David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
ONE PIANO, FOUR HANDS Thursday Evening, March 12, 2015 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,413th Concert
JUHO POHJONEN, piano WU HAN, piano
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
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.
This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited. Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices.
ONE PIANO, FOUR HANDS WINTER FESTIVAL IN THE ROSE - INTIMATE EXPRESSIONS Thursday Evening, March 12, 2015 at 7:30 JUHO POHJONEN, piano WU HAN, piano
Sonata in C major for Piano, Four Hands, K. 521 (1787)
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Allegro Andante Allegretto
(1756-1791)
POHJONEN, WU HAN
Andante and Five Variations for Piano, Four Hands, K. 501 (1786)
MOZART
WU HAN, POHJONEN
Andante and Variations for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 83a (1844)
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
POHJONEN, WU HAN
—INTERMISSION—
MOZART
Sonata in F major for Piano, Four Hands, K. 497 (1786) Adagio—Allegro di molto Andante Allegro WU HAN, POHJONEN
MENDELSSOHN
Andante and Allegro brillant for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 92 (1841) POHJONEN, WU HAN
notes on the
PROGRAM
Sonata in C major for Piano, Four Hands, K. 521 Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg. Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna. Composed in 1787. First CMS performance on November 20, 2009. Duration: 25 minutes Mozart’s earliest work for piano duet, the Sonata in C major (K. 19d), dates from his ninth year, when he was in London amazing the usually staid British musical public with his precocious skills. He wrote the sonata for performance with his favorite keyboard partner, his sister, Nannerl, who was all of 14 at the time. He did not return to the piano duet genre until 1772 in Salzburg, when he composed the D major Sonata (K. 381) for Nannerl and himself; two years later followed the Sonata in B-flat (K. 358). His five additional works in the genre all date from his years in Vienna: the Sonata in D major (K. 448, 1781), created to play with his pupil Josephine von Auernhammer; the C minor Fugue (K. 426, 1783), sprung from his study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s contrapuntal style; a set of variations (K. 501, 1786), written for the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister to help repay some cash advances; and the Sonatas in F major and C major (K. 497 and K. 521), composed for Franziska von Jacquin in 1786 and 1787. Among 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 Franziska (18). Mozart was very fond of the Jacquins and he visited them frequently to share their dinner, play his music for them, or keep Franziska up with her lessons when she proved to be one of his most talented piano students. In addition to his last two sonatas for piano duet, Mozart composed for Franziska two piano trios (K. 496 and K. 502) and the Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano in E-flat major, K. 498. He also wrote a bass aria (Mentre ti lascio, o figlia, K. 513) for brother Gottfried and several additional pieces, including the delightful Flute Quartet in A major, K. 298; when Joseph Franz visited him during an illness in April 1787, the ailing composer presented him with a sadly prophetic canon (K. 228) in appreciation—Ah, our life’s course is too short. The C major Sonata is a model of the fluency, technical polish, and refined expression with which Mozart invested the works of his full maturity. The first movement opens with a main theme that balances brio and delicacy with a bold initial phrase perfectly countered by a restrained, elegant response. Descending scales and a tiny pause mark the arrival at the gracious second theme, in which something new yet familiar is conjured from the three-note-pickup rhythm of the earlier elegant phrase joined with the rising contour of the bold opening motive. Such mastery of form-building continues in the development section, where the exposition’s motivic atoms, threaded together with brilliant figurations, are reconfigured without specific reiteration
of the themes as they pass through some areas of subtly expressive harmony. The full recapitulation of the exposition’s materials, appropriately adjusted as to key, provides the movement with its requisite formal and emotional balance. The Andante is tender
and sweetly melodic in the outer sections of its three-part form (A–B–A), more agitated at its center. The finale is a rondo with sonata elements based around the returns of a charming theme of music-box naivety mooted at the outset.
Andante and Five Variations for Piano, Four Hands, K. 501 Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Composed in 1786. First CMS performance on January 21, 2007. Duration: 8 minutes Franz Anton Hoffmeister built from his varied but interlocking talents one of the leading music publishing firms of late18th-century Austria. Hoffmeister was born in 1754 at Rothenburg am Neckar, just south of Stuttgart, and he went to Vienna at the tender age of 14 to study law. By the time he had qualified to practice at the bar, however, his vocational interest had shifted to music—composing, performing as a harpsichordist, and, especially, publishing. In 1783, when Viennese music publishing was still in its infancy, he had two series of his own symphonies printed in Lyons and issued them in Vienna under his personal imprint. The following year he announced in the local press that he would henceforth publish all his own works himself, and by summer 1785, when the first newspaper advertisements for his new firm appeared, his venture had expanded to include chamber and orchestral music by Haydn, Mozart, Vanhal, Albrechtsberger, and other significant Viennese and foreign composers. Hoffmeister’s business had flourished to
such a degree by the end of 1785 that one of his composers (and brothers in the Masonic Lodge), Wolfgang Mozart, started sending him imploring letters for loans and advances and commissions. Hoffmeister responded generously and Mozart paid him back with a number of important compositions during the next three years, including the G minor Piano Quartet (K. 478), Violin Sonatas in E-flat major (K. 481) and A major (K. 526), String Quartet in D major (K. 499, which has always borne the publisher’s name as its sobriquet), and Rondo in A minor (K. 511) and Sonata in F major for Piano (K. 533); Mozart also based the variations movement of his Flute Quartet in A major (K. 298) on a theme by Hoffmeister. It was for this lodge brother, business associate, and steady friend that Mozart composed his Andante and Five Variations for Piano, Four Hands, K. 501 in the autumn of 1786 as repayment for Hoffmeister’s generosity. To make the piece more easily saleable, Mozart revised his original conception of a work for two pianos to one for two players at a single instrument. (In the autograph manuscript, “Cembalo 1mo e 2do” is crossed out and replaced by “Mano diritta” [Right hand, or side] and “Mano sinistra” [Left hand].) The theme, original with Mozart, is one of those marvels of lucidity and apparent effortlessness in which are embedded the seeds of expressive ambiguity that Mozart
sought out in the works of his maturity— an opening phrase of eight measures answered not by one of another, predictable, eight measures but by one of ten; a slight harmonic deflection in the middle of the otherwise purely diatonic first phrase; a hint of the minor mode, like a high cloud passing momentarily in front of the sun, at the beginning of the second phrase. Mozart wove around these formal and emotional elements five variations of increasingly elaborate figurations that Wolfgang Hildesheimer, in his biography of the composer,
wrote comprise “155 bars of music perfect for teaching, use, and enjoyment.” The work reaches its most eloquent moment in the poignant fourth variation, in G minor, which the distinguished English musicologist Arthur Hutchings said is composed of “four lovely contrapuntal and chromatic strands. It is music as nearly perfect as can be imagined. Not even Mozart himself wrote a more admirable 18 bars.” A coda with weightless echoes of the theme’s first phrase closes this miniature masterwork.
Andante and Variations for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 83a Felix MENDELSSOHN Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg. Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig. Composed in 1844. First CMS performance on November 22, 1985. Duration: 12 minutes Early in 1841, Mendelssohn accepted the position as Royal Kapellmeister to Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Berlin, where his duties were to include administering the music section of the newly instituted Royal Academy of Arts, composing for the Royal Theater, directing the Royal Orchestra, and conducting the Cathedral Choir. In July, just before leaving Leipzig to take up his demanding new job in Berlin, he fulfilled a request from
the Viennese publisher Pietro Mechetti for a musical contribution to an album of original piano works whose sale would benefit the effort to build a memorial to Beethoven in his native city of Bonn; Chopin, Liszt, Czerny, Moscheles, and five other notable composers also participated. In tribute to Beethoven’s life-long dedication to the variations form, Mendelssohn created the Variations Sérieuses and then reported to his sister Rebecka, “I was so pleased by the process that I immediately wrote more variations on a sentimental theme in E-flat major. Now I am writing a third set, on a graceful theme in B-flat major. I feel as if I have to make up for not producing any [variations] in the past.” He also made a version of the B-flat Variations for piano, four hands three years later, adding two more variations to its original six, but he did not publish any of these pieces during his lifetime;
they were issued in 1850 as his Opp. 82, 83, and 83a. The Andante and Variations for Piano, Four Hands (Op. 83a) is based on a hymnal theme in three eight-measure periods, the lead in the first and third given to the left-hand pianist, in the second to the right. As with most traditional variations, the form, phrase structure, and essential harmonies of
the theme remain largely intact for the following variations, which here range in style from decorative to tempestuous, from elfin to one whose carefully intertwined voices recall a Bach chorale prelude. The closing section, as long as all that preceded it, comprises three paragraphs: an agitated strain of somber emotion; a reminiscence of the hymnal theme in its original guise; and a galloping dash to the end.
Sonata in F major for Piano, Four Hands, K. 497 Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Composed in 1786. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 25 minutes
The F major Sonata was finished on August 1, 1786, just three months after The Marriage of Figaro had been introduced at the Burgtheater. As with many of the works of 1786 that orbit around The Marriage of Figaro, the opera’s rich expression and exquisite style permeate the F major Sonata. Several commentators have noted the sonata’s symphonic breadth and suggested that it might sound well in an orchestral version. Arthur Hutchings wrote, “The whole work admirably suits its medium, despite the curious feeling that it is the piano duet arrangement of a symphony.” Sir Donald Tovey admitted
being tempted to transcribe it for string quintet, and grouped his analysis of the score with his essays on Mozart’s last six symphonies. The scale and refinement of the sonata are established immediately by its Adagio introduction, “as impressive as any before Beethoven,” according to Tovey. The remainder of the opening movement is disposed in a full sonata form richly invested with the chromatic colorings that lend such incomparable wealth of expression to the best of Mozart’s late works. The Andante is, wrote Ernst Fritz Schmid, “a blossom of extraordinary beauty, shimmering in light and glowing in darker colors, presented in a finely wrought contrapuntal setting.” It uses as its theme the same melody as that of the Larghetto from the Horn Concerto in E-flat major (K. 495), completed just five weeks earlier. The closing movement is a joyous rondo in which Mozart balanced grace and emotion in a manner unmatched by any other composer.
Andante and Allegro brillant for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 92 Felix MENDELSSOHN Composed in 1841. Premiered on March 31, 1841 in Leipzig by Clara Schumann and the composer. First CMS performance on December 12, 1980. Duration: 12 minutes Among the close friends and musical allies that Mendelssohn made after arriving in Leipzig in 1836 to take over direction of the Gewandhaus concerts were Robert Schumann, then known both as the editor of the influential journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and as a composer of ardent character pieces for piano, and Clara Wieck, one of her generation’s most brilliant and discerning pianists. Robert (age 26) and Clara (17) were just then at the start of the love affair that the girl’s father, Frederick, a highly regarded piano teacher who had nurtured his daughter’s gifts from childhood and who wanted to have neither her career nor her personal life impeded by an ambitious young musician, tried to thwart for the next four years through intimidation and legal machinations. Wieck’s threats and ceaseless barrage of litigation only
steeled the young lovers’ resolve, and Clara and Robert were finally married on September 12, 1840, the eve of the bride’s 21st birthday. Mendelssohn commiserated with his friends through their difficulties and publicly gave them his support after their wedding by arranging a concert at the Gewandhaus on March 31, 1841 at which he would conduct the premiere of Robert’s First Symphony, composed in a burst of inspiration at the beginning of the year, and Clara would perform music by Chopin, Domenico Scarlatti, Thalberg, and her husband; it was the Schumanns’ professional debut together as husband and wife. To round out the program, Mendelssohn composed the Andante and Allegro brillant to play with Clara. (The Allegro brillant was published as Mendelssohn’s Op. 92 in 1851, four years after his death; the Andante did not reach print until 1994.) The Andante, crepuscular and refined, reflects Clara’s comment that “[Mendelssohn’s] playing was always stamped by nobility and beauty.” The Allegro brillant is a virtuosic sonata-form movement, with a dashing main theme in Mendelssohn’s inimitable scherzo style and a second subject whose lyricism and harmonic subtleties may pay tribute to Robert Schumann’s piano idiom.
©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Widely praised for his broad range of repertoire from Bach to Salonen, Juho Pohjonen has attracted great attention as one of Finland’s most intriguing and talented pianists. He opened the 2014-15 season with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, performing Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5 with conductor Jeffrey Kahane. He joins the Brentano String Quartet for Brahms’ Piano Quintet in Kansas City and gives a recital at The Green Center in Sonoma, California. Abroad, he makes his debut with Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich performing Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto with conductor Lionel Bringuier. He has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, Atlanta, Danish National, Malmö, Finnish Radio, and Swedish Radio symphonies; Scottish Chamber Orchestra; and Lahti Symphony, with which he toured Japan. He has been presented on recital series in Carnegie's Zankel Hall, the Kennedy Center, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Detroit. His debut recording Plateaux features works by Scandinavian composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and his recital at the 2010 Music@Menlo Festival led to a recording for the Music@Menlo Live series. The winner of numerous prizes in both Finnish and international competitions, he was selected by Sir András Schiff as winner of the Klavier Festival Ruhr Scholarship in 2009. Mr. Pohjonen studied with Meri Louhos and Hui-Ying Liu at the Sibelius Academy, where he completed his master’s degree in 2008. He is a former member of CMS Two. Co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society, pianist Wu Han, named Musical America’s 2012 Musician of the Year, ranks among the most esteemed and influential classical musicians in the world today. She has risen to international prominence through her wide-ranging activities as a concert performer, recording artist, educator, arts administrator, and cultural entrepreneur. In high demand as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician, Wu Han has appeared at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, and performs extensively as duo partner with cellist David Finckel. In addition to her distinction as one of classical music’s most accomplished performers, Wu Han has established a reputation for her dynamic and innovative approach to the recording studio. In 1997 Wu Han and David Finckel launched ArtistLed, classical music’s first musician-directed and Internet-based recording company, whose catalogue of 16 albums has won widespread critical acclaim. Along with David Finckel, she is the founder and artistic director of Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival and Institute; is artistic director for Chamber Music Today in Seoul, Korea; and, in 2013, inaugurated a special chamber music program at Aspen Music Festival and School. Wu Han has achieved universal renown for her passionate commitment to nurturing the careers of countless young artists through a wide array of education initiatives. For many years, she taught alongside the late Isaac Stern at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center. Under the auspices of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Wu Han and David Finckel lead the LG Chamber Music School, which serves dozens of young musicians in Korea annually.
Spring 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.
3/24/15 4/2/15 4/16/15 4/20/15 4/30/15 5/7/15 5/13/15
11:00 AM 7:30 PM 9:00 PM 11:00 AM 7:30 PM 7:30 PM 11:00 AM
Master Class with Paul Watkins New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse Late Night Rose Master Class with Cho-Liang Lin Art of the Recital: Gilbert Kalish New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse Master Class with Jason Vieaux
All events are free to watch. View full program details online. www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
upcoming
EVENTS
THE ESCHER STRING QUARTET - VOCES INTIMAE
Sunday, March 15, 2015, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall The Escher String Quartet performs Sibelius's powerful "Voces intimae" along with masterworks by Berg and Schubert.
SCHUBERT & SCHNITTKE
Friday, March 20, 2015, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Schubert’s radiant B-flat major Piano Trio is performed alongside his melodic Violin Fantasy and Schnittke’s riveting Cello Sonata.
INSPECTOR PULSE POPS A STRING
Sunday, March 22, 2015, 2:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Join Inspector Pulse as he gets answers to a string of questions when he is visited by a string quartet. Featuring the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bartók, and more. Musical Instrument Petting Zoo held in the lobby from 1:00-1:45 PM.
THE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
cordially invites you to our
Spring Gala Honoring
Reynold Levy monday, april 20, 2015
Alice Tully Hall
•
Broadway at 65th Street
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is proud to honor Reynold Levy, the driving force behind the transformation of our home, Alice Tully Hall. “With its grand, airy, people-friendly new lobby and heavenly acoustics, the new Alice Tully Hall is a remarkable achievement.” -The New York Times
WITH A MUSIC PERFORMANCE BY Emanuel Ax, Alessio Bax, Joseph Kalichstein, Anne-Marie McDermott, Gilles Vonsattel, and Wu Han
For more information, please call 212-875-5216