2017 Bravo! Vail Chamber Book

2017

CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

J U N E 2 7–A U G U S T 4 , 2 0 1 7

WELCOME

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elcome to Bravo! Vail’s 2017 season of chamber music! Would it surprise you to learn that the six week long Bravo! Vail Music Festival that we know and love today started with just a few lovingly played chamber music concerts? As the story goes, the musicians and the audience members sat on the stage together at those opening concerts. My, how we’ve grown. And yet, chamber music remains our heart and soul.

The pages of this little book have been organized for you as a guide to some of the richest, deepest, most Anne-Marie McDermott intimate musical expressions ever written. String quartets ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

by Beethoven and Philip Glass; sonatas by Brahms and Shostakovich; trios, quintets, sextets, and triple quartets by Françaix, Mozart, Dvořák, and Steve Reich; and a world premiere by David Ludwig—all inhabit a rare and wonderful world of sonic beauty and visceral emotion. This is the music of family and friends, where every performance is a conversation, a dialogue, an interweaving of individual voices. You cannot help but be touched—whether by the music or the passion of the world-class musicians in front of you. They, like me, play chamber music as if our lives depended on it.

Please join us. Listen, and enjoy!

CONTENTS CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES........................... 2 FREE CONCERT SERIES............................... 4 CLASSICALLY UNCORKED

ZACHMAHONE.COM

PRESENTED BY ARIETTA WINE.......................... 6

SEASON AT A GLANCE................................ 8 CONCERT LISTINGS................................... 10 MEET THE ARTISTS.................................... 48 ALL PROGRAM NOTES © 2017 DR. RICHARD E. RODDA

NEW WORKS PROJECT

Bravo!’s flagship 30th season venture is the inaugural New Works Fund, which serves to nurture the creation of new music by today's most inventive composers; and to present the incredible wealth of music from the 20th and 21st centuries.

We celebrate the launch of the New Works Project with five commissions this season, including one for our August 3 Classically Uncorked concert (see page 46 for details).

BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

UP CLOSE & MUSICAL JUNE 27–JULY 25, 2017

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RAVO! VAIL’S CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES offers something for music lovers of all persuasions. Audiences will enjoy wellloved masterworks and new discoveries of the chamber music repertoire, performed by members of the resident orchestras alongside world-renowned guest artists and ensembles, all in the spectacular setting of the Donovan Pavilion, a stunning venue with expansive mountain valley views. Experience chamber music as it was meant to be heard: in a beautiful, intimate environment, with acclaimed artists, and among friends.

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2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT, PIANO (page 10)

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE JUN

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TOP: ZACHMAHONE.COM; FROM LEFT: © LISA MAZZUCCO; © CHRIS LEE

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EMERSON STRING QUARTET (page 22)

The Academy Chamber Ensemble with McDermott....................... 10 Emerson String Quartet................................................ 22 Music for Four Pianists/Eight Hands...........28 New York Philharmonic String Quartet Plays Beethoven & Dvořák...........36

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC STRING QUARTET (page 36) BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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FREE CONCERT SERIES

CHAMBER MUSIC FOR ALL JUNE 29–JULY 31, 2017

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AKE A BREAK FROM YOUR DAY with a free, hour-long chamber music concert performed by the Festival’s renowned musicians including the 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence and the 2017 Piano Fellows.

These programs offer a wide variety of repertoire, and are held in beautiful and unique community venues throughout the Vail Valley.

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2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE JUN

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

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ZACHMAHONE.COM (2)

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Gallery Row, Beaver

08 Creek, 1:00PM.........................16 JUL

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Edwards Interfaith Chapel, 6:00PM.....................18

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Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM............................................. 20

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Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM............................................. 24

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Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM............................................. 26

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

25 1:00PM............................................. 34 27 31

Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM............................................. 38 Brush Creek Pavilion, 6:00PM............................................ 40

Golden Eagle Senior

20 Center, 11:00AM................... 30 JUL

Vail Interfaith Chapel,

20 1:00PM............................................. 32

BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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CLASSICALLY UNCORKED PRESENTED BY ARIETTA WINE

ARTISTRY IN ABUNDANCE AUGUST 1–3, 2017

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HIRTY YEARS OF BRAVO! VAIL’S chamber music legacy culminates in an unforgettable series unlike any other. Featuring not one, not two, but three of today’s most visionary and enterprising string quartets, the world premiere of a brand-new commissioned work, intimate seating in a stunning setting, gourmet hors d’oeuvres and Arietta wines (“born of a passion for music”), Classically Uncorked pulls out all the stops and delivers an exceptional chamber music experience.

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2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE AUG

01 AUG

02 AUG

ZACHMAHONE.COM (1); ARIETTA WINE (1)

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One Quartet: A Toast to Beethoven................................42 Two Quartets: Glass & Schubert..................... 44 Three Quartets: Glass & Reich............................... 46

PRESENTED BY

BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

2017 SEASON AT A GLANCE 25 COLOR KEY Orchestra Concerts

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Academy of St Martin in the Fields 6:00PM | GRFA

27 Chamber Music 6:00PM | DP

Chamber Music Concerts Classically Uncorked presented by Arietta Wine Free Concerts

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Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Little Listeners 2:00PM | VPL

Dallas Symphony Orchestra 2:00PM | GRFA

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Pre-Concert Talk 5:00PM | GRFA

Little Listeners 2:00PM | APL

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

The Philadelphia Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Free Concert 6:00PM | EIC

Little Listeners 2:00PM | VPL

Soirée 6:00PM | Palumbo Residence

Chamber Music 6:00PM | DP

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Free Education & Engagement Events Linda & Mitch Hart Soirée Series

LOCATION KEY APL: Avon Public Library BCP: Brush Creek Pavilion CMBC: Crazy Mountain Brewing Company DP: Donovan Pavilion EIC: Edwards Interfaith Chapel EPL: Eagle Public Library GESC: Golden Eagle Senior Center

30th Annual Gala An Enchanted Evening 5:30PM | RCBG

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC Little Listeners 2:00PM | VPL Chamber Music 6:00PM | DP

GPL: Gypsum Public Library GRBC: Gallery Row, Beaver Creek GRFA: Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater LAG: Lundgren Amphitheater, Gypsum

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New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

25 Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC Chamber Music 6:00PM | DP

RCBG: Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch VAH: Vail Ale House VBC: Vail Brewing Company VIC: Vail Interfaith Chapel VMS: Vail Mountain School VPL: Vail Public Library

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1 AUGUST

Soirée 6:00PM | Balk Residence

Free Concert 6:00PM | BCP

Classically Uncorked Presented by Arietta Wine 7:30PM | DP

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY 22 JUNE Pre-Concert Talk 5:00PM | GRFA Academy of St Martin in the Fields 6:00PM | GRFA

FRIDAY

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Soirée 6:00PM | de Vink Residence

Academy of St Martin in the Fields 6:00PM | GRFA

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1 JULY

Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

Pre-Concert Talk 5:00PM | GRFA

Little Listeners 2:00PM | EPL

Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

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Little Listeners 2:00PM | GPL

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

The Philadelphia Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Free Concert 1:00PM | GRBC

Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

The Philadelphia Orchestra Special Time, 7:30PM | GRFA

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Instrument Petting Zoo 10:00AM | GRFA

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

Free Family Concert #1 11:00AM | GRFA

The Philadelphia Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

The Philadelphia Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

The Philadelphia Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

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Instrument Petting Zoo 5:00PM | LAG Free Family Concert #2 6:00PM | LAG

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Little Listeners 2:00PM | GPL

Free Concert 11:00AM | GESC

New York Philharmonic Pre-Concert Talk 6:00PM | GRFA 5:00PM | GRFA

Soirée 6:00PM | Smith Residence

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

Bravo! Vail After Dark 8:30PM | VAH

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Pre-Concert Talk 5:00PM | GRFA

Free Concert 1:00PM | VIC

Master Class 1:00PM | VMS

Bravo! Vail After Dark 8:30PM | CMBC

New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

Master Class 3:00PM | VMS

New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

Little Listeners 2:00PM | EPL

New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

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Classically Uncorked Presented by Arietta Wine 7:30PM | DP

Classically Uncorked Presented by Arietta Wine 7:30PM | DP

Bravo! Vail After Dark 8:30PM | VBC

New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

CHAMBER MUSIC

THE ACADEMY CHAMBER ENSEMBLE WITH McDERMOTT Introduction (Sextet) to Capriccio, Op. 85 (1939-1941) RICHARD STR AUSS (1864-1949)

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n his New Encyclopedia of the Opera, David Ewen offered the following précis of Capriccio, Strauss’ last opera: “The almost actionless libretto [set in a chateau in late18th-century France] is little more than a discussion as to which is more significant in opera, the words or the music. Flamand, the musician, becomes the spokesman for the music; Olivier, the poet, for the words. Both are emotionally involved with the Countess Madeleine. When LaRoche, a producer, plans a series of entertainments to celebrate the Countess’ birthday, she suggests that Flamand and Olivier collaborate, using for their material the day’s happenings and themselves as principal characters. When they leave to write their ‘entertainment,’ the Countess (looking in a mirror) asks herself which man she prefers.

She comes to the conclusion that both interest her equally. Her conclusion is Strauss’ answer to the problem that opened the opera: in opera, the words and music have equal importance.” In Capriccio, the Sextet begins before the stage is revealed. As it continues, the curtain rises to show the characters listening to the music played by an off-stage ensemble as the musician Flamand’s birthday offering to the Countess.

Sextet for Two Violins, Two Violas and Two Cellos in A major, Op. 48 (1878) ANTONÍN DVOŘ ÁK (1841-1904)

Dvořák’s String Sextet was composed in only two weeks during May 1878, and first given on July 29, 1879 at a private soirée in the Berlin home of the master violinist and staunch ally of Brahms, Joseph Joachim. The event marked the first time that a chamber work of his had received its premiere outside Bohemia, 10

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an important marker along the road of the composer’s burgeoning international renown.

Joachim introduced the Sextet to the public on November 9, 1879 in Vienna, and played it twice the following spring in London, where it excited an enthusiasm for Dvořák and his music that remained undimmed for the rest of his life. The sonata-form opening movement uses as its main theme a melody of rapturous beauty given as a sweet duet between first violin and first cello. The subsidiary subject is a short-breathed motive of small leaps and skipping rhythms initiated by the violin.

The skipping rhythms are given special prominence in the development section. A complete recapitulation and a long coda allow for the full appreciation of the movement’s splendid thematic components. The middle two movements—a Dumka and a Furiant—so strongly impress their folk idioms upon the Sextet that British critic Alec Robertson wrote, “The work has the effect of a brightly colored travel poster advertising Dvořák’s homeland.”

The Dumka was a traditional Slavic (especially Ukrainian) folk ballad of meditative character often describing heroic deeds. Dvořák wrote additional specimens such as the Dumka: Elegy (Op. 35, 1876), Furiant with Dumka (Op. 12, 1884), second movement of the Piano Quintet in A major (Op. 81, 1887), and “Dumky” Trio (Op. 90, 1891). The Furiant is a Czech dance whose fiery character is indicated by its name. The Sextet’s finale is a set of five variations on the theme given at the outset by the viola to which is appended a whirlwind coda.

Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello in E-flat major, Op. 44 (1842) ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Schumann sketched the Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello in just five days during September 1842 and completed the score only two weeks later during the five-

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month frenzy of creativity that also yielded up the Piano Quartet, the three String Quartets and the Phantasiestücke for Piano, Violin and Cello. The Piano Quintet opens with a striding, heroic theme played by the full ensemble. A gentler motive is posited by the piano and the violin as a transition to the second theme, a lovely scalar melody initiated by the cello. A recall of the vigorous opening theme closes the exposition. The development section, led by the piano (as is most of the work—the keyboard has only six measures of rest in the entire composition), deals mostly with permutations of the main theme. The recapitulation provides balance and closure by recalling the earlier thematic material in appropriately adjusted tonalities.

The second movement is in the mode and manner of a solemn funeral march into which are inserted two contrasting episodes. The first intervening paragraph is a lyrical effusion for the violin and cello in duet supported by a restless accompaniment from the inner strings and the keyboard. The second episode is a tempestuous passage of angry triplet rhythms that are not soothed until the lyrical melody from the earlier episode returns in a heightened setting. The funeral march, nearly exhausted, is heard one final time to bring the movement to a dying close. The Scherzo, called by one commentator “the glorification of the scale,” is strewn with long ribbons of ascending and descending notes. Two trios, one sweet and flowing, the other impetuous and Gypsy-inspired, provide contrast. The finale, one of Schumann’s most masterful formal accomplishments, begins in the shadow of defiant tragedy but, before its end, achieves a soaring, life-affirming proclamation through an expertly constructed double fugue based on the conjoined main themes of the finale and the opening movement.

DONOVAN PAVILION

ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS CHAMBER ENSEMBLE

Tomo Keller, violin Martin Burgess, violin Robert Smissen, viola Fiona Bonds, viola Martin Loveday, cello Will Schofield, cello

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

STRAUSS Introduction (Sextet) to Capriccio, Op. 85 (10 minutes)

DVOŘÁK Sextet for Two Violins, Two Violas and Two Cellos in A major, Op. 48 (33 minutes) Allegro moderato Dumka: Poco allegretto — Adagio, quasi tempo di marcia — Poco allegretto Furiant: Presto Finale (Tema con Variazioni): Allegretto grazioso, quasi andantino

— INTERMISSION — SCHUMANN Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello in E-flat major, Op. 44 (30 minutes) Allegro brillante In modo d’una marcia, un poco largamente Scherzo molto vivace Allegro ma non troppo

Concessions provided by:

FREE CONCERT

MUSIC FOR PIANO AND HORN Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70 (1849)

Saisons (“Seasons”) (1983)

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

GEORGES BARBOTEU (1924-2006)

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he Adagio and Allegro dates from 1849, when Schumann was in good health and spirits, and producing music with greater ease and speed than at almost any other time in his life— some thirty works date from what he referred to as “my most fruitful year.” It is a work of optimism and good cheer whose two contrasting movements achieve a particularly satisfying formal balance. The opening Adagio, marked to be played “with heartfelt expression,” is lyrical and dreamy. The Allegro (“fast and fiery”) follows rondo form, with an impetuous recurring main theme contrasted by intervening episodes of more thoughtful character.

Nocturno, Op. 7 (1864) FR ANZ STR AUSS (1822-1905)

Franz Strauss was the finest horn player of his time, a composer and conductor of considerable skill, and father of one of music’s greatest masters, Richard Strauss. Franz was descended from a century-long line of policemen, but his mother’s family was highly musical, and he learned to play violin, clarinet, guitar and all the brass instruments from two of his uncles. He got a job as guitarist to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria in Munich when he was fifteen, but worked diligently enough perfecting his horn technique that he toured Bavaria as hornist with a wind ensemble in 1845 and two years later won the principal horn position in the Bavarian Court Orchestra; he remained a chief adornment of that ensemble in concert and opera until his retirement 42 years later.

Strauss also taught at the Munich Academy of Music, conducted the amateur orchestra Wilde Gung’l, and received the Ludwigsmedaille from King Ludwig II for his services to Bavarian music. The Nocturno, one of the loveliest of Strauss’ character pieces for horn and piano, is lyrical and verdant in its outer sections, more agitated in its contrasting middle episode.

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Georges Barboteu, one of France’s leading horn virtuosos and teachers, was born in Algiers in 1924 and studied with his father, the horn teacher at the city’s conservatory; Georges joined the orchestra of Radio Algiers when he was just fourteen. In 1948, he became a member of the French Orchestre National and subsequently entered the Paris Conservatoire, winning the Prix d’honneur in 1950. The following year he took First Prize in the Geneva International Competition, and then played in the orchestras of the OpéraComique and Paris Opéra before becoming principal horn of the Concerts Lamoureux and, from 1969, the Orchestre de Paris. Barboteu also taught at the Paris Conservatoire, founded the wind quintet Ars Nova, and made several acclaimed recordings. In addition to studies for horn, Barboteu composed over forty works for chamber ensembles, including Saisons (“Seasons”) for Horn and Piano. The two parts of the opening Automne (“Autumn”)—horn calls in the first and a lyrical melody in the second—evoke respectively the time-honored fall hunt and the nostalgia of the days of waning sunlight. The thoughtful strains of Hiver (“Winter”) may have suggested the movement’s subtitle: “au coin du feu” (“by the fire”). Printemps (“Spring”) is portrayed by a sylvan theme and rippling accompaniment. Été (“Summer”) is languid and gentle, though the hand-stopped and flutter-tongue notes may represent the season’s inevitable flying insects.

A Danse of varied moods closes Barboteu’s ingratiating annual cycle.

Sonata in B-flat major, K. 378 (K. 317d) [originally for Violin and Piano] (1779) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

The B-flat Sonata, K. 378 (K. 317d), was composed for violin and piano in Salzburg early in 1779, soon after Mozart returned from

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29 his difficult and disappointing trip to Paris, when he was unable to secure a position there for himself and also suffered the death of his mother, who had accompanied him on the journey. The charming B-flat Sonata (K. 378), which belies the emotional circumstance of its composition, is disposed in three movements: fast–slow–fast. The opening Allegro is filled with the conversational lyricism and limpid grace that mark the most delightful of Mozart’s chamber creations. The second movement is a lovely song. The finale, in the rhythm and spirit of a minuet, is a rondo with a chuckling episode near the end that resembles the whirling Italian tarantella.

Sur le Cimes (“On the Peaks”) (1960)

© MARK KAITAOKA

EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991)

Eugène Bozza composed three operas, two ballets, two symphonies, two oratorios, four Masses and a half-dozen concertos, but his most important contribution to 20thcentury French music were his myriad pieces for wind instruments. Bozza, born in Nice in 1905 to a French mother and an Italian father, took his professional training at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won Premiers Prix in violin, conducting and composition, as well as the Prix de Rome. He began his career as a violinist with the Pasdeloup Orchestra, but gave up performing in 1930 to devote himself to composition and conducting.

From 1938 to 1948, he conducted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and in 1951, he was appointed director of the École Nationale de Musique in Valenciennes, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He died in Valenciennes in 1991.

Sur le Cimes opens with resonant bell-tones in the piano answered by a cadenza for horn whose open intervals suggest the valve-less hunting horn from which the modern instrument evolved. A pastoral melody with a rocking accompaniment evokes a flowered alpine meadow, while the ensuing galloping theme signals the resumption of the hunt. Another cadenza echoes the opening (literally—handstopped passages depict phrases bounced back from a nearby canyon) before the galloping theme returns for a virtuosic finish.

THURSDAY JUNE 29, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL David Cooper, horn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

SCHUMANN Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70 Langsam, mit innigem Ausdruck Rasch und feurig

FRANZ STRAUSS Nocturno, Op. 7

BARBOTEU Saisons Automne: Allegro Hiver “au coin du feu”: Andante cantabile Printemps (pièce pastorale): Modéré Été: Andante cantabile Danse: Allegro moderato

MOZART Sonata in B-flat major, K. 378 (K. 317d) [originally for Violin and Piano] Allegro moderato Andantino sostenuto e cantabile Rondo: Allegro

BOZZA Sur le Cimes The running time of this concert is approximately one hour.

DAVID COOPER

FREE CONCERT

STRING QUARTETS OF BEETHOVEN & MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” (1810) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

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eethoven was unable to take his usual extended country vacation during the summer of 1810, and instead settled for shuttling between Vienna and the distant suburb of Baden. The Op. 95 Quartet was begun during that time and completed

by October. “Serioso,” Beethoven called it, the only of his quartets to which he appended a descriptive sobriquet, and it may well reflect the flow of his emotions. Napoleon’s troops had invaded Vienna and his own health and finances were increasingly troublesome. But it is also a serious work in that it looks forward to the mighty concerns of form, texture and expression he was to address in his final series of quartets, written during the last three years of his life. The F minor Quartet’s intensity of emotion and titanic struggle to fuse into an inevitable whole its musical atoms caused the respected musicologist Joseph Kerman to write that here “the quartet becomes for the first time Beethoven’s private workshop.”

Appropriately, this confessional score was dedicated to Nikolaus Zmeskall, a secretary at court, who was the composer’s closest friend and confidant at the time. Unlike his works of the preceding decade, for which he sought quick performance and publication, Beethoven kept this piece to himself for an inordinate amount of time—it had to wait until 1814 to be heard and until 1816 to be published, which accounts for its high opus number.

The F minor Quartet is the shortest and the most highly compressed example of the genre that Beethoven wrote. It is music that grapples with the philosophic/artistic problem that he had broached in the Fifth Symphony: the “apotheosis,” or struggle to victory. “In this Quartet,” wrote Kerman, “Beethoven evokes that almost tangible sense of the artist 14

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assaulting a demon of his own fancying; we admire the process of assault, conquest, assertion or becoming that the illusion permits.” The struggle is joined immediately with the opening movement. The music is shorn of everything unessential—transitions, unrelated figurations, even the repeat of the exposition are abandoned in favor of the most lean, concentrated, forceful presentation of the musical materials and their development.

Almost in mid-thought, certainly without any sense of resolution, the movement fades away to an inconclusive ending. The Allegretto, though hymnal in texture and contemplative in mood, is prevented from banishing the accumulated uneasiness of the preceding movement because of its chromatic uncertainty and shifting tonalities.

The scherzo, propulsive yet somber, begins without pause. After a brief, expressive introduction, the finale follows a haunted rondo form until its closing page, when, at long last, the music is freed from the tragic tonality of F minor into the sunlight of its major-key coda.

String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, “Ist Es Wahr?” (1827) FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

In spring 1827, Mendelssohn indulged in a short holiday at Sakrow, the Magnus family estate near Potsdam, and there he fell in love, at least a little. The circumstances, even the maiden’s name, are unknown, but he was sufficiently moved by the experience to set to music a poem of his friend Johann Gustav Droyson that began, “Is it true [Ist es wahr?] that you are always waiting for me in the arbored walk?” The piece, published two years later under the title Frage (“Question”) as the first number of his Op. 9 set of songs, was woven as thematic material into the new A minor Quartet. The score was published in 1829 as Mendelssohn’s Op. 13.

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© MATT DINE

FREE CONCERT SERIES

The Quartet opens with a slow introduction whose A major tonality serves as an emotional foil for the tempestuous main body of the movement. Two arching phrases—the second soaring high in the first violin’s compass— preface the quotation of the searching motto phrase from Ist Es Wahr?, recognizable by its long–short–long rhythm. The music’s tempo and energy are quickened by scurrying filigree before the viola initiates the principal theme, based on the motto rhythm. The cello posits a lyrical melody as the complementary subject.

The scurrying phrases return to mark the onset of the development section, which is remarkable for the intensity of its counterpoint and its nearly febrile mood. The recapitulation serves both to return and enhance the earlier themes before the movement closes with an explosive coda that stops without resolving the music’s strong tensions. The deeply felt Adagio offers another paraphrase of the motto theme at beginning and end as the frame for the somber, densely packed fugal episode that occupies the middle of the movement.

The third movement, titled Intermezzo, uses a charmingly folkish tune, daintily scored, in its outer sections to surround an ethereal passage of musical feather-stitching at the center.

Both ideas are deftly combined in the coda. A dramatic cadenza-recitative for the violin over tremolo harmonies, reminiscent of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s A minor Quartet, Op. 132, launches the finale. A clutch of highly charged motives is presented and worked out with great intensity as the music unfolds. The work closes not with a wail of tragedy or with a sunburst of redemption, but with a recall of the Quartet’s most introspective moments— first the theme of the Adagio and then the introduction from the opening movement, bringing with it a final reflection upon the music and thought of Ist Es Wahr?.

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL

ZORÁ STRING QUARTET (Bravo! Vail 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence) Dechopol Kowintaweewat, violin Seula Lee, violin Pablo Muñez Salido, viola Zizai Ning, cello

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” Allegro con brio Allegretto ma non troppo — Allegro assai vivace ma serioso Larghetto espressivo — Allegretto agitato

MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, “Ist Es Wahr?”

Adagio — Allegro vivace Adagio non lento — Poco più animato — Tempo I Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto — Allegro di molto — Tempo I Presto — Adagio non lento — Adagio The running time of this concert is approximately one hour.

ZORÁ STRING QUARTET

FREE CONCERT

STRING QUARTETS OF MOZART, BOCCHERINI & HAYDN Divertimento in D major, K. 136 (1772) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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he Divertimento in D major, K. 136, is one of a set of three works (K. 137, 138 are the others) that Mozart wrote for string quartet in January 1772.

He was at home in Salzburg after his second trip to Italy, and these pieces seem to have been written in preparation for a return visit scheduled to begin the following autumn.

Knowing that he would be busy later in the year with the opera that had been commissioned for Milan, Lucio Silla, he put these charming works together in advance so that he would have ready some compositions that could provide a pleasant evening’s diversion, or could be easily expanded to modest symphonic proportions through the addition of wind parts on the spot. Unlike most divertimentos, this D major work has only three movements rather than the four or five most common in the genre. Significantly, the title “Divertimento” on the manuscript is not in Mozart’s hand, so we are left to speculate on what his exact classification of this music would have been. It mixes elements of quartet, symphony, sinfonia concertante, and various entertainment forms into a pleasing and mellifluous whole.

The opening movement is something of a virtuoso piece for the violins, almost a concertante duet; the lower strings provide continuous eighth-note pulsations that mask a certain paucity of harmonic activity. The main theme is announced immediately in long notes, with a complementary idea—a two-octave fall through the D major chord—following quickly. The second theme is announced by melodic trills and quick imitations among all the parts. The brief development section utilizes the long notes of the main theme, after which the recapitulation of the earlier materials proceeds as expected. The Andante, more 16

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pretty than profound, is in sonatina form (i.e., sonata without a development section). The finale, again a sonata form, races along with a quicksilver gait.

String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 58, No. 2 (1799) LUIGI BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)

Boccherini composed the six string quartets comprising his Op. 58 in 1799 for Pleyel, one of the Parisian music publishing firms that provided much of his meager income during his later years. The stately opening movement of the Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 58, No. 2 is built from three complementary ideas: a dignified descending theme begun by the second violin; an expressive melody with a dotted rhythm initiated by the first violin; and a stream of rising triplets. These three motives are repeated verbatim and then developed in turn through some carefully drawn dialogue among the participants before a reprise of the dignified theme draws the movement to a graceful close. The Menuetto is sturdy and its central trio wistful, but both are unsettled by sudden dynamic changes, shadowy harmonies and anxious instrumental interchanges. The Larghetto, marked to be played “malinconico” (“melancholy”), is based on a sighing melody intoned by the first violin. The finale takes as its theme a strain that begins with a remarkable likeness to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, on which Mozart had worked a set of harpsichord variations in 1781 (K. 265). It is a pleasing thought that Boccherini may have worked this movement’s involved contrapuntal display around one of childhood’s musical icons.

String Quartet in G major, Op. 77, No. 1 (1799) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, born into one of Austria’s most distinguished

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families in 1772, was among Vienna’s preeminent patrons of music at the turn of the 19th century. Beethoven’s biographer Thayer described him as “a violinist of considerable powers and so devoted a lover of music and the drama, so profuse a squanderer of his income upon them, as in twenty years to reduce himself to bankruptcy.” In 1799, the young Prince commissioned a set of six new string quartets from Joseph Haydn, then Europe’s most revered composer, who was still basking in the unalloyed triumph of the premiere of The Creation in April 1798. Haydn completed two of the pieces for Lobkowitz in 1799 (Op. 77, Nos. 1 and 2), but then broke off the series to take up the enormous labor on The Seasons, the successor to The Creation, which so sapped his strength that he was unable to finish any more of the quartets. The two quartets of Op. 77 were the last in the incomparable series of instrumental creations stretching over half a century with which Haydn had brought the quintessential forms of musical Classicism to their perfected states.

The G major Quartet’s opening Allegro, buoyant and elegantly polished, focuses principally on a single theme: a teasing little ditty in dotted rhythmic figures initially proposed by the first violin. This subject also serves as the second theme, though a short phrase of lyrical character is introduced for contrast. Both the dotted-rhythm motive and the lyrical phrase figure in the development section. The recapitulation is condensed by the excision of the earlier lyrical phrase. The Adagio hints at traditional sonata structure, but its form has also been equated with a free passacaglia because of the frequent returns of its opening motive. The third movement is labeled “Menuetto,” but it is really a fully developed scherzo, bristling with demonic energy, flying leaps and extreme registers. The finale is a sparkling sonata form based on an irresistible melody that Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon called “Haydn’s farewell to the world of Eastern European folk music.”

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MOZART Divertimento in D major, K. 136 (13 minutes) Allegro Andante Presto

BOCCHERINI String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 58, No. 2 (21 minutes) Allegretto lento Menuetto: Allegro Larghetto Finale: Allegro vivo assai

HAYDN String Quartet in G major, Op. 77, No. 1 (25 minutes) Allegro moderato Adagio Menuetto: Presto Finale: Presto

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HAYDN & BEETHOVEN STRING QUARTETS String Quartet in G major, Op. 77, No. 1 (H. III:81) (1799) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

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rince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, born into one of Austria’s most distinguished families in 1772, was among Vienna’s preeminent patrons of music at the turn of the 19th century.

Beethoven’s biographer Thayer described him as “a violinist of considerable powers and so devoted a lover of music and the drama, so profuse a squanderer of his income upon them, as in twenty years to reduce himself to bankruptcy.” In 1799, the young Prince commissioned a set of six new string quartets from Joseph Haydn, then Europe’s most revered composer, who was still basking in the unalloyed triumph of the premiere of The Creation in April 1798. Haydn completed two of the pieces for Lobkowitz in 1799 (Op. 77, Nos. 1 and 2), but then broke off the series to take up the enormous labor on The Seasons, the successor to The Creation, which so sapped his strength that he was unable to finish any more of the quartets. The two quartets of Op. 77 were the last in the incomparable series of instrumental creations stretching over half a century with which Haydn had brought the quintessential forms of musical Classicism to their perfected states.

The G major Quartet’s opening Allegro, buoyant and elegantly polished, focuses principally on a single theme, a teasing little ditty in dotted rhythmic figures initially proposed by the first violin. This subject also serves as the second theme, though a short phrase of lyrical character is introduced for contrast. Both the dotted-rhythm motive and the lyrical phrase figure in the development section. The recapitulation is condensed by the excision of the earlier lyrical phrase. The Adagio hints at traditional sonata structure, but its form has also been equated with a free passacaglia 18

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because of the frequent returns of its opening motive. The third movement is labeled “Menuetto,” but it is really a fully developed scherzo, bristling with demonic energy, flying leaps and extreme registers. The finale is a sparkling sonata form based on an irresistible melody that Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon called “Haydn’s farewell to the world of Eastern European folk music.”

String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” (1810) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Beethoven was unable to take his usual extended country vacation during the summer of 1810, and instead settled for shuttling between Vienna and the distant suburb of Baden. The Op. 95 Quartet was begun during that time and completed by October. “Serioso,” Beethoven called it, the only of his quartets to which he appended a descriptive sobriquet, and it may well reflect the flow of his emotions. Napoleon’s troops had invaded Vienna and his own health and finances were increasingly troublesome. But it is also a serious work in that it looks forward to the mighty concerns of form, texture and expression he was to address in his final series of quartets, written during the last three years of his life. The F minor Quartet’s intensity of emotion and titanic struggle to fuse into an inevitable whole its musical atoms caused the respected musicologist Joseph Kerman to write that here “the quartet becomes for the first time Beethoven’s private workshop.”

Appropriately, this confessional score was dedicated to Nikolaus Zmeskall, a secretary at court, who was the composer’s closest friend and confidant at the time. Unlike his works of the preceding decade, for which he sought quick performance and publication, Beethoven kept this piece to himself for an inordinate

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HAYDN String Quartet in G major, Op. 77, No. 1 (H. III:81) (25 minutes) Allegro moderato Adagio Menuetto: Presto Finale: Presto

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” (19 minutes) Allegro con brio Allegretto ma non troppo — Allegro assai vivace ma serioso Larghetto espressivo — Allegretto agitato

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amount of time—it had to wait until 1814 to be heard and until 1816 to be published, which accounts for its high opus number.

The F minor Quartet is the shortest and the most highly compressed example of the genre that Beethoven wrote. It is music that grapples with the philosophic/artistic problem that he had broached in the Fifth Symphony: the “apotheosis,” or struggle to victory. “In this Quartet,” wrote Kerman, “Beethoven evokes that almost tangible sense of the artist assaulting a demon of his own fancying; we admire the process of assault, conquest, assertion or becoming that the illusion permits.” The struggle is joined immediately with the opening movement. The music is shorn of everything unessential—transitions, unrelated figurations, even the repeat of the exposition are abandoned in favor of the most lean, concentrated, forceful presentation of the musical materials and their development.

Almost in mid-thought, certainly without any sense of resolution, the movement fades away to an inconclusive ending. The Allegretto, though hymnal in texture and contemplative in mood, is prevented from banishing the accumulated uneasiness of the preceding movement because of its chromatic uncertainty and shifting tonalities.

The scherzo, propulsive yet somber, begins without pause. After a brief, expressive introduction, the finale follows a haunted rondo form until its closing page, when, at long last, the music is freed from the tragic tonality of F minor into the sunlight of its major-key coda.

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MOZART: MUSIC FOR STRINGS String Quartet in G major, K. 387, “Haydn No. 1” (1782) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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f all the famous composer pairs— Bach and Handel, Bruckner and Mahler, Debussy and Ravel—only Mozart and Haydn were friends.

Mozart first mentioned his acquaintance with Haydn in a letter to his father on April 24, 1784, but he probably had met the older composer soon after moving to Vienna three years earlier. True friendship and mutual admiration developed between the two master musicians.

Despite the 24 years difference in their ages, they took a special delight in learning from and praising each other’s music. Mozart’s greatest testament to his respect for Haydn is the set of six superb string quartets composed between 1782 and 1785, and dedicated to his colleague upon their publication in September 1785.

These works are not just charming souvenirs of personal sentiments. They also represent a significant advance in Mozart’s compositional style, for in them he assimilated the techniques of thematic development and thorough integration of the instrumental voices that Haydn had perfected in his Quartets, Op. 20 (1771) and Op. 33 (1781).

The first of the “Haydn” Quartets (K. 387 in G major, completed in Vienna on December 31, 1782) shows Mozart in complete command of the technical resources and range of expression with which his older colleague had invested the genre. The work opens with a broad melody that introduces the sudden loudsoft contrasts that help to unify the Quartet’s four movements. The complementary theme, initiated by the second violin, is a perky tune with a hint of an opera buffa smile. After an ingenious development section that touches upon some of the chromatic possibilities implied in the earlier harmonic structure, the recapitulation returns the themes of the 20

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exposition. The Minuetto is almost symphonic in the breadth of its scale and the richness of its realization. The movement’s first section is worked out in full minuet form; the central trio slips into a lugubrious, sometimes almost eerie minor key. The form of the Andante is sonatina (the second theme is the limpid falling motive in triplet rhythm) and its emotion is nocturnal.

The finale, which blends formal elements of fugue and sonata, takes as its subject a longnote motive prescient of the theme that Mozart used to close the incomparable “Jupiter” Symphony six years later.

Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas and Cello in C major, K. 515 (1788) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

The year 1786 was the zenith of Mozart’s career in Vienna. Perhaps because of intrigue by his rivals, but more probably because the deep expression in his newest music did not suit the fickle taste of the Viennese, his local popularity began to wane. Though he tried to economize by moving from his spacious apartment in the Schullerstrasse (now a Mozart museum known as the “Figaro House”) to a smaller flat at 224 Landstrasse, he could not abandon his taste for fine clothes and elegant entertaining, and he took on debts, several of which were to the textile merchant Michael Puchberg, a fellow Mason. On April 2, 1788, an announcement signed by Mozart appeared in the Wiener Zeitung stating that he was offering for sale by subscription three new quintets “finely and correctly written” which would be available at Puchberg’s establishment in the Hohe Markt after July 1st.

The intention was apparently that Puchberg would keep the proceeds to repay a debt.

To create the promised trio of works, Mozart created anew the Quintets in C major (K. 515) and G minor (K. 516), and arranged the magnificent Wind Octet in C minor (K. 388) for five strings (given the curious Köchel

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number of 406). The quintets were completed in April and May during a hectic interruption in the composition of Don Giovanni (those same weeks saw Mozart’s only meeting with Beethoven when the sixteen-year-old Bonn musician came to Vienna for a fortnight of lessons, and the death of Papa Leopold Mozart in Salzburg), but the number of subscribers was so small that Mozart placed another ad in the Viennese press on June 25th. This, too, was largely ignored, and the project was dropped, though Artaria & Co. brought out K. 515 in 1789 and K. 516 a year later. Mozart returned to the string quintet form in December 1790 and April 1791 with works in D major (K. 593) and E-flat (K. 614) for the wealthy Hungarian amateur violinist Johann Tost. They were the last pieces of chamber music he wrote.

The grace, grandeur, and optimism of the C major Quintet are evident from its first measures, which introduce as main theme an upward traversal of the tonic chord by the cello that is greeted with a closing reply by the violin.

This apparently simple thematic pattern is the subject of some bewitching, proto-Romantic harmonic peregrinations before a contrasting thought, a flowing line of undulating shape, is advanced by the violin. Both motives are treated expansively in the development section before their full recapitulation rounds out the movement. The following Menuetto, with its irregular phrase lengths, uncertain tonality and chromatic inflections, brings an element of pensiveness to the score that was only hinted in the opening Allegro. The Andante is an elaborate, almost operatic duet for the first violin and first viola in the form of a sonatina (sonata without a development section). The finale, a skillful combination of sonata and rondo, resumes the buoyancy and high spirits of the first movement.

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MOZART String Quartet in G major, K. 387, “Haydn No. 1” (29 minutes) Allegro vivace assai Minuetto: Allegro Andante cantabile Molto Allegro

MOZART Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas and Cello in C major, K. 515 (31 minutes) Allegro Menuetto: Allegretto Andante Allegro

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EMERSON STRING QUARTET Chacony (Chaconne) in G minor, Z. 730 (ca. 1678) HENRY PURCELL (1659-1695)

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he “chaconne” (or “chacony,” to use Purcell’s word) is a set of continuous variations around a short, repeating melody. Among Purcell’s early realizations of the form is the Chacony in G minor, dating from around 1678. The piece is built on an eight-measure theme presented in the bass that becomes the subject for eighteen variations. The mood throughout is serious, almost tragic.

Two Fantasias (ca. 1680) HENRY PURCELL

The fantasia—or “fancy,” as it was most commonly known in Britain—was a popular late Renaissance-early Baroque form descended from the contrapuntal motet. It comprised several continuous polyphonic sections, usually in imitation, that were freely composed (i.e., not based on a borrowed cantus firmus); hence, the form’s name. The last known examples of the form are the thirteen pieces for viol consort that Purcell composed apparently in 1680.

The Fantasia No. 8 is a somber contrapuntal conversation among the participants that turns briefly to a quickened pace and brighter thoughts before resuming the opening mood for the close. The Fantasia No. 11 enfolds a central episode of plain texture within two contrasting imitative paragraphs of almost Bachian complexity and expressive depth.

String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 (1960) DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

In July 1960, Shostakovich was in Dresden composing the background music for a joint Soviet/East German film about the Second World War called Five Days, Five Nights. So moved was he by the subject of the story and 22

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by the still-unhealed scars of the city—the Allies had reduced Dresden to rubble in 1945 in a single night of the most fearsome bombing in the history of warfare—that he poured his feelings into the musical form he entrusted with his most personal thoughts—the string quartet. The Eighth Quartet was composed in three days in Dresden and dedicated to “the memory of the victims of fascism and the war.”

The chief motive running through the work and providing the germ for much of its thematic material is Shostakovich’s musical “signature”— DSCH, the notes D–E-flat–C–B. (The note D represents his initial. In German transliteration, the composer’s name begins “Sch”: S [ess] in German notation equals E-flat, C is C, and H equals B-natural.)

The Quartet is in five continuous movements. The DSCH motive is heard immediately in imitation in the somber opening of the first movement. Three other themes provide contrast: a quotation in dotted rhythms from the First Symphony; an eerie descending chromatic scale; and a reminiscence of the Fifth Symphony. The four thematic elements are recapitulated, and lead without pause to a furious toccata, brutal, hammering music depicting the destruction of war. The third movement is a scherzo, by turns sardonic and lyrical. The slow fourth movement explodes with an accompaniment figure transmogrified into gunshots. The three lower voices in unison play a melody from the Eleventh Symphony (“The Year 1905”) of 1957. After a repetition of the gunshots, the Russian song Exhausted by the Hardships of Prison is intoned by the first violin. The gunshots, the Russian Revolutionary song, and the Eleventh Symphony motive in condensed versions serve as the movement’s coda. The finale eschews Romantic apotheosis in favor of 20th-century doubt. The austere mood and the DSCH theme of the first movement return, and the music seems hardly able to maintain its forward motion. Its energy dissipated, perhaps through catharsis or just from weariness, the music dies away with an inconclusive open-interval harmony.

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String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (1825-1826)

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

On November 9, 1822, Prince Nikolas Galitzin, a devotee of Beethoven’s music and an amateur cellist, wrote from St. Petersburg asking the composer for “one, two or three quartets, for which labor I will be glad to pay you whatever amount you think proper.” Beethoven accepted the commission and set the fee of 50 ducats for each work, a high price but one readily accepted by Galitzin. Beethoven, however, exhausted by his labors on the Ninth Symphony in 1823-1824, could not complete the first of the commissioned works, the Quartet in E-flat major, until February 1825. The A minor Quartet was finished five months later and the B-flat was written between July and November, during one of the few periods of relatively good health Beethoven enjoyed in his last decade.

He began sketching the C-sharp minor Quartet in December 1825 and completed it during the following months.

The C-sharp minor Quartet may well be Beethoven’s boldest piece of musical architecture—seven movements played without pause, six distinct main key areas, 31 tempo changes, and a veritable encyclopedia of Classical formal principles. Though it passes beyond the Fifth Symphony, Fidelio, and Egmont in its harmonic sophistication and structural audacity, this Quartet shares with those works the sense of struggle to victory, of subjecting the spirit to such states of emotional unrest as strengthen it for winning the ultimate triumph. The opening movement is a spacious, profoundly expressive fugue which, according to Richard Wagner, “reveals the most melancholy sentiment in music.” The following Allegro offers emotional respite as well as structural contrast.

A tiny movement (Allegro moderato—Adagio) serves as the bridge to the expressive heart (and formal center) of the Quartet, an expansive set of variations. The fifth movement alternates two strains of buoyantly aerial music. The Adagio in chordal texture is less an independent movement than an introduction and foil for the finale, whose vast and densely packed sonata form (woven with references to the fugue theme of the first movement) summarizes the overall progress of this stupendous Quartet in its move from darkness and struggle toward light and spiritual renewal.

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PURCELL Chacony (Chaconne) in G minor, Z. 730 (7 minutes)

PURCELL Two Fantasias, (8 minutes) No. 8 in D minor, Z. 739 No. 11 in G major, Z. 742

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 (20 minutes) Largo Allegro molto Allegretto Largo Largo Played without pause

— INTERMISSION — BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (36 minutes) Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo Allegro molto vivace Allegro moderato — Adagio Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile — Più mosso — Andante moderato e lusinghiero — Adagio — Allegretto — Adagio ma non troppo e semplice — Allegretto Presto Adagio quasi un poco andante Allegro Played without pause

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STRING QUARTETS OF WEBERN & SHOSTAKOVICH Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”) (1905) ANTON WEBERN (1883-1945)

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he genesis of the Langsamer Satz is revelatory of the state of Webern’s creative and personal thinking in 1905, when he was 22 years old. Three years earlier, on Easter Day 1902, he set eyes on his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl, then sixteen, for the first time. They immediately became friends, and, during the following years, very much more. In the spring of 1905, he and Wilhelmine went on a five-day walking excursion in the Waldwinkel, a picturesque region in Lower Austria. Webern reveled in the beauty of the springtime countryside and the companionship of the woman who would become his wife six years later. “The sky is brilliantly blue,” he confided to his diary. “To walk like this among flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with the universe, without care, free as the lark in the sky above—O what splendor!” In June, still suffused with the glory of the Austrian countryside and the soaring emotions of young love, he composed his Langsamer Satz.

The Langsamer Satz is in three-part form.

The first (and last) section utilizes two themes: a melody of broad arching phrases, and a chromatic motive that climbs a step higher for each phrase. The central episode is based on a rhapsodic theme in flowing triplet figurations.

An epilogue of quiet, floating harmonies closes this souvenir of Webern’s youth, which Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, in their biography of Webern, called “pure and exalted love music.”

String Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major, Op. 117 (1964) DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

In 1948, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and many other important Soviet composers were 24

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condemned for threatening the stability of the nation with their “formalistic” music.

Through Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Soviet Composers’ Union and the official mouthpiece for the government, it was made known that any experimental or modern or abstract or difficult music was no longer acceptable for consumption by the country’s masses.

Only simplistic music glorifying the State, the land, and the people would be performed: symphonies, operas, chamber music—any forms involving too much mental stimulation— were out; movie music, folk song settings and patriotic cantatas were in.

Shostakovich saw the iron figure of Joseph Stalin behind the purge of 1948, as he was convinced it had been for an earlier one in 1936. After the 1936 debacle, Shostakovich responded with the Fifth Symphony, and kept composing through the war years, even becoming a world figure representing the courage of the Soviet people with the lightning success of his Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”) in 1941. The 1948 censure was, however, almost more than Shostakovich could bear. He determined that he would go along with the Party prerogative for pap and withhold all of his substantial works until the time when they would be given a fair hearing—when Stalin was dead.

With the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953 (ironically, Prokofiev died on the same day), Shostakovich and all of the Soviet Union felt an oppressive burden lift. The thaw came gradually, but there did return to the country’s artistic life a more amenable attitude toward art, one that allowed significant works to again be produced and performed. Shostakovich composed steadily thereafter until his death two decades later, countering a steady stream of cantatas, film music, patriotic marches and choruses, and instrumental pieces in a popular vein that he composed as a “People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R.” (a title conferred upon him in 1954) with creations of profound emotion and personal revelation: the magnificent and

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13 disturbing final symphonies (No. 13, “Babi Yar,” based on Yevtushenko’s searing poem about the German army’s massacre of 70,000 Jews near Kiev in September 1941; No. 14, settings of eleven texts dealing with death; and No. 15, one of the most stark and moving orchestral documents of the 20th century), First Violin Concerto, songs on verses of Alexander Blok and Michelangelo Buonarroti, and the last ten of his fifteen string quartets.

Vassily Shirinsky, first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, which premiered the Ninth Quartet in Moscow in November 1964, wrote that the work shows “grandeur, drama and a certain austerity.” The Quartet’s five movements (fast–slow–fast–slow–fast) are unified by their sharing of thematic fragments and by their uninterrupted connection one with the next. The opening Moderato is based on two themes: a doleful, wandering motive introduced by the first violin above a murmuring figure that courses incessantly throughout the movement; and a slightly grotesque little march from the cello. An octave-leap figure is spun from the march melody and combined with the principal themes for the balance of the movement.

The succeeding Adagio, using a melody of curious modal leadings, is a poignant dialogue between first violin and viola. The following scherzo is constructed in symmetrical “arch” form: A–B–C–B–A. The fourth movement is music of stone and ice. The lower strings give out a frozen chorale in octaves and thirds while the first violin emits timid, undulating sighs. The violin then posits a melody that tries to soar upward only to collapse back almost immediately upon itself to be met by the angry snappings of the second violin in a horrific transformation of the chorale theme. The process is repeated by the viola, but, despite the hollow howls of the lower strings, the first violin sings a brief, mournful incantation in its highest register before, drained of energy and enthusiasm, it again gives itself up to sighs and silence. The finale is a vast sonata form (main theme in fast triple meter, subsidiary theme in duple) incorporating motives from the earlier movements.

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WEBERN Langsamer Satz (10 minutes)

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major, Op. 117 (26 minutes) Moderato con moto Adagio Allegretto Adagio Allegro Played without pause

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MOZART CLARINET QUINTET Réverie Orientale for Clarinet and String Quartet (1888) ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV (18651936)

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lexander Glazunov was the most important Russian composer between the death of Tchaikovsky and the rise of the modern school of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He composed prolifically, conducted widely, and taught for many years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. “Within Russian music, Glazunov has a significant place because he succeeded in reconciling Russianism and Europeanism,” wrote Boris Schwarz. “He was the direct heir of Balakirev’s nationalism but tended more toward Borodin’s epic grandeur. At the same time he absorbed Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral virtuosity, the lyricism of Tchaikovsky and the contrapuntal skill of Taneyev.... He remains a composer of imposing stature and a stabilizing influence in a time of transition and turmoil.”

After the celebrated chemist and part-time composer Alexander Borodin died suddenly from a burst aneurysm early in 1887, Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov undertook to organize his manuscripts and edit and complete some of the works he did not live to finish, most notably the ambitious opera Prince Igor. Intrigued by the opera’s exotic central Asian setting and its story about the pagan Tartars invading Russia, Glazunov composed the Réverie Orientale for clarinet and strings in 1888.

Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in A major, K. 581 (1789) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

Mozart harbored a special fondness for the graceful agility, liquid tone and ensemble amiability of the clarinet from the time he first heard the instrument as a young boy during his tours. He later wrote for it whenever it was available. His greatest compositions for 26

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the instrument were inspired by the technical accomplishment and expressive playing of Anton Stadler, principal clarinetist of the Imperial Court Orchestra in Vienna, and a fellow Mason, for whom he wrote not only this Quintet, but also the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola (“Kegelstatt,” K. 498), the clarinet and basset horn parts in the vocal trios, the clarinet solos in the opera La Clemenza di Tito, the clarinet parts added to the second version of the G minor Symphony (K. 550), and the flawless Clarinet Concerto (K. 622), which was his last instrumental work, completed in October 1791, just two months before his death. The last years of Mozart’s life were ones of troubled finances, ill health and family problems that often forced him to beg for loans from others. It says much about his kindness and sensitivity that he, in turn, loaned Stadler money when he could, and even once gave him two gold watches to pawn when there was no cash at hand. The final accounting of Mozart’s estate after his death showed that Stadler owed him some 500 florins—several thousand dollars. The clarinet works he gave to his friend are beyond price.

The Quintet opens with a theme that is almost chaste in its purity and yet is, somehow, deeply introspective and immediately touching.

The second theme, a limpid, sweetly chromatic melody such as could have been conceived by no other musician of the time, not even Joseph Haydn, is given first by the violin and then by the clarinet, above a delicate syncopated string accompaniment. A reference to the suave main theme closes the exposition and serves as the gateway to the development section, which is largely concerned with permutations of the arpeggiated figures with which the clarinet made its entry in the opening measures. The recapitulation provides exquisite closure of the movement’s formal structure and emotional progression. The Larghetto achieves a state of exalted sublimity that makes it the instrumental counterpart to Sarastro’s arias in The Magic Flute, which George Bernard Shaw once said were the only music fit to issue from the mouth of God. The Menuetto is fitted with

JUL two trios: the first, a somber minor-mode essay for strings alone, is perfectly balanced by the clarinet’s lilting, Ländler-like strains in the second. The variations-form finale is more subdued and pensive than virtuosic and flamboyant, and serves as a fitting conclusion to one of the most precious treasures in Mozart’s peerless musical legacy.

Pizzicato Polka, Op. 234 (1869) JOHANN STRAUSS, JR. (1825-1899) AND JOSEF STR AUSS (1827-1870)

The Pizzicato Polka was written collaboratively by Johann and Josef for their 1869 summer concert season in Pavlovsk, Russia, Johann having earlier failed to persuade his brother to write such a piece alone. This delicious bon-bon was encored three times at its premiere on June 24th in Pavlovsk, and has remained one of the most popular items in the Strauss repertoire.

Accelerations Waltz, Op. 234 (1860) JOHANN STRAUSS, JR.

Strauss composed his Accelerations for the Valentine’s Day 1860 celebration of the student society of engineers at Vienna University and premiered it with his orchestra that evening at the city’s elegant Sofienbad Ballroom. The title, a tribute to the engineering profession, is more than justified by the work’s introduction and first waltz, and was made visual on the cover of its first publication. It was adorned with images of Zephyrus (the Greek god of the west wind), a paddle-wheel steamer, hot air balloon, telegraph wires and steam train.

Im Krapfenwaldl (Cuckoo Polka), Op. 336 (1869)

© DEANNA KENNETT

JOHANN STRAUSS, JR.

During the Strauss’ heyday, the “Krapfenwaldl”—literally “Jelly Doughnut Forest”—was a popular restaurant in the hills above Vienna. Johann Sr. led an orchestra there early in his career, and wrote his Krapfenwaldl Waltzes in 1828 in honor of the place. In 1869, Johann Jr. composed a graceful “Polka Française” titled Im Krapfenwaldl whose delightful avian sound effects reflect the inn’s rustic setting.

18 TUESDAY JULY 18, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL

ENSEMBLE CONNECT (Bravo! Vail 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence) Adelya Nartadjieva, violin Michelle Ross, violin Maren Rothfritz, viola Madeline Fayette, cello Yoonah Kim, clarinet

GLAZUNOV Réverie Orientale for Clarinet and String Quartet

MOZART Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in A major, K. 581 Allegro Larghetto Menuetto Allegretto con Variazioni

JOSEF STRAUSS & JOHANN STRAUSS, JR./ARR. TEKALLI Pizzicato Polka, Op. 234

JOHANN STRAUSS, JR./ARR. TEKALLI Accelerations Waltz, Op. 234 Im Krapfenwaldl (Cuckoo Polka), Op. 336 The running time for this concert is approximately one hour.

Ensemble Connect is a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education

ENSEMBLE CONNECT

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MUSIC FOR FOUR PIANISTS/EIGHT HANDS Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448 (K. 375a) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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mong the pupils that Mozart acquired soon after settling in Vienna in 1781 was Josepha Auernhammer, the only daughter of the socially prominent Economic Councilor Johann Michael Auernhammer. For a concert of his music at the Auernhammer home on November 23, 1781 at which he and Josepha were to be featured in joint performance, Mozart revived his Concerto for Two Pianos from the previous year (K. 365) and wrote a new Sonata for Two Pianos in D major (K. 448).

An American in Paris, Composer’s Original Version for Two Pianos (1928) GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

For An American in Paris, as for his other orchestral compositions, Gershwin created a fully finished score for two pianos before he began the instrumentation. He took the manuscript with him to Europe in the summer of 1928, working on it as he could and trying it out when he could find a willing and capable colleague. He orchestrated the two-piano score completely the following fall, and then cut out about four minutes of repeats and aggrandizements near the end before the premiere, though these are preserved in both the piano and orchestral manuscripts. An American in Paris was published in a version for solo piano in 1929 and for full orchestra the following year, but the two-piano score was not published until 1986.

Overture to William Tell (1828-1829) GIOACCHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868)

In 1824, Rossini moved to Paris to direct the Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political trends that were then gaining popularity. Rossini was too closely attuned to public fashion to 28

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ignore the changing audience tastes, and he began to cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his new position in Paris. Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in the 14th century, had recently created much interest when it was introduced to Paris in a French translation, and Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at least, a saleable one). The four sections of the Overture, virtually a miniature tone poem, represent dawn in the mountains, a thunderstorm, the pastoral countryside, and the triumphant return of the Swiss troops.

Waltz from Faust (1852-1859) CHARLES GOUNOD (1818-1893)

In the opera by Gounod based on Goethe’s classic telling of the legend, the aged Faust has signed away his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for the return of his long-lost youth. Faust and Mephistopheles set out on their adventures and come to a country fair, where the villagers are celebrating with a joyous dance (“Ainsi che la brise légère”).

During the waltz, Faust for the first time sees Marguerite, the maiden with whose vision the devil tempted his prey to agree to their pact.

España Rhapsody (1883) EMMANUEL CHABRIER (1941-1894)

“Every night finds us at the bailos flamencos [sic], surrounded by toreros in black felt hats, jackets nipped in at the waist and tight trousers. And all around, the Gypsy women singing their malagueñas or dancing the tango, and the manzanilla circulating from hand to hand. And all the while cries of ‘Olé! Olé!’”

Thus ran an excited report from Chabrier to some Parisian friends concerning his trip to Spain in 1882. Chabrier transcribed Spain’s indigenous music at every stop, carefully noting down jotas, tangos, habaneras, sevillanas and malagueña, and worked their spirit, style and motives into his España as soon as he arrived home in December.

Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla (1842) MIKHAIL GLINK A (1804-1857)

Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla is based on Pushkin’s fairy tale. Just prior to her betrothal to Russlan, Ludmilla has been spirited away from her father, the Grand Duke of Kiev, by the evil dwarf Tchernomor. Russlan perseveres through many fantastic adventures to regain his beloved and they are united in marriage in the final scene. The exuberant Overture is based on themes from the opera.

Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen (1990) MACK WILBERG (B. 1955)

Mack Wilberg is one of America’s leading composers and choral conductors. He holds a bachelor’s degree in piano and composition from Brigham Young University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in choral conducting from the University of Southern California. Wilberg taught at BYU, where he directed the Men’s Chorus and Concert Choir and headed the Department of Choral Music, until he became Associate Director, and later Director, of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

He is also active as a pianist, chamber musician, clinician, composer, arranger and guest conductor throughout the United States and abroad, and was formerly a member of the American Piano Quartet. Wilberg’s Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen is a modern treatment of several of the opera’s best-known moments.

A Scott Joplin Rag Rhapsody SCOT T JOPLIN (1868-1917)

Scott Joplin, the son of an ex-slave, played piano in honky-tonks as a teenager before settling in East St. Louis. He published his first piano rags in 1899 and the Maple Leaf Rag sold a half million copies within a decade.

The success of the piece encouraged Joplin to get married, write further rags, and expand his artistic horizons to include ballet and opera. After several years of wandering in the Midwest, he moved to New York in 1907 and spent enormous effort in composing and trying (in vain) to find a publisher for his opera, Treemonisha. His self-financed production of the opera in 1915 failed, and Joplin’s spirit was crushed. The following year he was admitted to a mental institution in New York, and died there on April 1, 1917 from the complications of syphilis. Today, so wide-spread and persistent is the popularity of Scott Joplin’s incomparable rags that they have come to represent an entire era in American musical and social history.

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18 TUESDAY JULY 18, 6:00PM CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

DONOVAN PAVILION Jenny Chen, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow) Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Anton Nel, piano Chelsea Wang, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow)

MOZART Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448 (K. 375a) (23 minutes) Allegro con spirito Andante Allegro molto

GERSHWIN An American in Paris, Composer’s Original Version for Two Pianos (19 minutes)

— INTERMISSION — ROSSINI/ARR. WERDE Overture to William Tell (12 minutes)

GOUNOD Waltz from Faust (4 minutes)

CHABRIER/ARR. CHEVILLARD España Rhapsody (7 minutes)

GLINKA/ARR. SPINDLER Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla (5 minutes)

WILBERG Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen (10 minutes)

JOPLIN/ARR. OLSON A Scott Joplin Rag Rhapsody (6 minutes)

Concessions provided by:

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MUSIC FOR STRINGS WITH ENSEMBLE CONNECT String Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5, “The Lark” (1790) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

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aydn’s Op. 64 Quartets are among the most lustrous jewels in the diadem of the composer’s chamber music, “perhaps his greatest single achievement of the period—six flawless masterpieces,” wrote the noted Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon. The Quartet in D major, known as “The Lark,” opens with the burst of almost Schubertian lyricism that suggested the work’s sobriquet. The second theme, which appears without strong demarcation, is a syncopated motive in chordal texture enlivened by occasional, brief flashes of heightened dynamics. A cascade of triplets ends the exposition, and serves as one of the principal elements of the development that follows. A full recapitulation rounds out the movement. The Adagio is a halcyon song for the first violin in which a short, somber episode provides contrast. The Menuetto combines grace and rusticity; the trio is more seriousminded. The finale is a dashing perpetuum mobile in three-part (A–B–A) form.

Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello (1933) JEAN FR ANÇAIX (1912-1997)

Jean Françaix, born into a musical family in Le Mans in May 1912, received his earliest training from his parents, but showed such precocious talent that he was regularly commuting to Paris for private lessons at the Conservatoire by age nine. Françaix’s earliest published work, a suite for piano, appeared a year later, and he settled in Paris for regular study at the Conservatoire, where he won first prize in piano when he was just eighteen; two years later he gained recognition as a composer with a symphony that was premiered in Paris by Pierre Monteux in November 1932.

He played the first performance of his own 30

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Concertino for Piano and Orchestra with much success in 1934, and subsequently made numerous tours of Europe and the United States as composer and pianist.

Françaix’s Trio for Strings opens with an agile movement based on a brittle theme that returns frequently enough to suggest the form of a rondo. The sparkling Scherzo is witty and insouciant; the central trio is delightfully oafish with its missed entrances and dropped beats.

The slow, plaintive song of the third movement serves as an expressive foil for the energy of the surrounding music. A zesty rondo built on a fanfare motive closes the Trio.

Passacaglia from Suite No. 7 in G minor for Violin and Viola (ca. 1717) GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL (1685-1759) ARR ANG ED BY JOHAN HALVORSEN (1864-1935)

Handel’s suites for harpsichord were apparently composed soon after he became director of music in 1717 to the household of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, at Cannons, the family estate in Middlesex. Among his noble students at the time was Anne, eldest daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and it is thought that he may have composed some of the suites anew or arranged them from earlier of his keyboard pieces for her instruction.

The Suite No. 7 in G minor concludes with a spacious Passacaglia, a variation on a repeating chord pattern, which was arranged for violin and viola by the Norwegian violinist, conductor and composer Johan Halvorsen.

String Quartet in E minor (1873) GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813-1901)

Following the composition and attendant difficulties of mounting Aida, his 26th opera, Verdi, at age 58, had sworn not to write again for the stage. He kept this vow until the poet

JUL Arrigo Boito and his publisher Giulio Ricordi convinced him to undertake Otello a decade later. Stuck in his Naples hotel room in March 1873, Verdi, for the first time in his working life, had no project at hand into which he could channel his creativity, so he turned to the string quartet, a genre he had studied and long admired but never practiced. Four musicians from the San Carlo orchestra played the Quartet privately for a few of the composer’s friends at the Hotel della Crocelle on April 1st, the day after Aida opened, but then Verdi filed the piece away, refusing public performances and withholding its publication. Despite insistent requests from chamber musicians and concert organizations, he did not allow the Quartet to be heard again until it was given before an invited audience at the Hôtel de Bade in Paris on June 1, 1876, when he was in that city to supervise the local premiere of Aida. The success of that private performance convinced him to publish the work, and it was soon heard publicly in Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere, and has remained a staple of the chamber literature. The Andantino, despite brief episodes of heightened intensity, is elegant and sentimental, with a principal theme reminiscent of a gentle waltz.

String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American” (1893) ANTONÍN DVOŘ ÁK (1841-1904)

On June 3, 1893, Antonín Dvořák left his apartment at 327 East 17th Street in New York City, where he was then directing the National Conservatory, and journeyed to Spillville, Iowa, a settlement of a few hundred souls founded some forty years before by a “BavarianGerman” named Spielmann. It was not the Germans, however, who followed Spielmann to the open spaces of Iowa, but the Czechs and the Bohemians, Dvořák’s countrymen. On June 8th, just three days after arriving in Spillville, he began his F major Quartet and finished the sketches in an astonishing 72 hours. Still bubbling with inspiration, the following day he started the String Quintet, Op. 97, which was completed on August 1st, just before he left to participate in a “Czech Day” at the Chicago World’s Fair. The finale of the “American” Quartet is a rondo built on a dashing folkdance melody.

20 THURSDAY JULY 20, 11:00AM FREE CONCERT SERIES

GOLDEN EAGLE SENIOR CENTER

ENSEMBLE CONNECT (Bravo! Vail 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence) Adelya Nartadjieva, violin Michelle Ross, violin Maren Rothfritz, viola Madeline Fayette, cello

HAYDN String Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5, “The Lark” Allegro moderato Adagio cantabile Menuetto: Allegretto Finale: Vivace

FRANÇAIX Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello Allegretto vivo Scherzo: Vivo Andante Rondo: Vivo

HANDEL/ARR. HALVORSEN Passacaglia from Suite No. 7 in G minor for Violin and Viola

VERDI Andantino from String Quartet in E minor

DVOŘÁK Finale (Vivace ma non troppo) from String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American” The running time for this concert is approximately one hour.

Ensemble Connect is a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education

FREE CONCERT

BEETHOVEN, POULENC & BRAHMS Eight Variations on a Theme of Count Waldstein for Piano, Four Hands, WoO 67 (ca. 1791) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (17701827)

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eethoven’s father, a singer at the Electoral court in Bonn, was an alcoholic, and much of the responsibility for supporting his family rested on Ludwig’s shoulders by the time he was a teenager. The young musician, already bursting with promise and ambition, found understanding and encouragement from the family of Emanuel von Breuning, Court Councilor to the Elector Maximilian Franz.

At the Breuning household, probably in 1788 (Beethoven was eighteen), he met Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, a close friend of the Elector, an amateur composer, a dedicated patron of the arts, and eight years Beethoven’s senior. Waldstein, descendent of one of Austria’s noblest families, became Beethoven’s most important early patron, regularly encouraging Maximilian Franz to make improvements in his working conditions as organist at the Electoral court, discreetly granting some small financial aid, making available to him a fine fortepiano, and commissioning the music for a Ritterballet (“Knight’s Ballet”) for the Bonn Carnival season of 1791. When Beethoven moved to Vienna for good in 1792, it was Waldstein who financed the venture. He sent the young composer off with an admonition to “receive the spirit of Mozart [who had died just months before] from the hands of Haydn,” which Beethoven did in a series of lessons with the recently retired Esterházy Kapellmeister. As a farewell gift sometime before Beethoven left Bonn, he wrote the set of Eight Variations for Piano Duet on a Theme by Count Waldstein (WoO 67) that embodies both the varied compositional styles and the keyboard techniques which his patron’s support and advice had helped him develop at an early age.

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Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1962) FR ANCIS POULENC (1899-1963)

The Clarinet Sonata, Poulenc’s last work except for the Sonata for Oboe and Piano, was composed in the summer of 1962 for Benny Goodman and dedicated to the memory of Arthur Honegger; Goodman and Leonard Bernstein gave the premiere in New York on April 10, 1963, ten weeks after the composer’s death from a heart attack in Paris on January 30th. Rather than the sonata structure often heard in the first movement of such works, the Clarinet Sonata opens with a three-part form in which a central section, at once benedictory and slightly exotic, is surrounded by a beginning and ending paragraph in quicker tempo. The second movement, marked “very sweetly and with melancholy,” is almost hymnal in its lyricism and quiet intensity. The finale is based on the progeny of a French music hall tune.

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (1894) JOHANNES BR AHMS (1833-1897)

Among Brahms’ close friends and musical colleagues during his later years was the celebrated pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who played Brahms’ music widely and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court orchestra at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving at Meiningen, Bülow invited Brahms to be received by the musicloving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and the composer was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised full dress for dinner.) At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor Clarinet Concerto by the orchestra’s principal player

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© YI-SUK JANG

20 of that instrument, Richard Mühlfeld, and he was overwhelmed. So strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy, and the Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (Op. 114) and Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (Op. 115) were composed for Mühlfeld without difficulty between May and July 1891. Three years later Brahms produced the two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano (Op. 120) for Mühlfeld.

The Clarinet Sonatas are works of Brahms’ fullest maturity: economical without being austere, tightly unified in motivic development, virtually seamless in texture yet structurally pellucid, harmonically rich, and, as always with his greatest music, filled with powerful and clear emotions trenchantly expressed. The autumnal opening movement of the E-flat major Sonata follows the traditional sonataform model. The first theme, suffused with cool sunlight, is an almost perfect example of melodic construction—rapturously lyrical in its initial phrases, growing more animated and wide-ranging as it progresses, and closing with a few short, quiet gestures. After a transition on the main subject followed by a brief moment of silence, the second theme, another gently flowing melodic inspiration, is introspectively intoned by the clarinet. The development section is compact and lyrical rather than prolix and dramatic, and leads to the balancing return of the earlier materials in the recapitulation.

The Sonata’s greatest expressive urgency is contained in its second movement, a curious stylistic hybrid of folkish Austrian Ländler, sophisticated Viennese waltz, and Classical scherzo. The movement’s principal, minormode formal section flanks a brighter central chapter. For the finale of this, his last chamber composition, Brahms employed one of his most beloved structural procedures—the variation. The clarinet presents the theme, with two echoing phrases from the piano alone.

This spacious melody is the subject of five variations, the last of which, a sturdy strain in a portentous minor key, is largely entrusted to the piano. An animated coda brings this splendid and deeply satisfying Sonata to its glowing conclusion.

THURSDAY JULY 20, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL Yoonah Kim, clarinet (Member, Ensemble Connect: Bravo! Vail 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence) Jenny Chen, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow) Chelsea Wang, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow)

BEETHOVEN Eight Variations on a Theme of Count Waldstein for Piano, Four Hands, WoO 67

POULENC Sonata for Clarinet and Piano Allegro Tristamente: Allegretto — Très calme — Tempo allegretto Romanza: Très calme Allegro con fuoco: Très animé

BRAHMS Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 Allegro amabile Allegro appassionato Andante con moto The running time for this concert is approximately one hour.

Ensemble Connect is a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education

YOONAH KIM

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MOZART & SHOSTAKOVICH FOR SOLO PIANO Piano Sonata in F major, K. 533/494 (1788, 1786) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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mong Mozart’s most loyal friends during his last years in Vienna were the members of the Jacquin family.

The paterfamilias, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, was a distinguished botanist and professor of chemistry at Vienna University who instilled the love of music in his children, Joseph Franz (21 in 1787), Gottfried (19) and Franzisca (18). Mozart was very fond of the Jacquins, and he visited them frequently to share their dinner, play his music for them, or keep Franzisca up with her lessons when she proved to be one of his most talented piano students. For the entertainment of the household, Mozart composed (for Franzisca) the Piano Trio in G major (K. 496), Piano Sonata for Four Hands (K. 497) and Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano in E-flat major (K. 498, “Kegelstatt”) during the summer of 1786, another trio later that year (K. 502) and the K. 521 Sonata in 1787, as well as a bass aria (Mentre ti lascio, o figlia, K. 513) for brother Gottfried, and several smaller pieces. Rounding out these delightful souvenirs of Mozart’s friendship with the Jacquins is a Rondo (K. 494) that he devised for Franzisca’s lessons in June 1786. In January 1788, after more than two years of financial reverses that caused him to borrow heavily, Mozart added to the Rondo an Allegro and Andante for piano (K. 533), apparently as collateral or payment for a loan from his publisher, Franz Anton Hoffmeister.

The opening movement follows the crystalline sonata form characteristic of Mozart’s instrumental compositions. The main theme, presented in the first measures without harmony, consists of a little figure in quick, even rhythms followed by a jaunty octave leap; the second theme incorporates an ascending trill motive. The brief development section grows 34

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from the rushing triplet figurations used to close the exposition. The recapitulation balances the movement’s form through the return and appropriate transposition of the earlier themes.

The Andante is the sort of deeply expressive music that at first puzzled and then alienated the fickle Viennese public of Mozart’s day, but now seems to be the most enduring of all his contributions to the art. The vivacious closing Rondo is based on a happy tune that circles around its central tone.

Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor, Op. 64 (1943) DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

Hitler’s siege of Leningrad was one of the most barbarous episodes in the history of warfare. Boris Schwarz, in Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970, described the horror: “This city of three million people was cut off, encircled, and condemned to death by starvation. The blockade lasted from September 1941 to February 1943; but even after the blockade was broken, the Germans were entrenched only two miles from the Kirov [munitions] works. During the eighteen months of the blockade, 632,000 people died of hunger and privation, according to official figures. Unofficially, the estimate is closer to one million deaths, or one-third of the population…. In addition to hunger and cold, the city was subjected to shelling and air raids.

The winter of 1941-1942, when the official food rations—if they could be obtained—were reduced to under 500 calories a day for many adults, was particularly cruel. People died everywhere, on the street, at work, in offices and factories. Water pipes burst and people had to drink the infested water of the Neva or of the canals. Electric power was cut to a minimum, and there were no lights in houses and offices.” Shostakovich distilled the mood of those dark, wartime days into his Sonata

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25 TUESDAY JULY 25, 1:00PM

© JANICE CARISSA

FREE CONCERT SERIES

No. 2 of 1943, whose inspiration was the death in October 1942 of Leonid Nikolaev, piano teacher at the Leningrad Conservatory and one of the first to recognize Shostakovich’s genius for composition. The score was dedicated to Nikolaev’s memory.

The opening movement is built according to traditional sonata principles. The vigorous main theme comprises three ideas: a moto perpetuo background of scales and broken chords that gives the music its expressive urgency; a falling two-note motive; and a march-like strain with dotted rhythms. These motives are given a closely compacted working-out until the abrupt arrival of the second theme, a step-wise melody presented in octaves high in the keyboard’s compass. The development starts with the quiet return of the falling two-note motive from the main theme, and goes on to include the rest of the movement’s materials. The recapitulation reprises the events of the exposition.

An extended coda explores further the developmental possibilities of the main theme.

The Largo, the heart of Shostakovich’s threnody to his teacher, is music of harmonic ambiguity, unsettled direction, attenuated texture and seared emotion. The theme of the outer sections of the movement’s three-part form seems to be the deathly ghost of a haunted slow waltz, moving through strange intervals and not always remembering the triple rhythm of the dance. The central episode is smoother in contour but seems barely able to maintain its forward motion because of its plodding accompaniment, a sort of eerie death march in three-quarter time. The finale is an extended set of variations on the long, chromatically inflected theme presented unadorned at the outset that encompasses a variety of styles and emotional states, none of them joyful.

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL Chelsea Wang, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow)

MOZART Piano Sonata in F major, K. 533/494 Allegro Andante Rondo: Allegretto

SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor, Op. 64 Allegretto Largo Moderato (con moto) The running time of this concert is approximately one hour.

CHELSEA WANG

CHAMBER MUSIC

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC STRING QUARTET PLAYS BEETHOVEN & DVOŘÁK String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (1847)

String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4 (1800)

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

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n May 14, 1847, two days after arriving home to Leipzig from an exhausting tour to London, Mendelssohn learned that his beloved sister Fanny had died suddenly in Berlin from a stroke at the age of 41. He collapsed upon receiving the stunning news, and he was too ill even to attend the funeral. He seemed to be recovering somewhat by early fall, when he went to Berlin to discuss business matters with his brother, Paul. The sight of Fanny’s rooms, left exactly as they had been on the day she was stricken, was, however, more than Mendelssohn could bear. He collapsed again and reverted to his state of the previous months. He made it back to Leipzig but suffered three strokes between October 7th and November 3rd. On November 4th, four months shy of his 39th birthday, Mendelssohn died. The F minor Quartet was his last important work.

The Quartet opens in an unsettled, almost tempestuous mood; the second theme is quieter and more lyrical. The development concerns itself exclusively with the passionate main theme. The second movement is not one of those scherzos of elfin grace that had vivified Mendelssohn’s compositions since his teenage years, but is rather sardonic and macabre. A barren trio stands at the movement’s center. The Adagio, the expressive heart of Mendelssohn’s memorial to his sister, herself a composer and pianist of excellent talent, is based on a little song he had sent to her in June 1830. The finale is at times almost a-thematic, consisting wholly of bare figurations and skeletal arpeggios. The sense of grief remains unassuaged through the work’s anxious closing measures.

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The year of the completion of the six Op. 18 Quartets—1800—was an important time in Beethoven’s development. He had achieved a success good enough to write to his old friend Franz Wegeler in Bonn, “My compositions bring me in a good deal, and may I say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover, for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers and even more, if I want them.

People no longer come to an arrangement with me. I state my price, and they pay.” At the time of this gratifying recognition of his talents, however, the first signs of his fateful deafness appeared, and he began the titanic struggle that became one of the gravitational poles of his life. Within two years, driven from the social contact on which he had flourished by the fear of discovery of his malady, he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, his cri de cœur against this wicked trick of the gods. These first Quartets stand on the brink of that great crisis in Beethoven’s life.

The C minor Quartet opens with a darkly colored theme that rises from the lowest note of the violin to high in the instrument’s range; the subsidiary subject is a sunshine melody derived from the leaping motive that closed the main theme. The witty sonata-form Scherzo begins with a jolly fugato and remains largely contrapuntal thereafter. The somber Menuetto is balanced by a delicate central trio. The Quartet closes with a Haydnesque rondo based on a sparkling theme reminiscent of the exotic “Turkish” music that was popular in Vienna at the end of the 18th century.

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25 TUESDAY JULY 25, 6:00PM String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American” (1893)

CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

DONOVAN PAVILION

ANTONÍN DVOŘ ÁK (1841-1904)

On June 3, 1893, Antonín Dvořák left his apartment at 327 East 17th Street in New York City and journeyed to Spillville, Iowa, a settlement of a few hundred souls founded some forty years before by a “BavarianGerman” named Spielmann. It was not the Germans, however, who followed Spielmann to the open spaces of Iowa, but the Czechs and the Bohemians, Dvořák’s countrymen. On June 8th, just three days after arriving in Spillville, he began his F major Quartet and finished the sketches in an astonishing 72 hours. Still bubbling with inspiration, the following day he started the String Quintet, Op. 97, which was completed on August 1st, just before he left to participate in a “Czech Day” at the Chicago World’s Fair.

A shimmering halo of string sound opens the Quartet and serves as the cushion for the viola’s presentation of the folk-like main subject. A shadow of darker emotion draws briefly across the music for the presentation of the complementary subject, but the mood brightens again for the closing theme, a delightful melody entrusted to the first violin.

The development concerns itself first with permutations of the main subject and then with an imitative treatment of a motive derived from the dark-hued complementary theme.

The recapitulation brings balance, formal closure and complete fulfillment to this most satisfying movement. The beautiful main theme of the Lento is first sung by the violin above a sadly undulating accompaniment. The mood becomes brighter as the movement progresses, but the plaintive tone of the opening again settles upon the music as it reaches its close.

The vivacious third movement is built from two contrasting strains, one (in F major) lively and dance-like, the other (F minor) more lyrical and mysterious. The finale is a rondo built on a dashing folk-dance melody.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC STRING QUARTET

Frank Huang, violin Sheryl Staples, violin Cynthia Phelps, viola Carter Brey, cello

MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (26 minutes) Allegro vivace assai Allegro assai Adagio Finale: Allegro molto

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4 (25 minutes) Allegro ma non tanto Scherzo: Andante scherzoso quasi Allegretto Menuetto: Allegretto Allegro

— INTERMISSION — DVOŘÁK String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American” (30 minutes) Allegro ma non troppo Lento Molto vivace Finale: Vivace ma non troppo

Concessions provided by:

FREE CONCERT

ALL LISZT FOR SOLO PIANO Etudes Nos. 5 and 10 from Twelve Transcendental Etudes (1826, 1837, 1851) FR ANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

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n 1826, when he was fifteen, Liszt composed a set of Twelve Etudes and published them as his Op. 1. Five years later, he heard Paganini play for the first time, and he spent the next several years trying to find keyboard equivalents for the dazzling feats that the legendary violinist accomplished on his instrument. To that end, Liszt undertook a thorough transformation of his Op. 1 Etudes in 1837 and produced one of the most awesome documents of instrumental virtuosity of the Romantic century—the Twelve Transcendental Etudes. Liszt returned again to the Transcendental Etudes, in 1851, when he alleviated some of their technical difficulties, tightened their formal structures, and added poetic titles to all but two of them.

Mazurka Brillante, S. 221 (1850) FRANZ LISZT

Liszt first met Frédéric Chopin in Paris in 1831, soon after the Polish émigré had arrived in the city from his native Warsaw.

They became friends and appeared together (the mind reels at the thought!) in 1832 performing Bach’s Concerto for Three Pianos with Ferdinand Hiller and often played at the same fashionable salons. Liszt programmed Chopin’s works frequently for his recitals, dedicated the Transcendental Études to him in 1838, wrote a biography of him after his friend’s death in 1849, edited all of his études for publication in 1878, and composed several piano works around 1850 that were influenced by the style and forms Chopin had perfected, including the atmospheric Mazurka Brillante, which was inspired by the 56 splendid compositions Chopin based on the dance type that originated in his home district of Mazovia during the 17th century.

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Reminiscences de Robert le Diable (1841) GIACOMO MEYERBEER (1791-1864) ARRANGED BY FRANZ LISZT

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831) is set in 13th-century Sicily. Robert, Duke of Normandy, is the son of a mortal woman and a devil who roams the earth as Bertram. Bertram seeks to claim the soul of Robert with the help of the spirits of nuns buried in a ruined cloister who had forsaken their vows and lived a life of debauchery. Liszt’s Reminiscences de “Robert le Diable,” composed for a recital in Paris in 1841, is based on the Valse Infernale (Act III, Scene 2), in which Bertram incites the ghosts of dead nuns to rise from their graves and perform a licentious dance, and the martial chorus that closes Act II, in which Robert engages in a tournament to win the hand of his beloved, Isabelle.

O Wenn Es Immer So Bleiben (“O, That It Could Last Forever”), after Anton Rubinstein’s Gelb rollt mir zu Füssen der brausende Kur (“The Mighty River Kura Streams Yellow Around My Feet”), Op. 34, No. 9 (1881) FRANZ LISZT

Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) was one of the towering figures of 19th-century Russian music—he was famed as a piano virtuoso across Europe before he was fifteen, composed prodigiously throughout his life, founded the Russian Musical Society to promote the works of his colleagues, established the country’s first important conservatory (in St. Petersburg, among whose earliest graduates was Tchaikovsky), and, in general, gave form and substance to the nation’s musical life. In 1854, Rubinstein composed a set of twelve Persian Songs based on German texts that Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt (1819-1892), a writer and scholar of Persian and Azeri literature, adapted from poems of the Azerbaijani poet and educator Mizra Shafi Vazeh (1794-1852). In 1881, Liszt

JUL wove an elaborate fantasia around the dreamy ninth song of Rubinstein’s cycle and titled it after the poem’s concluding line: The mighty river Kura streams yellow around my feet/its waves busily dancing,/light shines the sun/on my heart and the fields./O, that it could last forever! [O wenn es immer so bleiben].

27 THURSDAY JULY 27, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

Polonaise from Eugene Onégin (1879) P E T E R I LY I C H T C H A I KO V S K Y (1840-1893) ARRANGED BY FRANZ LISZT

Liszt arranged several Russian pieces for his three concert tours to that country in the 1840s.

He continued to transcribe Russian works even after he had given up public performance in 1847 to become music director at Weimar.

Among those late arrangements was the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onégin, made soon after the opera had premiered in Moscow in March 1879. The Polonaise, an elegant dance used by 19th-century Russian society to embellish its formal occasions, accompanies the ball scene in Act III.

Rondeau Fantastique sur un Thême Espagnol (El Contrabandista) (1837) FRANZ LISZT

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL Jenny Chen, piano (2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellow)

LISZT Two Selections from Twelve Transcendental Études No. 5. Feux Follets: Allegretto No. 10. Allegro agitato molto

LISZT Mazurka Brillante, S. 221 MEYERBEER/ARR. LISZT Reminiscences de Robert le Diable

LISZT O Wenn Es Immer So Bleiben, after Anton Rubinstein’s Gelb rollt mir zu Füssen der brausende Kur, Op. 34, No. 9

TCHAIKOVSKY/ARR. LISZT Manuel del Pópulo Vicente Rodríguez García (1775-1832) was among the leading tenors and most popular composers of his time. He won acclaim in Paris, London, Italy, the United States, and Mexico after establishing a reputation in his native Spain with performances and compositions that distilled the essence of his native land’s unique musical personality. García’s varied talents are nowhere better seen than in his one-act “operatic monologue for tenor” of 1804, El Poeta Calculista (“The Calculating Poet”), in which he declaimed the spoken monologue, sang, pantomimed, danced and acted. The author of the libretto is uncertain, but it may well have been written by García himself.

Among the most colorful of the title character’s numbers is one in which he imagines himself to be an outlaw: Yo que soy contrabandista—I’m a smuggler and I do as I please, I defy one and all, because I fear no one. In 1837, Liszt wrote a “hair-raising” Rondeau Fantastique (so described

by Australian-English pianist Leslie Howard, who has recorded all Liszt’s piano works for Hyperion) based on Yo que soy contrabandista.

Polonaise from Eugene Onégin

LISZT Rondeau Fantastique sur un Thême Espagnol (El Contrabandista) The running time of this concert is approximately one hour.

JENNY CHEN

FREE CONCERT

BARTÓK & WOOD WORKS String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 (1907-1908) BÉL A BARTÓK (1881-1945)

T

he year 1907, when he was 26, was a crucial time both personally and professionally for Béla Bartók. In January, he was appointed to the faculty of the Budapest Academy of Music as teacher of piano, and he soon became recognized as one of Hungary’s most talented keyboard virtuosos and pedagogues. By 1907, he had begun to establish himself as a composer and a folk music researcher, though his original works to that time, largely under the sway of late German Romanticism, had not yet revealed his distinctive creative personality. He was then also much occupied with thoughts of Hungarian nationalism (he even eschewed business suits for a short period in favor of traditional peasant dress), and the manner in which the music he was documenting on his research trips through the Transylvanian countryside could be most effectively incorporated into his original works. These matters—the advancement of his professional life as a composer, performer and teacher; the foundation of a personal compositional language; the way to mold his music to his patriotic feelings—became enmeshed that summer in an affair of the heart, his first serious love entanglement. On vacation in the town of Jászberény, a short distance east of Budapest, he met the Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer, then just nineteen, and fell in love with her. He wrote a concerto for Stefi, filled with allusions to his emotions, but she kept the score to herself, and the work was not played publicly until two years after her death in 1956, when it was published as the Violin Concerto No. 1, Opus Posthumous. On July 1, 1907, still in Jászberény, Bartók began sketching a string quartet (he had suppressed three youthful efforts in the form dating from 1896 and 1899; they are lost), but did not 40

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undertake further work on it until the beginning of the following year. By then, the affair with Stefi had come painfully, at least for him, to an end, as he indicated in his last letter to her (March 1908): “I have begun a quartet; the first theme is [borrowed from] the theme of the second movement of the Violin Concerto; this is my funeral dirge.” Tours to Switzerland, France and Italy that summer and fall precluded much progress on the Quartet, so the score was not completed until January 27, 1909. In August, Bartók, apparently recovered from his passion for Stefi, married Márta Ziegler, a sixteen-year-old student of his at the Academy.

The premiere of the new Quartet was given on March 19, 1910 at the Royal Concert Hall in Budapest by the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet.

The String Quartet No. 1 begins with a close canon [i.e., voices in exact imitation] in slow tempo on a lamenting theme (i.e., the theme derived from the principal motive of Stefi’s Concerto). Formal contrast is provided by the movement’s central section, based on a descending theme in worried rhythms (marked “very impassioned”). A return of the opening canon, floating high in the violins, rounds out the movement’s form.

An inconclusive harmony leads without pause to the next movement. The Allegretto combines the formal elements of a traditional opening movement with the expression of a spectral scherzo. It is in the finale that Bartók moved beyond the extended Romantic style of the earlier movements toward the characteristic compositional idiom, grown from the distinctive melodic leadings and fiery dance rhythms of Hungarian folk music, that informs his greatest works. The movement is introduced by a preludial paragraph in which the cello makes bardic pronouncements that are separated by excited punctuations from the upper strings. The main part of the movement is a sort of modern sonata-rondo whose structural demarcations are often blurred by the continuous thematic workingout. The movement’s folkish second theme

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31 MONDAY JULY 31, 6:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

is placed in high relief by its slow tempo and Impressionistic trilled accompaniment. Though the First String Quartet is among the earliest of Bartók’s works to exhibit the stylistic gestures that were to place him among the great composers of the modern era, it is music of undeniable personality and remarkable artistic vision and craftsmanship.

© CAROLINE BITTENCOURT

From the liner notes of Wood Works, the Danish String Quartet’s 2016 release on Dacapo Records: Folk music is the music of all the small places. It is the local music, but as such it is also the music of everywhere and everyone.

Like rivers, the melodies and dances have flowed slowly from region to region: whenever a fiddler stumbled on a melody, he would play it and make it his own before passing it on. You don’t own a folk tune, you simply borrow it for a while.

In Wood Works, we have borrowed and arranged a selection of Scandinavian tunes that are all very close to our hearts. We perform them as a string quartet, one of the most powerful musical vehicles we know of.

The string quartet is a pure construct: four simple instruments made of wood. But in all its simplicity, the string quartet is capable of expressing a myriad of colors, nuances and emotions—just like folk music. Our idea is to marry these two simple but powerful things: folk music and string quartet. Normally the string quartet has been reserved for the classical masters. Now we want to see what happens when we let the Nordic folk music flow through the wooden instruments of the string quartet.

Does it work? We hope so. And remember: we simply borrowed these tunes. They have already been returned.

BRUSH CREEK PAVILION

DANISH STRING QUARTET

Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin Frederik Øland, violin Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello

BARTÓK String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 (32 minutes) Lento — Allegretto Introduzione (Allegro) — Allegro vivace Selections from the Danish String Quartet’s recording, Wood Works, to be announced from the stage.

The running time of this concert is approximately one hour.

DANISH STRING QUARTET

PRESENTED BY

CLASSICALLY UNCORKED

ONE QUARTET: A TOAST TO BEETHOVEN Kongsgaard Variations for String Quartet (2006)

Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (1821-1822)

ANDERS HILLBORG (B. 1954)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

S

wedish composer Anders Hillborg gained his first musical experience as a chorister, started improvising as a teenager, and went on to study counterpoint, composition and electronic music at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music.

Except for a short time teaching composition at the Malmö College of Music in 1990 and occasional master classes and courses, Hillborg has since lived in Stockholm as a free-lance composer. He won the Swedish Gramophone Award in 1991 as Composer of the Year and has also received a UNESCO Composers Rostrum Award, Christ Johnson Music Prize, and 2012 Swedish Gramophone Award for Best Classical CD of the Year.

Kongsgaard Variations was composed in 2006 and dedicated to John and Maggy Kongsgaard, winemakers and co-founders of the Arietta winery in Napa Valley. Hillborg wrote of the work, “The label on a bottle of Arietta wine displays a couple of bars from the Arietta theme from Beethoven’s last piano sonata [Op. 111] in his own handwriting.

So when I was asked to compose a piece in honor of this fabulous wine, that theme would naturally have a key role. But whereas Beethoven’s piece is a set of rigorously carried out variations with a steadily increasing intensity curve, the Kongsgaard Variations are more like meditations, with no directional process. The music floats aimlessly through the centuries, displaying reminiscences of Baroque, folk-music, Renaissance and Romanticism, but with Beethoven’s Arietta theme as the musical epicenter.”

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Beethoven’s painful five-year court battle to secure custody of his nephew Karl from his brother Caspar’s dissolute widow (whom the composer disparaged as the “Queen of the Night”) finally came to an end early in 1820.

He won the case, but lost the boy’s affection (Karl, half crazed from his uncle’s overbearing attention, tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself).

The trial also exploded the composer’s own pretension that he was of noble blood. With the resolution of his custody suit, Beethoven returned to creative work, and began anew the titanic struggle to embody his transcendent thoughts in musical tones. In no apparent hurry to dispel the rumors in gossipy Vienna that he was “written out,” he produced just one composition in 1820, the Piano Sonata in E major, Op. 109, but followed that quickly with the A-flat Sonata, Op. 110, dated on Christmas Day, 1821, and the Sonata in C minor, Op. 111, finished just three weeks later, on January 13, 1822. The C minor Sonata was his last such work, followed in his output for piano only by the Diabelli Variations and the two late sets of Bagatelles (Op. 119 and Op. 126).

For the C minor Sonata Beethoven chose the unusual structure of two vast movements—a tempestuous essay in sonata form followed by a lofty set of variations of ethereal character— which are contrasted at almost every level: tonality (C minor, C major); rhythm (fiery, placid); melody (craggy and filled with dramatic leaps, hymnal and smoothly flowing); harmony (chromatic and bold, pure and introspective); texture (contrapuntal, chordal). This music is not only the product of the obsession of his last years with motivic development, fugue, variation and the very essence of musical form, but also embodies the potent emotionalphilosophical progression of darkness-to-light,

AUG struggle-to-transcendence, minor-to-major that makes the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies such powerful utterances.

String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky” (1806)

© AUTUMN DE WILDE

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Count Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky was one of the most prominent figures in Viennese society, politics and art at the turn of the 19th century. Born in 1752 to a singer at the Russian court, he ingratiated himself with a number of women of lofty station and entered the diplomatic corps at the age of 25. In 1788 in Vienna, Razumovsky married Elizabeth, Countess of Thun and sister of Prince Lichnowsky, one of Beethoven’s most devoted patrons. Four years later, he was assigned as Russian ambassador to Vienna, whose sybaritic life style perfectly suited his personality.

Razumovsky was also an accomplished violinist who indulged his interest in music by taking lessons from Haydn, playing in chamber concerts, and sponsoring the performance of works in his residence. In the spring of 1806, he took over from Prince Lichnowsky the patronage of the string quartet headed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, and commissioned Beethoven to write three new pieces that would be played in the grand palace he was building on the Danube Canal near the Prater. In honor of (or, perhaps, at the request of) his Russian patron, Beethoven included traditional Russian themes in the first two quartets of the Op. 59 set.

The Razumovsky Quartet No. 3, in C major, opens with an almost motionless introduction, influenced, perhaps, in its harmonic acerbity by the beginning of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet.

The mood brightens with the presentation of the main theme by the unaccompanied first violin, and there ensues a powerful movement in fully developed sonata form. Dark currents of feeling pulse beneath the rippling surface of the Andante: “A lament [that] searches many shadowy corners,” wrote Vincent d’Indy of this music; J.W.N. Sullivan thought that it presents “some forgotten and alien despair;” a “mystery of the primitive” concluded Joseph Kerman of it. The third movement, nominally a Minuet, is of a Romantic sensibility that leaves the elegance and simple grace of its model far behind. The finale is a whirlwind blend of rondo, sonata and fugue.

01 TUESDAY AUGUST 1, 7:30PM C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D PRESENTED BY ARIE T TA WINE

DONOVAN PAVILION

CALDER QUARTET

Benjamin Jacobson, violin Andrew Bulbrook, violin Jonathan Moerschel, viola Eric Byers, cello

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

HILLBORG Kongsgaard Variations for String Quartet (16 minutes)

BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (28 minutes) Maestoso — Allegro con brio ed appassionato Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile

— INTERMISSION — BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky” (33 minutes) Andante con moto — Allegro vivace Andante con moto quasi Allegretto Menuetto: Grazioso — Allegro molto

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

CALDER STRING QUARTET

PRESENTED BY

CLASSICALLY UNCORKED

TWO QUARTETS: GLASS & SCHUBERT String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima” (1985) PHILIP GLASS (B. 1937)

M

ishima: A Life in Four Chapters is director Paul Schrader’s 1985 movie about Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s most prominent 20thcentury authors, poets, playwrights, actors and film directors. The film recounts episodes from Mishima’s life and dramatizes scenes from some of his novels, and ends with his ritual suicide following his failed attempt at a coup d’état in 1970 to reinstate the Emperor as the nation’s sovereign. In his music for Mishima, Glass variously used large orchestra, string orchestra and string quartet to suit the dramatic intent of each scene. He extracted his String Quartet No. 3 from the score.

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 24 (1944) VINCENT PERSICHETTI (1915-1987)

American composer, educator, author, pianist and conductor Vincent Persichetti wrote his String Quartet No. 2 in 1944 and arranged for its premiere by the Roth String Quartet at the Colorado Spring Arts Festival on August 16, 1945. Just as they were beginning to rehearse the piece ten days before the performance, Persichetti recalled, “Someone came in breathlessly with the news of an atom bomb dropped on Japan. The quartet lit fresh cigarettes and went on with the rehearsal.”

Something of the country’s anxious/somber/ hopeful mood during those last days of World War II filtered into the Second Quartet. The opening movement, with its serious tone, modal themes and contrapuntal texture, is something of a 20th-century string quartet analogue to a Renaissance sacred motet, though its modern harmony and intense climaxes reflect the time of its creation. The second movement is a tenacious scherzo. The finale is prefaced by 44

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a slow, brooding introduction that serves as a foil for the music that follows—a muscular, intricately worked fantasia based on the craggy theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.

Quartettsatz (“Quartet Movement”) in C minor, D. 703 (1820) FR ANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

The Quartettsatz, which marks the beginning of Schubert’s creative maturity, follows a sonata form modified to reverse the repetitions of the themes in the recapitulation.

Six Moments Musicaux, Op. 44 (1999-2005) GYÖRGY KURTÁG (B. 1926)

Hungarian composer György Kurtág wrote the Moments Musicaux for the 2005 Concours International de Quatuor à Cordes in Bordeaux, France, incorporating into it ideas he had been collecting since 1999. The Invocatio surrounds a mysterious, firefly episode with aggressive framing music. The title of Footfalls recalls the 1975 play by Samuel Beckett in which the main character paces metronomically throughout.

The movement’s subtitle, however—… mintha valaki jönne—is borrowed from the poem No One Comes by the Hungarian poet Endre Ady (1877-1919): Kipp-kopp, as if a woman were coming [… mintha valaki jönne]/On a dark stairway, trembling, running/My heart stops, I await something wonderful/In the autumn dusk, confident…. Kipp-kopp, now a funeral twilight,/A misty, hollow melody sounds/The autumn evening./Today no one came to me./Today no one will come to me, no one. Kurtág said that the Capriccio is “full of cunning pitfalls” for both performers and listeners. In memoriam György Sebők is a musical eulogy to the celebrated Hungarian-American pianist and teacher, whose death in 1999 inspired the earliest ideas for this work. The title of the fifth movement refers both to Rameau’s descriptive Le Rappel des

AUG Oiseaux (1724, “The Roll Call of the Birds”) and to German violist Tabea Zimmermann, for whom Kurtág wrote Eine Blume [A Flower] für Tabea in 2000, after her husband, Israeli conductor David Shallon, had succumbed to an asthma attack while on tour in Japan. Twice the music breaks off for the cello’s eerie, veiled quotation of a phrase from the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) from the Requiem Mass for the Dead, which Kurtág labeled in the score “Mors, mors stupebit” (“Death itself will be struck dumb”). Les Adieux (in Janačék’s Manier) is a tribute to Beethoven’s eponymous Piano Sonata (Op. 81a), written in 1809 when Napoleon’s advance on Vienna sent the city’s nobles fleeing, as well as the Moravian composer Leoš Janáček.

02 WEDNESDAY AUGUST 2, 7:30PM C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D PRESENTED BY ARIE T TA WINE

DONOVAN PAVILION

AEOLUS QUARTET Nicholas Tavani, violin Rachel Shapiro, violin Gregory Luce, viola Alan Richardson, cello

String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, “Death and the Maiden,” D. 810 (1824)

CALDER QUARTET

FRANZ SCHUBERT

GLASS

When Wilhelmine von Chezy’s play Rosamunde, with extensive incidental music

by Franz Schubert, was hooted off the stage at its premiere in Vienna on December 20, 1823, the 27-year-old composer decided to turn his efforts away from the theater, where he had found only frustration, and devote more attention to his purely instrumental music. The major works of 1823—the operas Fierrabras and Der häusliche Krieg, the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin and Rosamunde—gave way to the String Quartets in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) and A minor, the A minor Cello Sonata (“Arpeggione”), several sets of variations and German Dances, and the Octet.

The D minor Quartet opens with a dramatic gesture founded upon a triplet-rhythm motive; the subsidiary subject is a lilting violin duet.

The development is a compact and closely worked contrapuntal elaboration of the second theme. The Quartet’s sobriquet—“Death and the Maiden”—is derived from the theme of its second movement, a song Schubert composed in 1817. The text contrasts the terror of a young girl (“Pass by, horrible skeleton!”) with the mocksoothing words of death (“I am your friend. Be of good cheer! You shall sleep softly in my arms!”).

Schubert worked a set of five variations on the theme. The Scherzo, with its unsettling rhythmic syncopations and restless expression, reinstates the defiant mood of the first movement. The finale, a feverish tarantella, combines formal elements of rondo and sonata.

See page 43 for personnel

String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima” (16 minutes) 1957: Award Montage November 25: Ichigaya 1934: Grandmother and Kimitake 1962: Body Building Blood Oath Mishima/Closing

PERSICHETTI String Quartet No. 2, Op. 24 (17 minutes) Slow Moderately fast Slow — Fast

SCHUBERT Quartettsatz in C minor, D. 703 (9 minutes)

— INTERMISSION — KURTÁG Six Moments Musicaux, Op. 44 (15 minutes) Invocatio (un fragment) Footfalls — … mintha valaki jönne Capriccio In memoriam György Sebők Zimmermann Les Adieux (in Janačék’s Manier)

SCHUBERT String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, “Death and the Maiden,” D. 810 (40 minutes) Allegro Andante con moto Scherzo: Allegro molto Presto

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

PRESENTED BY

CLASSICALLY UNCORKED

THREE QUARTETS: GLASS & REICH Three Intermezzos for Piano, Op. 117 (1892) JOHANNES BR AHMS (1833-1897)

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rahms described the Op. 117 Intermezzos as “three lullabies to my sorrows,” and associated the somber mood of the first with a poem by Johann Gottfried Herder: Sleep softly my child, sleep softly and well! It fills me with regret to see you cry. Several commentators have proposed that the second Intermezzo also found its inspiration and mood in the Herder poem, though Brahms himself never said they were related in that way. The Herder verse has also been connected with the Intermezzo in C-sharp minor (No. 3), but so has Longfellow’s 1855 poem Victor Galbraith, which recounts the execution by firing squad of a disgraced bugler from Middletown, Ohio during the Mexican War of 1846-1848.

Pangaea for Piano and Strings (2017) DAVID LUDWIG (B. 1972) Commissioned by Bravo! Vail as part of the NEW WORKS PROJECT

David Ludwig, born in 1972 in Doylestown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is the descendant of a distinguished musical family—pianists Rudolf Serkin and Peter Serkin are his grandfather and uncle, and his greatgrandfather was the renowned violinist Adolf Busch. Ludwig studied at Oberlin College (B.M.) and Manhattan School of Music (M.M.), and continued his post-graduate work at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School before earning a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. His teachers include Richard Hoffmann, Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, Ned Rorem and John Corigliano. In 2002, Ludwig was appointed to the faculty of the Curtis Institute, where he now serves as the Artistic Chair of Performance and Director of the Curtis 20/21 Contemporary Music 46

2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

Ensemble. In addition to important residencies in Europe, Asia and America, Ludwig’s honors include the First Music Award, Independence Foundation Fellowship, Theodore Presser Foundation Career Grant, Fleischer Orchestra Award, and two nominations for the Stoeger Award of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also received grants from Meet the Composer, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, and National Endowment for the Arts. In 2009 he was honored as a City Cultural Leader by the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, and in 2011 NPR Music selected him as one of the “Top 100 Composers Under Forty in the World.”

Pangaea was commissioned by Bravo! Vail in honor of the festival’s 30th season. The composer wrote of it, “‘Pangaea’ was the single huge continent on earth surrounded by one vast ocean over two hundred million years ago—eons before dinosaurs, much less humans. It was an entirely different planet from the one we know today, lush with the life of another world. The music of my Pangaea begins in the ‘Panthalassa’ ocean [from the Greek, ‘all sea’] that encircled the earth, rising up and plunging back into the depths. The second movement continues in this ancient world, inspired by the abundant life of the Pangaea super-continent as a kind of ‘Carnival of the [Prehistoric] Animals.’ In this music, I had in mind some acoustic principles that existed then as they do now, especially the overtone series, resonating through the ages.

“Writing the end of the piece brought me to thinking about the end of this world. Global climate change and warming started a chain of events that would lead to the disappearance of nearly all life on earth in a relative eyeblink of geological time: the ‘Permian/Triassic Extinction Event’ (called colloquially ‘The Great Dying’). It’s an unavoidable connection for me to our own man-made era of environmental desolation, which is the second greatest extinction event in earth’s history—and it is happening right now.

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03 THURSDAY AUGUST 3, 7:30PM “When I think about Pangaea—that another earth existed an inconceivable amount of time ago—I am both overwhelmed and comforted.

That we are so small only reinforces how precious our lives are and how fragile this world is, and I am left with renewed appreciation that we have music to inspire us to thought and action.”

String Quartet No. 5 (1991) PHILIP GLASS (B. 1937)

Glass’ Quartet No. 5 comprises five movements: a poignant introduction; a pulsing quick essay; a scherzo; a circling movement framed by a thoughtful music; and a swift finale that slows for recalls the poignant introduction.

Triple Quartet for Three String Quartets (1999) STEVE REICH (B. 1936)

Reich wrote of his Triple Quartet, composed in 1999 for the Kronos Quartet, “The initial inspiration for the piece comes from the last movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. While no musical material is taken from the Bartók, its energy was my starting point. While working on Triple Quartet, two other composers found their way into my consciousness. As I was beginning the piece, my friend Betty Freeman sent me a CD of the complete string quartets of [Russian composer] Alfred Schnittke [19341998]. I had never heard a note of his music.

In listening to his quartets, I was struck by his virtuosity and moved by the incredible Mesto of his Second Quartet. Listening to the ‘density’ of his music goaded me to thicken my own plot harmonically and melodically. Rhythmically in the Triple Quartet, the second and third quartets play in conflicting values partly inspired by Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare.

The result, all in all, is a piece considerably more dissonant and expressionistic than expected. The Triple Quartet is in three movements (fast–slow–fast).”

C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D PRESENTED BY ARIE T TA WINE

DONOVAN PAVILION

AEOLUS QUARTET See page 45 for personnel

CALDER QUARTET See page 43 for personnel

LYRIS QUARTET Alyssa Park, violin Shalini Vijayan, violin Luke Maurer, viola Timothy Loo, cello Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Rachel Calin, double bass

BRAHMS Three Intermezzos for Piano, Op. 117 (15 minutes) No. 1 in E-flat major No. 2 in B-flat minor No. 3 in C-sharp minor

LUDWIG Pangaea for Piano and Strings (18 minutes) World Premiere NEW WORKS PROJECT

Panthalassa Pangaea

— INTERMISSION — GLASS String Quartet No. 5 (21 minutes) I. II. III. IV. V.

REICH Triple Quartet for Three String Quartets (15 minutes) Quarter note = 144 Quarter note = 72 Quarter note = 144

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble was created in 1967 to perform larger chamber works with players who customarily worked together. Drawn from the principal players of the orchestra and normally play-directed by Academy Director/Leader Tomo Keller, the Chamber Ensemble performs in all shapes and sizes, from string quintets to octets, and in various other configurations featuring winds. Its touring commitments are extensive and include regular tours of Europe and North America. Its recording contracts with Philips Classics, Hyperion, and Chandos have led to the release of over thirty CDs.

ŠNATHAN RUSSELL

Aeolus Quartet (string quartet), violinists Nicholas

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Tavani and Rachel Shapiro, violist Gregory Luce, and cellist Alan Richardson, formed in 2008 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. A prize-winning ensemble, it has held graduate residencies at The Juilliard School and Stanford University, and has been recognized with an Educator Award from the Fischoff Chamber Music Association for innovation in educational outreach. It is currently developing an app-based program for music education in schools. Aeolus returns this summer for concerts in the Classically Uncorked series, following its successes last summer in Bravo! Vail events in Eagle, Edwards, Vail, and Wolcott.

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©AUTUMN DE WILDE

Calder Quartet (string quartet) made its Bravo!

Vail debut in 2011, and has subsequently performed here multiple times playing its signature, category-defying repertoire, which envelops core classical, modern, pop, indie, rock, and experimental composition. Together the violinists Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violist Jonathan Moerschel, and cellist Eric Byers have commissioned over 25 works. They have recorded for TV and film, and appeared not only in major concert venues around the world, but also on late night TV with hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Craig Ferguson.

©KURT MUROKI

Rachel Calin (double bass), a graduate of The Juilliard School, can be heard playing chamber music on the Canary Classics, Sony Masterworks, and Naxos recording labels. She has performed frequently with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, at the Aspen Music Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Currently on the faculty of the Perlman Music Program and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Calin performs on a double bass crafted by Carlo Giuseppe Testore in 1690.

©JESSICA GRIFFIN

Choong-Jin Chang (viola), a native of Seoul, Korea, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra as Associate Principal Viola in November 1994, and in 2006 was appointed Principal. As winner of Korea’s Yook Young National Competition in 1980, he made his debut with the Seoul Philharmonic at age twelve. A year later he moved to the United States to attend The Juilliard School, followed by studies in Philadelphia at the Esther Boyer College of Music at Temple University, and finally at the Curtis Institute of Music. Mr. Chang teaches both viola and violin.

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Jenny Chen (piano), at 22, is the youngest Doctor of Musical Arts candidate and teaching assistant at the Eastman School of Music. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, she was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music at age ten. She studied there with Eleanor Sokoloff and Gary Graffman, before going on to complete a master’s degree at the Yale School of Music. Since her debut (Philadelphia Orchestra, 2008), she has maintained a busy concert schedule, which this summer includes her appointment by Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott as one of two 2017 Bravo! Vail Piano Fellows.

©CAROLINE BITTENCOURT

©MARK KAITAOKA

David Cooper (horn) is a third-generation professional

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French horn player, preceded by his uncle and grandmother. He won the Principal Horn position with the Dallas Symphony in 2013, having performed as guest principal with many orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. An active chamber musician, David summered at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and performed here with 2015 Bravo! Vail piano fellow, Fei-Fei Dong. His Vail recital this June with Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott celebrates his new appointment as Principal Horn of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Danish String Quartet (Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, violins; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello) began its formation in the Danish countryside at a camp where amateur musicians could also enjoy football. It formed as a serious ensemble at The Royal Academy of Music, and since 2008, when Norwegian cellist Fredrik joined, it has received prizes and prestigious appointments every year. Included are Denmark’s biggest cultural honor, the Carl Nielsen Prize in 2011, and membership in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two program in 2013-14. This summer marks the Quartet’s Bravo! Vail debut.

2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

©LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO

Emerson String Quartet is celebrating its 40th anniversary having amassed an unprecedented list of achievements: more than thirty acclaimed recordings, nine Grammys (including two for Best Classical Album), three Gramophone Awards, the Avery Fisher Prize, Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year,” and collaborations with many of the greatest artists of our time. Violinists Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist Paul Watkins, who joined the group in 2013, mark the group’s Bravo! Vail debut this summer. Universal Music Group has reissued their entire Deutsche Grammophon discography in a 52-CD boxed set.

©DEANNA KENNETT

Ensemble Connect is a program for the finest young musicians in the country. Run by Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education, the program seeks individuals who are not only committed to musical excellence, but also to education. Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott invited five current Fellows— Adelya Nartadjieva, violin; Maren Rothfritz, viola; Madeline Fayette, cello; and Yoonah Kim, clarinet; and one graduate, Michelle Ross, violin—to come to Vail as Chamber Musicians in Residence to play a wide variety of music, and engage with Bravo! Vail audiences of all ages.

© LUCA VALENTA

Lyris Quartet (string quartet), a champion of new music, is the founding ensemble of the Hear Now Music Festival, which focuses on composers living in Los Angeles, where the ensemble is based. As part of Hear Now, the members—violinists Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan; violist Luke Maurer, and cellist Timothy Loov— have collaborated with and premiered works by Stephen Hartke, Don Davis, Arturo Cardélus, Veronika Krausas, and others. Its most recent recording, Intimate Letters, pairs the Janáček work with companion pieces by four living composers.

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Anne-Marie McDermott (piano), Bravo! Vail’s Artistic Director since 2011, enjoys a career playing and planning an incredible variety of music. Whether it’s the Gershwin Concerto in F (July 26); the premiere of a commissioned work (David Ludwig, August 3); an eclectic program for four pianists (July 21); a recording of Mozart with cadenzas by Chris Rogerson (due Fall 2017), or all five Beethoven piano concertos (Santa Fe Pro Musica in 2017 and 2018), “Annie” brings passion and commitment to everything. She is an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and is continually adding to her critically acclaimed discography.

Anton Nel (piano) won first prize in the 1987 Naumburg International Piano Competition. His multifaceted career has taken him to North and South America, Europe, Asia, and South Africa, where he was born and has toured extensively. He heads the Division of Keyboard Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and, in addition to concertizing and recording, teaches master classes at places such as the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and the Glenn Gould School in Toronto.

©CHRIS LEE

New York Philharmonic String Quartet

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comprises four Principal musicians from the Orchestra: Concertmaster Frank Huang (The Charles E. Culpeper Chair); Principal Associate Concertmaster Sheryl Staples (The Elizabeth G. Beinecke Chair); Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps (The Mr. and Mrs. Frederick P. Rose Chair); and Principal Cello Carter Brey (The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Chair). The group was formed in January 2017 during the Philharmonic’s 175th anniversary season; it made its debut as the solo ensemble in John Adams’s Absolute Jest in New York, and reprised the work on the Orchestra’s spring tour to Europe.

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© SALLY BROWN

Richard Rodda (program annotator) has provided program notes for numerous American orchestras, as well as the Kennedy Center, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Grant Park Music Festival (Chicago).

He is a regular contributor to Stagebill Magazine, and has written liner notes for Telarc, Angel, Newport Classics, Delos and Dorian Records.

©JANICE CARISSA

Chelsea Wang (piano), a native of West Des Moines, IA, started learning piano at the age of four and violin at age seven. She is currently pursuing her Bachelor of Music degree at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, PA, studying with Ignat Solzhenitsyn. At Curtis she holds a full-tuition scholarship as a recipient of the William A. Horn M.D. Fellowship. She makes her Bravo! Vail debut this summer as one of two Piano Fellows, chosen by Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott. Ms. Wang has captured first prizes at many competitions, and was a recipient of the 2012 Schubert Club Scholarship.

©CHLOE NING

Zorá Quartet (string quartet) combines the talents of Dechopol Kowintaweewat and Seula Lee, violins; Pablo Muñoz Salido, viola; and Zizai Ning, cello. Currently the Graduate Quartet in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, the ensemble won First Prize in the 2015 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. As a result of winning the Fischoff Competition, also in 2015, the Quartet toured the Midwest and appeared at the 2016 Emilia Romagna Festival in Italy. This summer it makes its debut as Bravo! Vail’s 2017 Chamber Musicians in Residence.

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THANK YOU EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT PROGRAMS Bravo! Vail is proud to offer dozens of free and low cost concerts and events to the community each summer. We thank all those whose support makes these events possible.

Letitia and Christopher Aitken Amy and Charlie Allen Alpine Bank Sheila and James Amend Antlers at Vail Bahman and Hamila Atefi Dierdre and Ronnie Baker Beaver Creek Resort Company Jayne and Paul Becker Rosalind and Mervyn Benjet Barbara and Barry Beracha Lin Bercher Bravo! Vail Guild Stacy and Mike Brown Doe Browning Carol and Harry Cebron Toko and Bill Chapin Sara and Michael Charles Kay Chester The Christie Lodge Eileen Clune Costco Rebecca and Carl Crawford Alice and Harvey Davis Arlene and John Dayton Barb and Rob DeLuca Destination Resorts Debbie and Jim Donahugh Kathy and Brian Doyle 54

2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

Molly Doyle and Richard Niezan Sandi and Leo Dunn Eagle County Eagle Ranch Association Kathleen and Jack Eck Gail and Jim Ellis Evergreen Lodge Kathy and David Ferguson FirstBank Cookie and Jim Flaum Four Seasons Resort, Vail The Francis Family Shelby and Federick Gans, in honor of Carole and Peter Segal Gail and Arnold Gelfand Holly and Ben Gill Sue and Dan Godec Anne and Hank Gutman Linda and Mitch Hart Karen and Michael Herman Hotel Talisa Kathy and Allan Hubbard Jackie and Norm Waite David Hyde Theresa and Steven Janicek Alexis and Thomas Jasper Sue and Rich Jones Vicki and David Judd Henny Kaufmann Linda and Mark Kogod/Jewelry Creations Judy and Alan Kosloff Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Kushner Sheila and Aaron Leibovic Lift House Lodge The Lion Lion Square Lodge

Lodge at Vail Candace and Brian Loftus Diane and Lou Loosbrock Rallet and John Lovett Paula Lutomiski and Prentice O’Leary Donna and Patrick Martin Barbie and Tony Mayer Anne-Marie McDermott and Michael Lubin Gayle and Pat McDonald Shirley and William S. McIntyre, IV Laurie and Tom Mullen Caitlin and Dan Murray National Endowment for the Arts Karen Nold and Robert Croteau Renee Okubo, in memory of T. Larry Okubo The Paiko Foundation, in honor of the Vail Police Beth Pantzer SueAnn and John Peck Martha and Kent Petrie, in memory of Eleanor M. Howard Nancy and Kent Pettit Linda Farber Post and Dr. Kalmon D. Post Patti and Drew Rader Mary Pat and Keith Rapp Amy and James Regan June and Paul Rossetti Alysa and Jonathan Rotella Adrienne and Chris Rowberry Wendy Rudolph and Graeme Bush Lisa and Ken Schanzer The Sebastian Vail Carole and Peter Segal Katharine and Robert Shafer Sitzmark Lodge Beth and Rod Slifer Slifer Smith & Frampton Foundation Rachel and David Smiley Alexandra Solal and Ron Mastriana Lauren and Bert Solomon Sonnenalp

Marcy and Gerry Spector Cathy and Howard Stone Lisa Tannebaum and Don Brownstein Dhuanne and Doug Tansill Jennifer Teisinger and Chris Gripkey Robin and Tim Thompson Joe Tonahill, Jr. Town of Eagle Town of Gypsum Carol and Albert Tucker United Way of Eagle River Valley U.S. Bank Foundation Vail Marriott Resort and Spa Vail’s Mountain Haus Vail Mountain Lodge and Spa Vail Racquet Club Anne and Jim von der Heydt Martin Waldbaum Sandra and Greg Walton Carole A. Watters Gunnel and Hal Weiser Westin Riverfront Resort and Spa Westwind Jane and Thomas Wilner Ellen and Bruce Winston Andrea and George Yetman

CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES Special thanks to the many donors and partners who make the Bravo!

Vail Chamber Music Series possible.

The Festival is so grateful for their generosity, which brings this beautiful set of concerts to life.

Fork Art Catering The Francis Family The Sidney E. Frank Foundation The Judy and Alan Kosloff Artistic Director Chair The Paiko Foundation, in honor of the Vail Police The Piano Fellows Fund Town of Vail BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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CLASSICALLY UNCORKED Presented by Arietta Wine

Bravo! Vail gratefully acknowledges the support of the many donors whose generous support brings this unforgettable series and experience to audiences.

Amy and Charlie Allen Arietta Wine The Francis Family The Sidney E. Frank Foundation The Judy and Alan Kosloff Artistic Director Chair The New Works Fund The Paiko Foundation, in honor of the Vail Police Red Canyon Catering Town of Vail

PIANO FELLOWS FUND The Piano Fellows Fund supports the professional development of exceptionally talented pianists, nurturing of young pianists at the beginning stages of their careers as soloists and chamber musicians, and an immersive apprenticeship with Artistic Director and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott. The Festival expresses its thanks to supporters of this Fund.

Sandi and Leo Dunn The Francis Family Sandra and Greg Walton

NEW WORKS FUND In celebration of its 30th season in 2017, Bravo! Vail is proud to launch the New Works Fund in support of the annual commissioning of new pieces of music. Bravo! thanks its generous supporters of this initiative.

Amy and Charlie Allen Tracy and Mark Gordon Anne-Marie McDermott and Michael Lubin 56

2017 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

The Paiko Foundation, in honor of the Vail Police Sandra and Greg Walton

LUIS D. JUAREZ HONORARY MUSIC AWARD Established in 2016, the Luis D. Juarez Honorary Music Award supports and extends opportunities for students to pursue musical studies. Bravo! thanks the donors whose support provides financial assistance to students for the costs of instruments, lessons, software, and other essential materials.

Marilyn Augur Dierdre and Ronnie Baker Jayne and Paul Becker Sarah Benjes and Aaron Ciszek Doe Browning Edwina Carrington Arlene and John Dayton Peggy and Gary Edwards Margaret and Tom Edwards Irene Emma Sallie and Robert Fawcett Cookie and Jim Flaum Tracy and Mark Gordon Anne and Hank Gutman Julie and Steven Johannes Judy and Alan Kosloff Shirley and William S. McIntyre, IV Kay and Bill Morton Laurie and Tom Mullen Caitlin and Dan Murray Jullie and Gary Peterson Patti and Drew Rader Martha Rehm and Cherryl Hobart Vicki Rippeto Sally and Byron Rose June and Paul Rossetti Adrienne and Chris Rowberry Carole and Peter Segal Slifer Smith & Frampton Foundation Rachel and David Smiley Cathy and Howard Stone Joanne and Frank Strauss Debbie and Fred Tresca

BUILDING A STRONGER COMMUNITY—TOGETHER Thrivent Financial is pleased to support Bravo! Vail. We succeed when our members and their communities thrive.

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THANK YOU

TO THE 2017 BRAVO! VAIL GUILD Thank you to the dedicated individuals who donate countless hours as volunteers of the Bravo! Vail Guild to help fulfill Bravo!’s mission of enriching lives through the power of music.