About the Program

Amy Beach

Piano Trio in a minor, opus 150

Born September 5, 1867, Henniker, NH

Died December 27, 1944, New York City

Amy Beach deserves to be remembered as more than just America’s first successful woman composer, as she is often categorized. A child prodigy, she appeared as piano soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at 17 and began composing while still a girl. At age 18 she married the Boston surgeon H.H.A. Beach, who—though a cultivated man musically—did not want his wife performing in public. He did, however, encourage her to compose. Beach had no formal training as a composer (which in her day meant European training), and as a composer she was essentially self-taught. Nevertheless, over the next several decades she produced a sequence of successful large-scale works. Her Mass in E-flat (1890) was the first work by a woman composer presented by Boston’s Haydn and Handel Society, and her “Gaelic” Symphony (1897) and Piano Concerto (1900) were performed to critical acclaim. Upon the death of her husband in 1910, Beach–then 43–resumed her career as a concert pianist, making a particularly successful series of tours through Europe. She composed prolifically throughout her life: though her list of opus numbers runs to 152, she actually wrote about 300 works. She was still active as pianist and composer at the time of her death in 1944 at 77.

In her later years Beach liked to spend her summers at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and it was there during the summer of 1938 that she composed her Piano Trio in a minor. She was 71 years old, and it would be her final piece of chamber music. The Trio is an unusually concise work: its three movements span a total of only fifteen minutes. The opening Allegro gets off to an active but subdued beginning on a series of deep piano runs. Beach marks these murmurando e legatissimo (“murmuring and bound tightly together”). Cello and violin enter with what at first seem thematic fragments, but these gradually coalesce into the first theme The music reaches a moment of repose, and then violin and cello lay out the second idea in a section marked Tranquillo. The opening material returns and drives to a great climax marked Maestoso (“majestic”) as the strings’ melody is underpinned by hammered octaves from the piano. Its energy spent, the movement subsides to a shimmering conclusion.

The central movement of the Piano Trio, marked Lento e espressivo, is in ABA form. Its outer sections are based on Beach’s own 1897 setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem Allein, a poem that had previously been set by such composers as Schubert, Clara Schumann, Grieg, and Wolf. Violin and cello sing the long main melody of the song in 6/8, and eventually the music comes to an expectant pause. The central episode is of unusual interest because it is based on quite a different song-tune. Nearly twenty years earlier, Beach had became interested in building a work on native materials: she drew three tunes from Franz Boas’ study of Inuit tribes and used them as the basis for her one-movement String Quartet. Now that interest returned, and she builds the central episode of the Piano Trio on another Inuit tune, here marked Presto. This tune dances nimbly along its 2/4 meter before the piano leads the movement back to its opening material. Beach rounds the movement off nicely with a quick reminiscence of the Inuit tune.

After two fairly well-behaved movements, the concluding Allegro con brio brings a welcome measure of slashing energy. The music surges ahead propulsively, much of its energy coming from Beach’s constantly syncopated rhythms. The movement builds to a grand climax, once again marked Maestoso, and drives to a grand conclusion.

The first performance of the Piano Trio took place on January 15, 1939 at the MacDowell Club in New York City. Beach was the pianist on that occasion.

Georgy Sviridov

Piano Trio in a minor, opus 6

Born December 16, 1915, Fatezh, Kursk

Died January 5, 1998, Moscow

The music of Gyorgy Sviridov is not well-known in the West, but in Russia he is regarded as one of the last great composers of the Soviet era. Born in western Russia, Sviridov showed musical talent early and as a boy was sent to study in Leningrad. He eventually would spend five years at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied with Shostakovich (the two would remain good friends for the next forty years). Sviridov composed in many different forms, but it is likely that he will be best remembered for his music for voice. His many songs, cantatas, oratorios and choral works set texts by such Russian writers as Pushkin, Blok, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, and Pasternak, and Sviridov also set texts by non-Russian writers, including Shakespeare and Burns. He composed one opera, two symphonies, two piano concertos, and a number of film scores. The circumstances of the creation of Sviridov’s Piano Trio in a minor did much to shape its emotional impact. He began work on the first movement in Leningrad in 1941 while that city was under siege by the German army, but he did not complete the trio until four years later, when he was 30. It was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946, though Sviridov remained dissatisfied—he returned to this music in 1955 and revised it.

Svirdov’s Piano Trio in a minor is an exceptionally powerful piece of music: it opens with a movement titled Elegy and continues with a scherzo that is invariably described as a “danse macabre.” The third movement, longest of the four, is titled Funeral March, and Sviridov concludes with an Idyll that is anything but idyllic. Throughout, listeners will sense the influence of Sviridov’s teacher Shostakovich, who wrote his similarly-dark Piano Trio in e minor at this same time.

The Elegy opens with a long, grieving melody for violin that sets the tone for much of what will follow, and the cello sings a second idea over steady col legno tapping from the violin. One feels a suppressed power in both these themes, and those premonitions are correct: the music quickly erupts into a violent development of these ideas, and the full-throated intensity of this movement strains the limits of chamber music. Its energy exhausted, the movement winds down to a barely-subdued conclusion.

There does seem to be something demonic about the Scherzo, which will remind many of the scherzo of Shostakovich’s Trio in e minor, though Sviridov’s music has an identity all its own. Matters relax a little, but not much, in the central episode.

Longest of the movements, the Funeral March is in many way the emotional climax of the work. The piano sits out for the first 90 seconds as the violin sings the bleak and mournful main idea over pizzicato accompaniment from the cello. The piano enters, the music recalls the main theme of the opening Elegy, and matters build to an overwhelming climax on a tragic funeral march that pounds its way along steady rhythms. The music fades into silence on eerie harmonics from the strings.

We expect a movement titled Idyll to provide some relief, and at first Sviridov seems to satisfy that expectation—the music rocks along happily on its light-hearted opening theme. But this calm does not last for long. Back comes the demonic energy of the earlier movements, and any hope of pastoral bliss is shattered as the music seethes with the intensity heard earlier. Rather than ending with this furious activity, Sviridov winds these tensions down. We hear reminiscences of the opening idyll music, and—after all its fury—the Piano Trio in a minor ends in the middle of nowhere, drifting into a numb silence that resolves nothing that has gone before.

This is a work that deserves to be better known.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Piano Trio in g minor “Trio élégiaque”

Born April 1, 1873, Oleg

Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills

Sometimes musical nicknames can be needlessly confusing, and that is certainly the case with Rachmaninoff’s two piano trios. He composed both of them very early in his career and nicknamed both of them Trio élégiaque.

Rachmaninoff had entered the Moscow Conservatory at age 12, studying piano and composition, and he proved a brilliant success at both: he graduated with honors in piano in June 1891 and won the gold medal—the highest possible award—in composition a year later. It was while he was still a student at the Conservatory that the young composer scheduled his first formal concert for January 30, 1892. On this program Rachmaninoff played piano works by other composers, and he also introduced several new works of his own, including the present one-movement piano trio. But he barely got the trio done in time—he composed it in four days (January 18–21), leaving just a week to get the parts copied and the music rehearsed.

Rachmaninoff’s second Trio élégiaque would be written in memory of Tchaikovsky, but his intention in the first was not so specific—that title suggests a general atmosphere rather than commemorating a particular event or loss. The music is marked Lento lugubre, which suggests its character perfectly, and listeners will discover that at age 18 Rachmaninoff already had command of that vein of somber lyricism that marks his mature music. Over subtly-shifting string accompaniment, the piano in octaves lays out the trio’s main idea before the strings are allowed to take it up. The violin has the second subject, which preserves the trio’s somber character, and the development–while active–remains at the measured opening tempo. Rachmaninoff closes out the trio by recalling the main theme in the strings above a darkly-tolling piano accompaniment.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Vocalise, opus 34, no. 14

Rachmaninoff wrote so much bravura piano music and so many dramatic orchestral works that one tends to overlook his greatest strength as a composer—an incredible lyric gift best evident in his more than seventy songs and numerous choral works. Vocalise dates from the summer of 1912, which Rachmaninoff spent at Ivanovka, his family’s country estate. There he completed a cycle of fourteen songs, tailoring each to the talents of an individual Russian singer he knew. The last of the fourteen—dedicated to soprano Antonina Nezhdanovka, a member of the Moscow Grand Opera—was wordless: the soprano was simply to sing the melodic line over piano accompaniment. The song proved popular, and a few years later—at the suggestion of conductor Serge Koussevitsky—Rachmaninoff arranged Vocalise for string orchestra. Vocalise has haunted performers as well as listeners: in addition to the original versions for voice and for orchestra, the current catalog lists transcriptions for cello, piano, and saxophone.

It is easy to understand this music’s appeal. Vocalise offers Rachmaninoff’s most bittersweet lyricism, suffused with a dark, elegiac quality—this music was, in fact, performed at the memorial service following Rachmaninoff’s own death.

Gaspar Cassadó

Trio in C Major for Pianoforte, Violin, and Violoncello

Born September 30, 1897, Barcelona

Died December 24, 1966, Madrid

Of Catalonian descent, cellist Gaspar Cassadó began his studies in Barcelona but went to Paris at age 13 to study with Pablo Casals. He launched an international career shortly after World War I, making his American debut in 1936 and returning for a second visit in 1949. As a cellist, he was renowned for the richness of his sound and made famous recordings of the concertos of Schumann, Haydn, Boccherini, and Vivaldi; late in life, he made several chamber music recordings with Yehudi Menuhin.

Cassadó was known in this country as a composer long before he appeared here as a performer: in 1928, Wilhelm Mengelberg had led the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of Cassadó's Catalonian Rhapsody. As might be expected, Cassadó wrote primarily for cello, and his compositions include a cello concerto and arrangements for cello of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 and Weber’s Clarinet Concerto.

A frequent performer of chamber music, Cassadó also wrote a great deal for chamber ensembles, including two cello sonatas. If there was a Catalonian side to Cassadó, there was also a classical element in his make-up, and this is on display in the Trio in C Major. It is in three movements in the expected fast-slow-fast sequence, though Cassadó challenges expectations at a number of points. After a dramatic first movement, the second is set at a heavy pace rather than being lyric, and the finale opens with a powerful recitative before this impassioned movement takes wing at the Allegro vivo.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger