Kavafian-Schub-Shifrin Trio

Kavafian-Schub-Shifrin Trio chamber music society at yale March 1, 2011

david shifrin Artistic Director

music of Milhaud Mozart Schumann Stravinsky

Robert Blocker, Dean

march 1, 2011 · 8 pm Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Kavafian-Schub -Shifrin Trio ani kavafian, violin and viola david shifrin, clarinet andré-michel schub, piano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, K. 498, “Kegelstatt” Andante Menuetto Rondeaux: Allegretto

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Märchenerzälungen (Fairy Tales), Op. 132 Lebhaft, nicht zu schnell Lebhaft und sehr markiert Ruhiges Tempo, mit zartem Ausdruck Lebhaft, sehr markiert intermission

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974)

Suite for violin, clarinet, and piano, Op. 157b Ouverture: Vif et gai Divertissement: Animé Jeu: Vif Introduction et Finale: Modéré. Vif

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Suite from Histoire du Soldat I. Marche du Soldat II. Le Violon du Soldat III. Un Petit Concert IV. Tango – Valse – Ragtime V. Danse du Soldat

As a courtesy to the performers and audience members, turn off cell phones and pagers. Please do not leave the theater during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is not permitted.

(left to right)

David Shifrin, clarinet · Ani Kavafian, violin and viola André-Michel Schub, piano

After 25 years of friendship and music-making, Ani Kavafian, André-Michel Schub, and David Shifrin – each a true virtuoso and a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center– came together as a trio with undeniable chemistry.

“The spontaneity, the excitement and the fun we have playing together is beyond what we ever anticipated,” they have said. Combined, they have performed with nearly every major orchestra around the world and in recital at the major concert halls.

mances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully as well as in venues across the country.

Born in Istanbul, Turkey of Armenian decent, Ani Kavafian began her musical studies with piano lessons at the age of three. At age nine, shortly after her family moved to the United States, she began the study of the violin with Ara Zerounian and, at 16, won the first prize in both the piano and violin competitions at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Two years later, she began violin studies at the Juilliard School with Ivan Galamian, eventually receiving Ani Kavafian a master’s degree with top honors. She is a proviolin and viola fessor in the practice of violin at the Yale School of Music. Ms. Kavafian resides in northern Ani Kavafian has performed with virtually all of Westchester, New York with her husband, artist America’s leading orchestras, including the New Bernard Mindich, and their son, Matthew. She York Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Cleveland, plays a 1736 Muir McKenzie Stradivarius violin.

Pittsburgh, Minnesota, Los Angeles Chamber, St. Louis, Delaware, Detroit, San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis, Utah, and Rochester or- andré-michel schub chestras. Among the many premieres she has piano given are Henri Lazarof ’s Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra and Tod Machover’s Concerto As a recitalist, orchestral soloist and chamber for Hyper Violin and Orchestra, both of which musician, André-Michel Schub has been praised she has recorded, as well as premieres of Aaron by critics and audiences around the world since Kernis’ Double Concerto for Violin and Guitar his career began almost three decades ago. He and Michelle Ekizian’s Red Harvest Concerto. Her has performed with many of the world’s most numerous recital engagements include perfor- prestigious orchestras, among them the Boston

kavafian-schub-shifrin trio Artist Profiles

and Chicago symphonies, Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, and the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras.

The list of conductors with whom he has collaborated is equally impressive, including James Levine, Edo de Waart, JoAnn Falletta, Seiji Ozawa, Sergiu Comissiona, Eugene Ormandy, and Mstislav Rostropovich, who invited him to join the National Symphony Orchestra for a nationally televised Fourth of July concert. His annual schedule includes recitals in major concert halls as well as appearances at the foremost music festivals, among them Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, Ravinia, the Mann Music Center, the Blossom Festival, Wolf Trap, and the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico.

Orchestras with whom he has performed include the Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Milwaukee, Denver, and Memphis symphonies, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Philadelphia and Minnesota orchestras. Internationally, he has performed with orchestras in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Korea and Taiwan. In addition, he has served as principal clarinetist with the Cleveland Orchestra and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as the American (under Stokowski), Honolulu, New York Chamber and Dallas symphonies.

David Shifrin has received critical acclaim as a recitalist, appearing at such a venues as Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the 92nd Street Y in New Born in France, André-Michel Schub came to the York City, the Library of Congress in Washington U.S. with his family when he was eight months D.C, and throughout Germany. As a chamber old; New York City has been his home ever musician, he has collaborated with artists such since. He began his piano studies with his mo- as the Guarneri, Tokyo, and Emerson String ther when he was 4 and later continued his work Quartets, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and with Jascha Zayde. Mr. Schub first attended pianists Emanuel Ax and André Watts. At Yale, Princeton University, and then transferred to he is the artistic director of the Yale in New the Curtis Institute, where he studied with York concert series and the Chamber Music Rudolf Serkin from 1970 to 1973.

Society at Yale.

david shifrin clarinet The San Francisco Chronicle calls David Shifrin’s playing “a revelation in just how beautifully the clarinet can be played.” One of only two wind players to have been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize since the award’s inception in 1974, Mr. Shifrin is in constant demand as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber music collaborator.

notes on the program

by Jordan Kuspa

Trio in E-flat major, K. 498, “Kegelstatt” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Though the clarinet was invented at the turn of the eighteenth century, it was not until the 1780s that the instrument became an equal of the other principal woodwinds. More than any other composer, Mozart was responsible for this elevation in status. With the composition of three famous works that feature the instrument (the Trio in E-flat, K. 498; the Quintet in A, K. 581; and the Concerto in A, K. 622), Mozart created the first body of clarinet repertoire that has maintained a place in the hearts of performers and audiences alike. As the earliest of these works (the manuscript is dated 1786), the Trio may be considered the first masterpiece written for the clarinet. Employing an unusual combination of clarinet, viola, and piano, Mozart eschewed facile virtuosity in favor of rich lyricism.

The work was dedicated to a piano student of Mozart’s named Franziska von Jaquin, and was premiered by Jaquin with Mozart on viola and Anton Stadler playing clarinet. Stadler was a frequent collaborator with Mozart: both the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto were written for him. The musicologist Alfred Einstein has argued that the key of E-flat represents friendship in Mozart’s late chamber works, and it is easy to imagine the subtle, witty interplay of the three instruments as a genial conversation between close friends.The title of the work, “Kegelstatt,” is the German word for a sort of bowling alley where the game skittles was played.

Although Mozart had scribbled “Vienna, 27 July 1786 while playing skittles” on the autograph of the Twelve Duos for Basset-horns, K. 487, there is no evidence to suggest that Mozart was likewise diverted while composing this intricate

work. It seems that the evocative title was merely a flight of fancy of later publishers.

Märchenerzälungen (Fairy Tales), Op. 132 Robert Schumann The waning months of 1853 represented the last happy period of creative productivity in Robert Schumann’s life. Though symptoms of the insanity that would consume his life were growing stronger, Schumann was buoyed by the arrival of a twenty year-old composer who provided him with companionship and inspiration: Johannes Brahms arrived unannounced at Schumann’s door on September 30th and stayed with the Schumanns for several weeks. It was around this time that Schumann composed the Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales), one of his last surviving chamber works.

The four movements of Märchenerzählungen are linked through the extensive use of two motivic ideas: one lyrical and moving upward, the other detached and moving downward. These are played out in music that moves from jollity to wistful melancholy and back. The final movement is particularly boisterous and cheerful.

Though he titled them “Fairy Tales,” Schumann did not specify extra-musical programs for these pieces. Instead, by marrying meticulous motivic development with free rhapsodic forms, Schumann suggested narratives that could take on any number of interpretations.

Sadly, the relative calm of the fall of 1853 would not last. Soon after Brahms’ departure, Schumann was forced to resign his conducting post in Dusseldorf. After a successful tour of the

notes on the program

by Jordan Kuspa

Netherlands, the Schumanns spent Christmas Suite from Histoire du Soldat at home in Germany. Scarcely two months later, Igor Stravinsky Schumann would be institutionalized until the end of his life in July 1856.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Stravinsky was fresh from the succès de scandale of The Rite of Spring. After the Bolshevik Revolution of Suite for clarinet, violin, and piano, Op. 157b 1917 (in which the relatively well-to-do composer Darius Milhaud lost all of his Russian estate), a return to Russia was impossible. Stravinsky was forced into Darius Milhaud was one of the most prolific permanent exile in Switzerland, and was in composers of the twentieth century, with an serious need of financial support. oeuvre that contained works in every major genre and for almost every western instrument. His The theatrical work L’Histoire du Soldat (The influences were wide-ranging, from French na- Soldier’s Tale) developed as a response to these tionalism (he was one of Les Six), to his Jewish pressures. Hoping for a piece that could be heritage, to his experiences with jazz in the toured with minimal cost, Stravinsky scored 1910s and 1920s, to his two-year visit to Brazil the hour-long work for a consort of violin, (1917-18). These varied inspirations melded double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, with Milhaud’s exhaustive appetite for musical and percussion. The story tells of a soldier who innovation to create a distinctly personal musi- sells his fiddle to the devil for a book that tells cal idiom. Milhaud quietly became a pioneer of the future. Stravinsky called upon three actors many major developments in twentieth- to play the soldier, devil, and narrator, with a century music, including the use of unpitched dancer in the silent role of the princess. Despite percussion, polytonality, and film music. As a the relative economy of forces, the premiere professor at both Mills College and the Paris (Lausanne, 28 September 1918) was a financial Conservatoire, he taught such diverse musical disaster, and had to be underwritten by the figures as Iannis Xenakis, Steve Reich, Dave Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart. In Brubeck, William Bolcom, and Burt Bacharach. gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to His Suite, Op. 157b (his catalogue ultimately him. Stravinsky may have been thinking of listed 443 opus numbers!), was written in 1936. Reinhart (an excellent amateur clarinetist) Derived from incidental music for the play Le when he arranged the present Suite from this voyageur sans bagage (The Traveler Without large work. Cast in five movements, the work Luggage) by Jean Anouilh, the Suite is full of highlights the virtuosic writing for the clarinet characteristic Milhaud touches such as the Latin and especially the violin, while the piano picks syncopations in the Ouverture, the imitative and up much of the music for the other members polytonal counterpoint of the Divertissement, of the original ensemble. Like Milhaud’s Suite, and the wild country fiddling of Jeu. this work is brimming with varied musical influences: Russian folk tunes, peasant fiddling, jazz, tango, and ragtime, all combined with Stravinsky’s unique sense of formal construction and rhythmic energy.

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Robert Blocker, piano March 23 | 8 pm | Wed | Sprague Hall

concerts & media Dana Astmann Monica Ong Reed Danielle Heller Richard Henebry

Horowitz Piano Series. Scarlatti: Four Sonatas; Chopin: Two Nocturnes, Op. 27, and Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49; Schwantner: Palindromes; Ravel: Sonatine; Ginastera: Sonata No. 1.

Tickets $12–22 • Students $6

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Kyung Yu and Elizabeth Parisot March 25 | 8 pm | Fri | Sprague Hall

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The Faculty Artist Series presents a recital by Kyung Yu, violin, and Elizabeth Parisot, piano.

recording studio Eugene Kimball Jason Robins

Bach: Mass in B minor March 26 | 8 pm | Sat | Woolsey Hall Bach Collegium Japan performs J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor. Masaaki Suzuki, director. Presented by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Tickets $15 • Students $8 (General Admission)

Miró String Quartet March 29 | 8 pm | Tue | Sprague Hall The Chamber Music Society presents Gunther Schuller’s Horn Quintet, with Julie Landsman, horn; plus Haydn’s Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 33, No. 2, “The Joke,” and Brahms’s Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 51, No. 1.

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