Saans for Violin, Cello, and Piano
COMPOSED 2017
Globalism has not only shaped trade, economics, and international relations but also had profound effects on art and culture. Reena Esmail is among the many gifted composers who bring together the music and sensibility of their ancestral heritage and their American home. “I was born in Chicago,” she said, “but I grew up in an Indian family. There’s a culture within your family, and there’s a different culture outside. I was always aware that there were going to be two versions of me that had to be navigated. . . . The thing about that is it gives you this dual perspective. You have a sense that there are always multiple ways of looking at things.”
Born into a first-generation Indian family, Esmail developed an interest in music as a child, took guitar, violin, and piano lessons, and attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts after the family moved to California. She earned her undergraduate degree in composition at Juilliard and her master’s and doctorate at the Yale School of Music. In 2011 Esmail
above: Reena Esmail
received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India, where she immersed herself in both her formal studies and the country’s culture for a year. “I was just a woman in India,” she recalled. “When I got back to the United States, the reverse culture shock was so intense that it’s never gone away. I’ve never been the same person since I left for India and came back.” Esmail has shared her unique musical perspective in works commissioned by, among others, the Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, Richmond Symphony, Albany Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Girls Chorus, Juilliard415, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She was the Seattle Symphony’s composer-in-residence in 2020–21 and is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Swan Family Artist-in-Residence through 2025. Her other honors include a United States Artist Fellow in Music (2019), grand prize winner of the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award (2019), Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), and Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow (2017–18). She is a founder and an artistic director of Shastra, a Los Angeles–based non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural
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collaboration between the music traditions of India and the West.
Reena Esmail on Saans for Violin, Cello, and Piano
I’ve always found the story of César Franck’s Violin Sonata as incredibly moving and romantic as the music itself. Franck wrote the piece in 1886 for Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe and his bride as a wedding present, and they premiered it at the ceremony, sight-reading through the score. It is one of my all-time favorite pieces, and the love and intention with which it was written resonates deeply through the music.
As I was finishing my clarinet concerto for the Albany Symphony in April 2017, I was also planning a trip to Paris for the wedding of one of my closest friends, pianist Suzana Bartal. As two women in our class of the Yale doctoral program, we supported each other unconditionally through some of the toughest moments of our lives, celebrated our accomplishments with each other, and developed a deep and lasting
friendship. As I wrote the slow movement of the clarinet concerto, I saw it could actually be turned into a piano trio as a wedding gift to Suzana and her husband, composer Eric Tanguy. Suzana is a world-class concert artist, and one of her chamber music specialties is playing piano trios.
The story ended up a little differently than that of César Franck—while I was at Suzana and Eric’s wedding, this trio, in an amazing coincidence, was actually being publicly premiered in Los Angeles on the same day [June 10]. Even though it was performed a world away, it made me so happy that it was premiered by some of my dearest friends in Los Angeles.
A beautiful addendum to this story: two years later, Suzana played this trio for the first time in the United States at a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills with cellist Peter Myers and violinist Vijay Gupta. And the next day, Vijay and I got married. I love that this one piece played a central role in both of our weddings.
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GABRIEL FAURÉ
Born May 12, 1845; Pamiers, Ariège, France
Died November 4, 1924; Paris, France
Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano in D Minor, Op. 120
Gabriel Fauré’s later years were plagued by increasing deafness and infirmity. He tried to keep his ailments secret, especially his loss of hearing, fearing that their discovery would undermine his post as director of the Paris Conservatory. He was surprisingly successful at his deception for several years, but by 1919 his condition became obvious enough that he was asked by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with all possible tact, to resign his position.
Through the efforts of Paul Léon, the fine arts minister, a small pension was arranged for him, but his financial outlook still offered a troubling insecurity. To aid his situation, friends and students sponsored concerts and publications in his honor, and he was assigned a number of editing jobs by the publisher Durand, including a new edition of Bach’s organ works in collaboration with Joseph Bonnet. Durand also encouraged Fauré to continue composing for chamber ensembles, and in the two years before
his death in 1924, he produced a trio for piano, cello, and either violin or clarinet as well as a string quartet. The piano trio was begun in the summer of 1922 at the country home of Fernand and Louise Maillot at Annecy-le-Vieux, and completed in Paris the following February. It was first heard privately at Mme Maillot’s Parisian salon soon thereafter and given publicly on May 12 at a concert of the Société Nationale by Tatiana de Sansévitch (piano), Robert Krettly (violin), and Jacques Pathé (cello). Six weeks later, it was played in Paris by the legendary ensemble of Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud, and Pablo Casals. The trio’s flowing opening Allegro is built on two themes similar in mood: the first is a sweet, sad song intoned by the cello; the other is a small-interval theme of undulating motion. These melodies are extended and elaborated with superb contrapuntal mastery so that the entire movement seems to be continuously unfolded from a single, bittersweet emotion. “The long slow movement must surely rank among Fauré’s most inspired,” according to British musicologist Robert Orledge. Much of the beauty of this music, like
this page: Gabriel Fauré, portrait by Eugène Pirou (1841–1909), ca. 1905. Bibliothèque nationale de France | opposite page: Johannes Brahms, lithograph portrait, ca. 1865, by Georg Engelbach (1817–1894). Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky
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COMPOSED 1922–23
that of some fine, old drawing, lies in the very economy of its means, making telling use of every line, stroke, and gesture. After two movements of such tender sentiments, the violence of the finale comes as a surprise. Its opening motif resembles the famous “Ridi, Pagliaccio” from Leoncavallo’s opera (a piece that Fauré once said incited the
“indignation of all those who care about music”), so the similarity was probably only coincidental. The music turns toward brighter tonalities as it nears its end, however, a device that Robert Orledge believed “put across an optimistic message of hope and a vibrant inner life that represents the triumph of mind over matter.”
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 40
COMPOSED 1865
For many years, Brahms followed the sensible practice of the Viennese gentry by abandoning the city when the weather got hot. During his later years, he spent many happy summers in the lovely hills and lakes of the Austrian Salzkammergut and in Switzerland, but during the 1860s, he preferred the ancient German spa town of Baden-Baden for his retreats. The periods away from Vienna were not merely times of relaxation for him, however, but were actually working holidays—some of his greatest scores (Violin Concerto, Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies, Piano Concerto no. 2, Haydn Variations, Tragic
Overture) were largely realized during his various summer junkets. Late in spring 1865, Brahms took comfortable rooms in Baden, which, he wrote to a friend, “look out on three sides at the dark, wooded mountains, the roads winding up and down them, and the pleasant houses.” It was while walking upon those sylvan hillsides above the town that the idea for the Trio op. 40 occurred to him. (On a later visit, he pointed out to his eventual biographer Albert Dietrich the exact spot where the inspiration for the piece struck.) He began the trio that summer and continued it after his return to Vienna in the fall but did not finish the score until November.
The trio’s opening movement, written in a leisurely Andante tempo (the speed of Brahms’s walk upon the Baden hills?), is disposed in an unusual form; rather
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than the traditional sonata-allegro, it employs two alternating strains (A–B–A–B–A) whose relaxed structure is the perfect vessel for this amiable music. The energetic scherzo is countered by the lyrical melody of the central trio section. Adagio mesto (mournfully) Brahms marked the following movement. Woven almost imperceptibly into the horn and violin lines soon after the return of its opening strain is the echo of a folk song Brahms sang as a
PROFILES
Baird Dodge Violin
A New York City native, Baird Dodge joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a violist in 1996. Later the same year, he moved to the second violin section. In 2002 he was appointed principal second violin by Daniel Barenboim. After studying violin and viola from an early age, Dodge attended the precollege division of the Juilliard School. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Swarthmore College in 1990 and a master’s degree in music from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1994. His teachers have included Helen Kwalwasser, Gregory Fulkerson, and Joyce Robbins.
child, “In der Weiden steht ein Haus” (In the meadow stands a house), which, transformed, becomes the principal theme of the finale, a joyous and life-affirming answer to the sad plaint of the preceding music.
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.
An avid chamber musician, Dodge has collaborated with such artists as Daniel Barenboim, Isidore Cohen, and Ida Kavafian and has appeared as a guest artist with the Chicago and Colorado string quartets. Dodge has performed at the Bravo! Colorado Festival, Taos Chamber Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, and on Music from Marlboro tours.
Baird Dodge has a special interest in contemporary music. He has often performed works by his father, Charles Dodge, including the premiere of his violin etudes at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in 1994. He recorded his father’s Viola Elegy for New Albion Records in 1992. In 2006 Baird Dodge premiered and recorded Carillon Sky, a chamber concerto written for him by Augusta Read Thomas, on the CSO’s MusicNOW series under Oliver Knussen. He has also championed the
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works of composer James Matheson and premiered several of his pieces, including Matheson’s Violin Concerto, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the CSO in 2011.
Karen Basrak Cello
Karen Basrak joined the cello section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2012. A native of Arlington Heights, Illinois, Basrak began her studies with Adele O’Dwyer, Gilda Barston, and Richard Hirschl. She received a bachelor of music degree in cello performance from the University of Southern California, where she studied with Eleonore Schoenfeld. While at USC, Basrak received several honors, most notably the Gregor Piatigorsky Award. Before returning to Illinois, Basrak was a member of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra beginning in 2001 as associate principal cello; she served as acting principal from 2002 to 2005 and principal from 2005 to 2012. Basrak has performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe and has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Northwest, Harper, Kishwaukee, Elmhurst, Skokie Valley, and Greenville symphony orchestras; Winnetka Chamber Orchestra, Marina del Rey–Westchester Symphony, and American Youth Symphony. As an advocate of music education, she has performed in schools throughout the
nation. In recognition of her efforts, she was awarded the key to the city of Greenville, South Carolina. Basrak is on the faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
Oto Carrillo Horn
Oto Carrillo was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000 by Daniel Barenboim. A native of Guatemala, Carrillo grew up in Chicago. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music performance from DePaul University and master’s in music performance and musicology from Northwestern University, studying horn with Jon Boen and Gail Williams. After graduating, he won positions with the Memphis and Cedar Rapids (now Orchestra Iowa) symphony orchestras and continued playing in Chicago for two seasons as a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, coached by Dale Clevenger.
Carrillo has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Metropolitana Orchestra of Lisbon as well as the Chicago Sinfonietta, Music of the Baroque, Chicago Philharmonic, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Prior to his appointment to the CSO, Oto Carrillo held positions in the South Bend and Southwest Michigan symphony orchestras. Recently, Carrillo gave a series of recitals in Vancouver, Canada, and served as guest principal
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horn of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico and guest associate principal horn of the Utah Symphony.
As an instructor, Carrillo has given many master classes at various institutions worldwide. He served for ten years on the faculty of the Pacific Regional International Summer Music Academy (formerly the Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific), a unique summer training program for aspiring young orchestral musicians in British Columbia. He is currently on the faculty at DePaul University, receiving in 2013 the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
Outside of playing horn, Carrillo enjoys savoring and occasionally brewing excellent craft beer, woodworking, playing sports of all types, traveling to beautiful places around the world, and the company of his wife, Sarah, a freelance trumpet player, and their college-aged children, Lucas and Isabelle.
Daniel Schlosberg Piano
Grammy-nominated musician Daniel Schlosberg has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as featured soloist and in numerous chamber music concerts. He has a passion for contemporary music, collaborating frequently with Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion. Schlosberg gave the world
premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s Starlight Ribbons for solo piano; the U.S. premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Calices (for violin and piano), and several sets of piano pieces by Stanley Walden. He was a founding member of Yarn/Wire, the lauded two pianos/two percussion group.
He has recorded for the Albany, Bridge, Centaur, New World, Nimbus, Jacaranda Live!, and Permelia labels. His latest solo release is Gaul Me Maybe: French Baroque Keyboard Music, consisting of works by Royer, Rameau, d’Angelbert, and Bach.
Schlosberg was on staff at Ravinia’s Steans Institute vocal program, and he is the director of the Baltimore Lieder Weekend, held each October, with consistent support from the Hampsong Foundation. He also maintains a duo with soprano Laura Strickling. Their album of new American art songs, 40@40, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts for Traditional Classical Album, and they received a Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Album.
Other recent projects include appearances at Ravinia and the National Gallery of Art (D.C.) and multiple appearances at Bargemusic in Brooklyn, New York.
He is also a frequent preconcert lecturer and program annotator.
Schlosberg is a Steinway Artist and professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also faculty advisor to the table tennis club.
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