Chamber Music Competition Winners, May 9, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

oneppo chamber music series

Competition Winners

David Shifrin, Artistic Director May 9, 2017 • Tuesday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

Competition Winners

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756–1791

Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452 I. Largo — Allegro moderato II. Larghetto III. Allegretto Noah Kay, oboe Elisha Willinger, clarinet Scott Leger, horn Hanul Park, bassoon Jenny J. Lee, piano

Benjamin Britten 1913–1976

String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 I. Andante sostenuto — Allegro vivo II. Allegretto con slancio III. Andante calmo IV. Molto vivace Laura Park, violin Jessy Je Young Kim, violin Emily Brandenburg, viola Samuel DeCaprio, cello 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.

Yale School of Music

Jean-Philippe Rameau 1683–1764 arr. by Ryohei Nakagawa

Steve Reich b. 1936

Gavotte and Six Doubles, RCT 5, No. 7 Felice Doynov, flute Michelle Nguyen, oboe Jesse McCandless, clarinet Scott Leger, horn Matthew Gregoire, bassoon Double Sextet (2007) I. Fast II. Slow III. Fast Elliot Lee, violin Jiyoung Choi, cello Evan Fojtik, flute Jesse McCandless, clarinet Matthew Gray, piano Dmitrii Nilov, percussion

special thanks to the coaches who worked with the ensembles: Humbert Lucarelli (Mozart) • Nina Lee (Britten) William Purvis (Rameau) • Robert Van Sice (Reich)

Notes on the Program

wolfgang amadeus mozart Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452

coda, but with two brilliant flourishes in the horn.

Mozart completed his Quintet for piano and winds in the early months of 1784, playing the piano part at the premiere at the Imperial and Royal National Court Theater in Vienna a mere two days after he’d finished writing the piece. Afterward, Mozart wrote to his father about the quintet: “It had the greatest applause. I myself consider it the best thing I have written in my life.”

Structurally in ternary form, the Larghetto creates long, singing lines built from many shorter fragments. After the winds state the first motif of the opening section, the piano presents the second against repeated pulsed notes. The middle section features an especially attractive horn melody. At the return of the first section, the music is scored differently so as to include a hauntingly gorgeous sustained chromatic line in the winds that functions to extend the first theme. The movement’s close is similar to the first part.

There is no question that the Quintet is the work of a master in command of his craft. Mozart manages to create a brilliant piano part that is perfectly integrated with the other instruments. He shows extraordinary skill in writing for the winds, demonstrating each instrument’s unique tone quality and taking into account the need for time to breathe. It all comes together successfully to create a highly emotional work in the most intimate style and presented with the simplest of means.

The first movement opens with a dignified and stately introduction, presenting each of the instruments via a short solo turn.

The two main themes of the body of the movement are stated quietly by the piano, with loud counterstatements by the entire ensemble. The concluding theme of the exposition, a descending syncopated figure, is dominated by the winds. The brief and straightforward development section is essentially four statements of the first theme, with each statement progressively a step higher than the previous one. This builds an organic tension which is finally released with the arrival of the recapitulation. The themes are further developed in the recapitulation, and the movement ends not with a

The sparkling rondo is made especially charming through both its deliberate Allegretto tempo and the playful treatment of the already appealing tunes. Traditionally, the rondo form is structured A-B-A-C-A, with A being the principal theme and B and C serving as contrasting material. After following the first four parts of this scheme faithfully, Mozart deviates from it, reintroducing B instead of bringing back A. As an even bigger surprise, he then inserts a cadenza in tempo, improvisatory-sounding parts written out for all five players, before finally relenting to provide the final statement of the A theme to end the piece.

–Jacob Adams benjamin britten String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 In 1939, Benjamin Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, docked in North America, having made a long sea voyage from their home country of England. With icy reactions toward the couple’s devotion to one another bleeding into audience receptions of Britten’s works, it appeared as though a change in

Notes on the Program

scenery was necessary for the pair. In 1941, two years after their arrival, Elizabeth Coolidge commissioned a string quartet from Britten, who eagerly accepted the work because of its financial promise. Perhaps most prominent in this first quartet is the music’s sheer beauty, as Britten weaves textures and melodies from open strings, ensuring an almost constant wealth of sonority. The first movement seems to include two movements of its own — the coaxing, pulsating upper strings in the highest of registers paired with the cello’s beckoning pizzicati; and the extroverted, raucous theme that threatens to crawl ever upward to the opening’s heavenly realm. The miniature second movement, marked Allegro con slancio, which translates as “with momentum,” chugs along, its impetus provided not only by a constant march-like figure but also by virtuosic interruptions that are passed around the ensemble. Again, Britten employs the ensemble’s full gambit, with scales climbing upward in the violins as the cello growls in its deep register. The third movement, an adagio, brings to mind Britten’s “Moonlight” movement from the Four Sea Interludes — the syncopated, sustained strings representing moonbeams penetrating the night. Toward the middle of the movement, the cello begins a series of solo cadenzas that are passed around the ensemble and eventually transformed into pizzicati. Britten then weaves the pizzicati from the first movement into this texture, bringing a feeling of reminiscence and familiarity to this nocturnal movement. The finale moves forward with running scales and pizzicato textures contrasted with a full, sustained motif that is almost always presented in pairs. This bountifully joyful movement closes with virtuosity and flash, driving the ensemble in unison towards its final D major cadence.

jean-philippe rameau Gavotte and Six Doubles, RCT 5, No. 7 Born only two years before J.S. Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti, Jean-Philippe Rameau was, in the words of BBC’s Ivan Hewett, “the greatest composer you’ve never heard of.” His infamous Treatise on Harmony of 1722 contradicts the school of thought that preceded the eighteenthcentury and that assumed music was based on melody, rather than harmony. Rameau, however, having studied the natural overtone series, accurately concluded that harmony was the basis of music. This methodology has dominated music-making since the publication of his treatise, distinguishing Rameau as one of the primary theorists in the history of Western Classical music. A prolific composer of opera, as well as vocal and organ music, Rameau turned to the harpsichord as his compositional medium of choice during his moves to Paris, the first in 1706 and the second, a permanent relocation, in 1724. Published in 1727 as part of his Suite in A minor, RCT 5, the Gavotte and Six Doubles is one of his most wellknown works. Essentially a theme and variations, the Gavotte’s simple theme resembles a passacaglia or chaconne, with the doubles, or variations, building in complexity. Of special note are the fifth and sixth doubles, which demand dexterity from all members of the ensemble.

– Danielle Wiebe Burke steve reich Double Sextet (2007) Everything around you, and within you, is vibrating right now. A relatively minute segment from all the endlessly moving stuff in the universe is moving in a Goldilocks

Notes on the Program

range of frequencies that your senses, and your mind, can recognize. This is sound.

Steve Reich’s music seems to distill the complexities of our art down to its most basic, granular forms. Pitch. Duration.

Loudness. Envelope. Timbre. Location.

These elements interact, and we react.

Combining these elements in a particular manner appeals to our innate ability to recognize patterns. Part of Reich’s skill is in his acknowledgement that listeners are at least partly responsible in this intricate pattern-making. The Double Sextet, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is richly patterned.

Two sextets, or six pairs? Throughout the work, Reich plays with these relationships: How do the voices within a single sextet work together, and how does each instrument relate to its doppelgänger? Similar instruments are entwined within an interlocking pattern. Medieval musicians called this hoquetus, or “hocket,” a kind of sonic hiccup wherein the musical line is broken up by alternations between multiple voices.

Rather than breaking the continuity of a musical line, the technique imbues it with unbroken and unyielding energy. You will hear it used in Middle Age polyphony, electronic dance music, and in the complex patterning of West African ensemble music.

The cut-and-sewn musical patterning that Reich uses throughout the Double Sextet resonates at the core of our perception and transcends cultural and temporal boundaries.

The paired configuration is practical and arguably vital for a non-stop twenty-minute composition whose instrumentation includes winds. When presented with the notion of writing for the Chicago-based music ensemble eighth blackbird – which includes

flute and clarinet – Reich inherently knew that the limitations of human lung capacity would require some workaround. Throughout the work, he layers these contrasting patterns, starkly varied in rhythmic buzz.

The pianos and vibraphones are locked into an ostinato pattern, as essential here as in the rhythm section of a jazz ensemble. In a slower sound space, the strings and winds engage in a stereophonic debate. In those brief punctuations of momentary pause, our ears gravitate toward more ringing sonorities: open air. The central movement (Slow), is something of a macroscopic “blow-up” of these moments of repose within the tripartite structure. It is ushered in, without pause, at the bell-toll of a vibraphone. The rhythmic pulsations plunge deep, while a dark and sensual waltz — in accordionesque, Parisian café-music timbres — rises up like steam hovering in a darkened film-noir alleyway. In keeping with the mirror-image quality of the work’s doubled instrumentation, the structure folds upon itself. A varied reflection of the Fast opening returns nearly in media res, thrusting forward as the twelve on stage gradually converge toward unity.

The Double Sextet, like so much of Reich’s work, is instilled with formal and harmonic logic, contrapuntal intricacy, and symmetry.

But first exposure to this music is best experienced more sensorially: let it wash over you, as only live performance can truly allow.

Later, upon another listen with the aid of a rewind button, discover why it so moves your mind and body.

– Patrick Jankowski

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Robert Blocker, Dean