David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
THE ART OF THE RECITAL GARY HOFFMAN AND DAVID SELIG Thursday Evening, January 22, 2015 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,392nd Concert
45th Anniversary Season
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th Floor New York, NY 10023 212-875-5788 www.ChamberMusicSociety.org
This concert is made possible, in part, by The Florence Gould Foundation and the Grand Marnier Foundation. The Chamber Music Society is deeply grateful to Board member Paul Gridley for his very generous gift of the Hamburg Steinway & Sons model “D� concert grand piano we are privileged to hear this evening.
THE ART OF THE RECITAL Thursday Evening, January 22, 2015 at 7:30
GARY HOFFMAN, cello DAVID SELIG, piano
CAMILLE Sonata No. 1 in C minor for Cello and SAINT-SAËNS Piano, Op. 32 (1872) (1835-1921)
Allegro Andante tranquillo e sostenuto Allegro moderato
ALBÉRIC MAGNARD Sonata in A major for Cello and Piano, (1865-1914) Op. 20 (1909-10) Sans lenteur Sans faiblir Funèbre Rondement
—INTERMISSION— LÉON BOËLLMANN Sonata in A minor for Cello and Piano, (1862-1897) Op. 40 (published 1897) Maestoso—Allegro con fuoco Andante Allegro molto
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited. This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
notes on the
PROGRAM
Some years ago I was approached by a cellist who had just completed a volume about French cello sonatas. He asked me if the book interested me and, given that I’m always curious about repertoire that is seldom played as well as the fact that I’ve lived in France for many years, I naturally responded positively. And so I received Stephen Sensbach’s exhaustive treatise on the French Cello Sonata composed between 1871 and 1939, the defining events being the Franco-Prussian War and Word War II. Every such sonata composed in that period is listed and described, including pertinent histories, as well as their whereabouts (whether published or not). 175 in all! I was floored by the sheer numbers as well as the recognition that gems no doubt lay amongst this vast collection. Some composers were known, others not. Concerning the works on this program, I was previously aware only of the Saint-Saëns, though I was not familiar with it. The other two were complete discoveries. This led to three recitals in a series entitled “French Cello Sonatas” with David Selig, a longtime collaborator and close friend who shares a love of this music, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. And ever since this music has become part of me. -Gary Hoffman
Sonata No. 1 in C minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 32 Camille SAINT-SAËNS Born October 9, 1835 in Paris. Died December 16, 1921 in Algiers. Composed in 1872. First CMS performance on February 11, 2005. Duration: 21 minutes The Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, and by September the Germans had surrounded Paris. Camille SaintSaëns joined the Fourth Battalion of the Seine to help defend the city. Paris endured four months of siege before the Germans started their bombardment in January 1871 (Saint-Saëns, posted on the ramparts, noted the pitches of the shells whistling overhead), and the city
capitulated before the end of the month. Saint-Saëns was especially grieved by the death of a close friend, the talented amateur musician and gifted painter Henri Regnault (his best-known work is a depiction of a radiant Salome in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), on January 19th, in one of the last engagements of the war; he was 27. Hardly had the Germans left in March than the Communards, intent on establishing a republic in France and furious over the humiliating treaty signed by the hastily assembled, royalist-leaning National Assembly, seized the city and opened the prospect of a terror reminiscent of the worst days of 1793. Saint-Saëns headed for London just one day before the roads out of Paris were closed. By July, the Commune had been suppressed and the Third Republic proclaimed, and Saint-Saëns
went home. The autumn was devoted to helping establish the Société Nationale to promote French music of serious purpose (and to dilute the influence in France of the Germans, especially Wagner) and to completing the tone poem Le Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel) and the opera La Princesse Jaune (The Yellow Princess), but Saint-Saëns broke off all his activities in January 1872 when his great-aunt Charlotte, his mentor, advisor, hostess of his Monday soirées, and emotional and material support, died unexpectedly. When he returned to work several weeks later, he channeled some of the difficult emotions of the preceding months into the Cello Sonata in C minor. The main theme of the sonata’s opening movement comprises several elements: long unison notes, fragmented scales, a short motive in dotted rhythms, and a smoothly arched phrase. These ideas are worked out to lead to the second theme, which consists of quietly pulsing piano chords in a brighter key underlain by
broken fifths in the cello. The components of the main theme are treated further in the development section before they are reassembled in their original order in the recapitulation. A short, fiery coda closes the movement. The Andante originated in an improvisation that Saint-Saëns played at a memorial service for Abbé Duguerry, a close colleague while he was organist at the Madeleine, who had been imprisoned and executed by the Communards. The movement takes as its theme a steadily flowing chorale melody whose phrases are traded between cello and piano, one playing the theme while the other offers support with a staccato bass line. The central episode is a free treatment of the chorale, which returns intact but elaborated to round out the movement. The sonata-form finale is unsettled in expression throughout, with a principal theme driven by roiling figurations in the piano and a subsidiary subject whose sunnier tonality and lyrical phrases are vitiated by its uneasy syncopations.
Sonata in A major for Cello and Piano, Op. 20 Albéric MAGNARD Born June 9, 1865 in Paris. Died September 3, 1914 in Baron, Oise, France. Composed in 1909-10. Premiered on February 25, 1911 on a Société Nationale de Musique concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris by cellist Fernand Pollain and pianist Blanche Selva. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 27 minutes
Albéric Magnard died as he lived—proud, headstrong, independent, determined— when the country manor house 30 miles north of Paris he was defending singlehandedly was torched after he shot and killed one of a marauding band of invading German soldiers in September 1914; he was among the first French casualties of World War I. All existing copies of his opera Yolande, the only full score for two acts of the opera Guercoeur, and the recently completed set of 12 Poemès en Musique also perished in the blaze.
Magnard was born in 1865 into the family of François Magnard, a prominent and prosperous author and journalist who became editor of Le Figaro, the country’s oldest national newspaper, a decade later. Albéric’s mother died when he was four and he was thrown into a difficult life-long relationship with his father, closely bonded to him emotionally and financially but resentful, even rebellious, toward him about following his own life path and career. The thorough primary education that Magnard received in preparation for entering some profession acceptable to his father included piano lessons, but he showed no exceptional talent for music as a youngster. After finishing high school in 1882, Magnard studied for six months at St. Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, England, had a brief stint of military service, and completed a law degree. By the time he graduated in 1887, he had settled on a career in music (a performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth that summer is thought to have been a catalyst), one in which success depended on talent rather than nepotism. He enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire to study composition with Massenet and graduated in 1888 with a Premier Prix in harmony. He continued his studies with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, which, despite its song-based name, emphasized instrumental music rather than the opera and academism favored at the Conservatoire, and under his teacher’s guidance produced his first two symphonies and the opera Yolande, which was staged (unsuccessfully) in Brussels. (After Magnard’s father finally accepted his son’s career choice, he championed the Schola Cantorum composers in Le Figaro and may have influenced the performances
of Albéric’s music.) Magnard completed his musical studies in 1892. François Magnard died in 1894 and Albéric expiated some of his conflicted feelings about his father in an orchestral Chant Funèbre. His life gained new direction when he married two years later and began teaching counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum, but he also experienced at that same time the first signs of deafness, a condition which exacerbated his innate curmudgeonly, unsociable nature. He earned some recognition with a selffinanced concert of his orchestral music in Paris in 1899, the premiere of his Violin Sonata in 1903 by the eminent Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, and the German premiere of the Third Symphony in Berlin two years later (arranged by Busoni), but distribution and publicity of his works was severely limited by his decision to issue his scores himself because of his distrust of music publishers. Depressed and disillusioned, his hearing failing, Magnard moved his family to Manoir des Fontaines in Baron in 1904 and largely abandoned Paris thereafter. He received a few performances, but they won him only a handful of admirers and a reputation for austerity at the time when Debussy (La Mer, Images for Orchestra), Ravel (Daphnis et Chloé, Mother Goose), and Stravinsky (The Firebird, The Rite of Spring) were addressing Parisian audiences in the most opulent of musical hues. When war broke out in July 1914, Magnard volunteered for military service but he was disqualified because of his age, so he stayed at Baron, sent his wife and children to safety, and awaited the German advance alone. He became a national hero when he was killed by enemy troops a few weeks later.
Magnard was a perfectionist who counterpoint teacher). The development completed fewer than 30 compositions section layers the arching main theme in a personal idiom subject to both and the stuttering motive before reaching German (Beethoven, Wagner) and French the fugue based on the “d’Indy motive.” influences (Franck, d’Indy)—three operas, Echoes of the “alla zingarese” theme four symphonies (he is occasionally bridge to the recapitulation, which returns referred to as the “French Bruckner” the exposition’s materials in altered forms. because of their scale and serious nature), The movement ends with a peaceful several independent orchestral works reminiscence of the opening theme. The (including the powerful 1902 Hymne á la Scherzo (headed Sans faiblir—“Without Justice, inspired by his outrage over the faltering”) is based on an insistent, anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair), a few repeated-note idea that takes on the piano pieces, sonatas for cello and violin, urgency of a telegraphic distress signal; a string quartet, a piano trio, a quintet for contrast is provided by the folksy central trio. The Funèbre piano and winds, and (Funeral March) some songs. The Cello “Magnard’s tendency that follows without Sonata was composed in was to intensify the pause is a marvelous 1909-10 and premiered dramatic element in his on February 25, 1911 statement that instrumental music…. on a Société Nationale transforms despair and In the Cello Sonata, the de Musique concert in loss into consolation dramatic character is Paris by cellist Fernand and acceptance. The more intense than ever.” opening music evokes Pollain and pianist Blanche Selva. The a solemn mood through score was dedicated to composer, music the piano’s dolorous plaint and the low, critic, and his Conservatoire friend Gaston hollow, bell-tone pizzicatos of the cello; Carraud, who wrote of it in his 1921 the cellist switches to bowed notes to biography of the composer, “Magnard’s suggest the drumrolls of the cortège with a tendency was to intensify the dramatic figure borrowed from the Marcia Funèbre element in his instrumental music…. In of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. The the Cello Sonata, the dramatic character is expressive cello melody that follows shifts more intense than ever.” subtly between sadness and hope. The movement courses through the funeral The sonata form of the opening movement rites of the opening again before finding is built around three thematic entities: an solace in a final luminous iteration of the arching, lyrical melody intoned by cello at expressive cello theme. The finale unwinds the outset; a stuttering motive in nervous around a muscular, sharply rhythmic rhythms; and a dramatic strain marked motive initiated by the piano and a broad, “alla zingarese” (in the Gypsy manner) noble strain entrusted to the cello. Both in the cello part and “alla d’Indy” in the themes return intact and in elaborately piano (a quick, rising idea in the left hand developed versions in a progression is later used as the subject for a fugue, suggesting a rondo-fantasia before the sonata perhaps a tribute to Magnard’s mentor and reaches its swift and brilliant close.
Sonata in A minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 40 Léon BOËLLMANN Born September 25, 1862 in Ensisheim Haut-Rhin, Alsace. Died October 11, 1897 in Paris.
Published in 1897. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 24 minutes
Léon Boëllmann was among the many gifted musicians who flocked to Paris following the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to join in creating one of the most brilliant periods of French musical history. Boëllmann was born in the Alsatian town of Ensisheim in 1862 into the large family (he was one of 14 children) of a pharmacist, who moved his brood to Paris in 1871 when the Germans took over the province as booty of the war. Soon after the family’s arrival in the capital, Léon entered the École Niedermeyer to study organ, piano, church music, and composition with the school’s director, Gustave Lefèvre, and Eugène Gigout, both sons-in-law of the late founder, Louis Niedermeyer. Boëllmann proved to be an exemplary student and he was hired as assistant organist at St. Vincent-de-Paul in Paris upon his graduation in 1881; he was named the church’s principal organist six years later. When Boëllmann married Lefèvre’s daughter (also Gigout’s niece) in 1885, the couple moved into Gigout’s home and Léon joined the faculty of his new uncle’s recently formed school of organ playing and improvisation. During the remaining years until his untimely death at age 35 in 1897, probably
from tuberculosis, Boëllmann taught, performed, wrote criticism for several Parisian music journals, moved easily in the city’s most elite musical circles, and composed prolifically. After the deaths of Boëllmann in 1897 and his young wife the following year, Gigout adopted their three children; the eldest, Marie-Louise Boëllmann-Gigout, became a respected teacher and organist in Paris. Boëllmann wrote some 60 works for orchestra, piano, chamber ensembles, voice, and chorus in a conservative idiom familiar from the music of Franck and Saint-Saëns, as well as a large collection of organ pieces for church service use. Three of Boëllmann’s compositions are for cello and piano—Suite, Op. 6 (c. 1890), Deux Morceaux, Op. 31 (c. 1896), and Sonata in A minor (c. 1897)—and were inspired by the playing of both the French cellist Jules Delsart (1844-1900), who is remembered for his arrangement of César Franck’s Violin Sonata for his own instrument, and the Belgian virtuoso Joseph Hollmann (1852-1927), for whom Saint-Saëns wrote his Cello Concerto No. 2 in 1892; Boëllmann dedicated his Cello Sonata to Delsart upon its publication in 1897. The sonata is in three movements that share themes, a favorite late-19thcentury French technique for unifying large compositions. Both motives from the slow, somber introduction—a cello phrase that falls and then rises through a quick triplet figure and an arching strain in dotted rhythms in the piano—figure later in the work. The main sonataform portion of the movement begins
with a quicker tempo and the cello’s presentation of the principal theme, a transformation of the introduction’s dotted-rhythm motive into a folk dance. The second subject is a rhapsodic melody built from ingenious repetitions of a onemeasure phrase. The development section is concerned with the dancing main theme and the triplet figure heard at the movement’s outset. The earlier thematic materials are then recapitulated, as is the introduction’s triplet motive, before the movement closes with a brief, brilliant coda recalling the dancing main theme. The Andante is built around two themes: the first, intoned by the cello, is a tragic strain whose emotion seems so profound as to prevent anything more continuous than broken, murmured phrases; the other is sustained with quiet determination and touching simplicity. The murmured phrases recur in the piano before the
cello recalls the triplet motive from the introduction to lead to impassioned statements of both the sustained melody and the broken opening phrases. A final, hopeful echo of the triplet motive closes the movement. The finale begins with a defiant, darkly colored theme that finds emotional and formal balance in the broad, noble strain that serves as the subsidiary subject. The development pits the finale’s main theme against the triplet figure remembered once again from the introduction, and a beatific rendering of the noble second theme seems to indicate that the tragic emotions have finally been banished from the sonata. The introduction’s arching, dotted-rhythm motive intrudes sternly in the piano one last time, however, and the finale ends in the defiant mood with which it began. © 2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Gary Hoffman is one of the outstanding cellists of our time, combining instrumental mastery, great beauty of sound, and a poetic sensibility. He gained international renown upon his victory as the first North American to win the Rostropovich International Competition in Paris in 1986. A frequent soloist with the world’s most noted orchestras, he has appeared with the Chicago, London, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, Baltimore, and National symphony orchestras as well as the English, Moscow, and Los Angeles chamber orchestras, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Netherlands and Rotterdam philharmonics, the Cleveland Orchestra for the Blossom Festival, and Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Hoffman has collaborated with such celebrated conductors as André Previn, Charles Dutoit, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Andrew Davis, Herbert Blomstedt, Kent Nagano, Jesús López-Cobos, and James Levine. He performs in major recital and chamber music series throughout the world, as well as at such prestigious festivals as Ravinia, Marlboro, Aspen, Bath, Evian, Helsinki, Verbier, Mostly Mozart, Schleswig-Holstein, Stresa, Festival International de Colmar, and Festival de Toulon. He is a frequent guest of string quartets including the Emerson, Tokyo, Borromeo, Brentano, and Ysaÿe. In 2011, Mr. Hoffman was appointed Maître en Résidence for cello at the prestigious La Chapelle de Musique Reine Elisabeth in Brussels. His recording devoted to Mendelssohn on the La Dolce Volta label (distributed by Harmonia Mundi) was released in 2012. He performs on a 1662 Nicolo Amati, the “ex-Leonard Rose.” David Selig has performed in many great concert halls such as the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Carnegie Hall in New York. He collaborates with singers Felicity Lott, Christianne Stotijn, Sandrine Piau, Jard van Nes, Véronique Gens, Nathalie Stutzmann, Elly Ameling, Teresa Berganza, François le Roux, and instrumentalists Gary Hoffman, Philippe Graffin, Marc Coppey, and Noël Lee. In 1989 he participated in the inaugural recital series at the Bastille Opéra, and his début recording (Villa-Lobos) was released. He has recorded the leitmotifs of Wagner’s Ring for EMI, and further recordings appear on Adda, REM, Forlane, and Globe. His latest recording, of Mendelssohn cello works with Gary Hoffman, appeared on the Dolce Volta label to great acclaim. Mr. Selig performs regularly in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, as well as the United States and Asia. He conducts masterclasses in chamber music and in song repertoire. This year’s concerts will take him to Italy, England, Germany, and Australia (in Sydney and at the Melbourne Recital Centre). In 2011 he was named professor at the Lyons Conservatoire National Supérieur, and he is artistic director of the chamber music Festival Les Journées Romantiques, held on a Parisian barge. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Mr. Selig studied in Paris at the Conservatoire with Aldo Ciccolini. He pursued further studies with Guido Agosti and Geoffrey Parsons and subsequently won prizes at the Sydney piano competition and the inaugural accompaniment competition in The Hague.
Winter 2015
WATCH LIVE Enjoy a front row seat from anywhere in the world. View chamber music events streamed live to your computer or mobile device, and available for streaming on demand for the following 24 hours. Relax, browse the program, and experience the Chamber Music Society like never before.
1/29/15 7:30 PM 2/4/15 6:30 PM 2/10/15 11:00 AM 2/11/15 6:30 PM 2/12/15 9:00 PM 2/18/15 6:30 PM 2/25/15 6:30 PM 2/26/15 7:30 PM
New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse Inside Chamber Music Master Class with Gilbert Kalish Inside Chamber Music Late Night Rose Inside Chamber Music Inside Chamber Music Orion String Quartet Plays Haydn
All events are free to watch. View full program details online. www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
upcoming
EVENTS
THE AMPHION STRING QUARTET
Sunday, January 25, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall In its debut Alice Tully Hall recital, the Amphion Quartet performs Haydn’s “The Bird” Quartet, Janáček’s “Intimate Letters,” and Grieg’s rarely-heard Quartet in G minor.
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE
Thursday, January 29, 7:30 PM • Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse Featuring works by Andrew Norman, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Vivian Fung, and more. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
DRUMMING
Tuesday, February 3, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Gems of the percussion repertoire take center stage in a sonically and visually captivating program, featuring works by Thierry De Mey, John Cage, Bartók, and more. Pre-concert conversation with featured percussionists at 6:30 PM in the Rose Studio. Free for ticket holders.