Melvin Chen, Apr 5, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

horowitz piano series

Melvin Chen

Boris Berman, Artistic Director April 5, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Yale School of Music

Melvin Chen April 5, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

François Couperin 1668–1733

Quatrième Concert (1722) I. Prélude II. Allemande III. Courante Françoise IV. Courante à l’italiéne V. Sarabande VI. Rigaudon VII. Forlane

Maurice Ravel 1875–1937

Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 I. Prélude II. Fugue III. Forlane IV. Rigaudon V. Menuet VI. Toccata intermission

Horowitz Piano Series

Ernest Chausson 1855–1899

Concert pour violon, piano et quatuor à cordes, Op. 21 I. Décidé II. Sicilienne III. Grave IV. Très animé Juliette Kang, violin argus quartet Jason Issokson, violin Clara Kim, violin Dana Kelley, viola Eric Adamshick, cello * * Eric Adamshick appears tonight in place of Argus Quartet cellist Joann Whang.

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.

Artist Profiles

Melvin Chen, piano A native of Tennessee, pianist Melvin Chen has received acclaim for performances throughout the United States and abroad.

As a soloist and chamber musician, Mr. Chen has performed at major venues in the United States including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Weill Recital Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Boston’s Jordan Hall, in addition to other appearances throughout the United States, Canada, and Asia.

Mr. Chen’s performances have been featured on radio and television stations around the globe, including KBS television and radio in Korea, NHK television in Japan, and NPR in the United States. Solo recordings include Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations on the Bridge label, praised as “a classic” by the American Record Guide, and Joan Tower’s piano music on Naxos.

Recordings of the Shostakovich piano sonatas and Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice were released in 2007.

An enthusiastic chamber musician, Mr. Chen has collaborated with such artists as Ida Kavafian, David Shifrin, Pamela Frank, Peter Wiley, and with the Shanghai, Tokyo, Miami, Penderecki, and Miró quartets. He has performed at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, Yale Summer School of Music/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Bard Music Festival, and Music from Angel Fire, among others.

Mr. Chen earned a doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University and also holds a double master’s degree from The Juilliard School in piano and violin. Previously, he attended Yale University, where he received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry

and physics and studied with Boris Berman, Paul Kantor, and Ida Kavafian. Mr. Chen was previously on the piano faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where he was also associate director. In 2012 he rejoined the faculty of the Yale School of Music, where he serves as associate professor (adjunct) of piano and Deputy Dean. He is the director of the Yale Summer School of Music/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.

Juliette Kang, violin Violinist Juliette Kang, the first associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, enjoys an active and varied career. Previously the assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Ms. Kang’s solo engagements have included appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Boston Pops, and every major orchestra in her native Canada. She has performed internationally with European and Asian orchestras and has given recitals in Philadelphia, Paris, Tokyo, and Boston. As gold medalist of the 1994 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, she was presented at New York’s Carnegie Hall in a recital with pianist Melvin Chen that was recorded live and released on CD. She has also recorded the Schumann and Wieniawski violin concertos with the Vancouver Symphony for CBC Records.

In 2012 she made her Philadelphia Orchestra subscription series debut with conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Her next solo feature with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be in January 2018, in a program conducted by Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Ms. Kang has been involved with chamber music

Artist Profiles

since studying at the Curtis Institute of Music. Festivals in which she has particpated include Bravo! Vail Valley, Bridgehampton (Long Island, New York), Kingston (Rhode Island), Marlboro, Moab (Utah), Skaneateles (New York), and Spoleto USA. In New York City she has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, at the Mostly Mozart Festival with her husband, cellist Thomas Kraines, and at the Bard Music Festival.

With Mr. Kraines, violist Che Hung Chen, and (Yale-trained) pianist Natalie Zhu, she is a member of the Clarosa Quartet, which is dedicated to exploring and enriching the piano quartet repertoire.

After receiving a bachelor of music degree from Curtis as a student of Jascha Brodsky, having entered the school at age 9, she earned a master of music degree at from the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Dorothy Delay and Robert Mann. She was a winner of the 1989 Young Concert Artists Auditions and in 1992 received first prize at the Menuhin Violin Competition of Paris. She serves on the Central Board of trustees at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School, one of the oldest and largest community schools of the arts in the country, founded in 1908 and having since served more than 300,000 students.

Argus Quartet The Argus Quartet was formed in the summer of 2013 and is receiving invitations from concert series throughout the United States and abroad. Recent performances include appearances at Carnegie Hall, Laguna Beach Live!, the Hear Now Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, the Birdfoot Festival, and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in

Amsterdam. This season also includes performances with the Brentano String Quartet and clarinetist David Shifrin at the Yale Summer School of Music/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Oneppo Chamber Series at the Yale School of Music, and Carnegie Hall. The Argus Quartet is serving as the Ernst Stiefel Quartet-inResidence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts during the 2016–17 season.

Argus is dedicated to reinvigorating the audience-performer relationship through innovative concerts and diverse repertoire — connecting with and building up a community of engaged listeners is at the core of the quartet’s mission. The quartet also believes that today’s ensembles can honor the storied chamber music traditions of our past while forging a new path forward. In that spirit, their repertoire includes not just staples of the chamber music canon but also a large number of pieces by living composers.

Through Chamber Music America and the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the Argus Quartet has commissioned a number of new works including quartets

by Donald Crockett, composer and Grammy Award nominee Eric Guinivan, and the 2014 Hermitage Prize winner, Thomas Kotcheff.

Argus served as the quartet-in-residence at New Music on the Point under the guidance of the JACK Quartet and was selected as one of three ensembles to perform works from Kronos Quartet’s “Fifty for the Future” commissioning project at Carnegie Hall.

The quartet is currently the fellowship quartet-in-residence at the Yale School of Music and is the first ensemble to be mentored by the Brentano String Quartet in that capacity. In addition to their teaching responsibilities at Yale, the members of the

Artist Profiles · Notes on the Program

Argus Quartet have worked with students through residencies and master classes at James Madison University, Rockport Music, the Milken School, the Young Musicians Foundation, California State University Long Beach, and the Birdfoot Festival.

Eric Adamshick, cello A graduate of Boston University, Eric Adamshick earned bachelor’s degrees in both cello performance and music composition/theory. As a soloist, he excelled under Michael Reynolds’ tutelage, tackling works such as Kodaly’s Sonata for Solo Cello and Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante.

As a composer, Eric studied privately under Rodney Lister and was able to have three premieres performed at Boston University, working with the Time’s Arrow Ensemble and the Boston University Symphonic Orchestra. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in cello performance at the Yale School of Music under the instruction of renowned cellist Aldo Parisot. An avid chamber cellist, Eric has worked with an expansive range of ensembles and repertoire with a specialization in new music and string quartets. He has been coached by members of the Muir Quartet, the Brentano String Quartet, David Shifrin, Ani Kavafian, and Michael Friedmann, as well as composers Joan Tower, Martin Bresnick, and Olga Neuwirth. He is currently working with the Béla Quartet, an ensemble that has enjoyed recent success winning the 2016 Chamber Music Competition at the Yale School of Music and performing overseas at the Royal College of Music in October 2016.

françois couperin Quatrième Concert (1722) François Couperin earned the title of “Couperin le Grand” (“Couperin the Great”), which distinguished him from the other high-profile musicians of the Couperin family. Quickly rising through the ranks as a church organist, he published a collection of organ masses early in his career. Gaining notoriety led to an even more impressive appointment to the royal court of Louis XIV. During his time serving the court, Couperin published several volumes of chamber music, harpsichord collections, and his most famous book, L’art de toucher le Clavecin (The Art of Playing the Harpsichord). The Concerts royaux were written for the Sunday concerts of the musically inclined Louis XIV, performed in what was most likely a very opulent hall at Versailles. There are four in the collection, which Couperin wrote between 1714 and 1715. These were suites of brief movements for which the composer did not specify instrumentation: the discretion of the performers dictated what the king might hear on a given evening. They could be performed by a lone harpsichordist or by a chamber ensemble that included a higher-pitched melodic instrument (perhaps oboe, flute, or violin), a lower-pitched instrument (viol or bassoon), and basso continuo. The Quatrième concert opens with a laconic, doleful prelude. The following movements adhere to popular dance forms (allemande, courante, etc.) that lighten and energize the mood. The clarity of form, elegance of phrasing, and lightness of spirit were the qualities that inspired Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin. These characteristics, considered typically “French,” acted as a stylistic signature for French composers beyond Couperin’s time.

Notes on the Program

maurice ravel Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 Ravel’s war years were unsurprisingly difficult. Le tombeau de Couperin began as an homage to the sensibilities and refinement of the French Baroque in the form of a solo piano suite in 1914, a year before he enlisted as a truck driver for the French Army. The job was taxing and stressful; the additional emotional burden of his mother’s death in 1917 contributed to his discharge a few months later. While recuperating at his grandmother’s country house, he returned to Le tombeau with a new perspective. Composers responded to the wars of the 20 th century with somber tributes and colossal memorials most often in large symphonic fashion. Though Ravel dedicated each movement of Le tombeau to a friend lost in combat, the piece reads as a celebration, not a eulogy. Rather than a cathartic manifesto of his time in the war, Le tombeau acted as a refuge of clarity and balance in a time of destruction and nihilism.

The Prelude begins with a brilliant and relentless coil of sextuplets. The Fugue, beginning with a somewhat obtuse subject, achieves a sense of timelessness as both hands in tandem slowly descend and re-ascend in register. Beginning with a sardonic, somewhat cubist melody in the violins, the Forlane takes inspiration from a Venetian dance popular among gondoliers before the music crosses the Alps into France. The bustling Rigaudon, a dance originating in Provence, depicts a joyous and whirling fête. The Menuet captures the essence of the graceful French dance with kaleidoscopic pianistic colors. A brilliant Toccata concludes the suite with constant bubbling 16th notes; a breathless fermata gives way to a roiling run from the

murky depths of the bass register to a triumphant chiming final chord in the high treble. In 1919, after the first performance of Le tombeau, Ravel decided to orchestrate the work. He chose four of the six movements for his final orchestration, a task he executed with dazzling color yet remarkable economy. ernest chausson Concert pour violon, piano et quatuor à cordes, Op. 21 Ernest Chausson’s salon in the eighth arrondissement attracted the most elite of the European art scene: Mallarmé, Debussy, Monet, and the Russian novelist Turgenev, to name a few. His career in music was somewhat unexpected as he had finished law school and secured a position in a high court. He began to take classes with Jules Massenet and Cesar Franck at the Paris Conservatoire and traveled often to hear Wagner’s operas. Considering his professional pursuits along with his private dabbling in the visual arts and literature, he was easily characterized as a “Renaissance man.” The inspiration for his Op. 21 concerto undoubtedly came from the Baroque concerto grosso, a cousin to Couperin’s Concerts royaux. While the piano and solo violin parts often enjoy the spotlight, neither commands quite the amount of attention expected of a typical concerto soloist. The quartet works in opposition to the soloists, but more often in support or in tandem with them. Though the work takes inspiration from the Baroque, the harmonic and melodic language is entirely Romantic.

After the successful premiere in Belgium with Ysaÿe and Pierret as soloists, Le Guide Musical lauded Chausson as “an ingenious

Notes on the Program

inventor of new sonorities,” a high compliment after stern rejection by the Parisian press. The manuscript of the piece shows Chausson sketched all of the principal themes at once — not surprising given the cyclical nature of the work as a whole.

The movements leave a trail of thematic breadcrumbs to be retraced in the finale.

The composer chided himself for his glacial pace in completing the work, but was able to celebrate the successful premiere, saying, “I must believe that my music is made for Belgians above all, for never have I enjoyed such a success … I feel giddy and joyful, such as I have not managed to feel for a long time.”

– Julia Clancy

HOROWITZ PIANO SERIES Boris Berman Artistic Director Wednesdays at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

MASTER CLASSES Most master classes take place Thursdays at 10:30 am in Morse Recital Hall APR 6

Melvin Chen

APR 13

Murray McLachlan, Chetham’s School of Music

APR 27

Peter Frankl

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