24/25 CLASSICAL SERIES
GIL SHAHAM, VIOLIN & ORLI SHAHAM,
PIANO
THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2025 | 7:30 PM
Shannon Hall at Memorial Union
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The Wisconsin Union Directorate Performing Arts Committee (WUD PAC) is a student-run organization that brings world-class artists to campus by programming the Wisconsin Union Theater’s annual season of events.
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PROGRAM
Amanda Röntgen-Maier (1853–1894)
Clara Schumann (1819–1896)
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Robert Schumann
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Violin Sonata in B Minor (1878)
Allegro Andantino
Allegro molto vivace
Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 (1853)
Andante molto
Allegretto Leidenschaftlich schnell
Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 105 (1851)
Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck Allegretto Lebhaft
Three Romances, Op. 94 (1849)
Nicht schnell Einfach, innig Nicht schnell
Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108 (1886–1888)
Allegro Adagio
Un poco presto e con sentimento Presto agitato
PROGRAM NOTES
AMANDA RÖNTGEN-MAIER
VIOLIN SONATA IN B MINOR
Swedish composer and performer Amanda Röntgen-Maier was a truly exceptional talent. She was the first woman to complete the Director of Music degree from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and the only woman to do so in her lifetime. She then went to the Leipzig Conservatory to study with Engelbert Röntgen, whose son Julius (also a composer) she would eventually marry. Known predominantly as a violin virtuoso, she toured throughout Scandinavia and participated in the active salon culture in Leipzig. She was close acquaintances with Edvard and Nina Grieg, among other famed musicians.
Once she married Julius, her career slowed down significantly as she focused on being a wife and mother. But she continued to perform occasionally, especially in salon settings, and even performed Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 3 (also heard on this evening’s program) with Clara Schumann on one occasion. The expectation that women would sideline their careers to take care of their family played a major role in reducing Röntgen-Maier’s professional life, but health problems after the birth of her second child also limited her ability to perform. She died prematurely at the age of 41, and fell into obscurity until her works started to see a revival in the 1990s, and even more so in the last 15 years.
Many of Röntgen-Maier’s works are now lost, but she composed in many chamber music genres, including for solo piano, violin and piano, string quartet, piano trio, piano quartet, and lieder. She performed her own Violin Concerto (1875) along with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Her Violin Sonata in B Minor—a success in her own time—has become one of her best-known works. She submitted it to the Swedish Art Music Society, where it was accepted by the council of readers; although they suggested changes to the slow movement, she asserted her own compositional voice and (notably politely) declined to make modifications.
Throughout the three movements, the Violin Sonata in B Minor demonstrates Röntgen-Maier’s controlled emotional clarity and mastery of form. In the second movement, which is essentially a character piece in ABA (sometimes called “rounded”) form, the opening section shows Classical balanced phrases and emotional reserve in triple meter to contrast with a faster B section that features syncopated emphasis on beat two. The first movement, in sonata-allegro form, contrasts an emotionally tumultuous first theme with a lyrical triple-meter second theme; yet despite her own skill as violinist, she holds back on virtuosic passages, using them only as decorative effects in service to the overall composition.
CLARA SCHUMANN
THREE ROMANCES FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, OP. 22
Clara Schumann’s career began as a piano prodigy, and as a result, her reputation in many ways outshone her husband Robert’s in their lifetime. Like Röntgen-Maier, once she married and had children, she dedicated more of her time to family life and less to composing, but she nonetheless gave more than 1,300 concerts over the course of her sixdecade career. During times when Robert’s composing was not supporting the family, her concertizing kept them afloat (even more so once he took himself to the asylum at the end of his life). While it is tempting to ask what kind of career Clara Schumann might have had if she had not gotten married, the reality is more complicated. As musicologist Alexander Stefaniak has recently discussed, her critical reception as a “revelatory” interpreter—that is, a pianist who reveals the inner truth of a work or the inner spirit of the composer—actually improved after she married. When she was unwed, her critics commonly called her interpretations too capricious and childlike (that is, girlish). After she married, she was praised for suppressing her creative inspiration and making her interpretation subservient to the composer (that is, she was subordinate and wifely). Ultimately, by fulfilling social expectations of a woman’s role as a supportive wife and mother—she was also frequently recognized as the champion of her husband’s music—she was able to reach new heights of artistic recognition no woman before her had achieved. Her impact on the chamber concert, especially as
an exponent of the canon of great composers of the past, is still felt today.
It was no accident that Clara’s predominant success was as an interpreter at the piano rather than as a composer. Composition was closely associated with the concept of genius, and strongly gendered masculine, whereas the interpreter was viewed as a vessel—reviewers commonly called her a “sibyl” or “oracle”—for such (masculine) genius. Clara did subscribe (for the most part) to these attitudes, which were a topic of regular discussion in letters between her and her friend, opera diva Pauline Viardot, another renowned woman interpreter who also composed and had a strong, if uncredited, hand in creating her operatic scores with composers. As a composer, however, Clara wrote two piano concertos (one unpublished until the 20th century), a piano trio, and the Three Romances on this evening’s concert, as well as ample solo piano works, lieder, and several piano and four-hands piano arrangements. She was a very close collaborator for many of her composer peers, notably her husband Robert and Johannes Brahms, both of whom valued her opinion and included references to her and her works in their own compositions. Indeed, acting as a nurturing and supportive collaborator does seem authentic to her personality, and not just a persona for the concert stage. Drawing on her deep knowledge of the Baroque and Classical masters whose place in the canon she helped cement, her style balanced Romantic impulses with a refined Classical sensibility.
In the Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Clara composed a set of character pieces, each with a distinct style and personality. They also demonstrate formal clarity, keeping with the ABA structure associated with the genre. The first Romance is dreamy and floating, and despite being completely written out, the music feels extemporaneous— similar to her husband’s style—with asymmetrical phrases, obscured metrical accents, and odd groupings of ornaments. It builds to a moment of tortured passion with upward leaps and strong emphasis on beat two (a reference to Robert’s Violin Sonata No. 1, also heard in this evening’s performance). The second Romance begins in a Baroque manner with squared phrases and a clear meter in the A section, only to move to a lyrical and harmonically rich B section. The final
Romance, marked “passionately fast,” evokes feelings of longing and desire by using carefully sustained dissonances and quick resolutions in the A section, moving to a more stable and optimistic B section by modulating, in true Romantic fashion, to a key borrowed from the minor mode.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
VIOLIN SONATA NO. 1 IN A MINOR, OP. 105; THREE ROMANCES, OP. 94
Few composers so thoroughly embodied the aesthetic of Romantic subjectivity as Robert Schumann. While most of his contemporaries (including his wife) sought to balance the Classical and the Romantic, he was the first composer, more than two decades later, to truly take up the mantle of Beethoven’s radical experimentalism in the late string quartets. An influential music critic as well as a composer, he naturally synthesized music and literature as Beethoven envisioned. As a composer, he was prone to fits of prolific output, focusing one on genre at a time, leading to his now famous “Lieder Year,” “Symphonic Year,” “Chamber Music Year,” and “Oratorio Year.” But a mental health disorder led him to attempt to drown himself, and he took himself to an asylum to live out the final years of his life.
Robert Schumann’s style might be summarized as feeling over form. His works often sound fundamentally guided by caprice, with ever-shifting feelings, and while he was savvy about structural organization, he often deliberately obscured or violated formal conventions. Indeed, even his experiments with cyclical elements—that is, bringing back motives and themes from previous movements in later ones—were not meant to ponder formal architecture but rather to evoke fleeting associations that trigger memory.
The Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Minor demonstrates his ability to render form subservient to feeling. The first movement is marked as “passionate”—a mood sustained throughout— and the tumultuous opening melody is one of his most memorable. Reminiscent of Beethoven’s late style, the second movement demonstrates some of Robert’s most innovative writing as fusion between an intermezzo and a conventional slow movement, oscillating between a fast-
paced peasant style with slow lyricism. The third movement is the most virtuosic for the violinist, with jagged staccato melodies driving most of the music forward.
The Three Romances, Op. 94, were originally written for oboe and piano, but his publisher, against the composer’s protestations, added that they could also be performed on violin or clarinet. After his death, Clara performed the works frequently with violinists, which legitimized the performing tradition. Like Clara’s Three Romances and the slow movement of Röntgen-Maier’s Sonata, these, too, are character pieces, and all follow a loose ABA form. The first is fantasy-like and builds to the contrasting B section rather than abruptly shifting to it. The second, marked “simple and deep,” begins with Classical, balanced phrases to contrast with the middle section, marked “a little more lively,” which turns to Romantic passion. Finally, the third contrasts a folklike opening with a flowing legato middle.
JOHANNES BRAHMS VIOLIN SONATA NO. 3 IN D MINOR, OP. 108
For Brahms, chamber music was a haven of personal expression throughout his career. Heralded as no less than the messiah of music by Robert Schumann, Brahms suffered from deep insecurity about living up to expectations—only made worse by mixed reviews of his works—such that he avoided the large-scale “public” genres, like symphonies, until he was 40. He worked primarily as a conductor and pianist. As a composer, however, he focused on chamber music, which, at the time, underwent a gradual transition from music for private domestic settings (or semi-private salon concerts) to serious music on the concert stage for a ticket-buying public. Despite the gradual change of venue and import, Brahms always maintained the “intimacy” and feeling of privacy associated with chamber music, not only in terms of musical interactions among ensemble members but also in the forthright emotional honesty of his style.
If Robert Schumann’s style can be summarized as feeling over form and Clara Schumann’s as feeling balanced with form, then Brahms’s may be considered form as feeling. Maintaining an appreciation for the classics and
the Classical, Brahms recognized the inherent expressive qualities of historical forms, allowing him to synthesize his emotional Romantic subjectivity with a Classical sensibility for clarity of expression. He focused on organic unity in his work by taking a few small motives and musical ideas and allowing them to develop, grow, change, and transform over the course of a movement. With a string of four chamber works composed between 1886 and 1888 (Cello Sonata, Op. 99; Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 100; Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 101; and Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 108), Brahms showed just how masterfully he could write music that was extremely economical and supremely lyrical all at once.
The Third Violin Sonata is so taut that all four movements last little more than 20 minutes in most performances. In the first movement, the opening theme forms the basis for almost all of what follows: The second theme is an inverted transformation, and a seemingly “new” theme that starts the development section is really a Baroque-style variation of the opening (built on a Bach-like wedge arpeggiation). The Adagio second movement also draws on the rhythmic gesture and melodic contour of the first movement’s opening, but puts it into a slow 6/8 meter, only to ultimately displace the beat and evolve into moments of duple meter. The third movement also draws on the opening theme of the first movement, taking the tail with its eighth-note pick-up rhythm (short long, short long) as the basis and proceeding through a range of ethereal moods and harmonies. The final movement continues to pull from the rhythmic profile of the first movement, but in a stirring and percussive 6/8 full of tumult and angst.
ARTIST BIO
GIL SHAHAM
Gil Shaham is one of the foremost violinists of our time. His flawless technique combined with his inimitable warmth and generosity of spirit has solidified his renown as an American master. He is sought after around the world for concerto appearances with leading orchestras and conductors, and regularly gives recitals and appears with ensembles on the world’s great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals.
Highlights of recent years include a recording and performances of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and recitals with his long-time duo partner, pianist Akira Eguchi. He regularly appears with the Berlin Philharmonic; Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies; Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; Los Angeles Philharmonic; New York Philharmonic; Orchestre de Paris; and in multi-year residencies with the orchestras of Montreal, Stuttgart, and Singapore.
Shaham has more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs to his name, earning multiple GRAMMYs, a Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice. Many of these recordings appear on Canary Classics, the label he founded in 2004. His 2016 recording 1930s Violin Concertos Vol. 2 and his 2021 recording of Beethoven and Brahms concertos with The Knights were nominated for GRAMMY Awards.
Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008, he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012, he was named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius and performs on an Antonio Stradivari violin, Cremona c. 1719, with the assistance of Rare Violins of New York’s In Consortium Artists and Benefactors Collaborative. He lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children.
ORLI SHAHAM
A consummate musician recognized for her grace, subtlety, and brilliance, pianist Orli Shaham is in demand for her prodigious skills and admired for her interpretations of both standard and modern repertoire. The New York Times called her a “brilliant pianist,” the Chicago Tribune referred to her as “a first-rate Mozartean,” and London’s Guardian said her playing at the Proms was “perfection.”
She has performed with most of the major orchestras in the United States, on stage internationally from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House, and appeared at music festivals around the world. Since 2007, she has been artistic director of Pacific Symphony’s chamber music series. She is also artistic director of the interactive children’s concert series Orli Shaham’s Bach Yard, which she founded in 2010.
Continuing her multi-year Mozart recording project, Shaham releases the final two volumes of the complete piano sonatas by Mozart in the 2023–24 season. Volumes 1–4 of the sonata cycle and a recording of Mozart’s piano concertos are already out. She has taught a master class centered around the Mozart sonatas on the digital platform Tonebase, and hosted a live online discussion and demonstration of the life and music of Clara Schumann. Her discography includes a dozen titles on Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Canary Classics, and other labels.
Shaham is on faculty at The Juilliard School, and has served on the juries of both the Cliburn and Honens international piano competitions. She is co-host and creative for NPR’s From the Top, and was host of America’s Music Festivals and Dial-a-Musician, a feature series she created, all of which are broadcast nationally. In addition to her musical education at The Juilliard School, Shaham has a BA from Columbia University. She was a member of the board of trustees of Kaufman Music Center, serving as chair through 2023.
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COMING UP ROOMFUL OF TEETH
Wednesday, April 9
7:30 PM
Shannon Hall at Memorial Union
Classical
BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET
Thursday, May 1
7:30 PM
Shannon Hall at Memorial Union
Jazz
We begin with Samuel Barber’s concise and dramatic Second Essay for Orchestra. Next, the eclectic and genre-bending string trio Time for Three joins our Symphony performing Kevin Puts’ Contact, a Grammywinning piece written specifically for the group. Intended to premiere in the summer of 2020, Contact took on new meaning as an expression of yearning for human contact during the peak of the pandemic. Maestro Young’s selection of movements from one of the greatest ballet scores of the 20th century, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, will leave us longing for more. Tickets are $15–$104: in-person at the Overture Center Box Office, 201 State Street, by phone: (608) 258-4141 or online at overture.org madisonsymphony.org/
Joseph Young, Guest Conductor Time For Three:
Ranaan Meyer, Double Bass
Nicolas Kendall, Violin
Charles Yang, Violin
Samuel Barber, Second Essay for Orchestra, Op. 17 Kevin Puts, Contact* Sergei Prokofiev, Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64 *MSO Premiere
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