Program Book - CSO Chamber Music: Chicago Pro Musica at South Shore Cultural Center

HUNDRED THIRTY-SECOND SEASON

Sunday, October 30, 2022, at 3:00

South Shore Cultural Center

CSO Chamber Music Series

CHICAGO PRO MUSICA

Diane Mues Viola

John Bruce Yeh Clarinet

David Cooper Horn Patrick Godon Piano

mozart

Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano in E-flat Major, K. 498 (Kegelstatt)

Andante

Menuetto

Allegretto

john bruce yeh diane mues patrick godon schumann

Märchenerzählungen for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op.132

Lively, not too fast Lively and very accentuated Calm tempo, with sweet expression Lively, very accentuated

john bruce yeh diane mues patrick godon

intermission

reinecke

Trio for Clarinet, Horn, and Piano in B-flat Major, Op. 274

Allegro

A Fairy Tale: Andante Scherzo: Allegro Finale: Allegro

john bruce yeh david cooper patrick godon

This performance is offered in partnership with the Chicago Park District and the Advisory Council of the South Shore Cultural Center.

comments by richard e. rodda

wolfgang amadeus mozart

Born January 27, 1756; Salzburg, Austria

Died December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria

Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano in E-flat Major, K. 498 (Kegelstatt)

composed 1786

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, Gottfried, and Franziska. Mozart was fond of the Jacquins, and he visited them frequently to share their dinner, play his music for them, and keep Franziska up with her lessons when she proved to be one of his most talented piano students. For the entertainment of the household, Mozart composed the trio for clarinet, viola, and piano (K. 498) in August 1786. He wrote the viola part for himself and the clarinet part for Anton Stadler, a fellow Freemason and a superb performer who later inspired the clarinet quintet (K. 581) and clarinet concerto (K. 622).

The sobriquet Kegelstatt has long attached itself to the clarinet trio, though it did not origi nate with Mozart. Kegel in German indicates the game of nine-pin bowling (known as “skittles” in English) and statt, the “place” where it was played, a pastime that enjoyed considerable popularity in Vienna during Mozart’s day. The trio (K. 498), which Mozart entered into his own catalog of compositions on August 5, 1786, was probably not composed while he was bowling, but the Twelve Duos for Horns (K. 496a), finished just one week earlier, were; he noted on that manu script that it was “untern Kegel schreiben”—“writ ten while bowling.” The apparent anomaly of the delicate task of musical notation while engaging in a sporting activity could be explained by Mozart’s ability to work out his compositions completely in his head before com mitting them, without mistakes or revisions, to paper—a clerical activity whose drudgery he was known to have alleviated with games, schnapps, or friendly conversations. The earliest source for the Kegelstatt subtitle appears to be the pioneer ing 1862 catalog of Mozart’s works by Austrian

from top: Wolfgang Mozart, portrait by Joseph Lange

1782, brother-in-law of the composer. Mozart Museum Salzburg

A botanical drawing from the 1809 edition of Fragmenta botanica by Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Mozart’s patron and fellow Mason

musicologist Ludwig von Köchel. Köchel did not have access to the manuscript of either the horn duos or the trio, so he worked those nearly contemporaneous compositions into his chrono logical list according to anecdotal information available to him—in other words, he seems to have mixed them up.

The opening movement shows an unstinting concentration on the turn motif pro nounced by the piano in the first measure. The clarinet introduces a subsidiary theme, a sort of proto-waltz, which does not, however,

keep the music from referring stubbornly to the opening phrase. The second movement is among the longest and most serious in expression of all eighteenth-century minuets. It contrasts the limpid grace of the clarinet with the rather gruff interjections of the viola and so much looks forward to the encroaching age of romanticism that Eric Blom said it revealed “a kind of Emily Brontë–like smoldering passion.” The last move ment is a melodically rich rondo in which the clarinet alone presents the theme, viola plays it on its first return, and viola and clarinet together give its last recurrence.

robert schumann

Born June 8, 1810; Zwickau, Germany

Died July 29, 1856; Endenich, near Bonn, Germany

Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 132

1853

In September 1850, the Schumanns left Dresden to take up residence in Düsseldorf, where Robert assumed the post of municipal music director. He was welcomed to the city with a serenade, a concert of his works, a supper, and a ball.

Despite Schumann’s promising entry into the musical life of Düsseldorf, it was not long before things turned sour. His fragile mental health, his ineptitude as a conductor, and his frequent irritability created a rift with the musicians, and the orchestra’s governing body presented him with the suggestion that, perhaps, his time would be better devoted entirely to composition. Schumann, increasingly unstable though at first determined to stay, complained to Clara that he

was cruelly treated. The orchestra committee began proceedings to relieve him of his position, but his resignation in November 1853 ended the matter. By early 1854, Schumann’s reason had completely given way, and on February 27, he tried to drown himself in the Rhine. A week later, he was committed to an asylum in Endenich near Bonn, where he lingered with fleeting moments of sanity for nearly two-and-a-half years. His faithful Clara was there with him when he died on July 29, 1856, at the age of forty-six.

Despite his difficulties in Düsseldorf, Schumann remained active creatively, and in October 1851 he composed a set of four pieces for the darkly hued combination of clarinet, viola, and piano that he titled Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales). Though Schumann, a voracious reader from childhood, knew well fantasy tales from Grimm, Andersen, Novalis, Hoffmann, and other legendary and literary sources (he loved to read them to his own children), the

above: Robert Schumann, 1850 Daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner. Hamburg, Germany

Märchenerzählungen do not attempt to depict any spe cific stories. They are really chamber character pieces, a genre at which Schumann had excelled since his ear liest piano works, meant to evoke mood and release the imagination to conjure its own fantasies. “They are predominantly cheerful pieces, written with a light heart,” Schumann explained to Breitkopf and Härtel when he submitted his man uscript for publication—very different in technique and effect from the somber col ors, plangent lyricism, and rhythmic dislocations of the Märchenbilder (Pictures from Fairy Land) that he had written for viola and piano two years earlier.

The first, second, and fourth of the Märchenerzählungen, arranged in simple, threepart forms (A–B–A) with few shadows cast across their harmonies and straightforward, even often march-like, rhythms, have an almost child-like naïveté. (Schumann had written three Kindersonaten [Children’s Sonatas] the previous June and a col lection of piano duets for children titled Kinderball in September.) Only in the third movement is there the sort of dreamy thoughtful ness that suggests an adult’s recollection of childhood, a lyrical remembrance of the awakening feelings of youth.

carl reinecke

Born June 23, 1824; Hamburg, Germany Died March 10, 1910; Leipzig, Germany

Trio for Clarinet, Horn, and Piano in B-flat Major, Op. 274

composed 1905

Carl Reinecke was one of the most versatile and accomplished German musi cians of the late nineteenth century. Born in a suburb of Hamburg in 1824, Reinecke was given a thorough musical education by his father, Johann Peter, a respected music

theorist and the author of several books. Carl developed into a good violinist and a virtuoso pianist, and he undertook a successful concert tour of Scandinavia when he was just eighteen. It was during that time that he met composer and conductor Niels Gade, who convinced him to move to Leipzig to study with his colleagues Mendelssohn and Schumann. In 1846 Reinecke was appointed court pianist to Christian VIII in Copenhagen, but following political upheavals two years later and the death of King Christian,

from top: Lithograph of Robert and Clara Schumann by Eduard Kaiser (1820–1895), Vienna, 1847; inscribed to their Zwickau friend, composer and writer Emanuel Klitzsch (1812–1889)

Carl Reinecke, 1890

he returned to Leipzig, which served as his base during the following years as he toured across the Continent. Between 1851 and 1854, Reinecke worked as a teacher of piano and counterpoint at the Cologne Conservatory and then became director of a concert society in Barmen near Düsseldorf, where he established himself as one of the country’s leading conductors. After a brief stint as director of music at the University of Breslau in 1860, he was appointed to the faculty of the Leipzig Conservatory and also named director of that city’s famed Gewandhaus concerts, a post he held for the next thirty-seven years. At the conservatory, he earned a reputa tion as an outstanding teacher and numbered among his students Grieg, Albéniz, Sinding, Sullivan, Muck, and Weingartner. He resigned from the Gewandhaus in 1897 to assume the directorship of the conservatory and remained there until his retirement in 1902. He died in Leipzig eight years later.

In 1904, Reinecke composed a sextet for winds that was premiered at the Giuseppe Tartini Conservatory in Trieste, Italy. That work was so well received that he wrote the Trio for Clarinet, Horn, and Piano in B-flat major, op. 274, for the school a year later.

The trio’s opening movement follows conventional sonata form, with an anxious main theme incorporating prominent

octave-leap and triplet-rhythm motifs and a more lyrical and expressively settled subsidiary subject. Both themes are worked out in a rather dramatic fashion in the development section and reprised in the recapitulation. The Andante is titled Ein Märchen (A Fairy Tale), and with its bucolic principal melody, often played in sweet-harmony duet by clarinet and horn, sepa rated by uneasy passages, does suggest a child’s story with foreboding episodes. The tale ends happily with an affirmative final statement of the principal theme. The scherzo, like many such pieces from the romantic period, has a mischie vous quality, which is balanced by two inter vening trios of gentler nature. The sonata-form finale takes an amiable melody as its main theme and a motif with sharply dotted rhythms as its second. The development section is largely concerned with a broad, triplet idea that was embedded in the second theme. The trio closes with a condensed recapitulation of the finale’s themes and a coda based on the octave-leap motif that opened the work.

Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.

Diane Mues Viola

With an early ear for music and encouragement from her family, violist Diane Mues developed her playing through vigorous engage ment in the Chicago classical music community. Raised and educated in suburban Addison, Illinois, Mues began her viola studies at the age of nine with Elaine Duckwall. Soon she became a member of the Chicago Youth Symphony, where she earned the principal viola chair under conductor Dudley Powers.

She then began working with Ruth Ray, a student of the renowned violin teacher Leopold Auer, in a period that greatly enriched her musical development. Mues earned a bachelor’s degree at DePaul University, where she was a student of longtime CSO Principal Viola Milton Preves. While in college, she was principal viola of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.

Following participation in the Tanglewood Music Festival, Mues was appointed assistant principal viola of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra. She joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1987. Over the years, she has enjoyed many collaborations in the Orchestra’s citywide educational programs, various cham ber-music performances, and appearances on WFMT-FM Chicago.

John Bruce Yeh Clarinet

John Bruce Yeh joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1977 at the age of nineteen, appointed bass clarinet by Sir Georg Solti.

The first Asian musician ever appointed to the CSO and the longest-tenured

clarinetist in the Orchestra’s history, he has served as acting and assistant principal and E-flat clarinet.

Yeh has performed as guest principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Seoul Philharmonic, and the Guangzhou Symphony. He was a prize winner at both the 1982 Munich International Music Competition and the 1985 Naumburg Clarinet Competition in New York. Yeh has per formed as a soloist with the CSO several times, including in Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto with Neeme Järvi and in the U.S. premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto with Pierre Boulez. He continues to perform as a soloist with orchestras around the globe.

An enthusiastic champion of new music, Yeh is the dedicatee of new works for clarinet by numerous composers, ranging from Ralph Shapey to John Williams. He appears at festivals and on chamber-music series worldwide, includ ing the Marlboro Music Festival, Taipei Music Academy Festival, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Yeh has performed with the Guarneri, Ying, Colorado, Calder, and Pacifica string quartets, among others. His solo and chamber music recordings have earned worldwide critical acclaim, including the 2007 release for Naxos, featuring Yeh, his wife Teresa Reilly, and his daughter Molly Yeh.

John Bruce Yeh is director and co-founder of Chicago Pro Musica, which received the 1985 Grammy Award for Best New Classical Artist. With clarinetist Teresa Reilly, erhu virtuoso Wang Guowei, and pipa virtuoso Yang Wei, Yeh formed Birds and Phoenix, an innovative quartet dedicated to musical exploration by bridging Eastern and Western musical cultures.

Yeh is on the artist-faculties of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College for the Performing Arts and Midwest Young Artists in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He is the proud father of Jenna Yeh, culinary artist and wine specialist in Chicago; Molly Yeh, percussionist and Food Network TV personality in Minnesota; and multitalented teenager Mia Reilly-Yeh.

PHOTOS BY TODD ROSENBERG

David Cooper Horn

David Cooper was appointed principal horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti in 2019. Prior to joining the CSO, Cooper served as a third and principal horn of the Dallas Symphony. He also served as principal horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, acting principal horn of the Victoria Symphony in British Columbia, and co-associate principal horn of the Fort Worth Symphony. He has been guest principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Liceu Opera in Barcelona. Cooper is an avid chamber musician performing as soloist all over the world.

David Cooper began his horn studies with Dale Bartlett in Lansing, Michigan. He comes from a professional horn-playing family, with both his uncle and grandmother serving as horn players in the Lansing Symphony. Cooper began performing with the Michigan State University Orchestra while still in high school and went on to attend the Curtis Institute of Music, earning a bachelor’s degree in music. At Curtis, where Cooper studied with Jerome Ashby, he received a Tanglewood Fellowship and later spent three consecutive summers at Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. Upon graduating, he continued studying with Eric Ruske.

In his free time, Cooper enjoys being a father in addition to doing Pilates and swimming. He loves animals and the outdoors.

Patrick Godon Piano

Patrick Godon made his debut as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in May 2007, having already performed as part of the Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival in 2003. He was invited to join the CSO on multiple East Coast and European tours and perfor mances at Carnegie Hall. He later became a regular organist for the Orchestra. Godon also performs as orchestral keyboardist with the Delaware, Milwaukee, and Peoria symphony orchestras. He is in demand as a collaborative pianist and has performed many live broadcasts on Chicago’s classical station WFMT.

Godon was the director of music at St. Gregory the Great, where he composed and arranged music for liturgies and participated with the parish choir in the 500th-anniversary celebra tion of Capella Giulia in Vatican City. He is the music director of the Tower Chorale of Western Springs, artistic director of the International Chamber Artists, and organist and choirmaster at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Lake Forest. Godon records demo CDs as pianist and organist for World Library Publications and the Gregorian Institute of America, which are sent to church musicians nationwide.

A native of Fargo, North Dakota, Patrick Godon began his studies with former CSO Principal Keyboard Mary Sauer in 1997. He stud ied with Andrzej Dutkiewicz at the Interlochen Arts Camp and with Jacob Lateiner in New York City at the Mannes Beethoven Institute. Godon holds both bachelor of music and master of music degrees in piano performance from DePaul University. He and his wife Keri are the proud parents of Gilbert, Oliver, and Atticus.

PHOTO BY TODD ROSENBERG