David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, February 13, 2014 at 7:30 Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse 3,287th Concert
GLORIA CHIEN, piano NICOLAS DAUTRICOURT, violin SEAN LEE, violin HSIN-YUN HUANG, viola DMITRI ATAPINE, cello NICHOLAS CANELLAKIS, cello JAMES AUSTIN SMITH, oboe
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This concert is made possible, in part, by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation. Many donors support the artists of the Chamber Music Society Two program. This evening, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of The Khalil Rizk Fund.
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, February 13, 2014 at 7:30 GLORIA CHIEN, piano NICOLAS DAUTRICOURT, violin SEAN LEE, violin HSIN-YUN HUANG, viola DMITRI ATAPINE, cello NICHOLAS CANELLAKIS, cello JAMES AUSTIN SMITH, oboe
ELLIOTT CARTER (1908-2012)
Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello (2001) SMITH, DAUTRICOURT, HUANG, CANELLAKIS
WOLFGANG RIHM (b. 1952)
Phantom und Eskapade for Violin and Piano (1993-94) LEE, CHIEN
LEON KIRCHNER (1919-2009)
Trio No. 2 for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1993) CHIEN, LEE, ATAPINE
—INTERMISSION— THOMAS LARCHER (b. 1963)
Kraken for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1994-97) schnell langsam bewegt fliessend schnell CHIEN, DAUTRICOURT, CANELLAKIS
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY (b. 1934)
Quartetto No. 2 for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello SMITH, LEE, HUANG, ATAPINE
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive, and is being recorded for future broadcast. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello Elliott CARTER Born December 11, 1908 in New York City. Died November 5, 2012 in New York City. Composed in 2001. Premiered on September 2, 2001 at Matthaeuskirche in Lucerne by oboist Heinz Holliger, violinist Thomas Zehetmair, violist Ruth Killius, and cellist Thomas Demenga. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 17 minutes Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the first composer to receive the United States National Medal of Arts, Elliott Carter is internationally recognized as one America’s leading voices of the classical music tradition. He was a recipient of the Prince Pierre Foundation Music Award and was one of the few living composers to be inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame during his lifetime. Carter’s prolific career spanned over 75 years, with more than 150 pieces, ranging from chamber music to orchestra to opera, often marked with a sense of wit and humor. His astonishing late-career creative burst resulted in a number of brief solo and chamber works, as well as major essays such as Asko Concerto (2000) for Holland’s ASKO Ensemble. Some chamber works include What Are Years (2009), Nine by Five (2009),
and Two Thoughts About the Piano (2005-06), widely toured by PierreLaurent Aimard. Carter showed his mastery in larger forms as well, with major contributions such as What Next? (1997–98), Boston Concerto (2002), Three Illusions for Orchestra (2004), called by the Boston Globe “surprising, inevitable, and vividly orchestrated,” Flute Concerto (2008), a piano concerto, Interventions (2007), which premiered on Carter’s 100th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall with James Levine, Daniel Barenboim, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (December 11, 2008), and the song cycle A Sunbeam’s Architecture (2011). Carter writes: “The Oboe Quartet is built up from a series of six duets, which cover every possible combination of the four instruments. Each duet lasts just a minute or two, and the other two instruments provide an accompaniment. When I wrote the Oboe Concerto for Heinz Holliger, he showed me the amazing things he could do, such as multiphonics and glissandi, and I incorporated them into the concerto. But this new piece doesn’t have any of those sounds in it. My works now are not really experimental in terms of special effects, but rather in the way the music is organized.” Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
Phantom und Eskapade for Violin and Piano Wolfgang RIHM Born March 13, 1952 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Composed in 1993-94. Premiered on July 1, 1996 in Johannisberg, Germany by violinist Ulf Hoelscher and pianist Siegfried Mauser. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 17 minutes
Wolfgang Rihm has composed more than 400 works, including many pieces for soloists, chamber groups, and orchestras—such as Jagden und Formen, Chiffre-cycle, and Pol— Kolchis—Nucleus—that have become an integral part of the repertoire. He has also written compositions that take their cue from music of past centuries: Deus Passus, an oratorio with Johann Sebastian Bach as a point of reference; Ernster Gesang and Das Lesen der Schrift, orchestral pieces of Brahmsian sound and gesture; and Fremde Szenen, a work of chamber music influenced by Robert Schumann. At age 25 he
wrote the chamber opera Jakob Lenz, which has since become one of the most often produced pieces of contemporary music theatre in Germany. Jakob Lenz was followed by a series of large-scale operas such as Die Hamletmaschine, Die Eroberung von Mexico, and Das Gehege, as well as the work of experimental music theatre Séraphin. He is one of the foremost song composers of our time and his string quartets (of which there are far more than the 12 numbered ones) are often presented in cycles by a wide range of groups. Rihm is a professor of composition at the Music Academy of Karlsruhe (where his students have included Vykintas Baltakas and Jörg Widmann) and the author of several books, including collections of his articles and interviews. Phantom und Eskapade was commissioned by Paul Sacher and dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. Subtitled Stückphantasien (Pieces of Fantasy), the intricate score consists of a series of disparate episodes that start pensive then fitfully become more and more energetic and playful before fading away to an inconclusive ending.
Trio No. 2 for Piano, Violin, and Cello Leon KIRCHNER Born January 24, 1919 in New York City. Died September 17, 2009 in New York City. Composed in 1993. Premiered on December 14, 1993 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. First CMS performance on February 1, 2007. Duration: 18 minutes Leon Kirchner’s compositional style was remarkably individual; earlier influences of Hindemith, Bartók, and Stravinsky soon yielded to a wholehearted identification with the aesthetics, if not necessarily the specific procedures, of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Extraordinarily gifted as both a pianist and a conductor, Kirchner was first and foremost a composer. A member of the American Academies of Arts and Letters and of Arts and Sciences, he was honored twice by the New York Music Critics’ Circle (String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2), and received the Naumburg Award (Piano Concerto No. 1), the Pulitzer Prize (String Quartet No. 3), the Friedheim Award (Music for Cello and Orchestra), and commissions from, among others, the Ford, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. He also conducted
at a number of leading music festivals around the world, most recently at Ravinia. He taught for many years at Harvard University. Kirchner was born in 1919 of Russian parents in Brooklyn, grew up in Los Angeles, and studied with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, and Ernest Bloch. Kirchner writes: “Were it not for Jaime [Laredo], I might not have written a second Piano Trio. But he was persistent, and Sharon [Robinson] and Yossi [Kalichstein] (all three had performed my first Trio with great devotion and brilliance) added to the need. “I find it difficult to ‘write about’ my own music, to equate life’s experience with ‘creation,’ but truly, one cannot separate the flow of reality from the world of illusion and creativity. Working late one evening, I subconsciously reviewed the course that music had taken in the last several decades: from post-12tone ‘serialism’ to uncertainty principles, from comedy to minimalism, and on to the new romanticismus (sic), from formidable titles to invisible content and so on…all the while feeling and hearing the gradual disintegration of “Gestalt” so important to Schoenberg (Stravinsky and Bartók and all the others); ‘formbuilding’ Schoenberg called it, that most vital and characteristic aspect of musical art in the Viennese Classic and before, that which gave music the possibility of endless revelation in performance. “And so I mused as I worked on my Music for Cello and Orchestra, the frame from which Trio No. II drew inspiration.
It happened that toward the ending of this work, a Bachian chorale “appeared,” a haunting and retrospective moment (in my mind), which moved in a dream-like way through Wagnerian and Mahlerian space, a kind of recapitulation, not only of thematic and structural needs the work engendered, but of that crucial time in our history in which some subterranean source had been blocked, leading us more and more to rapidly shifting styles and the “overweaning influence of chic,” to the exclusion, ultimately, of feeling
and “Gestalt”…and so my music seemed to recapitulate the past in an effort to empower an alternative future…my fantasy of course. “However, if words could explain or justify music then I shouldn’t have had to write a Trio I or II. But words cannot; they are a single simple parameter of understanding among an infinite variety in a multiple and complex and still mysterious art. So take it so…peripheral verbiage…by the composer.”
Kraken for Piano, Violin, and Cello Thomas LARCHER Born September 16, 1963 in Innsbruck, Austria. Composed 1994-97. Premiered on November 27, 1996 in Vienna. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 17 minutes Thomas Larcher is widely celebrated as one of the most interesting compositional voices at work today. He has composed vocal works such as Die Nacht der Verlorenen (2008) for baritone Matthias Goerne and the London Sinfonietta and the song cycle for tenor and piano, A Padmore Cycle (2012). Red and Green, his first major orchestra score written for the San Francisco Symphony and conducted by Osmo Vänskä, premiered in 2011. The Double Concerto for violin and cello was also commissioned and premiered in 2011 at the BBC Proms
with Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley under the direction of Ilan Volkov. Larcher was recognized for this work with the British Composer Awards’ International Category Award in 2012. He is currently composing several new pieces—a work for baritone Matthias Goerne and orchestra (commissioned by ZaterdagMatinee Amsterdam, the NSO Washington and Gewandhaus Leipzig), a new string quartet for the Belcea Quartet’s 20th anniversary, and a concerto for orchestra for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov. His work has been recorded by ECM. In early 2014, his new CD What becomes with Mark Padmore and Tamara Stefanovich will be released by Harmonia Mundi. His recordings have been awarded several international prizes, including the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, the Choc de la musique and the Diapason d’Or. In 1994, Thomas Larcher founded the “Klangspuren” festival, and served
as its Artistic Director until 2003. In 2004 he created the Swarovski “Musik im Riesen” Festival in Wattens, Austria, which he still runs.
“In counterpoint to this, a net of other layers is spanned across the piece (rhythmical layers, layers of character, and tone color).
Larcher writes: “Kraken is a reflection of my own compositional history. Different developmental stages are laid free, superimposed, and combined; layers are shifted, called into question, and destroyed.
“Instrumentation for a trio provides almost ideal conditions. The possibilities for combining the individual instruments are systematically exploited. Through the partial preparation of the piano, a fourth instrument, so to speak, is added.”
Quartetto No. 2 for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello Mario DAVIDOVSKY Born March 4, 1934 in Médanos, Argentina. Composed in 1996. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 11 minutes
Mario Davidovsky is widely recognized for his seminal contributions in the realm of electro-acoustic music. His Synchronisms No. 6, for piano and electronic sounds, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. He has received commissions here and abroad from various organizations including: the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Juilliard and Emerson String Quartets, Speculum Musicae, the Parnassus Ensemble, NYNME, The Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, and many others. He has also received numerous grants and awards including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, The Kaske
Prize (Germany), Naumburg Award, Asociasion Wagneriana, and Asociasion Amigos de la Musica (Argentina). Mr. Davidovsky is the Fanny P. Mason Prof. Emeritus at Harvard University, former MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University, and the director of the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley College. He has been recorded by Columbia Records, CRI, New World Records, Wergo, Nonesuch, Finnadar, Turnabout, Bridge Records, DDG, Albany Records; and published by C.F. Peters Corp., E.B. Marks Corp., and McGinnes & Marx. His main teacher was the composer Guillermo Graetzer. In 1958 he was invited to participate in the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, where he studied with Aaron Copland. Mr. Davidovsky’s interest in the fledgling field of Electronic Music was further encouraged by meeting Milton Babbitt, a faculty member that year. Learning of the imminent opening of the ColumbiaPrinceton Electronic Music Center in 1959, he joined the early group of
composers there and later became the Center’s director. Davidovsky writes: “Quartetto No. 2 is a short, single-movement composition, in which one of my objectives is to explore musical textures in which the very strong, individualistic, unique, and sometimes unyielding (but always beautiful) idiosyncrasies of the oboe would blend into a homogeneous texture with the string trio. The exploitation of
meet tonight’s
the rivalry between homogeneous and heterogeneous textures provides the dramatic contrast that fuels one of the narrative layers of this piece. The piece moves freely, alternating between slow and fast segments with moments which are lyrical and playful, expressive and virtuosic, crude and delicate. The piece was completed in December of 1996 having very much in mind the unique mastery and exceptional artistry of Peggy Pearson.”
ARTISTS
Dmitri Atapine has been described as “a splendid, elegant cellist” (Mundo Clasico), with “brilliant technical chops” (Gramophone), whose playing is “highly impressive” (The Strad). As a soloist he has appeared on some of the world’s foremost stages, including Zankel and Weill halls at Carnegie Hall, the National Auditorium of Spain, and Chicago Cultural Center. His frequent festival appearances have included Music@Menlo, La Musica Sarasota, Cactus Pear, Pacific Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, and Aix-enProvence Festival, among many others, with performances broadcast in the US, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and South Korea. His multiple awards include top awards at the Carlos Prieto International Cello Competition, as well as at the Plowman and the Vittorio Gui chamber competitions. His recent engagements have included collaborations with such distinguished musicians as Peter Wiley, Ani and Ida Kavafian, Wu
Han, Bruno Giuranna, David Shifrin, and St. Lawrence String Quartet. In collaboration with pianist Hyeyeon Park, he recently released a critically acclaimed world-premiere recording of Lowell Liebermann’s works for cello and piano on the Blue Griffin label. Other recordings can be found on the Naxos, Albany, Urtext Digital, and Bridge record labels. Mr. Atapine holds a doctorate from Yale School of Music as a student of Aldo Parisot. The artistic director of Ribadesella Chamber Music Festival and the Argenta Concert Series, he is the cello professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and an Artist of the Chamber Music Society. Nicholas Canellakis has established himself as one of the most soughtafter and innovative cellists of his generation, performing throughout the United States and Europe to critical acclaim. He is currently an Artist of the Chamber Music Society, having been
a member of the society’s CMS Two program from 2009 to 2012. A regular performer at Bargemusic in New York City, he has also given concerts in some of the country’s most prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Jordan Hall, the Kimmel Center, and Disney Hall. He has performed at the festivals of Santa Fe, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Mecklenburg, Moab, Bridgehampton, Sarasota, Verbier, Aspen, and Music from Angel Fire, among many others. Mr. Canellakis graduated from The Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory, studying with Orlando Cole, Peter Wiley, and Paul Katz, and was a member of Carnegie Hall’s Academy. An avid teacher, he is on the faculty of the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division. Filmmaking is a special interest of Mr. Canellakis. He has produced and directed several music videos and fictional shorts, and hosts a comedy web series called Conversations with Nick Canellakis. Chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the Superior Pianists of the Year and described by that newspaper as one “… who appears to excel in everything,” pianist Gloria Chien made her orchestral debut at the age of 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since then she has appeared as a soloist under the batons of Sergiu Comissiona, Keith Lockhart, Thomas Dausgaard, and Irwin Hoffman. She has presented recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Jordan Hall, Harvard Musical Association, Caramoor Musical Festival, Verbier Festival, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. An avid chamber musician, she has been the
resident pianist with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston since 2000. She has recorded for Chandos Records, and recently released a CD with clarinetist Anthony McGill. In 2009 she launched String Theory, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum of American Art in downtown Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director, and the following year she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute at the Music@ Menlo festival. A native of Taiwan, Ms. Chien is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a student of Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. She is an associate professor at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, a member of Chamber Music Society Two, and a Steinway Artist. Voted ADAMI Classical Discovery of the Year at the Midem in Cannes and awarded the Sacem Georges Enesco Prize, Nicolas Dautricourt is one of the most brilliant and engaging French violinists of his generation. He appears at major international venues, including the Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, Tchaikovsky Hall, Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan, Salle Pleyel in Paris, and Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées, and appears at many festivals such as Lockenhaus, Radio-France/ Montpellier, Ravinia, Sintra, and Davos. He has performed as a soloist with the Orchestre National de France, Quebec Symphony, Sinfonia Varsovia, Mexico Philharmonic, NHK Tokyo Chamber Orchestra, the Kanazawa Orchestral Ensemble, Belgrade Radio Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Nice Philharmonic, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Novossibirsk Chamber Orchestra, and European Camerata, under conductors
Eivind Gullberg Jensen, Michael Francis, Dennis Russell Davies, Michiyoshi Inoue, Kazuki Yamada, Yuri Bashmet, Fabien Gabel, Fayçal Karoui, and Mark Foster. He appears in such jazz festivals as Jazz à Vienne, Jazz in Marciac, Sud-Tyroler Jazz Festival, Jazz San Javier, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and the European Jazz Festival in Athens. Finalist and prize-winner in numerous international violin contests, such as the Wieniawski, Lipizer, Belgrade, and Viotti competitions, he has studied with Philip Hirschhorn, Miriam Fried, and Jean-Jacques Kantorow, and became artistic director of Les Moments Musicaux de Gerberoy in 2007. He is a member of Chamber Music Society Two and his three-year residency is the first to be supported by the Khalil Rizk Fund. He currently plays a magnificent instrument by Antonio Stradivarius (Cremona 1713). Violist Hsin-Yun Huang was the gold medalist at the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, the top prize winner at the 1993 ARD Competition in Munich, winning at the same time Japan’s prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. She has appeared as a soloist with the Berlin Radio Symphony, the City of London Sinfonia, the Russian State Symphony, the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Zagreb Soloists, the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra, ICE, the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, and the National Symphony of Taiwan. Recent highlights include concerto appearances in Central Park and Alice Tully Hall; collaborations with the Guarneri, Juilliard, Brentano, Orion, and St. Lawrence string quartets; the premiere of a new chamber concerto by Steven Mackey for viola
with chamber ensemble at the Aspen Festival; and a solo album, ViolaViola, that was released in fall 2012 by Bridge Records. Her upcoming highlights include a Hindemith concertos project with the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan as well as the first ever solo viola recital in the National Concert Hall in Beijing. Ms. Huang has participated in the Marlboro Festival, the Stavanger Festival in Norway, the Rome Chamber Music Festival, the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, the Moritzburg Festival in Dresden, the Cartagena Festival in Colombia, and the Spoleto Festivals, both in Italy and Charleston. In 2012 she was appointed the artistic director of the Sejong International Music Festival. An Artist of the Chamber Music Society, Ms. Huang is currently a member of the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School. With performances described by The New York Times as “breathtakingly beautiful,” violinist Sean Lee is quickly gaining recognition as one of today’s most talented rising artists, having received prizes in the Premio Paganini International Violin Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. His debut album featuring the Strauss Violin Sonata was released by EMI Classics and reached the Top 20 of the iTunes “Top Classical Albums” list. In recent years he has appeared as a soloist with the Jerusalem Symphony, Utah Symphony, Orchestra Del Teatro Carlo Felice, Westchester Symphony, Peninsula Symphony, and the Juilliard Orchestra, and as a recitalist, he has performed at Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium, Festival di Carro Paganiniano,
and Wiener Konzerthaus. In addition to his solo engagements, he has given chamber music performances at venues including the Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alice Tully Hall, Adrienne Arsht Center, and the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees as a student of Itzhak Perlman, Mr. Lee served as a teaching assistant to Mr. Perlman at The Juilliard School for three years and currently teaches chamber music in the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School. A member of Chamber Music Society Two, he is also a faculty member of the Perlman Music Program, where he was a student for 6 years, and performs on a 1799 Nicolas Lupot violin. Praised for his “dazzling,” “virtuosic,” and “brilliant” performances (The New York Times), oboist James Austin Smith performs equal parts new and old music across the United States and around the world. He is a member of Chamber Music Society Two, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Talea Ensemble and Decoda, as well as a regular guest of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
and Cygnus. His festival appearances include Music@Menlo, Marlboro, Lucerne, Chamber Music Northwest, Schleswig-Holstein, Stellenbosch, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, OK Mozart, Schwetzingen, and Spoleto USA; he has performed with the St. Lawrence and Orion string quartets and recorded for the Nonesuch, Bridge, Mode, and Kairos labels. Mr. Smith received his Master of Music degree in 2008 from the Yale School of Music and graduated in 2005 with Bachelor of Arts (in political science) and Bachelor of Music degrees from Northwestern University. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Leipzig, Germany at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy” and is an alumnus of “The Academy,” a collaboration of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, the Weill Music Institute, and the New York City Department of Education. His principal teachers are Stephen Taylor, Christian Wetzel, Humbert Lucarelli, Hansjörg Schellenberger, and Ray Still. In the fall of 2012 he joined the faculty at SUNY Purchase. The son of musician parents and eldest of four boys, Mr. Smith was born in New York and raised in Connecticut.