Robert Blocker, Dean
doctor of musica l arts r ecital
Jacob Ashworth violin
Thursday, November 16, 2017 • 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall
yale school of music
Jacob Ashworth, violin November 16, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall
set 1 Iannis Xenakis 1922–2001 György Kurtag b. 1926 Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750 Kurtag Bach
Mikka, for solo violin (1971) “Hommage à John Cage,” from Signs, Games and Messages (1987, rev. 1991) Grave, from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 (1720) “In Memoriam Thomas Blum,” from Signs, Games, Messages (1995) Fuga, from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 (1720) set 2
Eugene Ysaÿe 1858–1931 Irish traditional
“Malinconia,” from Sonata in A minor, Op. 27, No. 2, “à Jacques Thibaud” (1924) The Strayaway Child
Ysaÿe
"Sarabande," from Sonata in E minor, Op. 27, No. 4, “à Fritz Kreisler” (1924)
Salvatore Sciarrino b. 1947 Susan Kander b. 1957
Andante, from Sei Capricci (1976) (Malevolent) Dances, from Solo Sonata (2002)
doctor of musical arts recital
set 3 Nicola Matteis 1650–1714 Bach
Fantasia in C minor for solo violin (ca. 1676) Andante, from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 (1720)
Johann Georg Pisendel 1687–1755
"Lento," from Sonata for Solo Violin in A minor, JunP IV.2 (1717)
Bach
Allegro, from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 (1720)
This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree
artist profile · notes on the program
Jacob Ashworth, violin “A flat-out triumph for its two fearless performers” raved Opera News for violinist Jacob Ashworth’s 2015 fully staged perfo mance of Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragments. Across the spectrum of classical music, Jacob has gained a reputation as a consummate stylist, from his “exacting and sensitive” interpretations of modern works (The Boston Globe) to his “diligent attention to [baroque] period style” (The New York Times). The founder and artistic director of the “crack ensemble” (The New Yorker) Cantata Profana, winners of the 2016 CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Jacob is also co-music director of Heartbeat Opera, most recently conducting a “richly detailed yet delicate rendering” (The New York Times) of Puccini’s Butterfly in 2017. Jacob has performed extensively on period instruments, including as concertmaster for Nicholas McGegan with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Staunton Music Festival, Juilliard 415, and New York Baroque Incorporated. His first album, Hermestänze, featuring the music of Susan Kander, was released on MSR Records. set 1 The violin has always been an instrument for storytelling. The sonatas and partitas of Bach are as much a collection of character studies as they are formal inventions, virtuosic escapades, theoretical exercises, and harmonic meditations. Composers have been drawn to the lone violin for centuries, because it provides that rare combination of expansive versatility and virtuosity with surprising vulnerability. It
can simulate multiple harmonies, accompany itself, weave full textures, and explore extreme ranges. But any foray that takes the fiddle beyond its roots as a simple melodic instrument is an attempt to rise to dangerous heights from a delicate foundation, and that fraught balance is what makes solo violin playing so spectacular and so intimate. The violin has a few choice attributes which have variously fascinated composers. It has four strings, two of which can be sustained at once, but all four of which can be struck at once. It has a bow that enables unlimited sustain. It can be plucked. It has a full range of artificial and natural harmonics. It is the smallest and most agile of the string instruments (all of which share these other characteristics). And it is fretless. It is this last aspect which Iannis Xenakis exploits to full and almost exclusive extent in Mikka. The entire piece is conceived as one long glissando. The brilliance of the piece, though, is that in narrowing his parameters and focusing so intently on only one technical possibility of the instrument, Xenakis created an ingenious simulation of speech — mumbling, wordless, garbled, sometimes faint, sometimes a cacophony of voices — and found a means of telling a story. It is like entering a room of chatter in languages you don’t understand. Or, to my mind, it sounds just like the teacher in Charlie Brown. György Kurtag has the remarkable gift of being able to draw the most vivid characters with the fewest pen strokes. His masterpieces are miniature, conveying hyper-specific scenes and personalities in a few notes, a few gestures. Bach does the same; his sonatas and partitas have retained their place in the violin literature because
notes on the program
we are endlessly curious about the characters and stories they hold. The opening movements of Bach’s three sonatas, like the "Grave" of the A minor, are improvisatory meditations that seem always to speak through grief. The fugues are rhetorical madness, a rabid convention of voices in dialogue, in agreement, in argument, complementing, lashing out, exploring, and striving together for a satisfying solution.
fragile of string techniques. Acclimatizing to such rarified timbres can take a moment, but once the altitude sickness passes, a luminous beauty shines through and the etude becomes a serene meditation. These elements of folk, dance, etude, and caprice all combine in the gutsy finale of Susan Kander’s Solo Sonata. An initial outburst gives way to a swerving and jaunty dance, which eventually settles into a wry, sensual tango. When the first dance resumes, it carries the work to a thrilling finish.
SET 2 Eugene Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for solo violin are a compendium of new techniques for the type of grand and glorious violin playing that made him famous. He expanded our imagination of what a violin could do, seemingly overcoming the limitation of four simple strings and a bow. In the "Malinconia," his mastery of double-stops as a tool for expression and lyricism, and his embrace of new vocal styles in his soupy and scooping fingerings, allows for two equally fervent and mournful melodic lines to play at once. In the "Sarabande," through ingenious voicing solutions and a vision for how to navigate arpeggiation, he unravels a repeated ground bass figure into remarkably varied textures with a beautiful dramatic arc. And yet for all his innovation and pioneering, Ysaÿe’s style brings the violin somehow closer to the earthy world of the fiddle, which must have felt like a distant cousin to composers of the time. His inventions are brilliant, but not lofty. There is grit in the cleverness. Far from the firm ground of Ysaÿe is the perilously stratospheric sound world of Salvatore Sciarrino. His Sei Capricci for solo violin are written entirely in harmonics, echoing Paganini but using only the most
SET 3 Before Bach wrote his sonatas and partitas, and long before a cosmopolitan German style had invited rules and structure into solo violin music, there was the fantastical world of 17th century Italian violinists. Impulsive, erratic, and effervescent, Nicola Matteis’ Fantasia is a perfect sample of the kind of free-spirited, ornate composition that thrived in Italy and was a smashing success when brought to London, where Matteis immigrated. The notes don’t add up to beats; the beats don’t add up to measures. The harmonies meander through whichever keys seem to fall at the end of a flurry of notes. Before improvisation was about successfully getting from point A to point B with sound form and structure, it was about wild exhibition, constant diversion, and surprise. Of Bach’s many inventive ways of deploying the solo violin, his "Andante" stands out as a particularly ambitious exercise. The trick of keeping a continuous walking rhythm in the bass underneath a full melody on the same instrument is an astonishing conceit. Compared with the more formless violin music of Bach’s
notes on the program
predecessors, this movement confronts the player with a very limiting apparatus, but the challenge is enticing and the melody is sublime. There is a strong chance that Bach heard Johann Georg Pisendel perform his sonatas just a few years before Bach took to writing his own solo violin works. Pisendel’s style still smacks of Italian showmanship, but it has a Germanic gravity that makes it a perfect bridge to Bach’s genre-eclipsing volume. The first movement of Pisendel’s only solo violin sonata brings us back to A minor and leads us into Bach’s final "Allegro." It is ostensibly in Bach’s partitas, not his sonatas, that dance movements are to be found. But in fact, after the initial improvisation of each sonata, dance rhythms are inescapable. They find their way into the "Fugue" and the "Andante," and then are wholly embraced in the last movement — a busy, electrifying perpetual motion with a big cut-time swing.
Recap: Xenakis gives us effusive words in a language we don’t understand; Kurtag’s "Hommage à John Cage" falters at the moment of attempting speech; Bach’s "Grave" retreats inwards to grief-stricken thoughts, which receive their tortured, wordless scream in Kurtag’s "In Memoriam Thomas Blum"; picking up the pieces, Bach’s "Fugue" takes only the smallest kernel of speech and spins it out into a maze of conversations, a dramatic essay in search of closure. Ysaÿe’s lament is a moment of pure melancholy, ending in ritualistic tones; The Strayaway Child offers a simple answer in the rocking sway of its melody; the "Sarabande" weaves that simplicity into a fine-textured cloth; Sciarrino transports the natural harmonies of the instrument to an atmosphere of otherworldly beauty; the trance is broken by the exhilarating drama of Kander’s "(Malevolent) Dances," which bring us crashing back to human life, with all its passions and ecstasies. Out of a primordial ooze of gesture and harmony, the fanciful, almost garish roots of solo violin music come through in Matteis’ Fantasia; quickly we are rapt to a place of order and beauty in Bach’s "Andante"; Pisendel offers a more symphonic introduction, with full chords and big questions; Bach’s "Allegro" launches forward with a palpable vigor, but wrought with concern, careening every which way until ultimately exhausting itself on the threshold in its final bars. —Jacob Ashworth
Robert Blocker, Dean
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