David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday Evening, October 23, 2014 at 6:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,350th Concert
GILBERT KALISH, piano BENJAMIN BEILMAN, violin JULIE ALBERS, cello
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. Many donors support the artists of the Chamber Music Society Two program. This evening, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Jeehyun Kim.
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday Evening, October 23, 2014 at 6:30 GILBERT KALISH, piano BENJAMIN BEILMAN, violin JULIE ALBERS, cello
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Sonata in G major for Violin and Piano, Op. 78 (1878-79) Vivace ma non troppo Adagio Allegro molto moderato BEILMAN, KALISH
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
Trio in F minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 65 (1883) Allegro ma non troppo Allegretto grazioso Poco adagio Finale: Allegro con brio KALISH, BEILMAN, ALBERS
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Sonata in G major for Violin and Piano, Op. 78 Johannes BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg. Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna. Composed in 1878-79. First CMS performance on January 25, 1980. Duration: 26 minutes Brahms was inspired by his first trip to Italy, in the early months of 1878, to write his glowing and autumnal Piano Concerto in B-flat major. He returned to Goethe’s “land where the lemon trees grow” six times thereafter for creative inspiration and refreshment from the chilling Viennese winters. On his way back to Austria from Italy in May 1879, he stopped in the lovely village of Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in Carinthia, which he had haunted on his annual summer retreat the preceding year. “I only wanted to stay there for a day,” he wrote to his friend the surgeon Theodor Billroth, “and then, as this one day was so beautiful, for yet another. But each day was as fine as the last, and so I stayed on. If on your journeys you have interrupted your reading to gaze out of the window, you must have seen how all the mountains round the lake are white with snow, while the trees are covered with delicate green.” Brahms succumbed to the charms of the Carinthian countryside, and he abandoned all thought of returning immediately to Vienna—he remained in Pörtschach for the entire summer. It was in that halcyon setting that he completed his G major Sonata for Violin and Piano.
The sonata is, throughout, warm and ingratiating, a touching lyrical poem for violin and piano. The main theme of the sonata-form first movement, sung immediately by the violin above the piano’s placid chords, is a gentle melody with a hint of the Viennese waltz. Its opening dotted rhythm (long—short—long) is used as a motto that recurs not just in the first movement but later as well, a subtle but powerful means of unifying the entire work. The subsidiary theme, flowing and hymnal, is structured as a grand, rainbow-shaped phrase. The Adagio has a certain rhapsodic quality that belies its tightly controlled three-part form. The piano initiates the principal theme of the movement, which is soon adorned with little sighing phrases by the violin. The central section is more animated and recalls the dotted rhythm of the previous movement’s main theme; the principal theme returns in the violin’s double stops to round out the form. Brahms wove two songs from his Op. 59 collection for voice and piano (1873) into the finale: Regenlied (Rain Song—this work is sometimes referred to as the “Rain” Sonata) and Nachklang (Reminiscence). The movement is in rondo form, and, in its scherzando quality, recalls the finale of the B-flat Piano Concerto, written just a year before. Most of the movement (whose main theme begins with the familiar dotted rhythm) is couched in a romantic minor key (it turns brighter during one episode for a return of the theme from the second movement, played in double stops by the violin), but moves into a luminous major tonality for the coda.
Trio in F minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 65 Antonín DVOŘÁK Born September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia. Died May 1, 1904 in Prague. Composed in 1883. Premiered on October 27, 1883 in Mladá Boleslav by violinist Ferdinand Lachner, cellist Alois Neruda, and the composer as pianist. First CMS performance on April 23, 1976. Duration: 39 minutes Success for Antonín Dvořák was a twoedged sword. In 1874, when he was struggling to make a living as organist at St. Adalbert’s Church in Prague, he submitted some of his compositions to a committee in Vienna granting awards to promising musicians in the Habsburg provinces. Those pieces came to the attention of Johannes Brahms, who encouraged Dvořák in his work and successfully urged the panel to grant the young Bohemian composer the highest possible stipend. Three years later, after Brahms had seen that Dvořák’s award was renewed, he instructed his publisher, Fritz Simrock in Berlin, that he was to accept Dvořák as a new client. Dvořák was thrilled with the opportunities that his Viennese connections opened for him, and he paid Brahms great homage in word and tone for the rest of his life. Brahms, however, was indissolubly linked with the spirit and letter of German music, and Dvořák soon came to be torn between the desire on one hand to emulate his Viennese patron and on the other to support the political and social aspirations of his
fellow Czechs. That dichotomy resulted in a crisis of philosophy for Dvořák by 1882, when Brahms was urging him to settle in Vienna and opera houses in that city and Dresden were offering lucrative contracts for any work that he would write to a German-language libretto, a certain avenue to the international performance of his stage music. Dvořák was still painfully undecided between Vienna and Prague, between his adopted German symphonism and his native Czech heritage, when his mother died on December 14, 1882. The grief he suffered over her loss and the emotional distress brought about by uncertainty over his future artistic path threw him into a difficult period of dark moods and troubled thoughts. Even the birth of a son (Antonín) on March 7, 1883 and news that his Stabat Mater had been enthusiastically received at its English premiere in London a few days later did little to relieve his anxiety or ease his decision. After a brief hiatus in his creative work, he poured his feelings into some of his most powerful and deeply felt works during the following months. The first of those compositions was the superb Piano Trio in F minor, begun on February 4, 1883, only six weeks after Anna Dvořák’s death, and completed on March 31st. The Scherzo Capriccioso for Orchestra (Op. 66) followed immediately after the trio, and the Hussite Overture (Op. 67), inspired by the Hussite Rebellion, the 15th-century political, social, and religious movement led by Jan Hus that sought sectarian freedom and Bohemian independence, gave testimony that he had resolved his artistic conflict in favor of his Czech nationalism. The great D minor Symphony (No. 7, Op. 70) appeared a year later.
The F minor Trio, the first work of this period of intense emotion and heated creativity, received the brunt of Dvořák’s turbulent feelings. It is perhaps indicative of his troubled state of mind at the time that he omitted from the end of the manuscript the phrase Bohu díky (Thanks to God), which had invariably graced his earlier pieces. “There is hardly another work in Dvořák’s output so sorrowful, somber, and poignant,” wrote Hans-Hubert Schönzeler in his study of the composer. “It must rank among the greatest of his chamber music compositions.” Dvořák took special care with this trio, allowing nearly two months for its composition rather than the customary two or three weeks he usually devoted to a chamber work, and then revising it so thoroughly after its premiere, on October 27, 1883 in Mladá Boleslav (30 miles northeast of Prague), that he had to write out a complete new score. Though the opening movement is contained within traditional sonata form, its wroughtup, willful mood threatens, observed Paul Stefan, “to burst the bounds and transcend the content of chamber music, passionately striving to merge into the symphonic.” The dotted-rhythm main theme begins quietly in the strings, though this is a quiet not of calm but of suppression. The entry of the piano unleashes the inherent dynamism of the principal theme, but emotional control is again restored with the transition, which leads to the cello’s presentation of the second theme, a lovely melody whose nominal major mode is continually troubled by plaintive chromatic alterations. The development section, which ranges in mood from sullen to defiant, is impelled by an almost Beethovenian sense of drama. The recapitulation serves not only to recall
the exposition’s themes but also to thrust their emotional intensity onto a higher plane by means of richer figurations, tighter interplay among the instrumental lines, and expansion through motivic development. The second movement is a scherzo in the form of a Bohemian folk dance. The strings begin the dance with a bouncing motive, suggestive of a bagpipe-drone, upon which the piano presents the short-breathed, rather melancholy tune whose varied permutations occupy the first section of the movement. A full stop marks the gateway to the central trio, whose initial bright mood is clouded by the music’s unsettled rhythms and apprehensive lowered scale degrees. The opening section is repeated verbatim to round out the movement’s structure. The Adagio is one of Dvořák’s most deeply felt creations, beautiful of line, rich of sonority, and sincere in expression. Though the movement is in a key that could offer some sunny solace for the troubled music that surrounds it, the tiny flickers of chromaticism—the lowering of a tone by a half-step to blunt its happiness, like a cloud passing across the sun or the thought of a departed loved one at a moment of joy—further concentrate rather than dispel the trio’s abiding disquiet. The finale is modeled on the furiant, a traditional Czech dance whose fiery character is indicated by its name. The movement, built as a large sonata-rondo form anchored around the recurrences of its principal theme, draws strength from the struggles of the preceding music to achieve a life-affirming close with the turn to a heroic major tonality in its final pages. © 2014 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
American cellist Julie Albers is recognized for her superlative artistry, her charismatic and radiant performing style, and her intense musicianship. She made her major orchestral debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1998, and thereafter has performed in recital and with orchestras throughout North America, Europe, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, where she was named the first Gold Medal Laureate of the Gyeongnam International Music Competition. In 2001 she won Second Prize in Munich’s Internationalen Musikwettbewerbes der ARD, and was also awarded the Wilhelm-Weichsler-Musikpreis der Stadt Osnabruch. Recent performances have included debuts on the San Francisco Performances series and with the Grant Park Music Festival, where she performed Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso for Three Cellos with Mr. Penderecki conducting. In past seasons she has made concerto appearances with the orchestras of St. Paul, Colorado, Indianapolis, San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver, and the Munchener Kammerorchester. In addition to solo performances, Ms. Albers is an active chamber musician. A former member of Chamber Music Society Two, she currently plays with the Albers String Trio and the Cortona Piano Trio. She holds the Mary Jean and Charles Yates Cello Chair at the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. She has recorded works by Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Schumann, Massenet, and Piatigorsky for the Artek Label, and solo and chamber music of Kodály for the Bavarian Radio. She performs on a N.F. Vuillaume cello made in 1872. Violinist Benjamin Beilman captured First Prize in the 2010 Montréal International Music Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. His honors include a 2014 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, a 2012 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 2012 London Music Masters Award. This season’s highlights include his Alice Tully Hall concerto debut with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the Young Concert Artists Series, as well as performances with the San Francisco Symphony and The Philadelphia Orchestra. He has performed as soloist with the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, as well as with the London Philharmonic, L’Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, the Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He has given recitals at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, the Louvre, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Ravinia’s “Rising Stars” Series, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Mr. Beilman has appeared at Music@Menlo, Caramoor, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Music from Angel Fire, the Young Concert Artists Festivals in Tokyo and Beijing, and Chamber Music Northwest as well as at the Bridgehampton, Marlboro, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals. A member of CMS Two, he previously studied with Ida Kavafian and Pamela Frank at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Christian Tetzlaff at the Kronberg Academy. Mr. Beilman plays the Guarneri del Gesù, Cremona, 1735 ex Mary Portman on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the generous efforts of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
The profound influence of pianist Gilbert Kalish as an educator and pianist in myriad performances and recordings has established him as a major figure in American musicmaking. In 2006 he was awarded the Peabody Medal by the Peabody Conservatory for his outstanding contributions to music in America. He was the pianist of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players for 30 years, and was a founding member of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, a group that flourished during the 1960s and 70s in support of new music. He is particularly known for his partnership of many years with mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, as well as for current collaborations with soprano Dawn Upshaw and cellists Timothy Eddy and Joel Krosnick. As an educator and performer he has appeared at the Banff Centre, the Steans Institute at Ravinia, the Marlboro Music Festival, and Music@Menlo; from 1985 to 1997 he served as chairman of the Tanglewood faculty. His discography of some 100 recordings embraces both the classical and contemporary repertories; of special note are those made with Ms. DeGaetani and that of Ives’ Concord Sonata. A distinguished professor at SUNY Stony Brook, Mr. Kalish has been performing with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 2004.
upcoming
EVENTS
FAURÉ & YSAŸE
Sunday, October 26, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall The works of contemporaries Fauré and Ysaÿe are presented side-by-side in a program that reveals complementary themes in their compositional output.
INSIDE CHAMBER MUSIC
Wednesday, October 29, 6:30 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Focus on Schubert's "Trout" Quintet in A major This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
THE ART OF THE RECITAL
Thursday, October 30, 7:30 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Featuring Nicolas Dautricourt, violin; Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, piano This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive