ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOURTH SEASON
Tuesday, December 3, 2024, at 6:30
CSO Chamber Music Series
WINTER QUARTET
Ni Mei Violin
Danny Lai Viola
Katinka Kleijn Cello
Spencer Myer Piano
MAHLER Piano Quartet in A Minor Not too quickly
SAARIAHO Cloud Trio
NI MEI
DANNY LAI
KATINKA KLEIJN
INTERMISSION
FAURÉ Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15
Allegro molto moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivo
Adagio
Allegro molto
The Chicago Symphony Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda
GUSTAV MAHLER
Born July 7, 1860; Kalischt, Bohemia
Died May 18, 1911; Vienna, Austria
Piano Quartet in A Minor
COMPOSED 1876
In 1875, when Gustav Mahler matriculated there, the Vienna Conservatory was one of the leading music schools in Europe, rivaled only by those of Paris and Leipzig. Mahler’s principal professor was Robert Fuchs, who had begun what became a forty-year tenure at the conservatory just one year before; his composition teacher was Franz Krenn, a prolific writer of sacred music who was known for the thoroughness and stiff pedanticism of his instruction. Though not formally enrolled in Anton Bruckner’s classes, Mahler also sat in on some of his counterpoint lectures. Mahler proved to be an excellent student, attentive to his studies, and even inspired when it came to composition. He is known to have written at least one movement of a symphony, several songs, and a goodly number of chamber
pieces, including the opening movement of a piano quartet in A minor in June 1876. (He began a second movement for the proposed work shortly thereafter but left it incomplete.) The quartet won an important school prize, and it was performed with considerable success on July 10 at the conservatory and again at a recital in his parents’ Bohemian town of Iglau in September. “This composition shows an impressive wealth of ideas and a great skill in execution that reveal him as a composer of genius,” wrote the critic for the Mährischer Grenzbote.
The A minor piano quartet shows both Mahler’s assimilation of the influences of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms and his ability to create music of distinctive profile and strong emotion from his earliest years. The twelve-minute movement is disposed in proper sonata form, with a melancholy main subject marked by a melodic leap followed by a sigh and a contrasting subsidiary motif of a more animated character.
this page: Gustav Mahler, portrait by Leonard Berlin-Bieber (1841–1931), 1892 | opposite page: Kaija Saariaho, photo by Maarit Kytöharju
KAIJA SAARIAHO
Born October 14, 1952; Helsinki, Finland
Died June 2, 2023; Paris, France
Cloud Trio
COMPOSED
2009
Kaija Saariaho was among the most prominent creative figures of Finland, a country whose generous government support for the arts has given it a musical culture matched by that of few other nations. Saariaho was born in Helsinki in 1952, studied violin and piano as a youngster, and early on discovered an irresistible attraction to music. Joshua Barone, in his 2023 New York Times obituary of Saariaho, reported that “her mother later told her that at night she would ask for someone to ‘turn the pillow off’ because she could hear so much music coming from it that she couldn’t sleep.” Saariaho received her professional training at the Helsinki University of Art and Design and the Sibelius Academy, where her teachers included Paavo Heininen. She continued her studies at the University of Music in Freiburg, Germany, with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber and attended courses in computer music at Darmstadt and IRCAM in Paris, the avant-garde Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music Institute founded by Pierre Boulez;
Saariaho settled permanently in Paris in 1982 and died there in 2023.
Saariaho’s works, for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voice, and opera, many with electronics, are luminous in sonority and create shifting patterns of sound with a strong expressive core guided by her synesthesia, the reaction of multiple bodily senses to a single stimulus. “The visual and the musical world are one to me,” she told musicologist Pirkko Moisala in 2009. “Different senses, shades of color, or textures and tones of light, even fragrances and sounds blend in my mind. They form a complete world in itself.” The distinguished director Peter Sellars, an admiring collaborator with Saariaho on her stage productions, said,
I think both Bach and Kaija were creating music that is about light that shines out of darkness. The music understands the darkness, and at the same time, the darkness makes you begin to understand and recognize the light. . . . You don’t finish with these works. That’s the way it is with the works of the great composers. You return to them all your life, and these pieces just get more relevant and more necessary as time goes by.
Kaija Saariaho’s works earned her notable honors, such as the Grawemeyer Award, Nemmers Prize, Sonning Prize, Stoeger Award of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Grammy awards, and Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2008; she was named Greatest Living Composer in a survey of her peers conducted by BBC Music Magazine in 2019. Saariaho garnered widespread acclaim for her first opera, the visionary L’Amour de loin (Love from Afar), with a libretto by the Lebanese-French journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf based on an early biography of the twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. It was premiered at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, given its first American performance by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2002, and staged by the Metropolitan Opera in December 2016. L’Amour de loin was just the second opera by a female composer heard at the Met (more than a century after the 1903 performances of English composer Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald), recorded on DVD and a Grammy-winning CD, and has been seen internationally in more than a dozen productions. The last of her six stage works, Innocence, with an original Finnish libretto based on a painfully contemporary story about the aftermath of a fatal school shooting in Helsinki, was premiered to exceptional praise in July 2021 by the international festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Innocence has
since been staged in London, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and San Francisco, and is scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera during the 2025–26 season.
Saariaho on Cloud Trio
Astring trio is a fascinating ensemble. Even if its instruments come from the same family, it magnifies the individual character of each. When writing Cloud Trio, I was surprised at how different it was from writing for a string quartet. In this piece, the three instruments have different tasks and functions; they represent very different aspects of string playing. These tasks are sometimes very concrete: the violin tends to behave as an echo or reverberation, the viola creates new clouds next to the existing ones, and the cello often has the function of a shadow to the upper instrumental lines.
My ideas for this piece are about common textures: how to create one coherent texture—still complex and detailed—with individual lines. The four sections of the piece have their own colors and characters, and I leave it to the listener to imagine what kinds of clouds were their sources of inspiration.
Why Cloud Trio? When composing this piece in the French Alps (Les Arcs), watching the big sky above the mountains, I realized once again how rich a metaphor a natural element can be: its state or shape is so recognizable, and yet it is always varied and rich in detail.
opposite page: Gabriel Fauré, oil portrait of the composer painted by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), ca. 1889
GABRIEL FAURÉ
Born May 12, 1845; Pamiers, Ariège, France
Died November 14, 1924; Paris, France
Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15
COMPOSED 1876–79
In 1872 Gabriel Fauré was introduced to the Viardot family by his teacher and mentor, Camille Saint-Saëns. The Viardots were among Europe’s most prominent nineteenth-century musical families: Pauline, head of the clan, was one of the day’s leading mezzo-sopranos (her sister, Maria Malibran, was an equally celebrated singer); her daughter Louise enjoyed a successful career as a singer, teacher, and composer in Russia and Germany; her son, Paul, was a noted violinist and conductor. Fauré, then organist at Saint-Sulpice and composer of a growing number of finely crafted songs and choral works, became friendly with the Viardots, and he conceived a special fondness for Pauline’s younger daughter Marianne. Love blossomed sufficiently during the following years that their engagement was announced in July 1877—only to be abruptly broken off in October. Fauré was deeply wounded by the affair, and he never revealed the exact cause of the falling out, except to say in later years that “perhaps the Viardot family might have deflected me from my proper path.” The path the
Viardots would have preferred for the budding composer would have led, of course, through the opera house, but Fauré’s genius lay not in the large public forms of opera and symphony but in the intimate genres of song and chamber music. By the time his first important chamber work, the Sonata no. 1 for Violin and Piano, was premiered successfully in Paris in January 1877, he was already well advanced on his next instrumental composition—the Piano Quartet in C minor. This gestating work confirmed the creative direction Fauré chose to follow, so the collapse of his engagement to Marianne may have been occasioned as much by fundamental differences in artistic philosophy as by any breach of romantic sentiment.
The Piano Quartet no. 1, whose creation wrapped around this affair of the heart, opens with a modally inflected melody in dotted rhythms that provides much of the movement’s thematic material. Wide-ranging piano arpeggios lead to the complementary subject, a descending stairstep theme of brighter countenance. The development section is a masterful working out of the main subject that climaxes with a brief but stormy passage of rising scales to provide the gateway to the recapitulation. A gentle coda closes
the movement. The scherzo is music of ethereal delicacy whose central trio is spun from a lyrical string theme in chordal texture. The Adagio follows a three-part form (A–B–A) based on two motifs derived from an ascending scale: the first part (A) is halting and fragmentary; the other (B) is flowing and expansive. The sonata-form finale begins with a theme that recalls both the Adagio in its rising scalar contour and the first movement in its dotted rhythms. The
PROFILES
Ni Mei Violin
Ni Mei joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009. She came to the CSO from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where she was a member of the first violin section. A native of China, Mei began playing violin at the age of six. Her first teacher was her father, concertmaster and later music director of the Wuhan Philharmonic Orchestra. At ten, she entered the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she studied for eleven years under Duoqin Xu, Shisheng Zhang, and Zhinuo Ding.
Ni Mei came to the United States to continue her violin studies at Pittsburg State University in Kansas and at Rice University in Houston under
viola’s lyrical second theme provides contrast. The development, grown almost entirely from the second theme, reaches an impassioned climax before subsiding for the recapitulation. The quartet ends with a brilliant coda.
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.
Kathleen Winkler. During that period, she won Pittsburg State’s Concerto and Aria Competition, the Waddill Chamber Music Competition, and first prize in the Young Texas Artists Music Competition. Mei was also concertmaster of the Southeast Kansas Symphony, associate concertmaster of the Ohio Light Opera, and a member of the Houston Symphony.
Danny Lai Viola
Violist Danny Lai was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2014 by Riccardo Muti. He began his musical studies on the piano at the age of six and started the viola in the Iowa City public
school system when he was ten. At age sixteen, after performing the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a professional violist. He studied at Northwestern University with Roland Vamos while taking orchestral repertoire classes with former CSO Principal Violist Charles Pikler. After graduating with degrees in both economics and music, Lai joined the viola section of the Colorado Symphony.
In Chicago, Lai is a frequent chamber music collaborator, playing with groups such as Civitas, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Chicago Pro Musica, and his colleagues in the CSO. He also enjoys passing on knowledge to the next generation, giving master classes, teaching private lessons, and working with the Civic Orchestra.
Lai has made recital appearances at the Kennedy Center in Washington (D.C.). He is an alumnus of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in Sydney, Australia. He is also a prize winner in major competitions, including the Stulberg Competition, Jefferson Symphony International Young Artists Competition, Thaviu String Competition, and Luminarts Union League Strings Competition.
Danny Lai plays on a contemporary viola made by Franz Kinberg.
Katinka Kleijn Cello
Dutch cellist Katinka Kleijn appeared as soloist in the 2016 world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s Cello Concerto at Lincoln Center, New York.
In demand as a soloist, she performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Penderecki’s Concerto for Three Cellos, among numerous appearances, and in MarkAnthony Turnage’s Kai on the CSO MusicNOW series. She has collaborated in chamber music performances with musicians including Yo-Yo Ma, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and Christoph Eschenbach and appeared at the Marlboro Music Festival and on the Symphony Center Presents series.
Known for her individual projects, Kleijn presented at the Chicago Humanities Festival the solo work OilFree Blush, highlighting the carcinogenic properties of makeup. The work was commissioned jointly by Kleijn and the Humanities Festival from seven composers. A collaboration with the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the highly acclaimed and publicized work Intelligence in the Human-Machine by Daniel Dehaan.
As a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she has given many premieres, including the first American performance of Zona for solo cello and ensemble by Magnus Lindberg
and Eternal Escape for solo cello by Dai Fujikura.
Kleijn has recorded for Naxos, Boston Records, and Cedille. Her non-classical recordings include progressive rock band District 97, the ambient-folk duo Relax Your Ears, singer-songwriter David Sylvian, and guitarist Bill MacKay.
Spencer Myer Piano
Spencer Myer’s current season includes a tour throughout the United States, highlighted by his debut engagements with the Anderson, Gulf Coast, and Greenville symphony orchestras. He returns to the Grand Junction and Longmont symphony orchestras and Missouri’s Springfield Symphony Orchestra as soloist for its ninetieth anniversary opening night festivities. His recital engagements include Richmond, Virginia’s distinguished Belvedere series. Myer continues performing as part of the Daurov/ Myer Duo with award-winning cellist Adrian Daurov.
Spencer Myer’s orchestral, recital, and chamber music performances have been heard throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has been soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Boise, Dayton, Evansville, Louisiana, Massapequa, Northeastern Pennsylvania, and Rhode
Island philharmonic orchestras, among many others.
Myer’s recital appearances have been presented in New York City’s Weill Recital Hall, 92nd Street Y, and Steinway Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, and London’s Wigmore Hall, and many of his performances have been broadcast on WQXR (New York City), WHYY (Philadelphia), WCLV (Cleveland), and WFMT (Chicago).
Spencer Myer’s career was launched with three important prizes: first prize in the 2004 Unisa International Piano Competition in South Africa, the 2006 Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship from the American Pianists Association, and a gold medal from the 2008 New Orleans International Piano Competition.
His debut CD—solo music of Busoni, Copland, Debussy, and Kohs—was released in the fall of 2007. Myer’s most recent four recordings, William Bolcom: Piano Rags, Johannes Brahms: Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Debussy—Cello Sonata; Brahms—Clarinet Trio, and Robert Schumann: Works for Cello and Piano, are available on the Steinway & Sons label. In the fall of 2022, Steinway Classics released Chopin: The Four Impromptus, available on all download and streaming services.
In the fall of 2020, Spencer Myer was elected to the board of directors of the New York City–based Musicians Foundation.
Spencer Myer is a Steinway Artist.
spencermyer.com