Competition Winners

competition winners

oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director May 6, 2014 • Morse Recital Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

competition winners Tuesday, May 6, 2014 • 8:00 pm • Morse Recital Hall David Shifrin, Artistic Director

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827

Sonata for violin and piano, Op. 12, No. 3 I. Allegro con spirito II. Adagio con molt’ espressione III. Rondo. Allegro molto Matheus Garcia Souza, violin Miki Sawada, fortepiano

György Kurtág b. 1926

Hommage à R. Sch., Op. 15/d I. Merkwürdige Pirouetten des Kapellmeisters Johannes

Kreisler (Curious pirouettes of Kapellmeister Johannes

Kreisler) — Vivo II. E.: der begrenzte Kreis... (E.: The completed circle...)

— Molto semplice, piano e legato III. ... und wieder zuckt es schmerzlich F. um die Lippen...

(...and again, F.’s lips tremble in anguish) —

Feroce, agitato IV. Felhő valék, már süt a nap...(töredék-töredék)

I was a cloud, now the sun is shining... (fragment fragment) — Calmo, scorrevole V. In der Nacht (In the Night) — Presto VI. Abschied: Meister Raro entdeckt Guillaume de Machaut

(Farewell: Meister Raro discovers Guillaume de

Machaut) — Adagio, poco andante Isabella Mensz, viola Eric Anderson, clarinet (bass drum) Peter Klimo, piano intermission

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

Competition Winners

César Franck 1822–1890

Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 I. Molto moderato quasi lento II. Lento, con molto sentimento III. Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco Suliman Tekalli, violin Mann-wen Lo, violin David Mason, viola Allan Hon, cello Lo-An Lin, piano

special thanks to the coaches who worked with the ensembles: Michael Friedmann (Beethoven) • Ettore Causa (Kurtág) Kazuhide Isomura (Franck)

Notes on the Program

ludwig van beethoven Sonata for violin and piano, Op. 12, No. 3 Most people know of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese imperial court composer, from his famous depiction in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, and in its Academy Award winning film adaptation.

In other words, people know very little about Salieri. While his music has not procured the lasting legacy of Mozart’s, he is by no means insignificant, and he was at one time the teacher of another composer of some import: Ludwig van Beethoven. The young Beethoven studied counterpoint with Haydn for a number of years after first coming to Vienna. From Salieri, the great master of Italian opera, Beethoven learned to write for the voice, and his first three violin sonatas, Op. 12, are dedicated to this teacher.

More than perhaps any previous composer, Beethoven imbued the violin with a singing and vocal quality, placing it center stage to match the piano in the sonata context.

Most early classical violin sonatas, including many of Haydn’s more than 100 such works, were in fact trio sonatas – solo works for the keyboard, with the violin occasionally doubling the right hand, and a bass instrument reinforcing the left – a genre dating back to the Baroque. Mozart began to transform this with his early Paris sonatas, removing the bass voice, enhancing the role of the violin, and changing the genre into a conversational duet. Beethoven picked up where his esteemed predecessor left off, further enriching the role of the violin in his own sonatas. This coincided historically with developments in the instruments themselves, which could play higher, lower, louder, and softer than ever before. The expressive possibilities for the violin were growing, and Beethoven — who studied the violin as a supplement to his keyboard playing — fully exploited its potential.

This third sonata of the composer’s first set (written in 1797) was published as “Sonata for piano with the accompaniment of a violin.” The motivations for this were practical and perhaps commercial, implying that a keyboardist could enjoy the work as much without a musical companion. The piano writing in this sonata is both commanding and marked with Beethoven’s quintessential style: technically virtuosic, intense, and heroic. The pianist seems first and foremost to propel the work; Beethoven, not coincidentally, probably played these keyboard parts himself, and therefore imbued the piano line with the valiant image he had of himself. The violin, however, is decidedly more involved than in the typical “classical” violin sonatas that precede Beethoven’s contributions, introducing the lyrical second theme in the first movement, standing in for the human voice in the song-like Adagio, and intrepidly holding its own with flourishes to match the keyboard’s in the finale. Even from the opening, with its brief exchanges of musical turns between the two instruments, there is a sense of exchanging dialogue. A sonata is not unlike a marriage. There are quarrelsome moments, and occasions in which one partner seems to “take charge.” Ultimately, however, the relationship is harmonious, and one partner cannot truly thrive without the other. This writer will leave it to the listener to decide which role the piano or violin plays in the musical re-enactment of their own relationship.

Though many of Beethoven’s great later works are filled with a sense of struggle and bipolarity, this very early work seems to lack most projections of doubt. Here, Beethoven’s composition manifests confidence, boldness, and even unbridled joy. The composer would learn definitively of his auditory disorder in 1798, and the awareness of this impending loss of hearing would completely alter his disposition and the character of his music for the remainder of his life. However,

Notes on the Program

the third violin sonata comes from a young man with little doubt in his abilities as a musician, and in his capacity to overcome any physical limitations. Beethoven presaged the following in his diary in 1797, shortly before this sonata was written, on the occasion of his birthday: “Courage! My mind shall triumph over all weaknesses of the body. Twenty-five years are here; this year must determine the whole man.

Leave nothing undone.” Indeed, Beethoven leaves very little undone in this spirited and exuberant work. györgy kurtág Hommage à R. Sch., Op. 15/d The Hungarian composer György Kurtág paid “hommage” to a variety of musical figures in a number of his works, with subjects ranging from Tchaikovsky to Luigi Nono and even Nancy Sinatra. This musical tribute to the character of Robert Schumann, for clarinet, viola, and piano — written in 1990 — is imbued with Schumann’s spirit, and though it sounds as if from another musical world, evokes the great composer’s intensity, sense of play, and multiplicity. Kurtág’s six movements reflect Schumann’s propensity for writing evocative and often somewhat programmatic “fantasy pieces.” Even before the whimsical flourish that opens the piece, Schumann is present onstage, as the unusual instrumentation is identical to that of Märchenerzählungen, or Schumann’s “Fairy Tale Pieces.” Each movement also reflects the multiple facets and characters of Schumann’s personality. Schumann was a brilliant man, but wracked with mental instability and manic depression. He created fictitious personas that reflected his own multiple personalities, and fabricated musical worlds for these personas in his “fantasy” compositions. Kurtág casts these very personas in his hommage.

Among Schumann’s and Kurtág’s cast of characters, we first encounter Johannes Kreisler, the Romantic writer Hoffman’s alter ego, who represents a brilliantly creative voice sadly misinterpreted by the public as merely a clown. The introverted Eusebius (abbreviated “E.”) is Schumann’s “id,” and is met in the second movement, which then bleeds into the third, a depiction of Florestan (“F.”), the temperamental and extroverted “ego” of Robert Schumann, given to sudden emotional outbursts, effectively evoked by Kurtág in the clarinet’s wild screeches. The fourth and fifth movements are also a pair. The fourth is titled in Hungarian, “I was a cloud, now the sun is shining…” and serves as a prelude to the latter, “In the night.” Like many of Schumann’s fantasy pieces, Kurtág creates musical pictures of nature — birds, crickets, the fog of clouds and the brightness of the sun’s rays — to reflect the internal emotional state of man: joyous, and somber, austere and optimistic.

The first five movements are concise and economical. Like Anton Webern, Kurtág rarely dwells on a musical thought for long, and expresses a great deal of emotion and ideas in a brief time span, and with few instrumental forces, finding variety of color in the miniscule, and scarcely recycling any thematic material.

The final movement, however, is longer than all of the previous pieces combined, and is Kurtág’s most pronounced and profound “auf Wiedersehen” to Schumann. Titled “Farewell,” and evoking Master Raro, who was the balanced mediator between the two extremes of Schumann’s personality, Kurtág brilliantly settles the polarity of all of the prior music, drawing it to a close, and channeling it through the voice of Guillaume de Machaut, the late-medieval French composer who was the likely father of the complete musical setting of the Catholic mass ordinary, a pious work to say the least. The slow-moving movement processes religiously

Notes on the Program

like a funeral dirge, growing in intensity before quietly subsiding into the distance, as though the procession were passing before us and then moving away. césar franck Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 During the twentieth century, with its global wars, mass migrations, and advancements in communication, perspectives on music became quite blurry. Outright hatred between France and Germany motivated each nation’s artists to seek the utter expungement of the other’s influence from its own culture, leading to the construction of divisive philosophical and aesthetic barriers.

In France, the ultimate persona non grata was Richard Wagner, who embodied the hyperromantic aesthetic that the Parisian avant-garde would come to dismiss as maudlin and oversentimental. Any “conservative” French composers whose music reflected the German penchant for dense chromaticism, endless melodies, and serpentine shifts in harmony were dismissed alongside Wagner himself. Debussy, universally recognized today for his groundbreaking inventiveness, was ironically considered quite “un-French.” Cocteau once wrote that the composer “missed his way because he fell from the German frying pan into the Russian fire.”

César Franck — Belgian by birth — was cast into the fire along with the other French cultural “traitors,” as his Franck’s music demonstrates a Wagnerian and Lisztian influence.

However, far from a “conservative,” the composerorganist forever changed the scope of chamber music with his F minor piano quintet.

tives — similar to Wagner’s leitmotivs — that continuously transform throughout the work, though always remaining distinguishable. The second theme introduced in the first movement, a meandering line over an unchanging bass note, will reappear numerous times, in a number of guises, in subsequent movements. For Franck, all three movements sprout from the same few musical seeds present in the first. This lends the work a cyclical quality in which recognizable motives constantly reappear, occasionally in unexpected places and in new keys. The technique is most obvious in the finale, in which a motive from the end of the middle movement returns as the primary theme, as though an idea came to mind in the dream-like state illustrated in the lyrical Lento, becoming transfigured into an almost obsessive thought in the nervous and explosive finale. Indeed, volatility may well be the most appropriate characterization of the Quintet; the composer-cellist Édouard Lalo called it an “explosion.” Franck imbues the work with intense emotion, never shying away from extremes of both tonality and dynamics. It has been said that no chamber work contains as many dynamic markings of ppp and fff — the lower and upper limits of volume — as this one.

Camille Saint-Säens, to whom the work is dedicated, infamously walked off stage in preparation for its premiere, unwilling to perform the complex, almost manic piano part (Franck left the dedication intact, but removed the phrase “to my good friend.”) In the early twentieth century, the French avant-garde camp dismissed César Franck as antiquated or old-fashioned. It seems they might have missed something.

–Patrick Campbell Jankowski

The Wagnerian influence is most evident in the composer’s endlessly meandering key areas.

Franck always told his students that the key to composition was to “modulate, modulate.”

Like Wagner and Liszt, Franck establishes mo-

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