensely witty and as yet unrecorded classical pastiches for Anne-Marie.

The Ariel Quartet performed the vast reverie of the slow movement, Musica Celestis (Music of the Spheres), from Aaron’s First Quartet, last summer at Tippet Rise.

Aaron wrote his extraordinary 1992 arm cluster, yelling, foot-stomping take on Jerry Lee Lewis, Superstar Étude No. 1, for Christopher O’Riley. The New York Philharmonic premiered Kernis’s Dream of the Morning Sky when he was 23 years old. He was the youngest composer ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for his Second String Quartet in 1997 (the finale is the fast and furious “Triple Double Gigue Fugue”).

His 100 Greatest Dance Hits of 1993 is a percussive warm-up 214

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of shuffling Latin rhythms. His Too Hot Toccata is a moto perpetuo encyclopedia of Gershwin rhythms that snatches riffs from every instrument in the orchestra. He wrote his Gershwinesque Speed Limit Rag for David Zinman’s 65th birthday. Still Movement with Hymn is surrounded by the loss and grief of the war in Bosnia, as he says, “ending with a serene hymn where the tension and turbulence of the previous music is erased, at least momentarily.”

One of the most entertaining, fascinating, lavishly lyrical men of conscience in music, we are honored to be participating in three pieces which Aaron is composing for us over the next few years.

Franz Liszt: "Sleepless! Question" and Answer (1883) The music of Liszt’s old age is marked by an unusual economy of means. Gone are the days of creative abundance. It is almost as if he is trying to starve his compositions of the very notes they require to achieve their identity. His works frequently collapse into monody, and then into silence. Sometimes the piece is open-ended; that is, it just vanishes. The composition called "Schafflos!

Frage und Antwort" expires with a melodic line that ends on the dominant degree of C-sharp minor. For the faint-hearted, Liszt provided an ossia ending that is harmonised—proof that he knew that some of his contemporaries might find his first conclusion unacceptable.

—Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861—1886, Alan Walker

Liszt wrote this composition shortly after the death of Richard Wagner, so it might be an elegy for his son-in-law.

Liszt himself would be dead in three years. The question is in E minor, and the answer is, of course, E Major, which was Liszt’s “religious” key.

Liszt had become an abbé, and the subject of this piece is redemption (chords being the ultimate metaphor for the soul).

It was based on a poem by one of his students which has been lost to history. So it isn’t exactly autobiographical. Liszt was too proud for that.

"Sleepless" begins agitated, and ends in the middle of a hymn.

We’ve experienced such “open endings” before, from C.P.E. Bach to Madeleine Dring.

Liszt was the first virtuoso, the inventor of the modern concert (before Liszt, pianists shared the stage with trained monkeys), the creator of the tone poem, the father of modern music, lover of women and servant of God, Liszt’s works for solo piano alone fill 95 CDs.

Franz Liszt: "Bagatelle Without Tonality" (1885) As we advance over the years of music’s rampage through history, we begin to notice little lost pieces, like this bagatelle without a key. “A House with No Walls” was a paper on Sartre I reviewed on an academic committee at Columbia.

The Halekulani hotel on Oahu is Hawaiian for “House without a Key.” Some things, such as a minister without portfolio, are distinguished by what they don’t have.

“Bagatelle in No Key,” which might be an anticipation of Schoenberg, is in fact simply a harmonically ambiguous waltz, although it was the first self-proclaimed atonal piece in history. A bagatelle is an inconspicuous little bit of nothing, a trinket, a bauble, a cheap piece of fake jewelry. Couperin and Beethoven were famous for the musical kind, and SaintSaëns, Bartók, and Ligeti wrote notable ones.

Liszt may have intended this as the Fourth Mephisto Waltz, so it has a waltz format and is very similar in its theme to the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. (For background information,

you can read in this program the article on “Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz” played by Adam Golka on August 4.) The theme is also reminiscent of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre of 1874, which must have been the inspiration for this fragment. Liszt must have admired the keyless, homeless harmonics (or lack thereof) of the Saint-Saëns devil theme, which makes perfect sense for the devil: he is atonal, an angel without a heaven, a prince without a throne. What is hell but the lack of a home?

Even Mozart’s idea of hell in his opera Don Giovanni is chromatic waves. Chromaticism is another form of atonality, and the Bagatelle becomes quite chromatic after the main theme.

Interestingly, Janáček’s “homeless” theme for his Piano Trio (see the note in this program for July 15 concert) is fairly similar to Liszt’s own “homeless” motif here.

You can even hear the beginning of Bernstein’s “Maria” in the tenth measure. As Liszt struggles to find a key, Tony struggles for words to describe Maria.

The main waltz theme is almost Spanish, a “turn” or complex appoggiatura around one note. Liszt being Liszt, this simple theme then runs around the keyboard. Atonality is not supposed to be this much fun. You can almost hear one of Bizet’s toreadors pirouetting in front of the bull, as the “turn” theme lands on different notes, experimenting as to which one is best. You might do this in an improvisation or in composing a piece, and Liszt has had the brilliant idea to keep all the rough drafts and make them part of the final product. The chords all work to increase the tension, however, until Liszt loses interest or is overcome with emotion and has to stop. So there are multiple meanings (Gottfried Weber’s Mehrdeutigkeit) possible when a piece has no home key.

Anything goes.

Diminished arpeggios zip up the keyboard, a familiar trick Liszt uses all the time, but here he puts spaces between them.

They are like the attempts of a bat to fly, always interrupted.

This is a cadenza without a place to go, without a theme to improvise on.

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As the waltz theme is built up, you have the same feeling, that Liszt has kept all the failed chords and made a piece out of the discards.

as well. The change from major to minor is so wrenching that it is a good substitute for a sinking feeling, for a traumatic experience, for a sudden emotional reversal.

The main “turn” theme returns, and becomes a kind of will o’ the wisp, frequently used by Liszt and Mussorgsky to suggest demonic fairies. This is a chance to see how a composer puts together bits and pieces to make a work complete. In this case, Liszt hasn’t finished it into the kind of étude he might’ve written in his youth, but that makes it all the more modern and interesting. Artists came to realize that the well-made play wasn’t in fact true to life, and Zola’s and Verdi’s realism were the beginnings of fragmentation of plot devices, new ways to approach the re-creation of experience.

The pauses, or rests, between his Spanish outbursts or dance steps are also the pauses natural to the waltz melody, the oom-pah-pah where one of the beats is slightly delayed, or “pulled,” in a Viennese waltz. Liszt has exaggerated that slight pause as an entire full stop. When you put the stops and starts together, you get the waltz rhythm, even without its really being there. So it is also a waltz without a waltz. So modernity has figured out that the cleverest kind of art is no art at all, like the Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, who rented a space but forgot to do the paintings for it, so he left the walls blank and got great reviews.

Although the piece might have seemed chaotic to the age, today we can accept it just as it is without any sense of its being unusual. Music has come a long way, even if we’re not aware of having been brought along with it.

At the end, the piece climbs up in staccato notes with rests between them, exactly as Liszt does in his Gnomenreigen (Dance of the Gnomes), but he just leaves it hanging there without coming to a conclusion or a finale. A Piece Without a Coda is another wonderful evasive schoolboy trick: it’s even more brilliant (and a lot easier) not to have a brilliant coda.

I notice that modern screenplays use this trick a lot, when the hero says, “I should’ve thought of something clever to say, but I didn’t.” This is the Hollywood way to fake a clever conversation, or at least to think that you’ve faked it.

The main theme, marked Scherzando, alternates between F sharp and F natural, suggesting a traditional oscillation between major and minor modes, similar to his Question and Answer piece (see the piece on “Liszt: Sleepless!” from today), where the minor is the question and the major is the answer.

This “oscillation” between major and minor occurs throughout Rachmaninoff’s music as a traditional Russian melodic trick, as in his Prelude in E minor, Opus 32, No. 10 and in the third movement of his Piano Concerto No. 3. It is also used in Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra as a kind of “oh-oh” moment, and has become a staple of science-fiction film music 216

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Richard Wagner—Franz Liszt: "Isolde’s Love Death" (1867) This is Liszt’s transcription of Isolde’s love song at the end of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the famous closing Aria, “Mild und leise, wie er lächelt” (mild and gently, how he smiles). Wagner called this scene “Verklärung” (transfiguration) in his own concert version, calling the prelude “Liebestod.” Liszt’s arrangement was made during a period of great personal tension between Wagner and himself on account of Wagner’s extramarital liaison with Cosima von Bülow, Liszt’s daughter, then married to the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who conducted the premiere of Tristan. Cosima later became Wagner’s wife.

The music climbs achingly ever upward, striving for that apocalyptic transfiguration of love and death. The issue in this piece is that every phrase is a crescendo, but you can only build so much before you have built yourself out of house and home—the piano can’t get any louder. So you have to start very quietly to leave enough space for the dozens

of increasingly cathartic summits reached by Isolde, who is hallucinating that Tristan has risen from the dead. The constant yearning of the music is never resolved until the last gasp when Isolde dies, imagining that Tristan is beckoning her to the world beyond.

Wagner wrote the opera in Venice, having been thrown out of his house by his wife over a love affair with their host’s wife, Mathilde Wesendonck; and in Lucerne, where he had to move because he was a political fugitive. So the musical tension was an imitation of life.

In Isolden's Liebestod, Liszt remains very close to the original—which was perhaps an expression of his artistic veneration of Tristan und Isolde, since he otherwise never hesitated to make third-party works his “own” by making new, free arrangements of them…Liszt finally used a quotation from the second act of the opera, namely of the motif heard at the phrase “liebe-heiligstes Leben” (life of love most sacred) that Isolde and Tristan sing together in the second scene…

Since the verbal text was finally omitted, only those

who know the opera Tristan und Isolde are able to

discern the deeper meaning of these measures. It

must remain speculation as to whether this “motto”

that Liszt inserted may be regarded as a direct

commentary on his private situation during the

period of the work’s composition…

—Isoldens Liebestod, Dominik Rahmer, Ed., Henle

Verlag Folio Series, München, 2013. Arrangement

for Piano.

C. P. E. Bach: Rondo in C minor, Wq. 59/4 (1784)

or starting a new life somewhere else. As with the Sonata in G minor (see the note from earlier today)—spoiler alert, the piece ends in mid-sentence. Even Charles Rosen found C. P. E. incomprehensible, but he is in fact adorable. As with Poulenc, prepare to be deceived, tricked, deluded, amused, and left at the altar.

Music enters in the wrong key. Strange pauses give importance to unimportant phrases. Lovely lyric melodies are abandoned for the wild arpeggios which populate the bright stage lights of this pastiche. Don’t get too comfortable with any moment, because it’s doomed. Phrases lead to other phrases that lead to…a passing arpeggio. When you least expect it, a formal finishing phrase puts an end to the reverie.

Just before the end is a relatively long cadenza (C. P. E. doesn’t stay on any idea for more than ten seconds), leading to a hesitant, tiptoeing phrase, a repeat of the cadenza, and then, in the middle of the next tiptoe phrase, the staircase ends abruptly. This is what classical music isn’t, and C. P. E. has a great time with it. You wonder if, without the formalities and rules and formulas of the Classical era, people might have been able to be normal modern people, as C. P. E. was, and we could have skipped two or three stressful centuries and gone directly to the present.

Beethoven’s first sonata was written only a decade later, and you wonder if the arpeggio at the beginning of C. P. E.’s Rondo was the inspiration for Beethoven’s own ascending arpeggio opening, a phrase known as the Mannheim Rocket, from the Mannheim School which developed this trick and many others in the 1760s. The Mannheim Rocket was used

by Mozart in the fourth movement of his Symphony No. 40 (1788), so both Mozart and Beethoven may have gotten the idea from C. P. E. Bach (although all the Mannheim tricks, like the Mannheim birds, the Mannheim sigh, the Mannheim roller, were in the air).

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Morton Feldman: Intermission I (1950) Morton Feldman, like George Gershwin, was born of Russian Jewish parents (Gershwin’s father’s name was Gershowitz).

Feldman was the Oscar Levant of the avant-garde. Witty and cryptic, he and John Cage were at the center of modern music for most of their lives.

Feldman wrote seven “intermissions,” a witty concept in itself, including Intermission 6a and Intermission 6b. Feldman wrote this introductory “intermission” at 24. He said that “I matured at 24. I was a late starter.” The piece is around three minutes long and, much like Cage, has many silences, although Feldman claimed he never thought of silence; it was just there.

The silences and misdirections of C. P. E. Bach don’t necessarily provide ample warning for full-blown “accidental” music.

The way the piece looked on paper often dictated the way it was to be played. Think of his notes as sonic representations of the clusters of color in a Kandinsky painting. Kandinsky himself painted many canvases which were representations of sounds. To Feldman, a Jackson Pollock painting was a series of patterns which directed the hands around a piano keyboard. It was sheet music.

Feldman studied with Stefan Wolpe (I myself studied with Wolpe’s widow, Irma, who was sensibly devoted to keeping me away from her husband’s music. “Peter Serkin can have the Passacaglia, you get the Chopin,” she would say. It was like Steve Martin being allowed to have only the chicken in L.A. Story.)

Feldman often used grids for scores, specifying how many notes to play in a given time frame, but not which notes. He experimented with aleatoric music, where the notes to be played were determined by chance, but given certain rules by the composer. His “paintings” of music were dependent on outside values that are apparent only when you know what his intentions were.

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The circle of musicians gathering around John Cage towards the latter part of the 1940s—Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Christian Wolff—expressed a strong interest in the visual arts.

Cage, right from the time of his studies with Arnold Schoenberg in 1935, had taken an interest in abstract painting—Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian—and had himself begun painting…

Compositions begin with a leap that “is more like going to another place where the time changes” and end simply by being abandoned, without a speechlike gesture of closure…

In his piano miniatures Feldman traced a development that took him beyond the “repetitive statement” to juxtaposition and overlapping of shifting surfaces…

Feldman’s guiding principle seems to be that no aggregate [chord cluster] or sound event should appear twice in the same form but always undergo some alteration, reduction, compression, etc., as though his work were an energy field where sounds produced concentration, dilution, and rarefaction…

—Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism,

Entwurf einer Theorie der informellen Musik,

Gianmario Borio, Laaber Verlag, Laaber 1993 As Feldman himself wrote: My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In that sense, my compositions are really not “compositions” at all. One might call them time canvases in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music. I have learned that the more one composes or constructs, the more one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the controlling metaphor of the music.

Both these terms—Space, Time—have come to be used in music and the visual arts as well as in

mathematics, literature, philosophy and science…

I prefer to think of my work as between categories.

Between Time and Space. Between painting and music. Between the music’s construction, and its surface.

The art world in the ‘50s was centered in New York: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, to name but a few. Of all the composers in the circle around Cage, Feldman was, without a doubt, the one who remained most faithful throughout his life to the abstract expressionist aesthetic…

One senses that the ambiguity in his work is in some ways a protective device…a safe-zone constructed between confrontational forces…Feldman had sometimes gone to extreme lengths to maintain the ambiguity of his works….

This is indeed a matter of covering tracks, concealing structural underpinnings, censoring elements of a dialectic.

Through this vandalism of his own pieces, Feldman worked to create and maintain the protective zone of in-betweenness.

The notion of “flatness” in abstract expressionist paintings, and of the flattened picture-plane, is a more complex subject than it sounds. There are, nonetheless, direct echoes of this in Feldman’s conceptual modeling (“space is an illusion”), and this enables us to begin observing correlations between his work and that of the painters (Pollock, Ashton, Guston). Importantly, this notion of flatness has a complex theoretical and philosophical framework in terms of art history, and is strongly associated with the formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg….

—Alistair Noble (see below)

As Stefan Wolpe said, Feldman “is interested in surfaces that are as spare as possible and in the remnants of shapes that are barely heard at a distance.”

Book to Read: Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton, Feldman, Alistair Noble: Routledge, 2016

C. P. E. Bach: Sonata in E minor, Wq. 59/1 (1784)

by Peter Halstead

Presto — Adagio — Andantino Three years after he wrote this, C. P. E. would be dead. His brother, Johann, was music master to the Queen of England.

His other brother, Wilhelm Friedemann, unfortunately, was fairly dissipated. C. P. E. had two of the Bach Passions, which survive to this day. Wilhelm Friedemann had the others; they were sold for nothing, and have disappeared.

C. P. E. composed nearly 200 sonatas. The last ones, marked “für Kenner und Liebhaber” (for connoisseurs and amateurs) and published near the end of his life, explored alleys that his father, Johann Sebastian, had never visited. C. P. E. opened up the piano to sarcasm, irony, regret, foolishness, braggadocio—all emotions he presented with a light touch and from a great distance, as he intended to make fun of them. Rather than becoming a second-hand Sebastian, he became a modern composer. Not until Poulenc did someone come along with an ability to make fun of himself and traditional forms. Haydn and Mozart did it a bit, but C. P. E. did it constantly. By creating an unreliable narrator, he became a 20th century composer, more than a hundred years ahead of his time.

Critics who rely on the clichés that have been passed down (maybe clichés are the real survivors of history), such as C. P. E.’s “sensitive” style, miss every note. He was a complete riot. He didn’t write a note that wasn’t meant to be taken the 2017 Summer Season

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wrong way. He broke every rule consistently. Then he invented new rules and broke those. By maintaining a thin veneer of obeisance towards the age, he acknowledged his total control over the traditions, because he distorted them again. In his total mastery of the forms he mocked, he was the Jorge Luis Borges of classical music.

In 1785, he wrote at least four cantatas. We have a fragment of a lost St. Matthew Passion from that year. In his last years he wrote Passions for all four Gospels, all lost.

Despite his irreverence, which probably no one understood, he was appointed harpsichordist to Frederick II of Prussia in 1740. Frederick the Great, who listened to music he commissioned every night, but was somewhat diverted by the need to turn Prussia into a modern state while expanding its land through the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. Frederick became one of the four leaders of the Enlightenment, along with Catherine the Great of Russia, Leopold II of Tuscany, and Joseph II of Austria. He invited Voltaire to live at his palace, when Voltaire was a fugitive in France, and to whom he had written letters as a teenager.

Towards the end of his life, C. P. E. wrote the six influential sets of keyboard pieces “für Kenner und Liebhaber,” of which this is one.

Down scales lead to a boastful upward jaunt (“let’s all go on safari!”), the way a child would proudly show you something he broke. The left hand answers this challenge with two silly notes. Then the tempo improves in the second section, which repeats. You can understand that C. P. E. was noted for his accuracy and speed when you notice how often he just threw off scales and arpeggios. After a while of this, the arpeggios just end in silence several times, there’s a long fermata, and a scale ends in a final resolution which leads to the Adagio.

Like his other sonatas, this one has no divisions between movements, but rather bridges. After a serious beginning, strange modal scales and chords in the wrong key lead to a false resolution, which segues into the Andantino.

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It is unusual to end with a slow movement. The melody here is a long-breathed Mozartean improvisation, with the hands answering each other. When the hands overlap, they end clumsily. Arpeggios end on the wrong note. The Mozartean theme returns, with its awkward pauses. And then the moment passes, the theme ends one measure too soon, and the afternoon drifts away into evening, powerless to stop the sun setting, as always, too early.

Morton Feldman: Intermission II (1950) This piece is about a minute and a half.

My teacher Russell Sherman used to say that you can’t play Mozart until you’ve played Schoenberg, so that you know where Mozart was going, where he might have gone if he’d lived in a later age. When Mozart uses roiling chromatic octaves, that is, notes played interval-by-interval, both the black and white keys on the piano, to foreshadow death at the beginning of his opera Don Giovanni, written in 1787, to say that there’s something scary coming, that Don Juan is going to hell because of his behavior—an implicit moral judgment in the music—Mozart is looking forward to Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic “tone row,” that is, all “twelve tones” in a scale being used, as they are in chromatic octaves. Mozart had the idea of modern music before its time, but he stopped before he took it too far, because he accepted the rules of classical forms.

However, if he had lived another hundred years, the rules would have been different. We’re not very scared by chromatic scales, because we’re used to them. In Mozart’s day, they sounded much more terrifying.

And C. P. E. Bach in 1784 used these same chromatic scales.

So the same thing goes for C. P. E. You can’t listen to him without understanding that he was thinking of very modern ideas that weren’t quite available to him yet because, as much as he broke the rules, the new harmonic rules hadn’t yet been

invented. It took Liszt and Wagner and Brahms to make Schoenberg possible.

So Pedja, through his programming Bach and Feldman side by side, is in fact pointing out the similarities of C. P. E. to Feldman. Feldman is where C. P. E. was going. In his silences and his way of looking at music as blocks, shapes, textures, fabrics, colors of paintings, he is imitating what C. P. E. did in his day.

You can see that C. P. E. is using fast scales as textures rather than as single notes. He uses silences to disrupt expectations, as does Feldman. Feldman breaks up a long line into bits and pieces, as Picasso did with Cubism, as Pollock did when he took a long brush stroke and turned into ten smaller jabs and thrusts. They were fragmenting our more scripted, well-made fantasies, into the photons and monosyllabic patches of the way life and sound usually come to us. We don’t have time to listen to a symphony, so we turn on the radio and listen to something for a second or two until we decide we don’t like it, and then we change the channel.

So, although Feldman still sounds disturbing to us, if you skip the silences and put all his fragments together, they make a long line similar to one of C. P. E.’s melodies. As C. P. E. was thinking that melodies might be peripheral to more serious ideas (even though he pointed this out in amusing ways), Feldman is thinking the same thing. Their innovations were equally shocking to their respective ages. We can still be shocked at Feldman’s tone clusters or cut-off phrases.

But there isn’t anything very radical going on here: he’s just breaking up a melody into bits and pieces—tearing a passion to tatters, as Hamlet said.

C. P. E. Bach: Rondo in A Major, Wq. 58/1 Pedja may be feeling guilty that he’s programmed such quirky pieces of C. P. E. Here’s a more gorgeous lyrical piece, where C. P. E.’s silences, interjections, and asides don’t shake up the linear format, the horizontal drive, of normal classical music, but instead collaborate to make it richer without disrupting its flow. C. P. E. could follow the rules, and when he did, his work is emotionally powerful, perfectly formed, but still lyrical beyond the confines of the form. His technical demands are at the top of what the age expected of a virtuoso.

This short, five-minute Rondo has a few clipped phrases, but this time the phrases drive the linear action—they don’t interrupt it. They might be expected to have one or two more notes, but they succeed, in their shorthand fashion. So C. P. E. understood how to incorporate his innovations into more traditional forms without compromise.

Enjoy this well-made, pear-shaped gem, where C. P. E.’s modernist leanings work perfectly with older forms to make a work that succeeds as traditional classical and, at the same time, pre-Romantic music. As Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Brahms and Rachmaninoff looked back to earlier forms, while at the same time bringing great innovations to their epochs, C. P. E. Bach is their equal, blossoming in the crossroads of antiquity and modernity.

An “intermission” is an emission “between” other emissions, reading between the lines, a Greek rhetorical device known as “methexis.” It’s also a space between acts, a silence between sounds. But it’s also a mission, a crusade.

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Robert Schumann: Novelette, Op. 21, no. 8 (1838) This is the last of Schumann’s eight Novelettes, or short stories. He teased his betrothed, child prodigy Clara Wieck (who was then eighteen), that the stories were references to the attractive Clara Novello, the unrivalled soprano and great Handelian of her age. He said that the title “Wiecketten” was too clunky.

As a side note, the Welsh singer Clara Novello Davies was named after the great Clara Novello; Davies’s son, Ivor Novello (born David Ivor Davies), was the great British songwriter and actor, portrayed and sung charmingly by Jeremy Northam in Robert Altman’s excellent film Gosford Park (written by Julian Fellowes, who wrote Downton Abbey as a prequel to Gosford Park). Novello’s songs are the quintessence of 1920s British musical theater.

On a more serious note, Schumann told Clara that “in the Novelletten you appear in all possible situations and settings—pranks, scenes with fathers, weddings—in short, extremely engaging things, and I confidently assert that no one could have composed those Novelletten without knowing your eyes, nor without having kissed your lips.”

“Engaging” is of course his shorthand for being engaged to Clara. Schumann is writing his wedding march for his and Clara’s eventual marriage, a march which returns after each “adventure story.” He is besotted with Clara (as was Brahms later on).

Schumann had two contrasting personalities, the happy Eusebius and the meditative Florestan, whose disparities are on display in his episodic piece of 1835, Carnaval. In the Novelletten, he intersperses the important business of love with a collage of Eusebius marches, passionate Florestan pieces, elegant waltzes, polonaises, provocative songs without words. He called the episodes “on the whole cheerful and superficial, apart from a few moments where I get to the bottom of things.” He wrote to a friend that, “…something of the struggles that Clara cost me may be heard in my music 222

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and will certainly be understood by you as well. She was practically the sole begetter of the concerto, the sonata, the Davidsbündlertänze and the Novelletten.”

Schumann felt that there were revelations attained in between the marches.

The Novelletten are Schumann’s longest work. The eighth novelette is the longest, a combined nocturne, mazurka, and reverie, in between which the wedding march gallops.

The main theme is from Clara’s “Nocturne” in her Soirées musicales (Op. 6, No. 2), which Schumann called a voice from afar, “Stimme aus der Ferne.” He also used this theme in the beginning of his majestic Fantasie. After climbing three notes, this melody skips down five tones, where it becomes a modified “Clara” theme, which Schumann used in many of his works to acknowledge his love for Clara. It is most obvious in the slow midsection trio, where it lofts over a syncopated bass. Clara, in one of her many love letters to Robert, noted the presence of his manic alter ego, Eusebius, and signed herself, “your Eusebiana.”

In 1838, driven by his desire to be worthy of the budding pianist (who would become Germany’s greatest during her lifetime), Schumann rose to his most prolific, with the Fantasiestücke, the Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), the Kreisleriana, his Arabeske, and the Humoreske, five of his greatest pieces.

In 1838 Robert went to Vienna with Clara on her vastly successful concert tour, where she was named Königliche und Kaiserliche Kammervirtuosin, the “Royal and Imperial” chamber virtuoso, by appointment to both King and Kaiser.

Chopin talked Liszt into hearing her, and Liszt praised her effusively.

In 1840, Schumann finally married Clara, after suing her father in court for the right to her hand.

The eighth Novelette is episodic; each story ends emphatically, after each of which the Eusebius march resumes. This is Schumann wooing Clara, predicting their later married life together in music.

As Sir George Grove says, “His attempt to imbue the Novelletten with the quality of a Jean-Paulian narrative resulted in fragmented reprises, the embedding of smaller within larger structures…”

(Jean Paul Richter was a German Romantic novelist whose stories were similar to Laurence Sterne’s in Tristram Shandy [1759, 1767]: digressive, formless, labyrinthine, compelling.

He influenced Schumann enormously, in this piece and in the Papillons. Richter mentored and influenced E. T. A. Hoffmann, who wrote similar picaresque stories, which served as the basis for Offenbach’s opera, Les contes d’Hoffmann.)

Schumann abstracted his personality in ways that were considered opaque by Clara. But as Eric Jensen says in his book Schumann, “the eccentricity and resulting unpredictability… seems one of [his] greatest strengths.”

Schumann’s music is serious and introverted (despite the manic Eusebius marches) and not as compellingly virtuosic as Liszt or Chopin. Schumann had been a virtuoso, but had injured his fourth finger, sleeping with it in a noose designed to strengthen it but which in fact sprained it permanently. Out of this flaw sprung Schumann’s profundity, as he was forced to look into structure itself, rather than coasting on technique, as Liszt had done in his younger years. Schumann had criticized him for this in the journal Schumann edited in Leipzig, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

So many of the great moments in art come from a man’s need to rise to a better woman; the Novelletten fall into this rarified mold.

Book to Read: Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius, Peter Ostwald: Northeastern University Press, 1985

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A FLIGHT OF WINDS Saturday, August 26, 10:30 AM The Domo Jessica Sindell, flute Alex Klein, oboe Mark Nuccio, clarinet Daniel Hawkins, horn Frank Morelli, bassoon PROGRAM MAURICE RAVEL: Ma mère l'Oye, (arr. Frank Morelli)

Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant

Petit Poucet EUGÈNE BOZZA: Image for solo flute, Op. 38 ANTAL DORÁTI: The Grasshopper and the Ant MAURICE RAVEL: Ma mère l'Oye

Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes PAQUITO D'RIVERA: The Cape Cod Files, Lecuonerias FRANCISCO MIGNONE: Two Brazilian Waltzes for bassoon solo

Improvised Waltz

The Modinha that Villa Didn’t Write MAURICE RAVEL: Ma mère l'Oye

Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête VITALY BUYANOVSKY: Espana: From Four Improvisations from Traveling Impressions MAURICE RAVEL: Ma mère l'Oye

Le jardin féerique

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

by Jessica Sindell This year I was blessed with the opportunity to perform once again at the beautiful Tippet Rise Art Center. In the summer of 2016, I performed solo and accompanied flute at the Tiara Acoustic Shell and chamber music in the Olivier Music Barn.

From my past experience performing in these two acoustically different venues, I had a better sense of how to help in the programming of this summer’s upcoming concerts.

The Halsteads invited me to create my own group of winds for two performances. One would take place midday outdoors at the Domo and the other, an evening performance, in the Music Barn. No names of artists were suggested, which allowed me the freedom to recruit the top winds in the country. This project was an absolute dream for me! Rarely is there an occasion where one can choose exactly who they would like to perform with.

I first decided to reach out to the world-renowned horn player, William VerMeulen. He is extremely well connected in the music industry from having played and performed with every summer festival out there. Luckily, he was available for the suggested summer performance dates and from there he was able to suggest to me the top names for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. To everyone’s delight, our first choices were willing and able to attend Tippet Rise this summer. This left us with a mind-blowing roster of all-star wind players. On Bassoon we have Frank Morelli, Principal bassoon of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; Houston Symphony’s Principal Clarinetist, Mark Nuccio; Chicago Symphony’s Principal Oboist, Alex Klein; Houston Symphony’s Principal Horn and Rice University’s horn professor, William VerMeulen; and of course me, Jessica Sindell, piccolo player/flutist of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. We also later learned that pianist Pedja Muzijevic would be able to collaborate with us on the evening program. Having piano included in the mix gave us an unlimited choice of repertoire. The most difficult 226

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part of everything was the programming. Everybody loves to play certain pieces; however, this group was extremely laid back with repertoire choices and we were able to come together on two fantastic programs.

For the midday concert at the Domo, we concluded that it should be a winds-only program. The scenery surrounding the shell is absolutely breathtaking. I remember having to focus extra hard on my music when first performing there. I had the itch to just drop my flute and run out into the wilderness right there and then! It was an unforgettable experience for me to perform several French flute pieces with the mountains surrounding the shell and the birds accompanying my tunes with their chirping.

With this atmosphere in mind, we decided it was most fitting to program Frank Morelli’s brilliant arrangement for wind quintet of Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye. It is a suite that is originally written for orchestra, which I know we have all performed many times. It will be fun to experience the condensed quintet version and have the arranger himself playing with us! All of us will also perform our own solo pieces in between each movement. It worked out perfectly since each movement of the Ravel showcases one of the instruments in the quintet. We will conclude the program with George Gershwin’s Three Preludes, a jazzy and lighthearted work originally written for piano.

For the evening concert we have an impressive lineup. Pedja will be added into the mix as well. We will open the program with Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat Major, which features horn, piano, bassoon, oboe, and clarinet. Following that will be Madeleine Dring’s Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano. Dring was a major admirer of Francis Poulenc and you can hear much of his influence in this piece. Many of the melodic lines between the oboe and flute are extremely conversational and interactive; it’s a fun one to put on. We will then have an intermission, which will be followed by Glinka’s Trio pathetique for clarinet, bassoon, and piano. This piece is well-suited to the lyrical bel canto qualities of the clarinet and bassoon while also showcasing virtuosity in the piano.

Lastly, we conclude the concert with Poulenc’s Sextet, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano. This is one of the most satirical pieces Poulenc had ever composed. His first movement, cheery and carefree, moves to a second movement of melodic songfulness with a possible allusion to “come to me, my melancholy baby,” which can also be heard in the last movement, which evokes the feelings of vague and regretful longing.

We are all looking forward to this opportunity at Tippet Rise this summer!

Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye, “Cinq pièces enfantines” (five children’s pieces) (arr.

Frank Morelli) (1908 - 1910) Ravel wrote his Mother Goose pieces as a piano duet for his friends Ida and Cipa Godebski’s children, Mimi and Jean, who were six and seven. It was premiered by two other children, Christine Verger and Germaine Duramy (six and ten years old), at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. The piece was transcribed for solo piano in 1910, and in 1911 Ravel orchestrated the five-piece suite.

La pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane) was written in 1908. The other four pieces of the Mother Goose Suite were written in 1910.

Ravel’s most well-known piece, after Boléro, is his Pavane for a Deceased Infant. Because of Ravel, the word Pavane has taken on a more mystic connotation, as a dirge for an imaginary or mythical person. Ravel initially wrote it for his dying father, however.

The Sleeping Beauty fable comes from a collection of stories

by Charles Perrault entitled Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralites (Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals) (1697) with the subtitle Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose).

This piece is much shorter than its explanation. The flute plays in the Aeolian or minor mode, which is a scale that came from the Aeolian Islands in Greece. It was also called the low Lydian tonos (tone system). It was nine semitones lower than the normal pitch of the human voice (the Hypodorian mode). Originally there were four, then eight modes, and later around 1547 this became twelve modes, a precursor of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system of “tone rows.”

Gregorian chant, attributed to the Catholic Pope Gregory, was sung by monks a capella (without instruments), who used various modes (key systems) to express the ascetic spirituality of divine worship, which was too pure to admit instruments.

The flute and the mode are both very suited to the innocence of Sleeping Beauty.

A pavane is a courtly Renaissance dance from Padua, a Paduana or Padovano. (The Bergamasque was a dance from Bergamo, which happily coincides with the word “masque,” as these dances were performed at masked balls, when high society and courts would display their costumes before the King and Queen. The men would circle before the women in the shape of a peacock’s tail, and thus the name, Padovano, which happily coincides with both Padua and peacock in Italian. Most slow dances were originally fast, as most words come to mean their opposite over time.

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Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye, (arr. Frank Morelli): Le Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) (1910) “He believed he’d easily find his way because of the bread that he’d strewn all along his path; but he was very surprised to find not a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten everything.” (Charles Perrault, Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye) Tom is an oboe, wandering uncertainly around the hall, as the rhythm hesitates like the Ancient Mariner’s ship: With a short uneasy motion— Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion.

There are the crumb-eating birds, with cuckoo trills and glissandi (where the finger slides up the neck of the violin).

Tom’s oboe returns, but again loses its way.

Eugène Bozza: Image for solo flute, Op. 38 (1939) Bozza’s meditative Image begins like Debussy’s Girl with Flaxen Hair. Despite a few runs into the treble, the mood remains pastoral, in keeping with Ravel’s portrait of the meadows of childhood in his Mother Goose Suite. The low range of the flute is almost oboe-like. Birds flutter and fly out of view. The long scales range over the gamut of what can be played on the flute and require enormous breath control. The nuances of warbling and the sforzandi of sudden attacks offer Jessica a chance to play with the varying timbres of her instrument. This is a virtuosic yet relaxed study which explores the possibilities of sound which the flute can create, and a challenge to the performer to personalize the Impressionistic landscape.

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trombones, and wrote some 250 works for woodwinds and brass, adding immensely to their techniques. He was 34 when he wrote Image; like his Nuages, this is from his Impressionist period, as is apparent from the titles, both from Debussy.

Antal Doráti: The Grasshopper and the Ant (1980) In this evening of fairy tales, this fable composed by the great Hungarian conductor Antal Doráti is the first of his five pieces for solo oboe, written for the great oboist Heinz Holliger. It’s based on the fable from Jean de la Fontaine (and originally from Aesop). The Grasshopper, or La Cigale, is the symbol of imprudence in France. La Fontaine rhymes quite nicely in French, which Doráti has tried to bring to the music.

A cigale may be the mean between a thumb (un poucet) and a snake (un serpent), the pieces which surround it.

The grasshopper, having sung The summer away, Found herself dry When the North Wind came: Not a single piece of fly Or worm for love or money.

She cried famine To the ant her neighbor, Asked if she had A bit of grain to get her Through the winter.

“I’ll even pay you,” she said, “On my word, before August, Principal and interest.”

Do not a lender be, Goes the ant’s misanthropy.

“What’d you do when it was hot?”

She asked the bug.

“Night and day,” he shrugged, “I sang to my fans.”

“You sang? I’m so relievedOK: now you can dance.”

Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye: Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (Little Ugly Girl, Empress of the Pagodas) (1910) This movement is from Le Serpentin vert (The green serpent) by another fairy tale author, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.

In fact, she invented the term itself of les Contes de Fée (fairy tales).

Ravel quotes the story in the score: She undressed and entered the bath. Immediately the pagodas, male and female, began to sing and to play on various instruments. Some had theorbos, or lutes, made of walnut shells, others viols made of almond shells. For they were obliged to use instruments proportionate to their shapes and sizes.

Laideronnette was a beautiful princess until a witch turned her ugly. The snake had had a similar encounter, morphing from a handsome prince to a serpent courtesy of the witch. So the snake and the little girl go for walks, where they encounter singing pagodas (like tubs, they are suspiciously made of porcelain, but also diamonds and emeralds), which gives Ravel a chance to invoke his musical chinoiserie which was so popular at the time, and to pay homage to Debussy’s piece, “Pagodes,” from his Estampes.

Eventually the spell is broken; our heroes revert to prince and princess and live happily ever after, as fairy tales require.

Originally the piece was written entirely for the black keys of the piano, which imparts an Asian ambiance. The flute (with its walnut shell like the lutes in the tale) plays low while the horn (with its almond shell mouthpiece like the viols in the story) plays high, the ultimate collaboration between the source text and its translation into music.

Paquito D’Rivera: “The Cape Cod Files,” Lecuonerias (movement 3) (2009) D’Rivera is a charming raconteur and clarinetist, composer and saxophonist, an extraordinary virtuoso improviser, and, he jokes, a bullfighter. He’s won fourteen Grammy awards.

He performed when he was ten with the National Theater Orchestra of Cuba. He’s recorded more than 30 albums. He was a founding member of the United Nations Orchestra, a fifteen-piece ensemble organized by Dizzy Gillespie to showcase the fusion of Latin and Caribbean influences with jazz. His highly acclaimed ensembles—the Chamber Jazz Ensemble, the Paquito D’Rivera Big Band, and the Paquito D’Rivera Quintet—are in demand world-wide. His three chamber compositions were recorded live in concert with Yo-Yo Ma in 2003.

As he says, “Jazz started only in 1913. So we’re missing centuries of symphonies and composers. On the other side, the classical people are missing the freshness, the youth of jazz music. Improvisation is a ghost in the classical world.

They write down cadenzas.”

Lecuonerias starts with the opening solo from Rhapsody in Blue, but then thinks better about it, quotes from de Falla, and vamps until some melody suggests itself. Paquito loves to quote in his music: Malagueña, Mozart; and he encourages others to do it, so I have no idea what might happen during this piece.

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Francisco Mignone: Two Brazilian Waltzes for bassoon solo -Improvised Waltz (1981) -The Modinha that Villa Didn’t Write (1981) Francisco Mignone was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1897. In 1917 he graduated from the São Paulo Conservatory with a concentration in flute, piano, and composition.

At the end of his life, Mignone returned to favoring Brazilian material and composed with a nationalistic flair. He wrote many works that featured the bassoon.

Valsa Improvisada (Improvised Waltz) was completed in 1981. The waltz is introspective in nature. The Waltzes were composed during Mignone’s last compositional period and are excellent examples of the composer’s return to a nationalistic preference at the end of his life. Each of the sixteen Waltzes has a style indicative of popular Brazilian styles or pays homage to an aspect of Brazilian culture. It is unknown if the composer intended all sixteen Waltzes to be performed at one time or if he had specific groups in mind for live performance.

The sixteen Waltzes were not numerically numbered in the manuscript nor were they published in chronological order.

Therefore, the decision as to which Waltzes to perform, and in what order, is entirely up to the performer.

Aquela Modinha que o Villa não Escreveu (The Modinha that Villa Didn’t Write) is a sentimental love song from Portugal and Brazil, a Modinha. This particular one pays homage to Heitor Villa-Lobos. Villa-Lobos is described as “the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music.” He wrote in a Bachianas brasileiras style (Brazilian Bach-pieces), and strongly influenced Mignone.

Not only does Mignone pay homage to him with the title of this waltz, the remaining waltzes (and all of his other works) follow Villa-Lobos’ precedent to utilize descriptive titles that reflect the style or attitude of the composition instead of opus numbers. The Modinha Mignone wrote for the bassoon has 230

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an imploring and melancholy feel. The opening falling threenote motive is expanded upon through the waltz. The entire range of the bassoon is utilized to express the turmoil of a great love.

-Excerpted from “Mignone Waltzes” by Paula Brusky, PhD at paulabrusky.com

Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye: Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (The Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) (arr.

Frank Morelli) (1910) Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote the oldest and novel-length version of Beauty and the Beast in her La jeune américaine, et les contes marins (1740), later abridged by JeanneMarie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756.

Ravel appends a confused dialogue from the Beaumont version: “When I think how kind-hearted you are, you don’t seem so ugly.”

“Yes, it is true, I have a kind heart.

Still, I am a beast.”

“Many men are more beastly than you.”

“If I were witty I would think up a fine compliment by way of thanks, but I am only a beast.”

“Beauty, will you be my wife?”

“No, Beast!”

“I die happy because I have had the pleasure of seeing you again.”

“No, my dear Beast, you shall not die.

You shall live to be my husband!”

The Beast vanished and at her feet she saw a prince as beautiful as the God of Love. The prince thanked her for breaking the spell laid upon him.

So the beauty here is also bête (dim).

This movement has a lovely lilting syncopation to it. The Beauty begins as a slowly waltzing clarinet, but then becomes a flute and finally an oboe.

Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye: Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden) (arr. Frank Morelli) (1908 - 1910)

After a pause, the Beast enters as a bassoon. In the original Villeneuve novel, he was quite stupid. In the latest Disney film he is played as ferocious and later becomes Dan Stevens, the heartthrob of Downton Abbey. The ensemble waltzes together, but pulls away to reveal the demure flute and the dogged bassoon. The spell (there’s always a spell) is broken with a pause, beauty is transformed with the violin’s high notes, and the beast is subsumed into the waltz, presumably becoming more princely.

Returning to the stately processional of the first movement (Sleeping Beauty), the flute opens her eyes and crescendoes into waking. The nightmare is resolved into the normality of day.

But note how the ensemble has enlarged Ravel’s slight tale for children with more grown-up characterizations from Bozza, Dorati, D’Rivera, and Mignone.

Timothy Jackson: Don’t Make It Bad (2009) This is a horn solo based on the Beatles song, “Hey Jude” (1968), written by Paul McCartney. Paul wrote the song to comfort John Lennon’s son Julian during John’s divorce from Cynthia over Yoko Ono. John believed it was written about him. It was the longest single ever to top both the British and the U.S. charts, and spent more time at the top than any other Beatles song. Critics have pointed out that the song ultimately is about comforting the singer.

It was the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, who orchestrated the 40-piece band accompaniment in the long coda, which helped ensure the song’s success. It was the success of “MacArthur Park” which convinced EMI to leave in the long coda to “Jude.”

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PIANO AND WINDS Saturday, August 26, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano Jessica Sindell, flute Alex Klein, oboe Mark Nuccio, clarinet Daniel Hawkins, horn Frank Morelli, bassoon PROGRAM WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Quintet in E flat Major for Piano and Winds, K. 452

Largo - Allegro moderato Larghetto

Allegretto MADELEINE DRING: Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano

Allegro con brio

Andante semplice

Allegro giocoso INTERMISSION MIKHAIL GLINKA: Trio pathétique for clarinet, bassoon, and piano

Allegro moderato – Scherzo. Vivacissimo – Largo – Allegro con spirito FRANCIS POULENC: Sextet, FP 100 for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano

Allegro vivace

Divertissement: Andantino

Finale: Prestissimo

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Quintet in E-flat Major for Piano and Winds, K. 452 (1784)

Largo-Allegro moderato Larghetto Allegretto In 1781 Mozart had quarreled with his treatment by the hermetic court of the Archbishop Colloredo, and left for Vienna. Now he was on his own, and fortunately forced to compose more secular works to earn his living. In 1782 he finished The Abduction from the Seraglio in July and married Constanze in August, then began writing the six Haydn quartets.

Due to his friendship with the imperial librarian, composer, and diplomat Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who had access to what is now the largest library in Germany, Mozart got to know the works of Bach and Handel, and once transposed a Bach Oratorio from its manuscript simultaneously to the keyboard, while singing one of the choral parts.

In 1784 Mozart became friends with Joseph Haydn, who became his mentor. Mozart eagerly studied Haydn’s string quartets, saying: “It was only Haydn who finally taught me how to compose quartets.”

So Bach, Handel, and Haydn were melding in Mozart’s head at the time he wrote this Quintet. Mozart and Constanze had moved from their flat in Judenplatz to the Trattnerhof. He changed apartments in Vienna thirteen times.

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Johann von Trattner was the leading music publisher and retailer in Vienna between 1770 and 1790. He became court bookseller in 1751 and court printer in 1754. He built the Trattnerhof in 1777. Mozart lived there from January 23 to September 29 in 1784, where he gave piano lessons to Thérèse, Trattner’s second wife. He gave three concerts in Trattner’s concert hall.

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In his letters from March and April 1784, Mozart asks for his father’s understanding for not having the time to write to him because of the numerous engagements: 22 between the end of February and the beginning of April. Among them, three concerts in a subscription series at the Trattnerhof, two at the Burgtheater and others in the salons of Count Johann Esterhazy and Prince Galitsin. Mozart tells his father how wonderfully his performances were received: he won extraordinary applause, the hall was “crammed full,” and he was praised repeatedly for the first concert on March 17.

He proudly presents his father the list of subscribers to the Trattnerhof concerts: 174 names from the highest levels of society, all of whom attended his successful performances.

Among them, Prince Kaunitz, Prince Galitsin, Thérèse von Trattner, Baroness Martha Elisabeth von Waldstatten, Count and Countess Thun, Princess Lichnowsky, Prince Lobkowitz, Prince Liechtenstein, Count Zichy, Count Esterházy, Count Nostitz, Baron van Swieten, Councillor Greiner, Countess Waldstein, Count Zinzendorf, Baron Wetzlar, Princess Auersperg, Count Banffi, Ignatz von Born, Count Czernin, Prince Schwartzenberg, Countess Hatzfeld, and many others, all people of importance and position in the Viennese society.

Many of these names will figure in Mozart’s career, as they did in Haydn’s and later Beethoven’s. His final piece in March was this Quintet. Mozart wrote to his father that “I myself consider it to be the best thing I have written in my life.”

He had already written that March the Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat Major, K. 449 (whose structure parallels the later E-flat Quintet; it was an E-flat month), No. 15 in B-flat Major, K. 450 and Piano Concerto No. 16 in D Major, K. 451, which showed a new finesse in writing for woodwinds.

Mozart was growing exponentially; in his pieces you can hear him learning from himself as he goes along.

In the midst of the great Baroque sanctuary of the vast Hofburg Palace Library, in the cobbled narrow streets around the Trattnerhof, his head echoing with the three greatest composers of all time, one of whom was his teacher, Mozart is standing on their shoulders and moving aside books on

the shelf to add his own; he has preserved the minutes of his doing this in the Quintet you are now listening to. You are hearing a genius compose musical history.

Book to Read: http://michaelorenz.blogspot.ro/2013/09/mozart-intrattnerhof.html

Madeleine Dring: Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano (1968)

Allegro con brio Andante semplice Allegro giocoso

“Madeleine Dring was born on the moon and can therefore claim to be a pure-bred lunatic. Arriving on a speck of cosmic dust she came face to face with the human race and has never really recovered.”

Madeleine wrote this in one of her notebooks. She was a writer, composer, singer, actress, violinist; she could imitate anything on the piano. Six volumes of her songs have been published by Thames & Hudson. She felt the best way to compose was by not thinking about it.

At ten, she was admitted as a violinist to the Royal College of Music, where she studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams.

As a composer, she was unpretentious. Her cabaret songs and West End Revue material often featured her own lyrics and are full of cleverness, both musically and textually.

“Thank you, Lord,” was a song she wrote to her husband, Roger Lord, a professional oboist with the London Symphony Orchestra. He and André Previn premiered this Trio in the United States.

She emulated the witty style of Francis Poulenc, which can

be heard in the lightness and childlike lilt of the Trio. Just putting a flute and an oboe together echoes the vibrant cabaret style of Kurt Weill, another great genius of the café style and Broadway. The Andante of the Trio is one of the great, simple, and ethereal moments in classical music. The final movement could be Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev, or Mussorgsky.

The two cadenzas at the end are charming, and too short.

Don’t be surprised if the piece ends in the middle of a phrase (as it does).

Mikhail Glinka: Trio pathétique for clarinet, bassoon, and piano (1832) Glinka was Russia’s first great composer. The Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov), not to mention Tchaikovsky, were led by Glinka into the music of the steppes, of the carillons, of the folk songs sung by villagers, of the vast swamps that surrounded St. Petersburg, into Russia’s heartland. Glinka had grown up on an estate in the countryside, and those sounds never left him. He had absorbed Mother Russia, and it came out of him without his needing to quote anyone other than himself.

While traveling through Italy, he realized, as artists do, that he was wasting time abroad and that his mission was to go home and write. Sometimes the only way to be chastened into your talent is to putter around avoiding it.

But his earlier pieces hadn’t discovered Russia yet; they were still in Italy, where he had met Mendelssohn. The Trio is pathétique because he had broken up with a girl. He wrote on the score, “The only way I know love is by the pain it causes.”

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life in them. But I was still struggling somehow with my miseries and discomforts and wrote a trio for piano, clarinet, and bassoon. I was deprived of appetite, sleep. And I fell into the cruelest despair which I expressed in the above-mentioned trio.

In the Largo, the clarinet and bassoon intertwine with grief, as you have heard them do all weekend. No doubt the composer is the bassoon, la bête from Ravel (but he is also the clarinet, he takes both voices).

This piece was written before he decided he needed to study composition (which he did by chance with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin), so this is pure Glinka, without the academic polish of his later works.

Book to Read: Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study, David Brown: Oxford University Press, London, 1973

Francis Poulenc: Sextet, FP 100 for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano (1932, revised 1939)

Allegro vivace Divertissement: Andantino Finale: Prestissimo

Poulenc has learned a lot from C. P. E. Bach. The Andantino has been called a parody of a Mozart Adagio, and the third movement a neoclassical parody of Haydn himself, as was Prokofiev’s First Symphony of 1916 and Wuorinen’s later classical concerto.

A critic wrote of Poulenc, “all of France comes out of the windows he opens.” But in fact Poulenc was trying to dispel the Impressionism which had taken over French music, by using the raucous and blasphemous woodwinds which 236

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we’ve been enjoying this weekend to deflate French performance traditions.

Everything you’ve heard this weekend has been a preparation for letting go, for improvising, for understanding the foolishness of forms, for this exquisite romp through music history.

Poulenc was a member of Les Six (along with Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre), who used the noises of the industrial revolution, the white noise of Parisian streets (car horns, the circus, cafés, the burlesque clubs of Montmartre and Pigalle) to disrupt expectations.

The Sextet for Piano and Winds is about as determinedly lighthearted and satiric as anything he ever wrote. The first movement is filled with a characteristic juxtaposition of a rickytick jazziness and near-teary songfulness, the latter epitomized midway by a possible allusion to “come to me, my melancholy baby,” which returns in the last movement.

The Sextet, incidentally, was completed in 1932, the year Poulenc wrote his Two-Piano Concerto, and the linkage between the two works is extensive.

Reversing the first movement’s order of moods, the second movement begins and ends melodiously (is that main theme a take-off on Mozart’s well-known C-Major Piano Sonata?).

There is midsection kick-in-the-pants comic relief, and a surprisingly wistful ending. The finale is part ragtime buffoonery and part biting satire on the neoclassicism of the period. Poulenc, however, is rarely if at all wickedly satiric—he’s too goodhumored to take himself or others that seriously.

—Orrin Howard, the L.A. Philharmonic’s Philpedia

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CONVERSATION WITH ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT A Conversation Between Anne-Marie McDermott and Peter Halstead Peter: I was just reading that Brahms wrote a few angry reviews of Liszt’s late music; he must have been annoyed enough

by Liszt’s earlier, empty virtuosic rhapsodies, nothing like Brahms’s intense, meaningful intermezzi, but Brahms was even more threatened by Liszt’s direction towards what would become Schoenberg, those single ugly notes in the Csárdás obstinés. It was like Berg.

That was true of Goethe as well, with his novel Elective Affinities, where he eliminated all the adjectives. He took out the judgment, the values, the Romanticism.

Beethoven often writes a variation derived from the opening bars of a piece. That makes it easy to do and easy to predict.

One figuration, varied a hundred ways. The structure of Mozart and Haydn constantly introduces new linear, horizontal rather than vertical, material, without referring to an essential underlying repetition. They just introduce one theme and then they’re off to another one. You can’t figure out where they’re going to go. Themes can repeat in a different key or in the same exact notes, but without the same internal harmonic or mathematic chess game of later music or of a Bach fugue. So having said all this, let me try to make a question out of it: without that Germanic, Brahmsian complexity to hang your hat on, how do you approach the evolution of a piece by Mozart or Haydn? How do you derive meaning from music without an emotional equivalence?

Goethe and Liszt didn’t want to colorize words like Ted Turner did to old movies. Mozart and Haydn and Bach are a black and white world, where music functions like Atget’s photos of Paris: it’s about the angles, the chiaroscuro, the fog, without the easy victories of color, the lush personalizations of Romanticism.

Anne-Marie: That’s a brilliant lens to look at this period in piano music. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but in fact it’s similar to a question I get very often after concerts. This is a simple way of saying it. People ask me what I get out of playing Haydn. I say it’s the humor. They say, what do you mean humor? How can you identify what’s funny in music?

Brahms knew that Liszt was moving back to Haydn and Mozart and Bach, three composers that you’ve singled out, Anne-Marie, along with Prokofiev, in an age where music is filled with noise, with adjectives, where it’s harder to take a look at the notes themselves, that joy of the single notes.

Well, the technique that Haydn used to create humor was fermatas, for both humorous and dramatic effect. There are also some of the harmonic twists and turns that Haydn takes.

For instance, in the G Major sonata, which I’m playing here, the theme in the last movement goes up a half step. And then

Liszt wanted to take the adjectives out of Romanticism, the programs, the inner voices, everything that Brahms worked so hard to create. So of course Brahms felt that the music of the future was going to negate everything he worked for.

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So both Mozart and Haydn were moving towards opera, towards a world where melody dominated, not where structure was dissected in more inner, Germanic structural ways.

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the Second Movement just stops. There’s no set up, or drama, not like Beethoven, such as at the end of the Eighth Symphony, where you say, if he plays 5-1 5-1, sol-do, sol-do, one more time…So with Beethoven you always know the end is coming, it’s inevitable; in Haydn it’s not.

Peter: And grace notes. He uses grace notes to vary the way a scale sounds. It’s not the same, it has twenty ways it can sound different. He varies everything a lot.

Anne-Marie: I’m recording all the Haydn sonatas right now, and I love doing the repeats. It’s not just that he wrote them, of course, but it gives me endless ways to shape this music.

I remember a quote that Pablo Casals said of Bach: when I’m thinking about Bach, no two notes should be the same dynamic. It’s enough to give you nightmares at night, and it applies to all music: its like how we use words—our intonation is all over the place. With Mozart, Bach, Haydn, every single line is critically important. It has to have shape, not like Philip Glass where you don’t have to do anything to the music. With Haydn, it’s about the shape of the lines—not like Romantic music where you have color, accompaniment, textures—with this repertoire, with Haydn, every single note counts, it has to be voiced. If you leave one note out, you’re in trouble.

Peter: It’s so exposed. You can’t make a single mistake.

Anne-Marie: It’s completely evident if you do.

When I practice, I find it very helpful, as an exercise in opening up my own imagination, I first play very cold and clinical, then I ooze ridiculous emotions, very Romantic.

I play the piece through with different crazy ways to open up my own imagination about what shapes work and which don’t. I do it in a padded cell so I don’t scare the neighbors.

In the process of recording Mozart, I find a hundred new choices each time, it’s like stopping time, saying that these are my choices on these three days, but five years later, it’s different. I just recorded the Mozart Concerto K. 467 in Texas, and it was like a brand new piece, with new choices I was making.

Peter: You record something and then you listen to it in a few years and you say, that’s all wrong.

Anne-Marie: I’ve solved that problem: I never listen to a recording I’ve done. So I don’t have to deal with all that guilt.

But how does Mozart create such profundity with so few notes? I don’t have an answer for this.

Peter: It’s like the slow movement of K. 488, where people say the piano notes are just an outline and you should improvise the rest. But if you only play those few notes, it’s so powerful.

Anne-Marie: I think of the slow movement of K. 467. It’s the most simplistic movement. It hardly evolves. How can something so simple be so profound? So heart-wrenching?

The challenge is to make it so inspiring, the same as slow movements in Haydn.

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CONVERSATION WITH ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT on; they don’t just create a theme and vary it. That’s easy, you know where you’re going.

Anne-Marie: It’s the most simple things that move us: a baby, a sunrise, a puppy, or pure love, these really touch our hearts and, somehow, even though Mozart is known to have been so prolific, and Haydn and Bach as well, I don’t believe these things came easily to them. Pure melodies that are so sublime. But they had to be very disciplined.

Peter: If you played everything Mozart wrote, he would have been dead for ten years. He didn’t have time to write it, let alone play it.

Anne-Marie: So he had to be disciplined, careful about practicing, the same with Haydn and Mozart, they’d just sit down and work. No getting in the mood. They didn’t have time.

They had such a deep awareness of themselves.

Peter: But when they wrote a piece, and you see the manuscript, they didn’t change a note. They wrote it down perfectly.

Anne-Marie: Unlike a Beethoven manuscript, with changes all over the place…

Peter: There was no second-guessing and erasing. Mozart would just write the second-guessing. He didn’t rework things, he just kept writing.

Anne-Marie: I get more humbled by the music as time goes

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by, with Bach, and Haydn and Mozart, there are such minimal markings in the scores. There aren’t any instructions on how to play: you have to find the joy yourself. The exuberance, such as in the Second English Suite. How does he accomplish that with just single notes? It’s easy to be expressive in Romantic music. It comes easily; but with this music, Haydn, Bach, and Mozart, it’s not as evident.

Peter: There are no markings like “andante espressivo.” You got nothing. So interpretations can change. It can go any way you want it to. With Wanda Landowska, Bach was so lugubrious, just the way he was before Casals. And suddenly Casals made him dance.

Anne-Marie: Listening to recordings by Landowska, Bach sounds so flat-line. You say, why are they playing this if they can’t find the joy, the vitality, the sensitivity, the profundity, the humor?—it’s all there. You have to be committed to telling a story with this music—just like language. If every note is a monotone, everyone falls asleep. That’s what I hear with these recordings: Did someone say you’re not allowed to do a pianissimo or a fortissimo when playing Bach? Nothing is written. I believe that Bach would have loved the modern piano; the same with Mozart and Haydn: they were very dramatic composers.

Peter: It’s funny, Mozart sonatas get so annoying after a few decades, but not his operas.

Anne-Marie: But not his concerti, every one is amazing. I’m recording all the early ones. Haydn is the opposite of Mozart, every one of his sonatas is a masterpiece. I love the concerti, but they’re not quite as good.

Peter: The Haydn sonatas are always new, whenever you play them. And they’re fun.

Anne-Marie: They’re quirky.

My teacher used to say, “No sing, no sing.” When I’m working with students, I say, “What are you thinking about before you start playing?” The worst answer is: “Nothing.” If you’re not thinking anything, such as what is the character of this music, if you’re not thinking that you’re feeling the distance from one note to the next, if you’re not internalizing, then it won’t happen. It has to come out through the hands.

Peter: My teacher Russell Sherman used to say that if there’s a giant gap between one note and the next, and you have to make it sound like it’s an opera singer’s scoop between the two notes, you don’t have to play a glissandi, you can make that leap with your brain, and then it will happen in the notes.

Such as the first two notes of the Chopin E-flat Nocturne: if you pause a beat, it prepares the listener for the lift between the notes, the way a dancer lifts another. If you pause just a second, it creates this anticipation. You don’t have to have a glissando between the notes to hear the tension between them.

Anne-Marie: It’s all intention and mindfulness. I studied Zen Buddhism for many years, and I always use it to meditate on the music I play. If you don’t focus on the mind, then you take the chance you’re removing the meaning. You have to have those big leaps. When I was playing the Brahms G Major Sonata, so spacious, filled with breaths, my teacher

Raphael Bronstein started pushing down on my hand. It hurt, and it took me years to figure out what this man was doing.

Singing the melody to myself, he wanted me to be using my diaphragm, to feel it in my stomach, to feel the connection between notes. If the hand is placid, you don’t feel the struggle between these intervals. You’ve got to work hard, to press down.

How impactful the brain is with what we do, at channeling emotions. Recently I was recording Bach, and I had recorded all the slow movements, then on the third day, I was beyond exhausted, spent. It was late, nighttime, but I decided, “Let me do all the slow movements.” I was able to capture something in my exhaustion in those slow movements, and channel that. You have to draw on something in your emotional history, and use that—something you’ve experienced.

Peter: You need to create links between the notes, make a legato with your musculature.

Anne-Marie: To make a legato, you can’t let go until you play the next note, because the piano isn’t legato, you have to put extra effort into creating each note, you can’t just play the single notes. With this repertoire, articulation is critical. You need to have both the vowels and consonants to articulate phrases. Sometime it’s slight and sparkling, you’re pulling the sound, to help it pop, then other times you want the C minor Sonata, the first movement, you have to go deep into the keyboard, the key is a darker key, more serious, and that’s critical, how I seek my articulation. When it’s boring, I ask myself, Why? Why play Bach, if you’re not speaking?

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CONVERSATION WITH ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT Peter: Not singing.

You have to shape the quiet, and it takes enormous pressure. I show people how much pressure I use, I put my finger on their palm and press down, and it’s 40 pounds, just to make a quiet note.

Anne-Marie: That’s interesting. If I press how I play a note, there’s a lot of pressure. The piano isn’t a typewriter, where you hit each key lightly.

Peter: It’s not like the way the French play sometimes, jeu perlé, just feathering a note.

Anne-Marie: Pianos are amazing things. They respond to your touch. You have to caress the sound out of the piano, and it works, but if you don’t think about that, it’s no good.

On March 9th in New York, I’ll be playing Chopin’s Fourth Mazurka, Opus 17, No. 4, where you have to coax the sound out of the piano. It’s otherworldly; it requires a specific motion of the hand and fingers. If don’t have the sound in your head as a starting place, it won’t happen.

Peter: There’s so much more behind sound than a fingertip.

You have to use your elbow, your arm, your chest, your whole body. It doesn’t have to be visible, but it’s there.

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motion, but the elbow has to be behind those fingers. Even in Bach, you have to take full advantage of the whole body like in the Romantic repertoire, use your back, use natural gravity.

Peter: If there’s one missing link in the body, it affects the whole piece.

Anne-Marie: You can’t take it for granted, that all the parts are working. I never studied very long in a formal way, I stopped when I was eighteen, it was a ridiculous decision no doubt at the time, it was more of an impulsive thing, I was rebelling, but the good part was that over some time I learned so much more on my own in my own way, because there was no one telling me do it this way. Maybe it took me longer, but I was able to discover what works for my body and my hands.

Peter: Liszt didn’t have traditional fingering, because he was self-taught. When I was younger, my teacher said that no one played it the way I did, because I had very strange fingerings, but it was the same as Liszt’s. My fingers were scuttling like a crab around the keyboard. Maybe it makes you more interesting, or not as conventional.

Anne-Marie: To be satisfied, you have to make all the choices yourself. Whenever I learn a piece, I dig really deep. When I unearth it myself, each time I discover new things I haven’t thought about.

For instance, the Haydn sonatas are a world of possibilities, of how these things are shaped. For many years, my dearest piano friend has been Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. We’re both in the process of recording all the Haydn sonatas, he and I

adore each other, but we have such different approaches to the sonatas, so it’s very interesting for me to hear his records, and for him to hear mine. I’ve had this running dialogue with him for 25 years, he says you can’t play it that way, and I say you have to.

A, then the D sharp, it sounds like an army ten miles away; it gets closer and closer, nastier and nastier. In his slow movements, he said himself that he never wrote a slow movement melody that he didn’t strangle.

Peter: My teacher Russell Sherman said that you had to play Schoenberg to understand Mozart. I think he felt that Mozart would veer off into the wilderness, but then rope himself back, but that there was a whole world in the offing, around the corner, of insinuations, of tone rows, where Mozart was tempted to go but he’d catch himself just in time and draw back into his own era. But if you know what lurks there, it lends drama and color and modernity to Mozart.

Peter: The horrible political climate that Prokofiev and Shostakovich lived in, with the siege of St. Petersburg happening the same day as the premiere of his Seventh Symphony. There’s that wonderful book, Symphony for the City of the Dead, by M. T. Anderson, which puts all the death and drama and music together, and it’s a small example of their lives, trying on one hand to criticize the regime with their music and having the audience understand, and then pretending to write Stalinist music on the other hand that the censors would pass.

So does it help playing Prokofiev, as you do, to inform or expand the equivalencies of Mozart and Haydn? How does Prokofiev affect your playing of Haydn and Mozart?

Although Prokofiev escaped censure for much of his early years, the Zhdanov Decree banned much of his work and distorted his gift thereafter.

Anne-Marie: Perspective. Everything in life is about having a broad overview so you can zero in on your specific perspective on a certain piece of music. Having spent two years working on the Prokofiev sonatas, that changed me in a lot of ways, physically, the repertoire is so demanding, what challenged me with Prokofiev is the enormity of the emotional palette that he’s addressing. It’s surreal.

Anne-Marie: With Prokofiev you have twelve bars of pure beauty, then what sounds like a deliberate wrong note, an upsetting note, and it lulls you out of that profound simplicity you have with the slow movement of a Mozart piano concerto, where somehow Mozart was able to write this simple pure untouched melody—he lets it be, he doesn’t interfere with it.

For instance, in the Eighth Sonata, in the development, it’s a catastrophic world war, then the theme comes back in the recap, and it feels like a post-nuclear winter: emotionally barren and broken and fragile, like the beginning of the development of the Sixth Sonata, after that vicious opening tritone over the

It’s true that the time when Prokofiev lived influenced his music, but Mozart lived through wars as well.

Peter: And yet none of it seemed to enter his music. Although the playwright George Bernard Shaw said he’d rather have Mozart for his funeral, because Mozart understood 2017 Summer Season

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CONVERSATION WITH ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT death better than any other composer. Those chromatic scales in the beginning of Don Giovanni: the music goes up, but the Don is going down. To hell. It’s a tone row, it’s terrifying.

Anne-Marie: Prokofiev lets you see danger in Mozart. After two years of playing things in fortississimo, in smanioso, these dangerous emotions that Prokofiev was addressing, then you come back to Mozart with an added sense of possible danger.

It helped me discover danger in Haydn sonatas. They’re radical, especially when you consider what they must have sounded like during the era in which they were written. They inform one another.

So I try and keep a broad repertoire. I’m learning Beethoven’s Opus 111. I never learned it before, and it’s a matter of things informing other things, you see more and more possibilities, so that much time with Prokofiev helped me have a better touch, in a way, and be more demanding about where music can go.

Peter: There was so much death during Prokofiev and Shostakovich’s lives, and Mozart’s too, but he’s more subtle with it.

Anne-Marie: If not for war, for how it influenced Prokofiev, you couldn’t relish the purity of a Haydn or a Mozart slow movement. I wouldn’t have that depth of understanding of what a gift it is.

It’s pure beauty. That perspective brings something to me when I’m playing Haydn and Mozart; I’ve suffered loss and I can think about that and about its colors.But then to convey death in Mozart, Mozart’s concept of death, to an audience…

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had this universal language, as did Haydn, even if addressing the darker side of our emotional state. It’s very unifying.

During the first couple of concerts after 9/11, I was at Lincoln Center, and the Chamber Music Society did a tribute concert to the Fire Department. The hall was packed, tons of firemen there, all stunned. I tried to play a Brahms Intermezzo, and I’ve never felt such a great weight, because it felt like this was the only thing, there were no words, the only thing that could speak was music. It was this tremendous responsibility; I was shaking up and down because of the weight of the moment.

The only thing you could play was Brahms.

Peter: Brahms has it all, so much death, longing, joy.

Anne-Marie: If I’d played a slow movement of a Mozart concerto it’d have taken on a whole new meaning, the simplicity. That’s why it’s such a great responsibility for musicians to constantly be trying to gain new emotional perspectives on music. But in my life, I’m a big Eastern philosophy reader, and that helps open me up, that’s our job as musicians, to communicate music in the most alive way.

I can’t dictate what people feel when I play, but whatever it is, I need to make people feel it. If I can’t make people feel the music, I’m doing something wrong. We’re the re-creators, so our job is a difficult one: to be the translator. That’s what makes live performance so gratifying. And where you play is important. Playing in the Olivier Music Barn, the space inspires me. When you play in a great hall, it inspires you, you have more sound to play with, the intimacy, and in repertoire like this, to play Haydn and Mozart with that view, that acoustic, is very unusual.

Peter: It’ll add a whole new level of inner voices to the Mozart concerti, especially because it’s with the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

Anne-Marie: St. Lawrence is brilliant and fun. When they do the Mozart in these versions, they sound like fresh pieces, more like chamber music. Amazingly, you lose none of the drama of not having a full orchestra—you gain an intensity with the voicing, and you have great malleability with how you’re pacing things, because it’s just five people, so you have this flexibility.

Neumanns, it sounded exactly the same. So we need a more nuanced recording environment, to pick up all those touches, and we’re using the Pyramix System, and a second layer of mics above the first Decca Tree, so we have great hopes for recordings this year.

Next time, let’s talk about Buddhism and music.

Peter: You can pull and push the rhythms, take away and add timings, make a concerto into a chamber work.

Anne-Marie: So much comes from the articulation. Twenty musicians can’t be as crisp or articulate; it’s much harder. But just two violins can really nitpick and get into the music. I loved recording the concerti with the Calder Quartet; I could realize my dreams so much more in playing Mozart. I can be more of a control freak.

Peter: There are all these possibilities that aren’t there with a big orchestra…

Anne-Marie: I was playing K. 450 with the conductor Gilbert Varga in Denmark, and we managed to bring out the childlike nature of the work in each other. It was most magical; it felt like I was a kid in the best sense, able to access these carefree joys, because he was doing the same thing. I’m hoping we can capture that on the recording.

Peter: When I recorded my same D-flat program on an American and then a German Steinway, it was totally different to me, but with the mics, even though they were five 2017 Summer Season

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ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT AND FRIENDS Friday, September 8, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Anne-Marie McDermott in Recital PROGRAM JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in G Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:40

Allegro innocente

Presto JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in C minor for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:20

Allegro moderato

Andante con moto

Finale: Allegro JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in C Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:50

Allegro

Adagio

Finale: Allegro molto INTERMISSION JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in F Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:23 Moderato

Adagio

Finale: Presto

JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in E-flat Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:52

Allegro

Adagio

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Joseph Haydn: Sonatas

Allegro innocente Presto

Sonata in C Minor for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:20

Allegro moderato

Andante con moto

Finale: Allegro

Sonata in C Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:50 Allegro Adagio

Finale: Allegro molto

Sonata in F Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:23 Moderato Adagio

Finale: Presto

Sonata in E-flat Major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:52 Allegro Adagio

Finale: Presto Of Anne-Marie McDermott’s complete Prokofiev Sonatas, Gramophone magazine wrote, “Hers is a formidable achievement, reminding us that we have waited a long time for an American pianist of this stature.” Fanfare magazine called it “the best ever recorded.”

To her complete Gershwin and the complete Scriabin, Anne-Marie is now adding the complete Haydn sonatas, and we are thrilled to have some of them on display at Tippet Rise this summer. Haydn wrote more than 60 sonatas between 1758 and 1794, all of which retain today their wit, quirkiness, and charm.

Anne-Marie has chosen to play tonight her pick, set in the elegant jewel case of formal classical tradition which Haydn can invert, delete, make gentle fun of. With perfect comic timing, he waits an extra beat to put a musical reply two 248

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octaves lower than you expect it. Or maybe upside down.

But around these easily felt games swirl the vast cosmos of a mind that was the embodiment of music itself during his lifetime, despite living both earlier and later than Mozart.

Haydn is the center of the classical spirit. He started it before Mozart was born, and he finished it the year that Beethoven wrote the Emperor Concerto, the year that Mendelssohn was born.

His father was a wheelwright, his mother was a cook. There were no lawyers, doctors, clergymen, or musicians in his background. He left home at the age of six. When his voice changed at the age of seventeen, he was expelled from the choir with no money and no prospects. His wife used his manuscripts to line pastry pans.

And yet somehow this choirboy without hope became the creator of all that we take as ecstatic today in music: the symphony, the string quartet. He created The Creation, the Nelson Mass, the Surprise Symphony. Some 62 sonatas that never garnered much attention. By the end of the 19th century they had slipped mostly from notice.

Possibly he had no drama in his life; he never had an Amadeus written about him. He never sold his soul to the devil, or cut his violin strings on purpose to show how he could play on one string, as Paganini did. And there were no stories to his music. It was music for music’s sake.

As Wolfgang Hildesheimer says of Mozart:

[Music] cannot be translated into words, but exists and functions parallel to them, as a supplementary and yet full-fledged means of expression….Our pleasure consists in identifying with the creator, in feeling after him what he might or “must” have felt during the creative act; at the same time, we know that it will remain a mystery and would not want it any other way.

Each of these sonatas is a work of absolute precision, like a watch, and yet they function best when they get the time wrong. Their hours overlap with ours, and we speak their

language, yet we never understand for a second how they work, how the pendulum translates into time. Why is it that the most important facts of our world, magnetism, gravity, time, will always be mysteries? It is like the frightening fact that Mozart wrote the exact same amount of music over every four-year period, with an astounding regularity, as if he were a clock.Â

I love every note of these five sonatas, and can’t imagine anything finer than hearing Anne-Marie play them in a room of the same dimensions in which Haydn played them.

To live in his sublime sensibilities is the ultimate time machine.

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ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET Saturday, September 9, 10:30 AM The Domo St. Lawrence String Quartet

Musical Milestones PROGRAM FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN: Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2 Moderato

Adagio

Minuetto. Allegretto

Fuga a 4 Soggetti FELIX MENDELSSOHN: String Quartet in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2

Allegro assai appassionato

Scherzo. Allegro di molto

Andante

Presto agitato

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Franz Joseph Haydn: Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2 (1772) Moderato Adagio

Minuetto. Allegretto

Fuga a 4 Soggetti Haydn was Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, who required that his musicians decamp from Vienna to a swamp in Fertöd, Hungary, where he built an immense palace, home to the original “jewelbox” of the Olivier Music Barn. It was here that Haydn wrote this quartet. So Haydn has come home, in a way. You will hear the music the way Haydn heard it.

The other part of Fertöd was that no one liked being there.

It lacked all the comforts of Vienna; it was cold, drafty, and damp, as swamps will be. It was also where Haydn wrote his “Farewell” Symphony, where every musician left the hall one at a time until no one was left except Haydn and the Prince, who got the point, and left the next day for Vienna with his entourage. Critics have accused this Quartet of taking on the atmosphere of decay of Fertöd, of feeling soggy and oppressed.

However, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had just published his novel Julie, in 1761 and Emile in 1762, two of the most banned and burned books in history (see the discussion of this under the “Janáček Piano Trio” essay). Europe was destabilized in general, which this Quartet subtly reflects, so the miasma of the swamp is only part of its affetuoso ambiance.

The great musicologist Sir Donald Tovey wrote of the quartets, “Every page of the six quartets of Op. 20 is of historic and aesthetic importance.” There were many innovations introduced by these quartets, among them equal weight given to all four instruments, rather than just the violins (the tenors of chamber music). (Formerly.) The piece opens with the cello, rather than the violin. It’s a mystery why 252

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the viola was traditionally assigned accompaniments, rather than melodies, an insult which Haydn partially rectifies.

He digs deeper into his development sections. His phrases are uneven in length, rather than what was expected. The minuet isn’t danceable; its rhythm is subverted. Rather than closing with the standard dance movement, he writes a complicated fugue, with the fugue theme itself played upside down at one point. The instruments gradually leave the room, similar to the “Farewell” Symphony. Haydn writes over the music: Sic fugit amicus amicum: thus friend flees friend. We are honored to have the distinguished and impeccable St. Lawrence String Quartet introduce wit into the quartet tradition.

Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 44, No. 2 (1837)

Allegro assai appassionato

Scherzo: Allegro di molto Andante

Presto agitato Mendelssohn came from a prominent Hamburg banking family, although he grew up in Berlin. His aunt was a talented pianist, both a pupil and a patron of the Bach family. Bach was the only influence Mendelssohn later acknowledged.

Charles Rosen has called him “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known.” Felix was sent to Paris at seven for piano lessons. He wrote his first piano quartet at thirteen, and his first symphony at fifteen. At sixteen he wrote the immortal String Octet, and at seventeen his most famous piece, the Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although he added the famous “Wedding March” when he was 33. He was 26 when he wrote this brilliant quartet.

Mendelssohn later lived in Leipzig and founded its Conservatory, with Schumann’s magazine Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik an anchor of conservatism in music. This outlook walled Mendelssohn off from the great advances in the music of his age, but preserved his unique gifts intact from all influences. Mendelssohn was secretly fragile, despite his genial social presence, and was destabilized by any changes in routine, let alone the massive dislocation in the European Zeitgeist during his lifetime. Leipzig was a sanctuary for him, where he served as conductor of its symphony and helped resurrect Schubert’s reputation.

His Scherzo from the Midsummer Night’s Dream music has a lot in common with the moto perpetuo clockwork of the witty dance of a Scherzo in the second movement.

Mendelssohn was a brilliant pianist and organist. His two piano concerti are showpieces that every pianist learns by osmosis, because you can’t stop playing them once you start.

Book to Read: The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen: Harvard University Press, 1995

The energy and excitement of this virtuosic quartet transfigure all of Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn is famous for his Songs Without Words, which are piano pieces imitating art songs, immensely creative, lyrical, and delicate; the Andante here is essentially one of these songs.

He worked on this piece during his honeymoon, which partially accounts for its joy; but Mendelssohn was always a perfect musical citizen.

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ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT & FRIENDS Saturday, September 9, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano St. Lawrence String Quartet

AN EVENING OF MOZART PROGRAM WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Concerto No.12 in A Major, K.414

Allegro in A major

Andante in D major

Allegretto in A major WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Concerto No.13 in C Major, K.415

Allegro

Andante

Rondeau, Allegro INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Concerto No.14 in E-flat Major, K.449

Allegro vivace

Andantino

Allegro ma non troppo

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414 (1782)

Allegro in A Major Andante in D Major Allegretto in A Major

Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major, K. 415 (1782) Allegro Andante

Rondeau, Allegro

Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat Major, K. 449 (1784)

Allegro vivace Andantino

Allegro ma non troppo As Artur Schnabel said: Mozart—“too easy for children, too difficult for artists.” Mozart’s relatively simple, almost always cantabile, operatic song lines leave room in the busy pianist’s mind for second thoughts, for nerves, for soul-searching over how tone is generated. His lines are what you’d call “exposed,” mountain goats leaning out over the abyss. There’s no net to catch you if you fall, because everyone expects the next note.

Mozart is thus the soul of classicism: every note in its proper place, every chord perfectly leading to the next chord, God’s in his heaven, all’s well with the world. Every street sign is followed, every direction is obeyed, and everyone is charmed and preserved by this most ordered of worlds.

There are no characters that need to be brought out, no storylines to be inserted in the footnotes or the subtext. The plot needs no captions (at least not in the concerti). There 256

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don’t need to be special voicings, as Horowitz would do with Schumann or even Scarlatti. Every note does just what it is supposed to, every crescendo is musically right for the piece, and nothing is left to chance, to a last-minute decision, as you might be tempted to do in Beethoven, to take one of 50 directions on his complex road maps.

And how unique to be able to have the piano not drowned out by a Megazilla orchestra, but in fact to hear the dialogue of civilized voices where they collaborate, not compete.

Bach wrote one voice for each instrument. His Easter Cantata was performed with fourteen instruments and five singers.

On the other hand, Corelli’s orchestra in Rome had up to 150 musicians for special occasions, so there was always a desire for overwhelming sound.

Only later did Berlioz expand his manuscripts for 88 musicians, where each instrument has its own department, like a department store. Mozart never heard anything larger than a small orchestra in a room the size of the Olivier Music Barn.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Christopher Hogwood, William Christie, Andrew Parrott, Jordi Savall, Neville Marriner, and others have led a return to smaller orchestras and original instruments. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields was originally twelve players.

Beethoven added clarinets and trombones, bassoons and piccolos. Berlioz added harps, tubas, English horns, bass clarinets, E-flat clarinets, the double bassoon, the bass trombone, more brass, and more percussion. Richard Strauss demanded thirty-two violins, twelve violas, ten cellos, and eight double basses. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic did Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand (the Eighth) recently, they used around 1,100 performers.

In Mozart’s time, he would conduct his concerti from the keyboard. He was a notorious improviser, and he played many of the concerti with only a “fake book,” sketchy notes

to remind him of what he would do spontaneously. Modern composers have returned to aleatoric or random music, where the performer decides which versions she will play on the spur of the moment. Of course, the skeleton frameworks that Mozart provided for his slow movements are so gorgeous in their exposed simplicity that few musicians improvise with them. Mozart realized that not every musician would embellish the music as tastefully as he did, and so began to write out cadenzas, although the great D minor Concerto (No. 20) has no cadenzas and most pianists use the ones Beethoven wrote, although then of course you have a Beethoven concerto in the middle of a Mozart concerto.

Mozart’s operas represent the summit of all musical achievement. Beginning with the 14th concerto, you can hear how the concerti over the years were becoming operatic, although the piano parts have much more range around the keyboard than a singer would.

Mozart wrote the first two of these concerti for his own concerts. K. 414 is called the “little A Major,” because it is

somewhat similar to his later A Major Concerto, K. 467.

The two years during which Mozart wrote these concerti saw eleven concerti in total, all of them masterpieces.

Although people point to this period as the greatest in the history of piano concerti (he wrote both Nos. 23 and 24 in one month, March of 1786), you could say the same thing about his last two years (1790 and 1791), during which he wrote Così fan Tutte and Die Zauberflöte.

Everything that Mozart did set a precedent.

The miracle is that Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler could exist after Mozart. Germany nurtured them in a very different way than Salzburg did Mozart, as Russia provided later material for the great Russian composers, and as America produced Gershwin, Barber, Copland, Sessions, Wuorinen, Bernstein, Adams, Glass, Kernis, and so many others. The Romantics all gravitated towards Paris, although their values were widespread. There is possibly a clandestine geography to music.

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CONVERSATION WITH

DOUG PERKINS

By Alexis M. Adams AMA: Tell me about the beginnings of music in your life.

DP: My dad is totally tone deaf. He has no rhythm, no pitch, but I still grew up listening to music. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to Al Jarreau and Michael Jackson in the mornings. I’d always know when my mom would start cleaning on Saturday mornings because the tunes would start cranking.

I began as a saxophone player, and I was such a bad sax player that after a year of playing, my mother told me to quit and told me I could play any other instrument I wanted, just not the saxophone. So I became a drummer. I was ten or eleven years old. I played in bands, I even played electric bass for a while.

We were living in Pittsburgh. At some point, this guy who was the timpanist for the Pittsburgh Ballet came to my school.

He was going to do a presentation for everyone, but it was a bad weather day and no one showed up, except for me. So we hung out. At the end of the day he said, “You will study with me now.” And he took me under his wing. And then I was kind of off to the races, performing all over Pittsburgh and getting really involved in music and percussion. All along, I thought I wanted to be a social worker like my mom—I worked in housing projects running summer camps—but then enough people told me that I should follow being good at music. So I followed the music dream, and it worked out.

It’s surprising how much that part of my life (social work) comes back sometimes, even when doing things like Inuksuit, which we did at Tippet Rise last summer. Any time

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I’m running a big, unwieldy outdoor program I’m reminded of setting up camp in housing projects in Pittsburgh and making friends with the 30 kids who live there and making things happen.

AMA: I wonder why you’re so bad at the saxophone and so good at percussion.

DP: Yeah, I don’t know either. I think it just felt good to hit things. I remember it being hard to get my lip to loosen up for the low notes, and I just wasn’t that into it. But when I had sticks in my hands, a fire was lit. I don’t remember being fidgety, but now I wonder if maybe I was just a twitchy little boy and that percussion made me feel peaceful. Watching my nine-year-old, who’s a very active dude—sometimes when he has too much energy, he comes and plays my drums. So maybe it just helped.

AMA: You’ve organized and conducted several large-scale performances outdoors: Iannis Xenakis’s Persephassa in Central Park, John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit in the woods of Vermont and here at Tippet Rise, others. Can you talk about this theme of connecting your work, and music, with nature and the environment?

DP: Good question. I came to the work completely by accident. I was a percussionist and a recitalist and a chamber musician; the first part of my career was touring in a percussion quartet performing indoors. Then I met John Luther Adams and it opened me up to going outdoors, particularly when we took this trip to the tundra to play his percussion quartets, I think in 2008. On a whim, some friends and I

went and played on the side of a mountain, which is what kind of launched Inuksuit. And then, people started calling. My concert in Central Park happened because the guy who runs Make Music New York heard about a guy who played in the tundra and found out it was me and then threw this crazy idea of this concert in the lake at me, and we did it.

So, a happenstance vacation ended up guiding the next ten years of my career.

What’s become really meaningful to me, working outdoors in different locations, is that each performance is unique. The landscape itself dictates so much about a performance. So, the performance we did last year at Tippet Rise, the only way you’ll hear that piece sound that way is to hear it performed at Pioneer, and even then, it’ll never sound exactly the same. It’s also exciting to do performances in special locations because the audience has to make active choices about participating in performances like that. In a concert hall, everyone has an assigned seat, facing forward. The lights will dim and the performer will come out. But when we’re performing in non-standard locations, outside, like at Tippet Rise, the audience has to make a choice to trust the experience and be ready to witness something different from the norm. And they have to make the choice about how and where they’ll sit and how they’ll engage with the piece. I’m really drawn to finding ways to make concerts and performances where the audience can become as active a participant in the experience as the performer.

AMA: Can you talk about the dynamics of performing outside here—at Tippet Rise in particular—compared to,

say, the woods of Vermont or even Central Park, and how it might influence the music you make?

DP: The landscape of Tippet Rise offers a unique set of opportunities for both performers and sculptors. There are these beautiful rolling hills, but they’re also quite barren; there’s not a lot of tree cover. It’s very different from the woods of Vermont or even a park in New York City. At Tippet Rise, you don’t get the covering of the trees, and as a musician you don’t get the natural amphitheater effect of your sounds reflecting off of the trees. Sound carries in a very unique way at Tippet Rise. For example, when we worked at Pioneer last year, it was fun because the site makes a natural amphitheater where you’re covered on three sides because it’s tucked into three hills and you have ways to get sound reflection, as if you’re on a concert hall stage. Versus when you’re at, say, Beethoven’s Quartet, where it’s at the top of a hill and the sound can travel literally forever, so you have a whole different set of concerns and opportunities.

I’m excited this summer to perform at the Domo to hear what it sounds like on the inside. It’s an enclosed space, so the sound gets trapped. It’s more like a concert hall setting.

I’ve not attended a performance there yet, but I’m very excited because I hear the sound also travels a great distance from the Domo and the sculpture itself acts as an amplifier in some ways. So, what’s fun about Tippet Rise in that regard is that there are at least three or four different and unique sonic landscapes you can experience there. I have the feeling that on the last day of tours at Tippet Rise, we are going to exploit those.

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PARALLELS AND VARIATIONS Friday, September 15, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Vicky Chow, piano Timothy Feeney, percussion Todd Meehan, percussion Tristan Perich, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Stephen Versaevel, percussion

Parallels PROGRAM TRISTAN PERICH: Parallels INTERMISSION TIMOTHY FEENEY: Gryllidae JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Four Thousand Holes

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CONVERSATION WITH

DOUG PERKINS

By Devanney Haruta

Our composers today have each approached electronics in different ways. In Red Arc/Blue Veil John uses the electronics to take you from the local acoustic space to something more epic by using sounds that are broad and slow. He uses the electronics to create an expansive sense, to highlight some of the low sounds, and saturate the room with sound.

Paul Lansky is somebody who started his career as a computer musician, figuring out how to make music with computers. What’s funny about this piece, Travel Diary, is that it is an entirely acoustic piece. You hear rich harmonies, you hear cool, quirky rhythms, we make little, clicky noise sounds that you might hear in computer music, along with some driving percussion and drums. But it’s all acoustic.

Tristan’s music has always been tied up in the electronic. Parallels is another of his “1-Bit” pieces, where Todd and I are playing along with four channels of 1-Bit music. In this case, it’ll be Todd and I playing on two triangles and hi-hats with four microchips rocking out with us. The piece is fun because it’s virtuosic and exhausting for us, we are going non-stop once the piece starts, playing our little triangle gamelans. You definitely hear Tristan’s aesthetic in the music, but also some of his love of Philip Glass comes through, in the way that he treats harmony and rhythm.

For me, what’s personally exciting about all of it is that I know all the composers that I play.

I can’t have conversations with Beethoven but I get to hang out with all of these people. As much as the concert is about curating good music, it’s about playing music in the best way: friends making music together.

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Doug Perkins on his Saturday, September 16th performance at the Domo John talks about this idea of musical echo location, which means that he uses his music to fill a space with sound. By saturating the space, it gives you a sense of the musical footprint of the space because of the way the sounds are bouncing back.

In that case, the way that you’ll hear the sounds bouncing off of the Domo, or bouncing out into the valley will tell us a lot about what that mountain or hill sounds like. I don’t know the Tippet Rise terminology for where the Domo sits [a high bench ringed with drumlins: Peter], but the music will determine, through its form, how we hear that whole space. By the end of that concert we will all have a very different sense of the sonic landscape of that sculpture and the area around it, based on what the music has given us and the way it resonates through the space.

To me, Tippet Rise feels like a sacred space. You have to make an active choice to go there.

If you’re in Billings, it’s an hour’s drive, but for the most of the world it’s quite a bit of work and time to get there. Then, once you’re there, you have to get in the van, and you have to travel out some distance on the site to get up to the sculpture. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re all engaged in some larger activity or larger ritual. Even before the music starts, it’s special: it’s the only place in the world that looks like that, or sounds like that, and it is the only time the music will sound like that.

So, you can’t help but think it’s pretty wonderful. Performing concerts in recital halls is wonderful, but we all more or less understand that we’re going to go into a room where the comfortable chairs will face in one direction, the lights will get dark, someone will walk on stage, and we’ll hear the music. We’re all very used to that, and sometimes we do have very special concert experiences in those ways. But, I, personally, get really excited about things like getting to make music at the Domo, because none of us are quite sure how that’s going to turn out. It leaves open the possibility for singular greatness, and that, I think, is exciting.

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A CELEBRATION OF JOHN LUTHER ADAMS Saturday, September 16, 10:30 AM The Domo Vicky Chow, piano Timothy Feeney, percussion Todd Meehan, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Stephen Versaevel, percussion

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Nunataks JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Red Arc/ Blue Veil JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Selections from Strange and Sacred Noise

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VARIATIONS

Saturday, September 16, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Michael Brown, piano

PROGRAM FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Variations sérieuses, Op. 54 NIKOLAI MEDTNER: Second Improvisation, Op. 47

Theme: Mermaid’s Song

Var. 1: Meditation

Var. 2: Caprice

Var. 3: The Feathered Ones

Var. 4: Charms

Var. 5: Fancies

Var. 6: In the Stream

Var. 7: The Tumult of the Crowd

Var. 8: In the Woods

Var. 9: A Wood-Goblin

Var. 10: Elves

Var. 11: Gnomes

Var. 12: Incantation

Var. 13: The Threat

Var. 14: Mermaid’s Song

Var. 15: Bad Weather

Conclusion INTERMISSION MICHAEL BROWN: Folk Variations (2013) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Variations and Fugue for Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 35, “Eroica” Introduction

Theme, Variations 1-14

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Felix Mendelssohn: Variations sérieuses, Op. 54 (1841) Mendelssohn was raised in a wealthy and cultured banking family in Berlin, a distant cousin of Meyerbeer. Mendelssohn was also a child prodigy, who gave his first concert at nine, composed twelve symphonies for strings before he was fourteen, and his first orchestral symphony at fifteen. He wrote his greatest work, the overture to Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at fifteen, although he enlarged it seventeen years later when he was 31, adding the Wedding March. Always sickly, and subject to fits during which he spoke entirely in English (a sign of dementia), he died at 38 of a series of strokes brought on by this apoplexy. He was a fine watercolorist, a notable conductor, a brilliant pianist, and a great composer. He was affable to everyone, although his standards were understandably high and he in private approved of few people. He and the great soprano Jenny Lind loved each other at first sight, although it was too late: three years before his death. Mendelssohn was married and nothing came of it, but Jenny Lind created the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation in his honor.

His octet, his quartets, and his piano concerti are gorgeous, superior to his symphonies. The concerti are immense fun.

Once you start playing them, you can’t stop. His Songs Without Words are the staple of every young pianist. He wrote very little solo piano music, only the Songs Without Words, the Rondo Capriccioso, a few incidental pieces, and these variations.

These variations are called serious, because Mendelssohn was determined to be taken seriously, and not thought merely a wealthy dilettante. But the joke is on you, because they’re not what they seem. He was 32, and had matured beyond the facility of the piano concerti written a decade earlier.

Mendelssohn’s well-known music is so charming that it’s hard to remember he was German, not French.

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His theme is frighteningly somber, despite its flip last three staccato notes. This should be a clue that something is in the wind. It is only in the variations that it livens up.

Mendelssohn’s debt to Bach is quite apparent initially.

The genius of the piece is that each variation is basically one page and very short, so you can hear the piece progress by leaps and bounds. Its MacGuffin, its secret, is that it masquerades as an ugly thing, but it’s going to surprise you.

While the treble notes of the theme survive each variation, Mendelssohn will open up what in the beginning seems a very compressed, tight, overwritten fugal 30 seconds. In the beginning, he very seriously shows you the structure he’s going to use to astonish you, and you can’t believe there’s very much to it.

You can hear the treble descend down four notes three times (and one extra time in the bass). You can hear the midvoice answer by ascending up three notes for six times, and also echo the treble by descending right after it does.

The treble is a separate melody, although it’s hard to hear it the first time. All it does is perform a pirouette, like a dancer’s fouetté, and end up five notes from where it turned, like a classical slide or schleifer. Often a turn in Mozart starts on the dominant key and ends with a high note in the tonic or main key. That is: sol-do.

In between, you can hear that slow pirouette in the treble, while below it a variety of things happen. It is these “things” which are the variations.

If you remember how staid these patterns seem, you will be all the more amazed as they molt in front of you.

No matter how involved he gets, Mendelssohn always pulls up short to end the piece abruptly and flippantly with a staccato “do-sol-do” like a tolerant father finally just throwing his son over his shoulder and stalking off. He has made the theme dense to give him material to accordion out into seventeen different plans of attack, which are, variation by variation:

1. A faster pirouette in the midrange 2. Bass octaves which perform the pirouette 3. A bass rondo form which repeats what the treble says a second after it, like children playing a game in the back seat, repeating what each says 4. Quiet syncopated chords in both hands which finally make the melody very clear and lyric, as the piece grows through repetition and thus familiarity. But it is more than merely getting to know it: it is how Mendelssohn is airbrushing his ugly duckling each time to make it shine 5. Syncopated high chords which are answered by similar low chords 6. Fast throwaway arpeggios in between staccato chords, where the chords pose a question which is answered by the quick arpeggios 7. Fast repeating triplets with a doubled note in the middle 8. Even faster triplets with the chords placed in between, a technique he used in the last movement theme of his G minor Concerto 9. Now the triplets are accompanied by arpeggios in the left hand, so both hands are moving very jauntily and the theme becomes exciting 10. A slow mournful mock fugue where the hands simply repeat the pirouette: first the right, then the left, so you begin to realize that this has been the pattern all along 11. While the bass in a waltz time accompanies the theme, the theme won’t be swayed to participate in the waltz, but keeps to a more sober and regular rhythm while the pinky plays the theme, which ascends higher and higher, bit by bit, so now you hear this element of the theme, which has always been there, but is highlighted in this version 12. A wild variation with double notes making a kind of march where the double treble is answered by a doubled bass.

This is twice as long as the other variations, but still very short; you hate when it ends.

13. In another long (yet short) variation, the right hand plays a staccato scale leading to a staccato arpeggio, and that pattern continues for the length of the variation. It is easy to tell when the variations end because of the abrupt do-sol-do.

14. The adagio variation, where the now-familiar theme is made quite lyric, and you realize it was always beautiful, but it was hidden in a forest of chromatic brambles. This beautyand-the-beast piece gradually grows on you.

15. Mendelssohn breaks up the hands so the left hand plays a note which is followed by the beautiful theme in the right hand. The piece performs a slow syncopation until…

16. …the hands unite to play very fast triplets where the one bass note is now answered by two treble notes. This is very fast and jazzy, and, before you know it, it becomes…

17. …the last, longest, and most virtuosic variation, where the sober left hand now comes into its own, leaping in tenths to play a syncopated and dynamic bass while the right hand is freed to play arpeggios and broken octaves. At last Mendelssohn shows himself to be the dashing virtuoso he is, with left hand octaves answered by five-note broken chords in the treble, until a D minor arpeggio runs from high to low the way it does in Chopin’s last prélude. The energy continues in a tremolo (a trembling octave) in the bass while the right hand plays an impassioned version of the original melody.

It’s about to end with the usual do-sol-do when—surprise! — Mendelssohn pulls a brilliant coda out of his hat.

Left and right hands play syncopated chords until the supposedly drab Cinderella turns into a gorgeous Princess, her solo climbing time and again to the heights, then falling down in diminished chords to give a brilliant arpeggio a chance to leap and suddenly stop in midair—when the last six somber, extremely serious, fatal slow chords give you goose bumps.

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A moth has morphed into a butterfly, but Mendelssohn wants you to appreciate that, underneath that glittering shell, her soul is the same drab D minor you didn’t initially appreciate— but now you really do. Mendelssohn has made you love her.

Mendelssohn has a unique voice; his chamber work is as gorgeous as Brahms, his piano concerti are filled with fire and panache, his sense of a beautiful melody is that of a great composer. But most of all, his sense of humor is very contemporary. In calling this “serious” variations, he makes fun of serious, that is, dull, music, by beginning in that vein.

But he then renders this dull salon music energetic, delightful, and increasingly intense as he opens it up. So it is far from serious—it is a complete romp.

Finally, the last three flippant notes in the theme (which seem like throwaway notes designed to end the piece always without any integration with the rest of the piece) become, in the end, the most moving and serious of all. You realize that the joke is that the serious has become fun and the fun has become serious. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn knows where everything is going before he writes a single note. He knows that the triviality of the theme’s ending will become its apotheosis, its raison d’être, its true heart. This is very funny, but it’s also very moving, very earth-shaking. It has it both ways. And that is the essence of Mendelssohn.

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Theme: Mermaid’s Song Var. 1: Meditation Var. 2: Caprice Var. 3: The Feathered Ones Var. 4: Charms Var. 5: Fancies Var. 6: In the Stream (On the Waves) Var. 7: The Tumult of the Crowd Var. 8: In the Woods The Music of Tippet Rise

Var. 9: A Wood-Goblin

Var. 10: Elves

Var. 11: Gnomes

Var. 12: Incantation

Var. 13: The Threat

Var. 14: Mermaid’s Song

Var. 15: Bad Weather Conclusion Medtner wrote many musical fairy tales and “forgotten melodies,” of which the greatest was his Second Improvisation, “in the form of Variations,” based around the world of the Czech water nymph Rusalka, the focus as well of his Third Piano Concerto. Dvořák composed an opera to her as well in 1900.

Rather than simply a siren who lured sailors to their deaths, Dvořák’s water nymph is condemned to be banished to eternal watery darkness if she ever loves a human and he betrays her, which dependably happens. She is a great tragic figure.

Medtner’s version, however, describes a child’s fairy tale world of elves, gnomes, and winged dancers. Like Schumann, Medtner is unconcerned with performance traditions. The penultimate variation, “Bad Weather,” or “The Storm,” would have been a more virtuosic ending, but Medtner instead used a meditative repetition of the beginning as his ending. He was uninterested in virtuosity except as it served his musical descriptions. Each of these vignettes stands alone. They are united by their common descriptive fancy, anchored by a constant tragic center: no matter how these creatures fly about the night air, they are linked by a common curse, possibly having something to do with Dvořák’s lightless sea.

The innocuously titled Second Improvisation from 1925 is actually one of (Medtner’s) most substantial works: a theme, fifteen variations and coda lasting about half an hour. Very rarely recorded, it occupies a roughly similar position in Medtner’s output to the Paganini Rhapsody in Rachmaninoff’s, though here the theme, “The Song of the Water Nymph,” is Medtner’s own. He gave his variations

whimsical-sounding titles involving elves and gnomes, waves, forests and storms, but the music is seriously beautiful in his most sophisticated manner, and (Geoffrey) Tozer (who has recorded most of Medtner) may well be right to claim it as a work of tragic autobiography.

-Calum MacDonald, Chandos Records Medtner entered Moscow Conservatory at the age of twelve, and then studied privately with Sergei Taneyev, who encouraged him to become a composer. Taneyev was Tchaikovsky’s close friend, and replaced him as director of the Conservatory. While there, he taught Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.

Taneyev made a piano transcription of The Nutcracker Suite, which is available today, with Tchaikovsky’s additions.

Taneyev knew all the musicians who made up Russia's musical heritage: Borodin, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov (The Five), as well as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner.

In 1895 and ’96, Taneyev stayed with Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy’s wife Sophia became infatuated with Taneyev. Taneyev was never aware of it, but Tolstoy wrote it up in his story "The Kreutzer Sonata."

Medtner was at the center of Russian musical history even without Taneyev, although his music has none of the nationalist motifs found in his peers. This is a rare chance to hear a composer who Rachmaninoff generously claimed was the greatest of his time.

Medtner’s music was harmonically adventurous, but had a Romantic aesthetic that was out of fashion in trendy Paris. Other locales welcomed his music more readily: he was acclaimed in the United States and Canada, and especially in England.

His 1935 book The Muse and Fashion, published by Rachmaninoff in Paris, expressed his disillusionment with modern music. The same year, Medtner moved to England. Failing health compelled him to give

up concertizing in 1944, but he was able to make some classic recordings of his piano music through an arrangement set up by a newly formed Medtner Society, supported by the Maharajah of Mysore.

These are outstanding examples of his superb playing technique and of his compositional intentions.

-ArkivMusic Our friend the piano technician Tali Mahanor came across original manuscripts of the Medtner sonatas, and lent them to Dover for their complete 2012 edition.

Medtner possessed a distinctive touch at the piano; he despised a soft, caressing, wiping of the keys—he had his own view on the art of piano playing, his own school of pianism, and his own style, which to many seemed harsh and severe. But how this tough and honest touch, without any mawkish skating over the keyboard, this rugged, austere stroke could “exhaust” an incredible depth of sound, coming, it seemed, from the innermost soul of the instrument, and how, with such a “hard” touch, the sudden, lyrical phrases of his sublime melodies were borne away!

—Marietta Shaginyan, Reminiscences About Rachmaninov, Moscow: Muzïka, 1974 Medtner provided the Russian pianist Edna Iles with invaluable interpretative techniques which she cataloged in her exhaustive Notes, including isolating voices by means of staccato, which the Chilean-born pianist Alberto Guerrero taught to the young Glenn Gould, who never credited anyone for it, possibly because it defined his playing.

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Variations: From Dark to Light Notes by Michael Brown This concert showcases four contrasting theme and variation sets by Felix Mendelssohn, Nicolai Medtner, myself, and Ludwig van Beethoven. The program begins with sérieuses, followed by Medtner’s brooding and rarely played Second Improvisation. Russian composer Nicolai Medtner was one of the most gifted composer-pianists in the first half of the 20th century, as well as a close friend of Rachmaninoff. His Second Improvisation is a masterful set of harmonically complex variations, whose sections depict birds, elves, gnomes, goblins, and mermaids.

The second half turns toward the brighter side with my Folk Variations and Beethoven’s "Eroica" Variations. Composed in 2013 for my dear friend the pianist Adam Golka, Folk Variations is a theme and six-variation set based on the popular folk song “Yankee Doodle.” However, the work does not present the familiar folk tune in any clearly recognizable form but rather rearranges its pitches to create an “American” sonority.

The program concludes with Beethoven’s groundbreaking 15 Variations and Fugue in E-flat Major, Op. 35. Nicknamed the "Eroica" Variations, it is a masterful composition with an unusual structure of an introduction, theme, fifteen variations, and a fugue. The work’s harmonic and contrapuntal complexity foreshadows Beethoven’s late transcendental style.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Variations and Fugue for Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 35, “Eroica” (1802) Introduction

Theme, Variations 1-15 Fugue

Finale (andante) Beethoven used the "Eroica' theme often, notably in his Third or “Eroica” Symphony and in the Finale of his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus. Here, in the consistently virtuosic and witty "Eroica" Variations, he uses every trick he knows to explore its endless graces. This is one of the most wonderful pieces anywhere, and you should simply sit back and enjoy it played at its height by Michael Brown. Winner of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Michael Brown has been described by the New York Times as a “young piano visionary” and “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”

He will play one of his many compositions, Folk Variations (2013), this evening.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Brown earned dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano and composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. His early teachers were Herbert Rothgarber and Adam Kent, and he has worked with pianists Leon Fleisher and Richard Goode.

You can watch Michael play the variations on YouTube at the DiMenna Center in New York, also the home of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s: http://you-tube.one/watch/QENNZGw1SVNaSDZV/ beethoven-eroica-variations-op-35-michael-brown-piano. html Michael has also made a recording of them.

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You can see Michael perform the gorgeous Mendelssohn Sextet at the 2015 Opening Night of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU02EzF0HJM Under Wu Han and David Finckel, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has created an archive of 30 years of spectacular filmed performances at America’s foremost cultural center, all of which is available to anyone with a computer, smart phone, or iPad at: https://www.youtube.com/user/chambermusicsociety

Here’s Michael’s profile on the Chamber Music Society channel of YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q gItUFPGc1E In his spare time, Michael enjoys cooking kale, reading and obsessing over American history, and memorizing obscure Woody Allen films. He has said that his goal this past spring was to take 30,000 steps: to walk from the High Line up to where he lives in Washington Heights in New York City. He feels “there’s a lot of fun and joy that can be part of this business.”

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OUR POP-UP WEEKEND Friday, September 16, All Day The Cottonwood Campus Angella Ahn, violin Vicky Chow, piano Timothy Feeney, percussion Lesley Flanagan, voice Todd Meehan, percussion Tristan Perich, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Stephen Versaevel, percussion

We had the idea late in the season to finish up the summer with “pop-up performances,” modern music played in different locations around the ranch, both outside and inside, like the Fête de la Musique in Europe.

We were extremely fortunate to have the composers John Luther Adams, Tristan Perich, Lesley Flanigan, and Tim Feeney at the concerts. The latter three performed their own pieces; we also hosted John Luther Adams’s longtime collaborators, the percussion virtuosi Doug Perkins and Todd Meehan; the avant-garde pianist Vicky Chow; as well as the Montana violinist Angella Ahn and the percussionist Stephen Versaevel.

Modern classical works might seem to be more ad lib, more free, than the rigors of Beethoven or Liszt, but in fact the vocabulary is entirely new, and the demands are if anything greater on the musician. New motions, new hand positions, new rhythms must be mastered, which is much harder than the performance traditions of older music, ingrained in us until they are second nature.

So this celebration of disciplined and structured tonalities performed by the people who compose it was a unique chance to be feet away from the genius of our age.

I stood about one foot away from Angella Ahn as she played Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz” on her gorgeous Zygmuntowicz violin in the Daydreams schoolhouse.

Ahn travels the world as the violinist of the acclaimed Juilliard-trained Ahn Trio, composed of Angella and her sisters Lucia (piano) and Maria (cello). They have played in New York’s Lincoln Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Argentina’s Teatro Colón, Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace, and the Beijing Concert Hall, among others. This year they play in Turkey, Chile, Canada, and elsewhere. Michael Nyman, Maurice Jarre, and Paul Schoenfeld have written pieces for them, and Patrick Demarchelier has photographed them.

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Ahn is also Professor of Violin and Viola at Montana State University. She lives in Bozeman, one of the many international artists who astonish the world but always return to the sanctuary of Montana. O’Connor is the legendary fiddler who mixes bluegrass, jazz, and country-western into classical styles.

He presented his second and third string quartets with the violinist Ida Kavafian, the violist Paul Neubauer, and the cellist Matt Haimovitz at Merkin Concert Hall in New York.

Ahn also played Bach’s “Air on the G String,” Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and the hymn “Amazing Grace” outside Daydreams. John Newton was a slave-trader who was converted to grace during a storm at sea; he wrote the lyrics of the hymn out of gratitude to God. His words were later matched with the music of the traditional song “New Britain,” itself an amalgam of two earlier British songs, “Gallaher” and “St. Mary.” Over time “Amazing Grace” has become the anthem of racial and religious freedom on many continents.

George Meredith, the novelist who wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist, was the creator, with George Eliot, of the psychological novel. Meredith was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times. In 1881 he wrote the poem “The Lark Ascending,” which surviews its own contents, as Coleridge might have said, shaping its words to the lark’s song, and lending itself to music, repeating, trilling, ringing.

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To hear one of the great violinists play a gorgeous piece on an amazing instrument in the reverberant closeness of Patrick Dougherty’s Schoolhouse had to have been one of the great experiences for everyone lucky enough to stumble on it that afternoon. Tristan Perich performed his piece for three toy pianos, qsqsqsqsqqqqqqqqq, with Doug Perkins and Todd Meehan, sitting on the floor of Daydreams (a brief film of it can be seen on the Tippet Rise Instagram). This fugue, or round, is insistent and childlike, rising into a massive chorale out of tiny instruments you quickly forget are meant as toys.

The way its initially simple melodies combine, Bach-like, deepens with repetition, and was well-served by the resonant wooden walls of the Schoolhouse, enveloping its audience in its finally symphonic echoes. Pieces in the Schoolhouse sound like concerts inside a violin case. Its close quarters create a cathedral-like aura around the music in a very small space. I don’t think I’ve ever heard music performed in such an effective and sonorous space, both mellow and ringing at the same time. We plan to program more pieces in this unique theater.

Perich’s wife is “the speaker-building, feedback-loving, experimental musician” Lesley Flanigan. By miking her own innovative speakers, Lesley uses her voice to add to feedback loops which provoke even the most robust of sound systems into intimations of mortality. She performed her piece

Residue, a Gregorian chant which uses the imperfections inherent in jangling harmonies and buzzing electronics to pay homage to a celestial acoustic immanence. She writes hymns to an electric divinity. Her frequencies rise up to a distracted god. Imperfections are the flaws in time that allow us to exist.

Noam Chomsky invented a concept he called negative syntax.

If St. Paul wrote, referring to the two thieves crucified with Jesus: “Do not fear that one of the thieves is damned; do not presume that one of the thieves is saved.” Paul has said nothing; his statements cancel themselves out; but he has in fact said everything. He has described the perplex of free will and the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, a quantum entanglement where an atom (or a cat) is both alive and dead until we open the box and observe it. It is our observation which determines its state. Schrödinger meant the parable to be a reductio ad absurdum, a criticism of the impossibility of the quantum idea of superposition, wherein matter lies in a trance, a “macroscopic indeterminacy.”

However, this “Copenhagen interpretation” ultimately became the clearest example of the dual nature of matter, both a wave and a particle, placed in a suspension where its identity could be resolved only by us, by the human presence. This leads in fact to a theory in which the purpose of the universe is to be observed by us. This can be a very reassuring thought, although it leaves us with the responsibility for creation: is the universe good or bad because it reflects ourselves?

It is more reassuring to be freed of this burden with the Buddhist idea that our presence is simply carried along on the immense wave of existence. But at some brief point reality intrudes, as Einstein suggested, and we become capable of picking which door hides the lady, which the tiger. We choose. Can there be both free will and indeterminacy, and can they coexist? Are we the particle whose weight collapses the universe, proving the logic of belief, or does the universe continue to expand infinitely, beyond the structures and theorems we try to impose on it? Or is our existence the one irritant that makes finite pearls out of unspecified protoplasm, that returns the galaxy to stasis? Is thought itself the one wrinkle, the terminal imperfection, that trips up the nonchalance of time, that weights existence in our favor?

So it is this residue, this leftover thought, which emerges from Flanigan’s loop of self-destructive chaos. It is her own voice which emerges from the white noise.

Tim Feeney presented his Gryllidae, for eight clave players and electronics, in 2015.

Gryllidae is the family name for crickets, and the piece imitates the sound of a nighttime pond. The performers’ live sounds interact with prerecorded clave sound and field recordings of insects and spring peeper frogs, arranged around the audience via speaker objects assembled from small transducers and mason jars.

Feeney has invented his own speakers, where wires bring current to a vibrating drum, which creates a low croak, magnified by a traditional jam jar. Cicadas and frogs sing deafeningly at night to discourage predators.

As in La Fontaine’s “La cigale et la fourmi,” crickets are avatars of irresponsibility and lazy summer nights.

They sing for our lost youth, and Tim brought them back in a rush of nostalgia with dozens of acoustic droids populating the floor, flickering with candles, as the barn lights lowered.

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John Luther Adams was represented by Red Arc/ Blue Veil, which, like his Pulitzer Prize–winning symphony Become Ocean, is a sheen of deep piano bass, tinkling bells, the electronic gloss of vibes, and the shimmer of crotales (antique cymbals) growing and diminishing like unseen waves washing over a small boat on Alaska’s terrifying Bering Sea at night, when the sea, uncontrolled by day’s reassuring vision, grows ever louder, reaching the sky. Like the sheer chaos of conflicting currents in a rip tide, the music is unfettered by any compositional system, as aleatoric as the ocean. The Northern Lights extend across the night sky in a fiery arc of shimmering particles, charged with frequencies emitted by storms on the sun, and flicker down like fireworks in blue sparkles that animate the night sky.

As Adams has written of his solo piano piece Nuna taks, which Vicky Chow performed, “Nuna-taks are mountains that rise up out of icefields and glaciers.

The jagged contours of nunataks contrast sharply with the smooth whiteness that surrounds them. As the ice melts and the sea rises, these solitary peaks stand as stark reminders of human isolation and vulnerability.” Growing from a D minor chord in the deep bass, impressionistic arpeggios rise out of the snow, the stark and frightening bezels of buried giants, the way wrecks tilt and settle in the ocean currents of Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral. Time has expanded the palette with which a composer can portray the unearthly strangeness of 278

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these glacial islands, which exist only in the Inuit language, as the vocabulary of mountains was mostly French in Victorian days. Although this is a short piece, the cosmic paths it suggests for these snowbound asteroids break new harmonic grounds. Words lose their meaning and shapes exist without words in the immense arctic voids that shelter such monstrous anomalies. And yet, painted in the middle of sheer white Barnett Newman or Josef Albers or Piet Mondrian colorfield canvases, these creatures of the id gain their power because they are avatars of the bedrock deep under the glaciers, as the mythological giants took their power from touching the earth, and Hercules had to lift them up in the air to defeat them.

In Four Thousand Holes, the shimmering stars in the night sky are represented by equally luminous chords

in Vicky Chow’s high piano treble, their range

extended by the vibraphone and xylophone played by Doug Perkins.

Two of the sections of Adams’s Strange and Sacred Noise were performed at the Tiara, our outdoor pavilion, and around Calder’s stabile Deux Disques, set on a geologic bench overlooking the ranch.

The composer has written:

“My own most powerful experience of [the transcendent nature of noise] has been through the all-night drumming, chant, and dance ceremonies of the Iñupiat and Yup’ik Eskimo peoples—ceremonies which demonstrably alter the consciousness of listeners and participants, through the rapid and insistent reiteration of loud, acoustically complex sounds.”

In thinking deeply about the symmetries of structure, Adams realized that the Newtonian physics on which we base our organized world has given way to the fragmentation of quantum mechanics, to chaos theory, to fractals.

So Strange and Sacred Noise is a study in how to interrupt the symmetry of tribal drumming. Adams has written: “Symmetry is predictable: One equals one. It neutralizes questions about where a piece is ‘going,’ or what will happen next. If the next sound is inevitable, then it’s free to stand only for itself. Without the expectations of narrative development or ‘the element of surprise,’ both the composer and listener are free simply to listen to the music.

“Although I feel free to break the symmetry at any time,

I try to do so primarily in response to the physical characteristics of the instruments, or to practical realities of performance and notation, rather than to my own ideas of what should happen next. Morton Feldman did this with an exquisite touch. He called his forms ‘crippled symmetry.’ (In fact, that’s the title of one of his later works.) I think this is also something of what Barnett Newman meant when he spoke of ‘busting the geometry’ in his paintings.”

In the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska, Adams has focused for decades on natural phenomena, from the songs of birds and elemental noise to fractal geometry.

Clouds, mountains, coastlines, tree bark, and lightning are all natural fractals. Their shapes are complicated and irregular, unlike spheres or lines, which scientists can easily explain with equations. But turbulence, running water—the real-time flaws of a more minutely observed world—have required a different mathematics, and a different music.

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the codifier of fractal geometry and the art of the uncontrolled, wrote: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”

The chaos and irregularity of the world—Mandelbrot referred to it as “roughness”—is where the music of John Luther Adams lives, feathered with ferns and smoothed with stars.

Like the receding mirrors-in-mirrors of a Cantor set, the serendipity of a fractal is present in its DNA. A part of a cloud is similar to the rest of the cloud. A pine tree has branches that are made from branch-like twigs, which in turn branch out into trunk-like nodes. A small sand dune has the same shape as a huge sand dune. Lightning forks the way a tree branches. Rivers meander like the roots of trees. Nature’s patterns are random, but strangely similar. And so the rhythmic material of Strange and Sacred Noise is an onomatopoeia of the layered structures underlying nature’s apparent chaos.

As William Blake wrote of the fearful symmetry of the tiger, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

So our pop-up day turned into a beguiling exploration under September’s deep blue skies of the imperfections of this scudding matter, and the way modern music mirrors them, in both diaphanous beauty and jagged disarray.

—Peter Halstead 2017 Summer Season

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Works To Live By

by Peter Halstead

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here are many works we refer to in our brochures and programs. They are the books, plays, poems which have stuck in Cathy’s and my minds over the years, and which we use to explain and enlarge the world in our minds. We thought it might be helpful to present a list of these works, in case anyone is curious. The biographies are the kind which tell you about the era in every sentence.

Reading Proust was one of the great experiences of our lives. Painter’s book is very helpful, as are Shattuck’s two volumes, which discuss the era in witty and informative prose. After you read some of Trollope or Dickens, you’ll probably read a lot more.

But music is just the start of it, as someone said of Schnabel. Music isn’t just a sound; it’s a philosophy.

The more we understand its specific language, the deeper our insights into the miracles the world offers. Music teaches us how to live. It gives us moments of clarity, of insight. We can use it to illuminate our lives. To escape our sorrows. And, especially, to celebrate our joys.

Stendhal said that no one would fall in love if he hadn’t read about it first. Reading is a dangerous sport. We become what we read.

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Tom Stoppard Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon Italo Calvino If on a winter’s night a traveler 280

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Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory Pale Fire The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Saul Bellow Humboldt’s Gift Mervyn Peake Gormenghast Raymond Roussel Impressions of Africa Tibor Fischer Voyage to the End of the Room Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past (Random House, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff; vol. 7 translated by Terence Kilmartin) The first volume, Swann’s Way, is a tough start because the wonderful story of Swann himself doesn’t start for forty pages, because Proust decided to put his dream-metaphor of falling asleep first. Even though this essential reverie is crucial to the book, it’s slow going. I’d start with the witty stuff about Swann and his love life, and save the sleep metaphor until you’rehalfway through the volumes, when it becomes obvious how Proust’s occasional prose poems deepen the novel and reveal its gears.

Anthony Trollope The Way We Live Now Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend

Andrei Bely (translated by John Cournos) Petersburg This book is about linguistic tricks, Rudolf Steiner, and the strangification of what Nabokov described as the way a city whirls above you, completely unfamiliar, before it settles down into a known place.

BIOGRAPHIES, CRITICISM, ESSAYS George D. Painter Marcel Proust: A Biography

Lawrance Thompson Robert Frost: A Biography Like the great biographies of Proust by Painter or Robert Frost by Thompson, this book has revelations in every sentence: about the people, the stories, the atmosphere of the most creative time in history, populated with Liszt, George Sand, Chopin, Hugo, Marie d’Agoult.

Stacy Schiff Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) Oscar Wilde Intentions Hugh Kenner The Pound Era Roger Shattuck The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time

eulogy to the Shiants in the Hebrides, to life on isolated islands.

James Attlee Nocturne: A Journey In Search of Moonlight A journey to the last places of true darkness and a search for moonlight throughout history and literature.

M.T. Anderson Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad The terror years of Stalin and a city surrounded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht, in which a composer writes a symphony that forever captures the horror and the beauty of Russia.

PLAYS

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest An Ideal Husband Alan Ayckbourn Henceforward House & Garden Relatively Speaking

POEMS

Douglas Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October,” “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “And death shall have no dominion,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art” Collected Poems

Adam Nicolson Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides The heir to the great British country house Sissinghurst, Nicolson has written many interesting books about his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Sir Harold Nicolson, who were members of the Bloomsbury crowd. This is a stunning poetic

W. H. Auden “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” “Song of the Master and Boatswain,” “Roman Wall Blues,” “Who’s Who,” “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” “Stop All the Clocks,” “At Last the Secret Is Out,” “If I Could Tell You,” “Musée des Beaux Arts” Collected Poems 2017 Summer Season

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POEMS (continued)

Archibald MacLeish “Bahamas,” “The Learned Men,” “Epitaph for John McCutcheon,” “Calypso’s Island,” “Thunderhead,” “What Any Lover Learns,” “The Old Man to the Lizard,” “They Come No More, Those Words, Those Finches,” “The Two Priests,” “Captivity of the Fly,” “An Eternity,” “Poem in Prose,” “The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever,” “The Rape of the Swan,” “Speech to the Scholars” Collected Poems (especially New Poems 1951)

Richard Wilbur “A Courtyard Thaw,” “A Summer Morning,” “First Snow in Alsace,” “Parable,” “On the Marginal Way,” “Complaint,” “Seed Leaves,” “Walking To Sleep,” “Running” Collected Poems: 1943-2004 James Merrill Divine Comedies Nights and Days

Arthur Rubinstein My Young Years Incredible stories-this is like having dinner with one of the greatest raconteurs in history. What was it like to be a genius who knew everyone at the height of the classical and social worlds, with a perfect memory, and who was also a lot of fun?

Arthur Rubinstein My Many Years This supremely assimilated virtuoso who spoke six languages and could play anything has astonishing stories about his attempted suicide, his decision to become a piano teacher, his slumming with the Rothschilds. You can’t put it down.

Gary Graffman I Really Should be Practicing: Reflections on the Pleasures and Perils of Playing Piano in Public Graffman is very funny and has marvelous stories of his life in music, as well as serious reflections on compulsive practicing.

Katie Hafner A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano MUSIC There are many wonderful books about pianos, Russell Sherman but Hafner really makes it fascinating, and she understands what makes a piano great.

Piano Pieces The first half of the book features brilliant Perri Knize biographies of each finger, and extraordinary, Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey contrarian flashes of genius. This is a sampling of You follow the writer from ignorance to gradual the philosophic brilliance which Sherman and his awakening to complete realization of what gives a wife, Wha-Kyung Byun, have brought to polishing piano character. Much more fascinating and some of the greatest virtuosi of the concert world, somehow more “edge of the seat” than it sounds. such as Marc-André Hamelin, Livan, and George Li. Wolfgang Hildesheimer Mozart Intense and brilliant, this lyric and exhilarating plunge into the biography of creativity sets a new standard for how to think about music.

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Tim Page The Glenn Gould Reader Gould was witty, unique, brilliant, eccentric, tragic, and funny. He developed new ways of thinking about music, while being extremely entertaining.

Kevin Bazzana Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould The most balanced and probing of the many wonderful biographies of a great genius.

Alan Rusbridger Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible As the former editor of the excellent paper The Guardian, Rusbridger can ask every classical master how they play Chopin’s “Governess” Ballade, as he learns it himself over a year, in between covering the major stories of the era. This witty book turns what might seem a specialized and pedantic effort into an adventure that’s impossible to put down.

David Dubal Evenings with Horowitz: A Personal Portrait Nikolai Grozni Wunderkind This is a Bulgarian Holden Caulfield (who in real life studied at Brown) loose in the Sofia Conservatory, getting in trouble with apparatchiks, girls, and pianos, interspersed with emotional and original descriptions of playing Chopin.

Paul Roberts Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy From paulrobertspiano.com: “This book…relates the piano music of Debussy to the cultural background of Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century. It has become a seminal text on the subject, admired by scholars, teachers, and concert pianists all over the world.”

Reflections: The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel Written by a master pianist, this book, like his Debussy volume, tells you about the stories and the era that inspired Ravel to write his challenging Impressionist études.

Harold C. Schonberg The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present Schonberg’s sense of wonder and his idolatry of speed might have turned concerts into spectacles, but his enthusiasm is a lot of fun, and he set the standard for virtuosity as a sport.

Thad Carhart The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier I had a similar experience myself in a maison particulière near the Place des Vosges in Paris, run

by Daniel Magne, the son of Messiaen’s technician, where I found a piano that was the twin of one of Horowitz’s. A wonderful book about not just pianos, but also Paris.

Lang Lang Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story Lang Lang’s father suggested he throw himself off a balcony when he came in second at a competition. He wept when he realized that his apartment at Curtis was just for him, not for twenty students. China tried to replace him at his own concert at the last minute with another prodigy. This is an extraordinary and difficult journey through enormous sacrifices, told with compelling honesty.

Oscar Levant The Memoirs of an Amnesiac Levant said of himself, “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” The inspiration for Peter Sellers’s character in The World of Henry Orient, Levant was an acid wit who made hypochondria into a profession; an excellent pianist, his name was synonymous with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but he also recorded music by Debussy, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian.

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Artist Profiles

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The Ariel String Quartet Zuill Bailey Michael Brown Alexander Chaushian Jenny Chen Vicky Chow The Escher String Quartet Tim Feeney Xavier Foley David Fung Adam Golka Caroline Goulding Matt Haimovitz Daniel Hawkins Paul Huang Jeffrey Kahane Aaron Jay Kernis Alex Klein Anne-Marie McDermott Todd Meehan The Meehan/ Perkins Duo Frank Morelli Pedja Muzijevic Mark Nuccio Natasha Paremski Douglas Perkins Joshua Roman Jessica Sindell The St. Lawrence String Quartet Yevgeny Sudbin Stephen Versaevel Jiacheng Xiong 2017 Summer Season

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THE ARIEL STRING QUARTET

istinguished by its virtuosic playing and impassioned interpretations, the Ariel Quartet has earned its glowing international reputation. Formed in Israel nearly twenty years ago when its members were students, the Quartet was recently awarded the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award. The Quartet serves as the Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where they direct the rigorous chamber music program and perform their own annual series of concerts in addition to their busy touring schedule.

In the 2016-17 season, the Ariel Quartet will perform the complete Beethoven cycle in Berlin, following a performance of the cycle for Napa’s Music in the Vineyards, and will also tour with Alon Goldstein in performances of the Mozart piano concertos arranged for quartet and piano. The Ariel Quartet’s 2015-16 season featured their debut at Carnegie Hall.

Formerly the resident ensemble in the New England Conservatory’s Professional String Quartet Training Program, the Ariel has won a number of prestigious international prizes, including the Cleveland Quartet Award and the Grand Prize at the 2006 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Mentored extensively by Itzhak Perlman, Paul Katz, Donald Weilerstein, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, and Martha Strongin Katz, among others, the Quartet spent a formative year in Basel, Switzerland, to study in-depth with Walter Levin. The Quartet has received significant scholarship support for the members’ studies in the United States from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, Dov and Rachel Gottesman, and the Legacy Heritage Fund. Most recently, they were awarded a substantial grant from The A. N. and Pearl G. Barnett Family Foundation.

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Zuill Bailey is one of the most dynamic and sought after

cellists today, appearing with major orchestras and in recitals worldwide.

His recording of Michael Daugherty’s Tales of Hemingway with the Nashville Symphony on the Naxos Label won a 2017 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Solo and Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

ZUILL BAILEY

His discography includes releases on Telarc of the Bach Cello Suites, the Britten Cello Symphony and Sonata, the complete Beethoven and Brahms Sonatas, and the Elgar and Dvořák concerti with the Indianapolis Symphony. On the Steinway Label he has released Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante and Sonata, and Nico Muhly’s cello concerto and Bloch’s Schelomo with the Indianapolis Symphony.

He is a Distinguished Alumnus of Johns Hopkins University and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School, respectively.

Zuill Bailey is the Artistic Director of El Paso Pro-Musica, the Sitka Summer Music Festival in Alaska, the Northwest Bach Festival (Washington state) and Professor of Cello at the University of Texas at El Paso. He performs on a 1693 Matteo Gofriller Cello.

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MICHAEL BROWN

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inner of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Michael Brown has been described by the New York Times as a “young piano visionary” and “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”

Selected by Sir András Schiff for his “Building Bridges” series in 2016-17, Mr. Brown will make debut solo recitals in Berlin, Florence, Milan, Frankfurt, Antwerp, Zurich, and New York’s 92nd Street Y. Recent highlights include debuts with the Seattle, North Carolina, Flagstaff, and Maryland Symphony Orchestras and the New York Youth Symphony in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium.

Mr. Brown joined the roster of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program in 2015 and performs with the Society in Alice Tully Hall and on tour.

He regularly performs concerto and solo recitals; in a trio with violinist Elena Urioste and cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and frequently performs recitals with each of them.

Recent commissions of his own compositions include a Piano Concerto for the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and works for the Look & Listen Festival, Bargemusic, Concert Artists Guild, and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Brown earned dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano and composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Michael Brown is a Steinway Artist. michaelbrownmusic.com

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he internationally acclaimed Armenian cellist Alexander Chaushian performs regularly throughout the world, both as a soloist and in chamber music projects. Chaushian is Artistic Director of the International Pharos Chamber Music Festival in Cyprus and the Yerevan Music Festival in Armenia.

His recent concerto appearances include concerts with Royal Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestras, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He works regularly with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra and has most recently performed Khachaturian’s Concerto-Rhapsody with the orchestra under Vassily Sinaisky in September 2016.

ALEXANDER

CHAUSHIAN

He enjoys regular chamber music relationships with distinguished artists, including Yuja Wang, Julia Fischer, Levon Chilingirian, Yuri Bashmet, Diemut Poppen, François-Frédéric Guy, and Emmanuel Pahud, and he has also collaborated with Yehudi Menuhin.

His regular chamber music partner is renowned pianist Yevgeny Sudbin. He is also a member of the Tchaikovsky Trio with Pavel Vernikov and Konstantin Bogino.

Chaushian’s recordings include several highly acclaimed CDs for the BIS label in which he is partnered

by Yevgeny Sudbin, and his recently released concerto CD with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, also on BIS, received rave reviews and was selected as “Album of the Week” by The Independent, UK. After initial studies in Armenia, Alexander Chaushian studied in the United Kingdom at the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. He then pursued advanced studies at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin. Chaushian won numerous prestigious prizes, including the 12th International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and the ARD Competition in Germany.

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Twenty-two-year-old pianist Jenny Chen is the

JENNY CHEN

youngest Doctor of Musical Arts candidate and teaching assistant at the Eastman School of Music. She was accepted by the Curtis Institute of Music at age ten under the pedagogy of Eleanor Sokoloff and Gary Graffman. She then went on to complete a master’s degree at the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Robert Blocker and Melvin Chen. Currently, her mentor is Douglas Humpherys.

Jenny Chen represents a new generation of performers.

Her passionate artistry expresses her individuality and sincerity about music. With her energetic personality, she has been invited to perform at many festivals, including Chamber Music Encounters of Lincoln Center, Tippet Rise Art Center, Sejong Music Festival, Mainly Mozart Festival, and Bravo! Vail Festival.

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Jenny Chen made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age fourteen, and subsequently the Orchestra invited her to return. She also performed with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, National Repertory Orchestra, Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, New York Downtown Sinfonietta, and Pacific Symphony. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with prestigious musicians such as Anne-Marie McDermott, Peter Wiley, and Arnold Steinhardt.

Jenny Chen performs in venues throughout the world and has received audience acclaim at Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center, Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, He Lu Ding Hall in China, National Concert Hall in Taiwan, Vredenburg Leidsche Rijn in the Netherlands, and Solti Hall in Hungary. Her performances have been broadcasted on live TV and radio from WHYY’s On Stage at Curtis, Classical MPR’s Performance Today, and FOX Rochester.

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Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has been described as

“brilliant” (The New York Times), “a monster pianist” (Time Out New York) and a “new star of new music” (Los Angeles Times). She is the pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Grand Band, New Music Detroit, X88, and has collaborated with other ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Her recent recordings of Steve Reich’s Piano Counterpoint (Nonesuch) and Tristan Perich’s Surface Image (New Amsterdam Records) were included in the “top albums of the year” lists in Rolling Stone and on Rhapsody. Her solo album AORTA (New Amsterdam Records), features six new works by American composers and Rome Prize winners: Andy Akiho and Chris Cerrone, Molly Joyce, Daniel Wohl, Jacob Cooper, and Jakub Ciupinski. An EP of Sonatra, a solo piano work by Bang on a Can founder Michael Gordon, will be released in 2017 on Cantaloupe Music. As an artist frequently broadcasted on WNYC’s Q2 radio, her recorded work can be found on the Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Tzadik, Cantaloupe Music, Innova, Hinterzimme, and AltaVoz labels.

VICKY

CHOW

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Interviews and articles featuring Ms. Chow have appeared in The Huffington Post, Gramophone, The New York Times, The Vancouver Sun, and many more. Her performances of works by Morton Feldman and John Cage were featured on BBC3’s documentary series The Sound and The Fury, based on Alex Ross’s book The Rest is Noise. Upcoming projects include new commissions

by Tristan Perich, Nik Baertsch, and Vanessa Lane for piano duo X88 and new and recent John Zorn works for piano and improvising bass and drums with Tyshawn Sorry and Shanir Blumenkranz. www.vickychow.com 2017 Summer Season

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The Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its

profound musical insight and rare tonal beauty. “They hold the listener spellbound from first bar to last,” said BBC Music Magazine.

THE ESCHER STRING QUARTET

Within months of its inception in 2005, the ensemble came to the attention of key musical figures worldwide.

Championed by the Emerson Quartet, the Escher Quartet was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be Quartet in Residence at each artist’s summer festival.

The quartet’s recent debuts in Europe include the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Berlin Konzerthaus, London’s Kings Place, Slovenian Philharmonic Hall, and Auditorium du Louvre. A former BBC New Generation Artist, the quartet has performed at the BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall and is a regular guest at Wigmore Hall.

The Escher Quartet continues to flourish in its home country, serving as Season Artists of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and String Quartet in Residence at Southern Methodist University and performing at Alice Tully Hall, Kennedy Center, and the Ravinia and Caramoor festivals.

Volumes I and II of the complete Mendelssohn Quartets, released on the BIS label in 2015, were received with the highest critical acclaim, with comments such as “… eloquent, full-blooded playing…The four players offer a beautiful blend of individuality and accord” (BBC Music Magazine). The Mendelssohn series is concluded this season with the release of Volume III. The quartet has also recorded the complete Zemlinsky String Quartets in two volumes, released on the Naxos label in 2013 and 2014, respectively, to accolades.

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Composer and performer Tim Feeney frequently

collaborates with experimental musicians and improvisers, including the trio Meridian, with percussionists Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart; pianist Annie Lewandowski; cellist and electronic musician Vic Rawlings; vocalist Ken Ueno, saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar; banjo and electronic musician Holland Hopson, and many others.

Within this community, Tim has presented work at experimental spaces throughout the United States, such as the Red Room in Baltimore, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Knitting Factory New York, and The Stone, as well as the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford Art Museum, Mills College, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College. He has recorded for the experimental Caduc, Accidie, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, homophoni, Audiobot, Soul on Rice, lildiscs, and Brassland/Talitres labels.

He was a founding member of the quartet So Percussion, a member of Boston’s Callithumpian Consort, and performed with Rinde Eckert in his Pulitzer-nominated Orpheus X, directed by Robert Woodruff and staged at the American Repertory Theater, the off-Broadway Duke Theatre on 42nd Street, and the 2008 Hong Kong International Festival.

TIM FEENEY

PERCUSSION

Most recently, he has performed in quartet and large ensembles with composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, with whom he recorded for the Tri-Centric Foundation for release in 2017.

Tim is currently Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Alabama.

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Hailing from Marietta, Georgia, double bassist Xavier

Foley has captivated audiences “with superbly executed performances… playing fluidly and passionately” (Splash Magazine).

XAVIER FOLEY

Mr. Foley has appeared as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, Nashville Symphony, the Brevard Concert Orchestra, the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra and with the Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie Hall, as well as on tour around the United States. As a winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he will make his New York and Washington, DC debuts as only the second double bassist in YCA’s history next season at Merkin Concert Hall, supported by the Sander Buchman Prize, and at the Kennedy Center.

Mr. Foley captured First Prize at the 2014 Sphinx Competition and at the International Society of Bassists Competition in 2011. He was the winner of Astral’s 2014 National Auditions. Mr. Foley has performed with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and has participated in the Marlboro Music Festival and the Delaware Chamber Music Festival.

At the Young Concert Artists Auditions, he won four special performance awards, including the Buffalo Chamber Music Society Prize, the Harriman-Jewell Series Prize, the Paramount Theatre Prize, and the Tri-I Noon Recitals Prize. He has been awarded the Rhoda Walker Teagle Concert Prize, which sponsors his New York debut.

DOUBLE BASS

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Also a composer, Mr. Foley studied with Edgar Meyer and Eric Sessler at the Curtis Institute of Music. He earned his Bachelor of Music in 2016, after working with Edgar Meyer and Hal Robinson. Mr. Foley’s double bass was crafted by Ruano Solano.

Described as “stylish and articulate” in The New York

Times and having “superstar qualities” by Le Libre, pianist David Fung is widely recognized for performances that are elegant and refined, yet intensely poetic and uncommonly expressive. Mr. Fung appears regularly with the world’s premier ensembles, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Israel Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Belgium, the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, and with the major orchestras in Australia, including the Melbourne, Queensland, and Sydney Symphony Orchestras.

DAVID FUNG

In July 2016, Mr. Fung’s highly acclaimed debut with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival was “everything you could wish for” (Cleveland Classical) and he was further praised as an “agile and alert interpreter of Mozart’s crystalline note-spinning” (The Plain Dealer). Other highlights of the season include Mr. Fung’s New York recital debut presented by Lincoln Center’s Great Performers, invitations to the Louvre, the Kennedy Center, Caramoor, and a recital tour in China at all the major venues, including the Beijing Concert Hall, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, Guangzhou Opera House, and Tianjin Grand Theater.

Mr. Fung garnered international attention as a winner in two of the “top five” international piano competitions (the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels and the Arthur Rubinstein in Tel Aviv). In Tel Aviv, he was further distinguished by the Chamber Music and Mozart Prizes, awarded in areas in which Mr. Fung has a particularly passionate interest. Mr. Fung is the first piano graduate of the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles.

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Adam Golka began the 2016/17 season in recital at the

Dusznicki Intenational Chopin Festival and playing chamber music at the Krzyzowa Festival. He continues his work with András Schiff, playing duo recitals with Alumni Masters of Schiff’s Kronberg Academy in Koblenz and at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn.

ADAM GOLKA

Adam plays Rachmaninoff Cto. No. 3, Brahms 1, and Chopin 1 this season, and celebrated New Year’s Eve playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in the Ft. Worth Symphony’s re-opening gala. He reprises the “Van Cliburn: American Hero” program for the Cliburn’s outreach events, and again at the Competition in June.

In New York, Adam plays with the Manhattan Chamber Players at Merkin Hall, and leads the Brooklyn String Orchestra in performances of Bach’s D minor Piano Cto. András Schiff has presented Adam in recitals in New York, Berlin, Zurich, and at the Ruhr Festival in Germany. In New York, the Wall Street Journal reported “this was playing with dramatic flair and conviction, bold yet musical, filled with risk-taking. He threw himself into the performance with abandon, and he had the skill to pull it off.”

PIANO

Adam Golka has appeared with symphony orchestras in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and abroad with the BBC Scottish Symphony, NACO in Ottawa, Sinfonia Varsovia, and the Shanghai and Warsaw Philharmonics.

He is a winner of the Gilmore Young Artist’s award and the Max I. Allen Classical Fellowship Award of the American Pianists Association, and is currently Artist-in-Residence at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

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For nearly a decade, the virtuoso violinist Caroline

Goulding has performed with the world’s premier orchestras, in recital and on record, and has blossomed from a “precociously gifted” (Gramophone) 13-year-old soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra to “a skilled violinist well on her way to an important career” (Washington Post).

In 2016, Germany’s ARS label released Caroline’s first new recording since her GRAMMY-nominated and chart-topping debut released on Telarc in 2009, when she was just 16. Caroline’s 2016 recording, with pianist Danae Dörken, includes works by Schumann, Enescu, and Dvořák.

CAROLINE

GOULDING

Since that 2006 Cleveland Orchestra debut, Caroline has appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras throughout North America, including Toronto, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, Milwaukee, Pasadena, and Alabama, and with the National Symphony, the Florida Orchestra, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In Europe and Asia, Caroline appeared with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Netherlands Philharmonic, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Her recitals have taken her to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, the Tonhalle-Zurich, the Louvre museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, and she has performed as a chamber musician as part of the Marlboro Music Festival.

Widely recognized by the classical music world’s most distinguished artists and institutions for her “vibrant and intensely musical” playing (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Caroline was a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2011. In 2009, she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and was the recipient of the Helen Armstrong Violin Fellowship.

VIOLIN

Caroline plays a violin made by Brooklyn-based maker Sam Zygmuntowicz, circa 2016.

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MATT HAIMOVITZ

enowned as a musical pioneer, Matt Haimovitz is praised by The New York Times as a “ferociously talented cellist who brings his megawatt sound and uncommon expressive gifts to a vast variety of styles.”

He has inspired classical music lovers and countless new listeners by bringing his artistry to concert halls and clubs, outdoor festivals, and intimate coffee houses -any place where passionate music can be heard.

Haimovitz made his debut in 1984, at the age of 13, as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic. At 17 he made his first recording with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for Deutsche Grammophon. He made his Carnegie Hall debut when he substituted for his teacher, the legendary Leonard Rose, in Schubert’s String Quintet in C, alongside Isaac Stern, Shlomo Mintz, Pinchas Zukerman, and Mstislav Rostropovich.

In 2000, Haimovitz made waves with his Bach “Listening-Room” tour, for which he took Bach’s beloved cello suites into the clubs across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. His 50-state "Anthem" tour in 2003 featured the cellist’s own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Haimovitz’ recording career encompasses more than 20 years of award-winning work on Deutsche Grammophon and his and composer/producer Luna Pearl Woolf’s own independent label Oxingale Records, now in collaboration with PENTATONE.

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Born in Israel, Haimovitz studied at the Collegiate School in New York and at the Juilliard School, after which he continued his studies with Ronald Leonard and Yo-Yo Ma. In 1996, he received a B.A. magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard University. Haimovitz plays a Venetian cello, made in 1710 by Matteo Gofriller; however, for this performance he will play a Giovanni Grancino of Milan cello (c. 1695-1700) graciously provided to him by the company CANIMEX INC. from Drummondville (Quebec) Canada.

A native of Chandler, Texas, Daniel Hawkins will begin

his career as the new Utility Horn of the San Francisco Symphony starting in September 2017. He was the National Winner of the Music Teacher’s National Association Young Artist Brass competition in 2014 and won First Place in the Mid-South Horn Workshop Concerto Competition in 2010. Mr. Hawkins has performed with ensembles around the country, including the San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony, Dallas Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, and the New World Symphony. He has also participated in Masterclasses with several horn pedagogues, such as William VerMeulen, Barry Tuckwell, David Cooper, Gail Williams, and Andrew Bain. During the past few summers, he has participated in numerous music festivals, including the Texas Music Festival, Sarasota Music Festival, Round Top Music Festival, and the National Repertory Orchestra. Mr. Hawkins began his college career at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, studying with Dr. Charles Gavin.

After studying with him throughout high school and one year of college, he then transferred to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to obtain his Bachelor’s degree in Horn Performance and study with Gregory Hustis and Haley Hoops. Starting in August of 2015, he moved to Houston, Texas to study with William VerMeulen to receive a master’s degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.

DANIEL

HAWKINS

HORN

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PAUL HUANG

recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2015, Taiwanese-American violinist Paul Huang is recognized for his intensely expressive music making, distinctive sound, and effortless virtuosity.

Huang performs in recital and with major orchestras internationally. In 2015, he stepped in for Midori to appear with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leonard Slatkin performing Sibelius’s Violin Concerto to critical acclaim. Other season highlights included his Lincoln Center debut, performing the Barber Concerto with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and his sold-out solo recital debut on Lincoln Center’s “Great Performers” Series. An acclaimed chamber musician, Huang appears as a member of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two. He has performed recitals for the Kennedy Center, the Louvre, Seoul Arts Center, the National Concert Hall in Taiwan, and many others, and he is a frequent guest artist at music festivals worldwide.

Huang’s first solo CD, Intimate Inspiration, was released on the CHI-MEI label. In association with Camerata Pacifica, he recorded “Four Songs of Solitude” for solo violin on their album of John Harbison works, released on the Harmonia Mundi label in 2014.

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Born in Taiwan, Mr. Huang began violin lessons at the age of seven. He is a proud recipient of the inaugural Kovner Fellowship at the Juilliard School, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees under Hyo Kang and I-Hao Lee. He plays on the 1742 ex-Wieniawski Guarneri del Gesù, on loan through the generous efforts of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Equally at home at the keyboard or on the podium,

Jeffrey Kahane has established an international reputation as a truly versatile artist, recognized by audiences around the world for his mastery of a diverse repertoire ranging from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to Gershwin, Golijov, and John Adams.

Since making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983, Kahane has given recitals in many of the nation’s major music centers, including New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, and in many cities abroad. He appears as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Toronto and San Francisco Symphonies, and others. Kahane made his conducting debut at the Oregon Bach Festival in 1988. Since then, he has guest conducted many of the major orchestras in North America and Europe.

JEFFREY KAHANE

Kahane has recorded for the SONY, EMI, Telarc, RCA, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon, Virgin Records, Decca/Argo, and Haenssler labels. His recordings include works by Gershwin and Bernstein with Yo-Yo Ma, the complete works for violin and piano by Schubert with Joseph Swensen, and Bach concertos with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Hilary Hahn.

A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Kahane was First Prize winner at the 1983 Rubinstein Competition and a finalist at the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition. He was also the recipient of a 1983 Avery Fisher Career Grant. Kahane is Professor of Keyboard Studies at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and is in his 20th and final season as Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

PIANO

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AARON JAY KERNIS

inner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and 2011 Nemmers Award, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America’s most honored composers. His music appears prominently on concert programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by preeminent performing organizations and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco, Toronto, and Melbourne (AU) Symphonies, Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Sharon Isbin.

His works have been recorded on Virgin, Dorian, Arabesque, Phoenix, Argo, Signum, Cedille, and many other labels. Recent recordings include his “Goblin Market,” and “Invisible Mosaic II,” (Signum); “Three Flavors,” featuring pianist Andrew Russo, violinist James Ehnes and the Albany Symphony with conductor David Alan Miller (Albany); and a disc of his solo and chamber music, “On Distant Shores,” (Phoenix). Kernis’s conducting engagements include appearances with the Pascal Rioult Dance Company, at major chamber music festivals in Chicago and Portland, and with members of the San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras and New York Philharmonic.

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He is the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and, for 11 years, served as New Music Adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 15 years. Kernis teaches composition at Yale School of Music, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Classical Music Hall of Fame. Leta Miller’s book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series.

Grammy award-winning oboist Alex Klein began his

professional career at age 11 in his native Brazil.

Recognized as one of the world’s leading oboists, he was Principal Oboe with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim until 2004, leaving the position due to the onset of musician’s focal dystonia, but returning to the CSO under Riccardo Muti in 2016 in a continuing effort to suppress the consequences of dystonia.

ALEX KLEIN

Klein has performed chamber music recitals and as a soloist with major orchestras internationally. His recordings include concertos written for him by Yano Sydor and David Stock, and are released by Teldec, Boston Records, Newport Classics, Musical Heritage Society, and Cedille Records. His master classes are held at the world’s top music conservatories, including the Juilliard School, Paris Conservatory, Geneva Conservatory, Central Conservatory in Beijing, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and the RimskyKorsakov Conservatory in Saint Petersburg. He has adjudicated international competitions in Japan, England, Russia, Switzerland, and in the United States.

Klein founded and is Artistic Director of Santa Catarina Music Festival, which quickly rose to become Latin America’s largest music festival, and served as founder and General Director of PRIMA, the Program of Social Inclusion though Music and the Arts, establishing youth and children’s orchestras in the public school system in the Brazilian state of Paraiba, beginning with the areas hardest hit by social risk.

OBOE

Klein has been a faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the University of Washington, Northwestern University, and Roosevelt University. He now joins the faculty of DePaul University.

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For over 25 years, Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia.

ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT

She made her debut at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig performing Bernstein’s "Age of Anxiety" with the MDR Orchestra and had her first recital tour of China. Recent concerts with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center featured performances at Wigmore Hall in London, Hamburg, and Aarhus.

The breadth of McDermott’s repertoire matches that of her instrument, spanning from Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, to works by today’s most influential composers. She has premiered dozens of works, including a piano sonata written for her by Charles Wuorinen.

In addition to being an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she serves as Artistic Director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, leads chamber music festivals in Florida and Curaçao, and is Curator of the Mainly Mozart Festival’s Spotlight Series in San Diego.

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Ms. McDermott began making recordings in 2005.

About her critically acclaimed recording of The Complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas (Bridge Records), Gramophone wrote, “we have waited a long time for an American pianist of this stature.” Ms. McDermott released an all-Chopin CD to great critical acclaim in 2012. In spring of 2014, McDermott released her fifth acclaimed recording: a Mozart concerto disc (Bridge Records) and in December 2014, she released a 2-CD Haydn recording featuring Five Sonatas and Two with the Odense Philharmonic.

Todd Meehan is an Associate Professor of Percussion

at the Baylor University School of Music. He has performed throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia as a soloist, orchestral, and chamber musician. Todd currently performs contemporary percussion chamber music with the Meehan/ Perkins Duo and is the Principal Timpanist of the Waco Symphony Orchestra. He has commissioned new works for percussion by composers David Lang, Paul Lansky, Tristan Perich, Charles Wuorinen, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Alejandro ViĂąao, among many others. He has released recordings on Cantaloupe, Bridge, New World Records, and Physical Editions.

Todd earned his Doctor of Musical Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees from the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, and his Master of Music degree from Yale University. He performs on Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Zildjian cymbals, Remo drumheads, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, and Black Swamp accessories. Todd enjoys spreading big ideas on music through his organization, Liquidrum.

TODD MEEHAN

PERCUSSION

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Since its founding in 2006, the Meehan/ Perkins Duo

THE MEEHAN/PERKINS

DUO

PERCUSSION

(Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins) has redefined the American percussion duo through its diverse commissions and engaging performances. The Duo has been called “exuberant” by The New York Times and “gifted percussionists” by The Wall Street Journal.

To date, the Duo has commissioned composers David Lang, Paul Lansky, Tristan Perich, John Supko, Nathan Davis, Jonathan Leshnoff, Alex Wroten, Scott Lindroth, and Matt McBane. The Duo has shared this music with audiences throughout the country, including performances at the Barbican Center, Weill Recital Hall, MoMA, the Bang on a Can Marathon, (le) poisson rouge, the Ojai Music Festival, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, the International Festival-Institute at Round Top, and the Percussive Arts Society International Convention.

The Meehan/ Perkins Duo’s recording Restless, Endless, Tactless: Johanna Beyer and the Birth of American Percussion Music chronicles a largely unknown body of early percussion works from the 1930s

by Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, and others. The release was praised as “immaculately played by the duo” by the BBC Music Magazine and “an engaging experience” by Gramophone. Fanfare magazine perhaps best sums up the recording by stating, “This is a must-hear for anyone remotely interested in the development of music in the past century and is strongly recommended.” The Duo’s latest release, Parallels, was named one of Rolling Stone’s Top Avant Records of 2015.

The Meehan/ Perkins Duo uses Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Pearl/Adams drums and keyboards, Black Swamp Percussion accessories, Remo drumheads, and Zildjian cymbals.

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Frank Morelli, the first bassoonist to receive a doctorate

at Juilliard, has been soloist at Carnegie Hall on nine occasions, and performed at the White House for the final state dinner of the Clinton Presidency. Principal bassoonist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra and the Westchester Philharmonic, he was principal bassoon of the NYC Opera for 27 years. He teaches at Juilliard, Yale, MSM, SUNY Stony Brook, and the Glenn Gould School in Toronto. His more than 160 recordings include MSR Classics solo CDs From the Heart, Romance and Caprice, Bassoon Brasileiro, and Baroque Fireworks. The magazine Gramophone proclaimed: “Morelli’s playing is a joy to behold.” The American Record Guide stated: “the bassoon playing on this recording is as good as it gets.” Of his DG recording of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto with Orpheus, Fanfare magazine added that this recording “reset a reviewer’s standards at too high a level for comfort in a world more productive of ordinary music making.” The Orpheus CD Shadow Dances, which features Frank Morelli, won a 2001 Grammy Award.

A prolific chamber musician, he has appeared at the most prestigious national and international festivals. He is a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, ensemble in residence at MSM, and Festival Chamber Music. He compiled the landmark excerpt book Stravinsky: Difficult Passages for Bassoon for Boosey and Hawkes and has numerous transcriptions in print. His revision of the widely-used Weissenborn Bassoon Method Book and Studies will soon be in print, commissioned by Carl Fischer Publishers.

Please visit www.morellibassoon.com. `

FRANK MORELLI

BASSOON

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Pianist Pedja Muzijevic has performed with the

PEDJA MUZIJEVIC

PIANO

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Atlanta Symphony, Dresden Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Orquesta Sinfonica in Montevideo, Residentie Orkest in The Hague, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Shinsei Nihon Orchestra in Tokyo, and the Zagreb Philharmonic. He has played solo recitals at Alice Tully Hall and Frick Collection in New York, Terrace Theater at Kennedy Center and National Gallery in Washington, DC, Ravinia Festival, Casals Hall and Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo, Teatro Municipal in Santiago de Chile, the Aldeburgh Festival in Great Britain, and many others. His festival appearances include Spoleto USA, Bay Chamber Concerts, Toronto Summer Music, Bravo! Vail, Mostly Mozart, etc. He has toured with Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project throughout the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia and with Simon Keenlyside in Trisha Brown’s staged version of Schubert’s Winterreise at Lincoln Center in New York, Barbican in London, La Monnaie in Brussels, Opera National de Paris, as well as in Amsterdam, Lucerne, and Melbourne. Pedja is the artistic administrator of Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York and part of the artistic leadership at Banff Centre in Canada, where he directs a residency called Concert in 21st Century.

Mark Nuccio is Principal Clarinetist with the Houston

Symphony Orchestra and he serves on the clarinet faculty at the University of Houston’s Moore School of Music. Mr. Nuccio performed thirteen years with the New York Philharmonic as Associate Principal and Solo E-flat Clarinetist and four years as Acting Principal Clarinet. Before serving with the Philharmonic, he held positions with orchestras in Pittsburgh, Denver, Savannah, and Florida. An active soloist and chamber musician, Nuccio made his Carnegie Hall New York recital debut in 2001 and has performed concertos on multiple occasions with the New York Philharmonic. As a studio musician, Mr. Nuccio is featured on numerous movie soundtracks, including Failure To Launch, The Last Holiday, The Rookie, The Score, Intolerable Cruelty, Alamo, Poohʼs Heffalump, Hitch, The Manchurian Candidate, and various television commercials, and he has performed on The Late Show with David Letterman and on the 2003 Grammy Awards. He is also an avid chamber musician, performing in Europe, Asia, and across the United States. His own debut album featuring the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms, Opening Night, was released in November 2006. A Colorado native, Mr. Nuccio has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Colorado and a masterʼs degree from Northwestern University, where he studied with renowned pedagogue Robert Marcellus. Beyond his active performing schedule, Mr. Nuccio is a dedicated teacher committed to training the next generation of musicians and teaches master classes in the U.S. and abroad.

MARK NUCCIO

CL ARINET

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With her consistently striking and dynamic

performances, pianist Natasha Paremski reveals astounding virtuosity and voracious interpretive abilities.

NATASHA PAREMSKI

Natasha has performed with major orchestras across Europe and North America. She has toured with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica and given recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Schloss Elmau, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, and elsewhere. A passionate chamber musician, Natasha has been a guest of many chamber music festivals.

Natasha enjoys performing beyond the traditional concert hall. In 2008, she was the featured pianist in choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Danses Concertantes at New York’s Joyce Theater. She was also featured in a major two-part film for BBC Television on the life and work of Tchaikovsky, shot on location in St. Petersburg. And she participated in the filming of Twin Spirits, a project starring Sting and Trudie Styler that explores the music and writing of Robert and Clara Schumann.

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Natasha’s first recital album was released in 2011 to such great acclaim that it was re-released on the Steinway and Sons label five years later. In 2012, she recorded Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Fabien Gabel.

Born in Moscow, Natasha began her piano studies at the age of four with Nina Malikova at Moscow’s Andreyev School of Music. She moved to the United States at the age of eight and became a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter.

Natasha has received numerous awards, including the Gilmore Young Artists prize, the Prix Montblanc, Switzerland’s Orpheum Stiftung Prize, and the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year.

D

oug Perkins has been described as “terrific, wide-awake and strikingly entertaining” by the Boston Globe and declared a “percussion virtuoso ” by the New York Times. He founded the percussion quartet So Percussion and the Meehan/ Perkins Duo. He also performs regularly with Signal, eighth blackbird, and countless others.

DOUG PERKINS

Doug’s recordings can be heard on the Bridge, Cantaloupe, Harmonia Mundi, New Focus, and New World labels. His productions of Persephassa in Central Park Lake and John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit were named Top Ten Performances in 2010 and 2011 by The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Time Out NY. Doug is on the percussion faculty of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, the Director of the Chosen Vale International Percussion Seminar, served with eighth blackbird as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Chicago, and was previously on the faculty of Dartmouth College.

PERCUSSION

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Called “a cellist of extraordinary technical and

musical gifts” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Roman has earned an international reputation for his wide-ranging repertoire, his artistic leadership, and his versatility.

JOSHUA ROMAN

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Roman spent two seasons as principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. He has appeared as a soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Moscow State Symphony, and Mariinsky Orchestra, among many others. An active chamber musician, he has collaborated with Cho-Liang Lin, Assad Brothers, Christian Zacharias, Yo-Yo Ma, the JACK Quartet, the Enso String Quartet, and Talea Ensemble. Roman was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra’s 2009 debut concert at Carnegie Hall, and has given a solo performance on the TED2015 main stage. Mason Bates’s Cello Concerto was dedicated to Roman, who gave its “world-class world premiere” (Seattle Times) with the Seattle Symphony in 2014, and has since performed it with orchestras around the U.S. The Pulitzer Prizewinnig composer Aaron Jay Kernis wrote Dreamsongs for Roman, which he performed with the Omaha Symphony in March of this year.

Roman serves as Artistic Director of Town Music at Town Hall Seattle and as Artistic Advisor of Seattle’s Second Inversion. His YouTube series (youtube.com/joshuaromancello), “Everyday Bach,” features Roman performing Bach’s cello suites from beautiful settings around the world.

Roman was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015.

He is grateful for the loan of an 1899 cello by Giulio Degani of Venice.

Hailed as an “expressive champion” by the Cleveland

Plain Dealer and “superb” by The Oregonian, Jessica Sindell is the current solo piccolo player of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Prior to her most recent position, Jessica won her very first orchestral audition at the age of 22 for principal flute of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra. She performed there for over two years and recorded two albums with the Oregon Symphony.

JESSICA SINDELL

Jessica is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Bonita Boyd. While pursuing her master's, she performed with the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra.

Ms. Sindell was the recipient of consecutive fellowships to participate in the Aspen Music Festival and school during the summers of 2012 through 2013 as well as the Music Academy of the West in 2014. In 2012 she began performing at the Lake Tahoe Music Festival, which she still presently attends every summer. She has been acting principal of the Mainly Mozart festival in San Diego, as well as acting principal with the Colorado Music Festival. She has been invited to perform chamber music in the Camera Lucida series in San Diego, in Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest festival, and the Nielsen Flute concerto with the Portland Chamber Orchestra. Jessica has made appearances with the Houston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony, and several other orchestras.

F LU T E

She performs and records with the Pink Martini band on occasion.

Jessica is thrilled for her second appearance at Tippet Rise!

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“Modern...dramatic...superb...wickedly attentive...

THE ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET

with a hint of rock ‘n’ roll energy...” are just a few ways critics describe the musical phenomenon that is the St. Lawrence String Quartet. The SLSQ is renowned for the intensity of its performances, its breadth of repertoire, and its commitment to concert experiences that are at once intellectually exciting and emotionally alive.

Fiercely committed to collaboration with living composers, the quartet’s partnerships with Adams, Jonathan Berger, Osvaldo Golijov, and many others have yielded some of the finest additions to the quartet literature in recent years. The ensemble is also dedicated to the music of Haydn, recording his groundbreaking set of six opus 20 quartets in high-definition video for a free, universal release online in 2017. According to The New Yorker, “no other North American quartet plays the music of Haydn with more intelligence, expressivity, and force.”

Established in Toronto in 1989, the SLSQ quickly earned acclaim at top international chamber music competitions and was soon playing hundreds of concerts per year worldwide. They established an ongoing residency at Spoleto Festival USA, made prize-winning recordings for EMI of music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Golijov, earning two Grammy nominations and a host of other prizes before being appointed ensemble-in-residence at Stanford University in 1999.

In the words of Alex Ross of The New Yorker: “The St. Lawrence are remarkable not simply for the quality of their music making, exalted as it is, but for the joy they take in the act of connection.”

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Hailed by London’s Daily Telegraph as “potentially one

of the greatest pianists of the 21st century,” Yevgeny Sudbin has appeared with distinguished conductors and symphony orchestras throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. These include London Philharmonic, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Singapore Symphony, the Bergen, Czech, and Warsaw Philharmonics, the European Union Orchestra, and L’Orchestre de Lyon under Leonard Slatkin. In North America, he has appeared with symphony orchestras from coast to coast. Yevgeny’s recitals have found him performing annually in Wigmore Hall’s Master Series and in concert halls and festivals from Singapore to Zurich, Aspen to Seattle.

YEVGENY SUDBIN

Yevgeny has an ongoing exclusive recording contract with the Swedish label BIS, with numerous solo CDs featuring repertoire by Scarlatti, Haydn, Chopin, Scriabin (awarded the MIDEM Classical Award for best solo instrument CD at Cannes), Rachmaninoff,and Liszt/Saint-Saëns/Ravel. He has recorded with Sao Paulo Symphony, Singapore Symphony, and the Bergen Philharmonic, with Andrew Litton conducting the Scriabin Piano Concerto and Medtner Piano Concerto No. 3.

Yevgeny was born in St Petersburg in 1980 and began his musical studies at the Specialist Music School of the St Petersburg Conservatory with Lyubov Pevsner at the age of 5. In 1990, he emigrated with his family to Germany, where he continued his studies at Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule. He completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the Royal Academy of Music under Christopher Elton. Today, Yevgeny lives in London with his wife and two young children and, in his spare time, he is an avid photographer.

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Stephen Versaevel, Director of Percussion Studies/

STEPHEN VERSAEVAL

PERCUSSION

Assistant Director of Athletic Bands at Montana State University since August 2006, is a Doctor of Music candidate in Percussion Performance at The Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL, where as a Graduate Assistant, he instructed the Marching Chiefs “Big 8” Drum Line. He holds a master’s degree in Percussion Performance from the University of Kansas and a Bachelor of Music Education from South Dakota State University, and has studied with Dr. John Parks IV and Mr. James McKinney.

Stephen is currently a Section Percussionist with the Bozeman Symphony Orchestra and Carl Fischer Publications recording ensemble in Tampa, Florida.

As a soloist he has appeared with the Montana State University Symphony Orchestra on their goodwill trip to Vietnam and Thailand, the University of Kansas Percussion Ensemble, The Florida State University Percussion Ensemble, and was a performer on the prestigious FSU Kaleidoscope series concert. Stephen’s other performance credits include playing in the Key Stone City Percussion Ensemble, performing highlights from George Crumb’s “The American Songbook Collection” at the fall 2011 National Association of Teachers of Singing Texoma Region Conference, the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, Dothan Symphony, the Helena Symphony, and the San Angelo Symphony Orchestra. Stephen may also be heard on the critically acclaimed compact disc Dusk: Music From the Heartland (2004), featuring the University of Kansas Percussion Ensemble.

Stephen is active as both an educator and arranger for many high school and college drum lines across the United States, and is president of the Montana chapter of Percussive Arts.

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The Musician at Tippet Rise

J

iacheng Xiong is a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studies with Robert McDonald. Prior to entering Curtis, he attended the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, where he was awarded eight scholarships for outstanding professional excellence. He has performed in recital at the famed Salle Cortot in Paris, and appeared on NPR’s From the Top. In 2013 he was awarded first prize in the first Korea International Competition for Young Pianists. In 2015, Xiong was awarded second prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition for young artists, second prize and the “audience favorite” prize at the Viseu International Piano Competition. In 2016, he took the second prize at the Stecher and Horowitz Foundation International Piano Competition.

In the same year, he did his first concert tour of China.

JIACHENG XIONG

PIANO

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Education at Tippet Rise Montana State University Honors College Program:

A Montana State University Honors College “Art Expedition” course will bring 20 to 25 Honors students to Tippet Rise in August, 2017. Students will attend concerts, discussions with the Art Center’s founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead, and lectures by architect Laura Viklund and Tippet Rise Artistic Advisor Charles Hamlen. The visit will give students the opportunity to immerse themselves not only in art, music, and nature, but also architecture, environmental sciences, engineering, and land management, all in a way that links the human experience with the sights, sounds, and sensations of rural Montana.

The students will be accompanied by Dean Ilse-Mari Lee, Professor of Music and Dean of the Honors College, and a professional cellist. In preparation for the weekend, students will study the artists, musicians, musical scores, composers, natural history, and artwork they will experience at Tippet Rise.

The MSU Honors College aims to enrich the state of Montana by offering exceptional opportunities to Montana students to study, conduct research, and exchange ideas in challenging and supportive environments on and off campus. Honors College students routinely receive some of the most prestigious academic awards, including the GatesCambridge Scholarship, the Truman Scholarship (Brown, Vanderbilt, Yale and MSU all had two winners last year), and the Goldwater Scholarship (MSU ranks eighth in the nation, just ahead of Yale, for the total number of Goldwater Scholars).

Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild:

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is funding Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild International Sculpture Park, which celebrates the rich environmental, industrial and cultural heritage of the Blackfoot Valley. Sculptors have been invited to create

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significant site-specific works of art using the materials—natural and industrial—that are associated with the community’s economic and cultural traditions. The Tippet Rise Fund will support the installation of a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty at Sculpture in the Wild in September 2017.

Workshops at Tippet Rise:

Tippet Rise offers many workshops and other cultural opportunities at the art center throughout the seasons, including: • Three Summer Camp Workshops with the Boys & Girls Club of Carbon County in 2016, one led by internationally renowned sculptor Mark di Suvero. These workshops will continue in 2017.

• Montana Shakespeare in the Parks worked with Red Lodge High School students at Tippet Rise in the fall of 2016. In the Spring of 2017, Montana Shakes held workshops with local Fishtail and Nye Schools at Tippet Rise.

• A local summer nature workshop and an adult watercolor plein-air workshop will be offered at the art center in 2017.

• Tippet Rise has hosted group piano lessons for many of the region’s piano students.

Art In Montana Women’s Prison:

When Cierra Coppock was 14, she sold her iPad to finance her school project: paying her art teacher to teach the work of Van Gogh, whom she loves, and other artists to women in the Montana Women’s Prison in Billings. Several years later, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation continues Cierra’s initiative, and the only criticism the program has received is that it isn’t frequent enough.

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Tippet Rise and the Community

by Lindsey Hinmon

CARBON COUNTY ARTS GUILD The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is pleased to support the Carbon County Arts Guild. With this collaboration, we support the common purpose of keeping art as a vital part of the education of today’s youth. The Tippet Rise Fund brings art into the classrooms of seven local schools through a traveling art teacher program. Three art teachers make regular visits to Nye, Fishtail, Luther, Fromberg, Joliet, Roberts, and Belfry schools, schools in which art classes may not have otherwise been an option. Through this partnership, students also come to Tippet Rise Art Center to meet artists during the installation of their sculptures, and to experience, hands on, art in nature. In 2015, the Fishtail and Nye Schools worked with renowned sculptor Stephen Talasnik during the installation of Satellite #5: Pioneer.

Motivated by the visit, they returned to their classrooms to build their own sculptures using their interpretations of Satellite #5: Pioneer and the skills they learned from Talasnik. In 2016, Luther School students visited Tippet Rise with art teacher Willis Johnson.

They returned to school, where they cast their own Ensamble Studio-inspired pieces and reflected on their experience at the art center through watercolor, pencil, pen, and other media. The students’ artwork was on display for a month-long art show at Honey’s Café in Red Lodge in July of 2016. Tippet Rise is thrilled that programs such as these will continue to grow alongside the art center.

RED LODGE AREA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION In partnership with the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation and the Carbon County Arts Guild, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation brought more than 20 local grade school students to Tippet Rise to participate in a unique workshop 320

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with artist Patrick Dougherty during the installation of Daydreams. Students worked alongside Patrick, one of today’s most admired sculptors, learning and building their own sculptures using local willows.

Students boarded the bus at the end of the day with arms full of willows for their own future creations. The Tippet Rise Fund also supports the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation’s activities in the community of Red Lodge. For example, with Tippet Rise Fund support, the Community Foundation was able to run its Youth Volunteer Project, an initiative to enrich the learning environment in local schools; one such initiative is the construction of a new recording studio in Red Lodge High School.

RED LODGE MUSIC FESTIVAL The Red Lodge Music Festival has celebrated summer music camp for more than 50 years, focusing on inspiring a love of classical and jazz music in youth.

The Festival’s nine-day camp hosts professional faculty to teach student musicians and prepare them to perform in recitals. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation supports scholarships for the Festival’s Honor Ensemble and other students.

NYE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION The Nye Community Foundation was founded in 1999 to build a permanent financial base to support and promote projects that will benefit the residents of Nye and the surrounding area. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation provides scholarship funding for the Foundation’s efforts to encourage the higher education dreams of local students. Since its founding in 1999, the Nye Community Foundation has awarded over $90,000 in scholarships.

NYE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is proud to support the Nye Volunteer Fire Department’s fire prevention and protection services.

With the Fund’s support, the Department is now better equipped with a custom “wild lands fire truck” and a Smokey the Bear fire danger sign for the town.

The Tippet Rise Fund also purchased equipment and tooling for an off-road tanker truck for the Department and helped to expand community outreach programs for fire prevention education, such as fuel mitigation around homes and subdivisions and maintaining fire extinguishers. Tippet Rise Art Center appreciates the hard work and time that volunteer fire fighters dedicate to ensure the safety and security of the community and land near the art center and throughout the region.

ABSAROKEE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION The Absarokee Community Foundation takes pride in organizing and building a stronger community within Absarokee and its surrounding communities for today and for the future. In support of the ACF’s efforts, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation funds local community initiatives for educational, environmental, and social services. Local nonprofit organizations supported by ACF with the help of funders like Tippet Rise Fund include the Absarokee PTA, Husky Wilderness Adventures, Operation Second Chance, Emergency Medical Services, the Absarokee Senior Center, and the Stillwater Valley Watershed Council SKIP’S KIDS Absarokee resident Skip Meier created Skip’s Kids to which he dedicates his time and energy to provide

local youth with positive pursuits and academic support. Supported by the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Skip’s Kids provides a safe place for students and young adults to congregate and learn; runs after-school programming including archery, arts, cheerleading, and wrestling; offers summer camps that teach hunting safety and camping skills; and delivers academic tutoring. Many adults volunteer with the program, providing positive mentors and role models as well as sharing their skills and talents with the students. Tippet Rise Art Center hopes to share with Skip’s Kids the vision of art, music, and nature at the art center.

ABSAROKEE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation has been proud to support the Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department’s mission to protect and preserve the lives and property of Absarokee area residents. Because the Fund cares about the safety and efficacy of the dedicated Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department volunteers, the Fund has provided support for updating uniforms as well as purchasing new helmets and a thermal imaging camera. The Tippet Rise Fund also purchased a new ice-making machine for the Fire Department, and it supports the Department’s efforts to provide fire safety and prevention education in the local schools.

ABSAROKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLS It is a joy to share a love for music with our region’s young people. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation helped to purchase equipment for the Absarokee Public Schools’ music departments, including keyboards, MIDI controllers, and orchestral string instruments.

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Tippet Rise Partnerships We are very fortunate to partner with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the modern art branch of the august Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian is our nation’s museum, and also the world’s largest museum complex, founded in 1846, with nineteen museums and nine research facilities. We are supporting ARTLAB+, their digital lab, which provides training for young people in technologies such as disc jockeying and virtual reality, offering certifications which students can then use for college admissions and later in the job market. Melissa Chiu, the Director of the Hirshhorn, believes in extending the nation’s museum to everyone in the country, not just urban residents. Fishtail is one of the first beneficiaries of that expanded outreach. We thank her, the staff, the Hirshhorn board, and David Skorton, the 13th Secretary of the Smithsonian, for the loan of Two Discs and Stainless Stealer, both by Alexander Calder. Two Discs was given to the Hirshhorn by its founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, in 1966. This is its first appearance outside Washington, D.C. Joseph Hirshhorn presented Stainless Stealer to the Hirshhorn in 1972.

We celebrate as well our friendship with the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, whose Artistic Director, Anne-Marie McDermott, returns to Tippet Rise to perform once again. Hailed as one of the Top 10 "Can't Miss" Classical Musical Festivals in the U.S. by NPR, Bravo! Vail is the only festival in North America to host four world-renowned orchestras in a single season: the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, playing in the gorgeous outdoor Ford Amphitheater.

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The Billings Symphony Orchestra has contributed both the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City Strings to Tippet Rise over the past few years. We support their Explore Music education and outreach program.

The UK’s National Theatre broadcast its series of recorded plays in the Olivier Music Barn last summer and fall, including Hedda Gabler, Saint Joan, Twelfth Night, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. We also broadcast select performances by Glyndebourne Opera.

Tippet Rise’s partner, The Sidney E. Frank Foundation, has helped fund the filming and broadcast of many Glyndebourne, National Theatre, and Royal Shakespeare Company plays over the years.

Montana State University Honors College will hold an “Art Expedition” course at Tippet Rise Art Center. The Honors College aims to expand learning beyond the traditional classroom boundaries. Twenty to twenty-five multidisciplinary, highly motivated students will have the opportunity to attend concerts, explore the beautiful natural surroundings, and contemplate the unique, large-scale art installations.

Finally, we have been inspired for many years by our friendship with Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley. They generously agreed to part with Mark di Suvero’s iconic Beethoven’s Quartet, which was displayed at Storm King since 2003. Di Suvero’s sculptures have been displayed there since 1968. Widely celebrated as one of the world’s leading sculpture parks, Storm King has welcomed visitors from across the globe for 50 years. Its pristine 500-acre landscape of fields, hills, and woodlands provides the setting for a collection of more than 100 carefully sited sculptures created by some of the most acclaimed artists of our time. Storm King published the first definitive monograph of the works of Mark di Suvero, with 150 photographs.

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The Tippet Rise Team Lindsey Hinmon Director of Outreach and Logistics

Lindsey keeps the logistics of Tippet Rise humming smoothly, alongside her husband, Pete. She coordinates with artists, musicians, community members, and educators, from kindergarten teachers to university professors, as well as leaders from regional and national cultural institutions, welcoming everyone into the Tippet Rise family.

Lindsey oversees public relations and is instrumental to the Art Center’s planning and development, helping to bring the Tippet Rise vision of nature, music and art intertwined to full, blooming life-an experience she hopes to share with her Montana friends and people from all over the world.

Pete Hinmon Director of Operations A lifelong pursuit of adventure in the mountains led Pete to Tippet Rise, where he draws on his experience to make the organization’s vision and mission a reality.

Intrigued by the exploration of art and nature, Pete’s role at Tippet Rise is an adventure in itself. Often working in tandem with his wife, Lindsey, Pete provides team leadership, oversees the Art Center’s operations, planning, and development, and coordinates the installation of its sculptures.

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Ben Wynthein Ranch Manager Ben oversees ranching operations at Tippet Rise.

From May to mid-November, this work includes grazing oversight of 200 to 300 calf-cow pairs, 100 to 120 heifers, and 2,000 to 2,600 head of sheep. He works year round to improve Tippet Rise’s rangeland health as well as its water use and conservation practices.

Through these efforts, Ben endeavors to make Tippet Rise an increasingly healthy and viable ranch-land, wildlife habitat, and treasured piece of the Montana landscape. In the process, he hopes the Art Center’s guests can enjoy and experience Montana’s rich ranching heritage. For the past ten years, Ben has lived with his family on or next to what is now Tippet Rise.

Melissa Moore Communications and Administration Manager With a background in theater and hospitality, Melissa oversees communication and administration at Tippet Rise. From managing the Art Center’s website and social media accounts to orchestrating event planning and ticketing, her contributions are indispensable to day-to-day operations and to her colleagues at Tippet Rise. Melissa lives in Red Lodge with her husband and two young daughters.

Beth Huhtala Art Education and Visitor Center Coordinator With a background in fine art and education, Beth has taught kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as at the college level, running art workshops, teaching classes, and giving tours. She earned a BFA from the University of Wyoming and an MFA from the University of Montana and is a professional artist herself. Beth began working at Tippet Rise as an intern during the inaugural season, and now oversees the organization’s art education programs, which focus on art, music, architecture, and conservation in hands-on workshops for all ages.

Alexis Adams Publications Administrator Alexis helps to write and edit stories and other content for the art center’s website, ads, and this very book. Before joining the Tippet Rise team, Alexis was a freelance writer, contributing to Oxford University Press, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and other publications. A “nearly” lifelong Montanan, she has also spent much of her life in Greece. Today she lives in Red Lodge with her two teenaged children, a bird dog named Milly, and a couple of Greek cats.

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Thank you to the many others on the Tippet Rise team who help to keep the art center flourishing. They include: Chris Clark Along with the team she brings to assist her, Chris works behind the scenes to keep the Cottonwood Campus and other Tippet Rise structures clean, warm, and welcoming. With her infectious smile and longtime roots in this region, Chris makes Tippet Rise feel like home.

Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed Chefs Nick and Wendi of Wild Flower Kitchen provide delicious sustenance to our guests, artists, and staff.

Nick was born in London, the child of a Brit and a Montanan. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon. From Los Angeles, Wendi studied at Johnson & Wales University in Denver. The two met in Colorado and moved to the family cabin in Fishtail. They started Wild Flower Kitchen in 2015.

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Kathy Kasic and Mickey Houlihan Kathy is a film artist who chases the light with a camera to capture the delicate, ephemeral moments of our life on this planet. At Tippet Rise, she directs films and, along with Mickey Houlihan, oversees the video interns. She also teaches film at Montana State University, has exhibited her work at international festivals and art galleries, and broadcast on television including National Geographic, BBC, and PBS. Mickey has traveled through the natural wonders of the world while recording music in nature with the Paul Winter Consort. He has witnessed the imbalances of our ways during the filming of “Racing Extinction� and received a Grammy Award for his work with cellist David Darling. Working with Kathy at Tippet Rise to help steer the intern program of sound recording and filmmaking is a chance to reveal the beauty in art, music, and landscape that connects us all.

Craig M. White While Craig has had many management positions with national marketing and advertising firms during his career in communications, he has never wandered far from his love of the creative process since his very first position at D’Arcy MacManus and Masius. From Budweiser to Bravo! Vail, he has managed a wide variety of accounts from coast to coast. At Tippet Rise, Craig uses his artistry and his skills as a graphic designer to create beautiful advertising pieces, brochures, this book you are holding in your hands, the 2017 Summer Music Program and many other creative works.

Jeanne Reid White Drawing on a background of management, planning, marketing, and fundraising for diverse groups, from international ski events to classical and jazz concerts, Jeanne serves as Special Projects Advisor at Tippet Rise. She finds it deeply fulfilling to work with musicians from all genres, help them realize their creative visions, and then share it with audiences in the Olivier Music Barn, on the land of Tippet Rise, and throughout the virtual world. Jeanne and her husband, Craig, enjoy skiing, hiking, traveling, and all kinds of live music performances.

Laura Viklund Architect Laura Viklund worked as a timber framer for several years before attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design to earn her Master’s in Architecture. She and her husband, Chris Gunn, founded Gunnstock Timber Frames in 2005. At Tippet Rise, their contributions include Will’s Shed, the extraordinary Olivier Music Barn, and the Artists’ Residences. They constructed the Tiara Acoustic Shell, and worked alongside Stephen Talasnik in the construction of Satellite #5: Pioneer.

On-Site Management (OSM) Based out of Bozeman, Montana and Jackson, Wyoming, OSM managed the construction of Will’s Shed and Ensamble Studio’s three sculptural structures: the Domo, the Inverted Portal, and the Beartooth Portal.

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To our friends, neighbors, and visitors, This has been a wonderful summer, I can safely say before it’s even started, looking at all the sly programs which our artists made up on their own.

Many of them have chosen ways of showing us the sounds of their quartets, instrument by instrument, and then closed their weekends with gorgeous showpieces which assemble all the sounds and textures of those instruments into extraordinary works.

So this has been a season of growing, of learning about very creative ways of thinking (like Feldman’s idea of painting with tones), and ways of teasing out the flaws inherent in having to follow conventions in every age (as in the Poulenc Sextet or the CPE Bach sonatas), or ways in which composers copy one another (as Janácek copied Beethoven) to add layers to the tree rings of musical history.

By this time, we all understand a bit more about how composers think, why people write what they write, and how it happens that they write at all.

And it’s all because these young people stayed inside and studied for 30 years, grappled with their fingers and their breath like Olympic athletes; because composers sometimes even gave their lives for the music they wrote (as Prokofiev and Shostakovich chose to live in Stalinist Russia and endure the deaths of most of their friends because they needed to weave the land into their music); and because all of you chose to give up some of your time and come to Tippet Rise to be part of this pageant of history, this quirk in human aspiration, where I hope we’ve all grown concert by concert into a world that’s somehow been enlarged by the sheer love of mankind, by people who would go to all this trouble to entertain complete strangers with a shot in the dark, a breeze through the woods, the sound of distant churches—the sound of Russia in 1910, or Vienna in 1784—but also the sound of Montana today.

Thank you.

Peter and Cathy and the Team at Tippet Rise

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CONCERT PERFORMANCES FROM OUR 2017 MUSIC SEASON Nikolai Medtner: Sonata Tragica in C minor, Op. 39, No. 5, from “Forgotten Melodies”: Performed by Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/234386771 Frédéric Chopin: “Minute Waltz” in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1: Arranged and performed by Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/228499513 George Enescu: Impressions from Childhood, Performed by Caroline Goulding and David Fung: https://vimeo.com/251736683 W. A. Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in E minor, K. 304: Tempo di Menuetto, Performed by Caroline Goulding and David Fung, https://vimeo.com/250376580 Robert Schumann: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, Op. 121, mvt. 4: Bewegt: Performed by Caroline Goulding and David Fung, https://vimeo.com/238145603 Franz Liszt: Sonata in B minor: Performed by Jenny Chen, https://vimeo.com/253644968 Frédéric Chopin: Etude Op. 10, No. 3: Performed by Jenny Chen, https://vimeo.com/230091432 Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etude No. 10 in F minor: Performed by Jenny Chen, https://vimeo.com/228727262 Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, “The Dance at the Village Inn”: Performed by Adam Golka, https://vimeo.com/240705807 Johannes Brahms: Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, mvt. 3. Scherzo: Performed by Adam Golka, https://vimeo.com/239037768 Samuel A. Ward: “America the Beautiful”: Improvisation performed by Jeffrey Kahane, https://vimeo.com/231213297

Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83, mvt. 3: Precipitato: Performed by Natasha Paremski, https://vimeo.com/247035779 Sergei Rachmaninoff: Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 19, mvt. 3: Andante: Performed by Zuill Bailey (cello) and Natasha Paremski (piano), https://vimeo.com/241911968 C.P.E. Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq. 65/17: Performed by Pedja Muzijevic, https://vimeo.com/251991034 Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye, 5. Le jardin féerique: Performed by Jessica Sindell (flute), Alex Klein (oboe), Mark Nuccio (clarinet), Frank Morelli (bassoon), Daniel Hawkins (horn), https://vimeo.com/254228483 Eugène Bozza: Image for solo flute: Performed by Jessica Sindell, https://vimeo.com/241258165 Vitaly Buyanovsky: España, from Four Improvisations from Traveling Impressions: Performed by Daniel Hawkins, https://vimeo.com/245454039 J.S. Bach: English Suite No. 2 - Prelude: Performed by Anne-Marie McDermott, https://vimeo.com/254145647 John Luther Adams: Red Arc/Blue Veil: Performed by Vicky Chow and Doug Perkins,

https://vimeo.com/246899161

Gabriel Fauré: Nocturne No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 33: Performed by Michael Brown, https://vimeo.com/256602389 Ludwig van Beethoven: Variations and Fugue for Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 35, “Eroica”: Performed by Michael Brown, https://vimeo.com/258173032 Nikolai Medtner: Second Improvisation, Op. 47 (Var. 14: Mermaid’s Song; Var. 15: Bad Weather; Conclusion): Performed by Michael Brown, https://vimeo.com/248486378

Tippet Rise Staff and Credits Founders Cathy and Peter Halstead Artistic Advisor Charles Hamlen Director of Operations Pete Hinmon Director of Outreach and Logistics Lindsey Hinmon Ranch Manager Ben Wynthein Communication and Administration Manager Melissa Moore Publications Administrator Alexis M. Adams Art Education and Visitor Center Coordinator Beth Huhtala Maintenance Assistant Dan Luttschwager Special Projects Advisor Jeanne Reid White Director of Audio and Video Mickey Houlihan of Digital Poets Director of Film Arts Kathy Kasic of Digital Poets and Metamorph Films Audio Engineer Monte Nickles Piano Technicians Mike Toia, Tali Mahanor, Drew Carter Food Services & Catering Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed from Wild Flower Kitchen Creative Consultant and Graphic Design Craig M. White Videography Djuna Zupancic, Kathy Kasic, AndrĂŠ Costantini, Erik Petersen

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Photography AndrĂŠ Costantini, Iwan Baan, Peter Halstead, Paul Johnson, Kevin Kinzley, Erik Petersen,

Yevgeny Sudbin, Craig M. White Website Design Crush & Lovely Lead Design and Planning

Alban Bassuet

Architecture (Olivier Barn, Residences, Tiara, Will’s Shed) Laura Viklund and Chris Gunn, Gunnstock Timber Frames Architecture (Energy Building, Daydreams Schoolhouse, Solar Canopy) CTA Architects Engineers Acoustician Alban Bassuet Landscape Architect Lisa Delplace and Liz Stetson from Oehme, van Sweden Interior Design Cynthia Waters LEED Consulting High Plains Architects Design and Engineering Arup Audiovisual Consultant K2 Audio, LLC Local Civil Engineering DOWL Local Engineering MKK Engineering Civil Contractor BAIRCO Construction Management Engel Construction, Inc., and On Site Management, Inc. Public Relations Polskin Arts & Communications/A Division of Finn Partners, and Skinner/Benoit Public Relations

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This publication was prepared for Season Two at Tippet Rise Art Center.

Photographers for the 2017 Art Center Guide: Iwan Baan Andre Costantini Peter Halstead Paul Johnson Kathy Kasic Kevin Kinzley Erik Petersen Yevgeny Sudbin Craig M. White Djuna Zupancic Cover Photography by Yevgeny Sudbin Text by Peter Halstead and the Tippet Rise Team unless otherwise noted.

Edited by Alexis Adams, Amy Holmes, René Saller Creative Consulting and Design by Craig M. White Production by McKenzie Designs, LLC ©2018 Tippet Rise, LLC Two Discs and Stainless Stealer photos, by permission, © 2018 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic or mechanical (including photo copy, film or video recording, internet posting, or any other information storage and retrieval system), without the prior, written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018906273 ISBN 978-1-7823390-0-8 Printed by Thomas Printing, Billings, Montana Printed on 10% Post-Consumer Recycled Fiber, FSC. Visit tippetrise.org for more information about the artists, tours, events, videos of performances and interviews.

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96 South Grove Creek Road, Fishtail, MT 59028 406-328-7820 tippetrise.org

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