Gil Shaham Program

W I S C O N S I N U N I O N T H E AT E R

IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

DAVID AND KATO PERLMAN CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

GIL SHAHAM SAT, DECEMBER 11, 2021 | 7:30 PM SHANNON HALL, MEMORIAL UNION

WISCONSIN UNION THEATER

2021-2022 SEASON Third Coast Percussion

Brentano String Quartet

Renée Fleming

Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain

Join us to gather in community and feel the power of live performing arts.

SPRING 2022

THIRD COAST PERCUSSION + MOVEMENT ART IS

BLACK ARTS MATTER FESTIVAL

Thursday, January 27 | 7:30 PM Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall at Hamel Music Center

March 23-26 Memorial Union

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET Thursday, February 10 | 7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

PACHO FLORES WITH UWSO Saturday, March 5 | 7:30 PM Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall at Hamel Music Center

GEORGE HINCHLIFFE’S UKULELE ORCHESTRA OF GREAT BRITAIN Thursday, March 31 | 7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

RENÉE FLEMING Saturday, April 30 | 7:00 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

The Performing Arts Committee (PAC) brings world-class artists to the campus community and beyond by programming the Wisconsin Union Theater’s season of music, dance, theater, comedy, and spoken word. PAC focuses on pushing the range and diversity in programming while connecting to students and the broader Madison community.

In addition to planning the Wisconsin Union Theater’s Season, the Performing Arts Committee programs and produces student-centered programming such as the New Performance Showcase and poetry workshops. PAC makes it a priority to connect students to the performing artists through educational engagement activities, supporting them before their show, or introducing them from the stage.

WUD PAC is part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Leadership and Engagement Program and is central to the Wisconsin Union’s purpose of creating community and a place where all belong and developing the leaders of tomorrow.

This performance is made possible by the David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Fund.

SUPPORT FOR THE 2021-2022 CONCERT SERIES PROVIDED IN PART BY: George Elder Fund for the Union Theater Dr. Linda I. Garrity Living Legends Endowment Fund Robert and Linda Graebner Jean C. Hodgin Fund Bill and Char Johnson Classical Music Series Fund Barbara and Frank Manley Cultural Arts Fund Mead Witter School of Music Stephen Morton David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Fund Marie B. Pulvermacher Wisconsin Union Theater Fund Fan Taylor Fund Douglas and Elisabeth B. Weaver Fund for Performing Arts Wisconsin Union Theater Endowment

GIL SHAHAM, VIOLIN SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2021 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003 (1720) Grave Fuga Andante Allegro Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 (1720)

Allemande Courante Sarabande Gigue Chaconne

INTERMISSION Scott Wheeler (b.1952)

Isolation Rag (2020)

Max Raimi (b.1956)

Violin Etude: Anger Management

Reena Esmail (b.1983)

When the violin (2018; rev. 2020)

Johann Sebastian Bach

Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006 (1720) Preludio Loure Gavotte en Rondeau Menuett I Menuett II Bourrée Gigue

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003; Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004; Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006

About the Composer Few names in the history of European music are as freighted as that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Today he has come to represent a pinnacle of refinement and clarity, as well as artistic creativity, steeped in the deepest religious conviction and intellectual prowess. This reputation, while wholly merited, rests primarily on his accomplishments in Leipzig after 1723, specifically the inhuman feat of composing new cantatas weekly and his infamously cerebral and encyclopedic masterpieces from the last decade of his life, Art of Fugue and Musical Offering. The three solo violin works heard on this evening’s program, however, were compiled in 1720 in Cöthen and probably written up to a decade earlier (possibly in Weimar). They reveal a composer who was young and hungry, and on the cusp of his greatest career successes. The pieces date to the same time as he composed his set of six Brandenburg Concertos, a masterly collection meant to dazzle the Duke of Brandenburg in the hopes of securing a job at his court.

Like the concertos, the collection of six Violin Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001–1006) was likely written for musicians of the courts of Cöthen and Weimar. At this point in his career, Bach freely drew on the variety of musical styles and tastes of the time, creating music that was by turns conservative and widely appealing, or experimental and esoteric. These works show moments of the high Baroque extravagance that he has come to epitomize as well as the simpler and more restrained styles that would grow in popularity in the 1720s, and eventually become the foundation of the Classical style against which Bach’s music is usually pitted.

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003 Although marked in four movements, three self-contained sections comprise Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, as the first two movements—Grave and Fuga—are a prelude and fugue pairing.

The Grave offers an open-ended and meandering melodic line typical of a prelude with sparse accompaniment that enters only to underline the changing harmonies. The freewheeling style, however, allows Bach to accomplish a sleight of hand as he modulates from the home key to the dominant by the end of the movement, making way for the Fuga, which features a characteristically pointed (and thereby memorable) subject. In this movement, Bach’s power to evoke multiple melodic lines and intricate counterpoint on a solo instrument comes to the foreground. After such an elaborate musical construction, the Andante displays a simplified texture in which the lyrical melody floats above a grounding eighth note accompaniment, an innovation of the time that would come to define the Classical style. In the Allegro finale, Bach shows off his intimate knowledge of Vivaldi’s style by using a repeating head motive to establish a pattern, only to break it by spinning out more and more elaborate melodic ideas and figurations as the music carries on.

Performance Time: approximately 20 minutes

Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 In the Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Bach puts on display his greatest skill and technique as a composer. Like the Brandenburg Concertos, this work is meant to impress. Called a “partita” (which means “in parts” or “in movements”), the work is a standard Baroque dance suite in which each movement is in a different courtly dance style, with an allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue.

Yet as upfront as this genre may purport to be, by the 1700s the dance suite had become a vehicle for some of the most innovative compositions of the time. This worked because composers could start each movement with one or two simple phrases that established the dance meter for the audience, after which they had free reign to experiment within a very permissible harmonic form—just as Bach does here. The first two movements, Allemande and Courante, are the most straightforward, and yet they immediately display Bach’s ability to evoke rich harmonies from simple melodic lines. In the Sarabande, though, he signals that he is going on a journey, as any semblance of the slow, stately dance’s meter quickly falls away into a dreamy meandering. The following Gigue is characteristically jaunty enough, but it too loses the feeling of the dance in favor of fun virtuosic display. The Chaconne finale—which is roughly equal in length to the previous four movements combined—is a feat with little parallel. The dance’s form is a theme and variations on a repeating harmonic ground, and Bach exploits this structure to bring together a blooming string of moods, harmonic modulations, and melodic styles such that the solo violin work ultimately feels not just symphonic, but almost psychedelic.

Performance Time: approximately 25 minutes

Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006 Like the Second Violin Partita, the Third Violin Partita, BWV 1006, is also a dance suite. Yet while the former was extravagant and experimental in style, the latter provides a refined and simplified example of the genre while offering an array of less common dances, including the loure, gavotte, menuett, and bourée. The opening Preludio showcases the harmonic modulations and rapid arpeggios for which the preludes of The Well-Tempered Clavier are known. Bach then proceeds to the stately Loure, which is a slow tempo version of a gigue. In this pared down example, Bach illustrates the conventional formal structure that Baroque dances take: The first half is repeated, followed by a second contrasting half.

So conventional is the Loure in its structure that it offers a perfect foil to the Gavotte en Rondeau that follows. In this movement, Bach writes a gavotte melody, which repeats once at the beginning to help it stick in the ear, and then intersperses additional repetitions of the opening theme with virtuosic episodes that highlight the performer’s technique. Taken together, Menuett I and II return to the standard dance form but provide contrasting visions of the spritely dance: The first has an angular and percussive melody that throws into relief the smooth and lyrical melody of the second. Next, the quick Bourée allows the violin to take off on flights of fancy while maintaining the dance’s jovial character. Finally, the Gigue uses the shifting metric emphasis of that dance to display a creative array of melodic figures in a quick tempo.

Performance Time: approximately 18 minutes

Scott Wheeler (b.1952) Isolation Rag

Written in 2020 for Gil Shaham, Scott Wheeler composed Isolation Rag during that unique time of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet through the evocative power of memory and the boundlessness of music, the work provides some reprieve from the immediate confines of the moment during which it was composed. As Wheeler has said, “While stuck at home working on other commissions, a wistful little ragtime tune came into my head, probably inspired by William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost, which Gil and Akira [Eguchi] had played as an encore in that last concert. I called it Isolation Rag; it includes a couple little quotes from the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and one from the Brahms Violin Concerto. So the result is a bittersweet portrait of a solo violinist playing for himself in his apartment, missing his orchestra.”

Wheeler’s choice to compose a rag may have come from his own burst of personal memory as well. In 1979, at 23 years old, he composed Calamity Rag—around the same time as Bolcom’s more well-known rag Graceful Ghost. After a small but vocal group of aficionados championed the revival of ragtime in the 1960s—specifically bringing the forgotten Black composer Scott Joplin (1868–1917) to wider attention and greater esteem—young composers like Bolcom, Scott, and William Albright adopted the rag and fused it with modernist musical idioms, creating a new subgenre familiar in form but experimental in style. Forty-one years after he penned Calamity Rag, perhaps Wheeler was also fondly remembering his early days with Isolation Rag. Performance Time: approximately 4 minutes

Max Raimi (b.1956)

Violin Etude: Anger Management Max Raimi is an increasingly rare bird in today’s musical landscape: a composer who is also a working performer. Even more distinguished, he is a performer-composer whose works have been played by the orchestra that employs him. A violist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1984, Raimi has composed music since he was a small child. His works range from solo concert etudes, like the one heard on this evening’s program, to full-scale orchestra works. His music has been championed and programmed by conductors who include Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti. In 2018, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Muti, gave the world premiere of Three Lisel Mueller Settings, which was inspired by Raimi’s admiration for the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s ability to depict the drama of everyday life in a way he says was “not ornamented or extraneous.”

While Raimi may well appreciate austerity in other avenues of his art, the concert etude Anger Management draws on an ostensibly flashier tradition: the virtuoso show piece. Originally written for viola, Raimi transcribed the work for violin. As the name would imply, the work opens with an impassioned spirit reminiscent of 19th-century Romantic virtuosos like Liszt and, of course, Paganini. The opening downward-leaping motive almost stutters as the piece continues to ramp up. Yet as it unfolds, the work finds levity by integrating the angular motive into smooth melodic lines before one final decisive statement at the end. If the anger of the title is immediately felt at the start of the work, then the management comes out through the journey of the work.

Performance Time: approximately 3 minutes

Reena Esmail (b.1983) When the violin

Reena Esmail brings the worlds of Indian and Western classical music into dialogue through her works.

An American composer of Indian descent, she studied composition at The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. Through a Fulbright grant, she also studied Hindustani music in India. Deeply enmeshed in both traditions, Esmail’s music goes beyond a mere blending of styles to interrogate and reconcile the aesthetic and social contradictions inherent in East-West fusions. In the chamber piece Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz (My Sister’s Voice), for example, she updates the “Flower Duet” from Delibes’s beloved yet problematic opera Lakmé—which portrays many exoticist stereotypes and few accurate depictions of its Indian characters and British colonialist setting—by pairing a Hindustani singer with an operatic soprano and letting the musical conversation unfold into new harmonic and melodic worlds.

When the violin also sees Esmail bringing her compositional voice into dialogue with another master from the Western canon. Originally written as a companion to Tomás Luis de Victoria’s solemn and mournful Renaissance motet O vos omnes (which usually commemorates a death), When the violin draws on the poem “The Gift” by 13th-century Persian poet Hafiz. The poem speaks to the joy that is found when the violin “can forgive the past … stop worrying about the future … [and] forgive every wound caused by others.” In the poem, the inauspicious opening gambit “when the violin” repeats, following a different line of thought each time, sometimes leading to almost rapturous flights contemplating the divine. Esmail’s opening phrase also repeats, becoming an anchor as the violin wanders seamlessly into other worlds. In Esmail’s own words, “This piece is about … realizing that ‘breakthroughs’ often don’t have the hard edge, the burst of energy that the word implies, but that they can be about finding tender, warm, deeply resonant spaces within ourselves as well.”

Performance Time: approximately 4 minutes

—Eric Lubarsky

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. A Grammy Award–winner who was also named Musical America’s “Instrumentalist of the Year,” Mr. Shaham is sought after throughout 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 the acclaimed recording and performances of Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin. In addition to championing these solo works in the coming seasons, he will also join his longtime duo partner—pianist Akira Eguchi—in recitals throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

Mr. Shaham appears regularly with orchestras that include the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, and San Francisco Symphony, as well as multi-year residencies with the orchestras of Montreal, Stuttgart, and Singapore. Mr. Shaham also continues his exploration of violin concertos of the 1930s, including the works of Barber, Bartók, Berg, Korngold, and Prokofiev, among many others.

Mr. Shaham has more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs to his name, which have earned multiple Grammy Awards, as well as Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice awards. Many of these recordings appear on Canary Classics, the label Mr. Shaham founded in 2004. His CDs include 1930s Violin Concertos, Virtuoso Violin Works, Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Hebrew Melodies, The Butterfly Lovers, and many more. Mr. Shaham’s most recent recording in the series 1930s violin concertos—including Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2—was nominated for a Grammy Award. His latest recording of Beethoven and Brahms concertos with The Knights was released in 2021.

Mr. Shaham was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1971. He moved with his parents to Israel, where he began violin studies with Samuel Bernstein of the Rubin Academy of Music at the age of 7, receiving annual scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1981, Mr. Shaham made debuts with the Jerusalem Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic, and the following year, he took the first prize in Israel’s Claremont Competition. He then became a scholarship student at The Juilliard School, and also studied at Columbia University.

Mr. Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008 he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius, and lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children.

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COMING SOON! JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 CONCERT SERIES THIRD COAST PERCUSSION + MOVEMENT ART IS Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 7:30 PM Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall at Hamel Music Center A performance about collaboration and transformation.

THE PROGRAM: “Metamorphosis” Works by Philip Glass, Tyondai Braxton, and Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton)

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union The Brentano’s 30th Anniversary Concert Tour

THE PROGRAM: Haydn: String Quartet in D Major, Op. 71, No. 2 J.S. Bach/Bruce Adolphe: “ContraDictions” J.S. Bach/Steve Mackey: “Lude” Schubert: String Quartet in G Major, Op. 161 (D. 887)

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