NINETY-FOURTH SEASON
Sunday, March 9, 2025, at 3:00
Chamber Music Series
Leonidas Kavakos Violin
Daniil Trifonov Piano
BEETHOVEN
Sonata No. 4 for Violin and Piano in A Minor, Op. 23
Presto
Andante scherzoso, più allegretto
Allegro molto
POULENC
Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 119
Allegro con fuoco
Intermezzo: Très lent et calme
Presto tragico
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 78
Vivace ma non troppo
Adagio
Allegro molto moderato
BARTÓK
Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano (Folk Dances)
Moderato: Lassú
Allegro moderato: Friss
Please join a postconcert Q&A session with both artists in Orchestra Hall.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Artist-in-Residence position, held by Daniil Trifonov, is made possible through a generous gift from James and Brenda Grusecki. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Artist-inResidence position, held by Daniil Trifonov, is made possible through a generous gift from James and Brenda Grusecki.
COMMENTS
by Richard E. Rodda
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Sonata No. 4 for Violin and Piano in A Minor, Op. 23
In a world still largely accustomed to the reserved, genteel musical climate of prerevolutionary classicism, Ludwig van Beethoven burst upon the Viennese cultural scene like a fiery meteor. The most perceptive of the local nobility, to their credit, recognized the genius of this gruff Rhinelander and encouraged his work. Shortly after his arrival, for example, Prince Karl Lichnowsky provided Beethoven with living quarters, treating him more like a son than a guest. Lichnowsky even instructed the servants to answer the musician’s call before his own, should both ring at the same time. Another of the composer’s staunchest patrons was Count Moritz von Fries, proprietor of the prosperous Viennese banking firm of Fries & Co. and treasurer to the imperial court. Fries, seven years Beethoven’s junior, was a man of excellent breeding and culture. A true disciple of the Enlightenment, Fries traveled widely (Goethe mentioned meeting him
in Italy) and lived for a period in Paris, where he had his portrait painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (remembered for her famous portraits of Marie Antoinette and Mme de Staël) and, with his wife and baby, by François Gérard (court painter to Louis XVIII). Fries’s palace in the Josefplatz was designed by one of the architects of Schönbrunn, the
from top: Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait in oil on ivory by Danish artist Christian Horneman (1765–1844), 1803. Bodmer Collection, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Germany | Count Moritz von Fries and his family, oil on canvas, by François Gérard (1770–1837), ca. 1805. Belvedere, Vienna, Austria
emperor’s suburban summer residence, and housed an elegant private theater that was the site of frequent musical presentations. In April 1800 Fries hosted what developed into a vicious piano-playing competition between Beethoven and the visiting German virtuoso and composer Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823), which Beethoven won in a unanimous decision. Following that victory, Beethoven composed for Fries two sonatas for violin and piano (opp. 23 and 24) and the String Quintet, op. 29, whose dedications the count eagerly accepted. Fries remained among Beethoven’s most devoted patrons, providing him with a regular stipend until he tumbled into bankruptcy in 1825 following the Napoleonic upheavals; the Seventh Symphony of 1813 was dedicated to Fries.
The two sonatas for violin and piano that Beethoven composed for Count Fries in 1800–01—the passionate A minor (op. 23) and the pastoral F major (op. 24, subtitled Spring)—were apparently conceived as a contrasting but complementary pair, perhaps intended to be performed together. (Beethoven headed the manuscript of the F major piece “Sonata II,” and originally instructed the Viennese publisher T. Mollo to issue the two works under the single opus number 23. An apparent engraver’s error, however, caused the two violin parts to be printed in different formats—one upright, one oblong—making printing in a single
volume awkward, so the sonatas were reissued separately with individual opus numbers.)
The Sonata in A minor, op. 23, is one of Beethoven’s most austere compositions, full of terse linear writing and frequent stretches of studied counterpoint. The principal theme of the first movement’s sonata form is a restless melody balanced between scalar motion and leaping arpeggios. The subsidiary subject provides contrast with its limpid liquidity and even rhythmic flow. The development section concerns itself entirely with the main theme. A quietly held chord serves as the gateway to the recapitulation, which returns the earlier thematic material in appropriately adjusted tonalities. The teasingly playful second movement, also in sonata form, makes its first theme from the little two-note fragment initially proposed by the piano. An episode of imitation between keyboard and violin leads to the second subject, comprising a tiny wobbling figure and a traversal of the scale in tripping dotted rhythms. The brief development section has room only for a few hints of the main and imitative themes before the recapitulation amicably saunters in. The finale, a rondo of the French type, with frequent recalls of the main theme, returns to the minor-mode sepia of the opening movement, though its mood is anxious rather than tragic.
FRANCIS POULENC
Born January 7, 1899; Paris, France
Died January 30, 1963; Paris, France
Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 119
COMPOSED
1942–43
Poulenc wrote and destroyed two violin and piano sonatas before completing his only extant specimen of the form in 1943. The work was begun at his country retreat in Noizay, a tiny village in the Loire Valley, in the summer of 1942 and completed there on Easter Sunday 1943; Poulenc premiered it at the Salle Gaveau in Paris on June 21, 1943, with violinist Ginette Neveu at a benefit concert for writers and musicians imprisoned during World War II. Perhaps inevitably, the time of its creation and the circumstance of its first performance colored the sonata with more than Poulenc’s customary quotient of melancholy. The score was dedicated to the celebrated poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was killed in 1936 at the age of thirty-eight at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Poulenc greatly admired Lorca and his writing and, in addition to dedicating this sonata to his memory, set three of his poems, in French translations, in 1947. The association of the sonata with the poet’s death
above: Francis Poulenc
also accounts for the title of the finale— Presto tragico—and the quotation from Lorca that Poulenc placed at the head of the second movement: “The guitar makes dreams cry,” an allusion to Lorca performing Spanish folk songs while accompanying himself on the guitar.
Slashing violin chords introduce the opening movement’s jaunty main theme, for which the piano provides a chattering, stubbornly independent accompaniment. The music quiets for the lyrical second theme, a sad, Slavic-sounding plaint such as Tchaikovsky might have conceived during one of his Parisian visits. The main theme is then developed with considerable intensity. A pause and a jagged transition lead to a poignant, bittersweet song in the violin after which the main and second themes are given a condensed and subdued recapitulation. Poulenc said that the second movement was a “vaguely Spanish Andante cantilena.” This introspective and dreamy intermezzo, with the violin arching above tolling-bell chords in the keyboard, sounds like a vision of Spain that the composer might have conjured over a third glass of amontillado in a Parisian café. The finale, Presto tragico,
is in two starkly contrasted sections. The opening part is built around a bustling theme rooted in Poulenc’s Parisian folklore idiom. The closing section, however, which follows after an abrupt break in the music, speaks of
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
tragedy, with mournful sighing phrases from the violin and a sad, halting accompaniment in the piano. The sonata ends with a few bleak, isolated, stabbing gestures.
Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 78
COMPOSED 1879
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 abandoned all thought of returning immediately to Vienna—he remained in Pörtschach for the entire summer. It was in that halcyon setting that he composed his Sonata no. 1 for violin and piano.
Brahms is known to have written at least three sonatas for violin before the present work. All were lost or destroyed by him. (Brahms was almost pathologically secretive about his sketches and unfinished works, and he refused to
this page: Johannes Brahms, ca. 1872 | opposite page: Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in Carinthia, Austro-Hungary, where Brahms summered while writing his Second Symphony. Engraving and print by the Oester Lloyd Art Institute in Trieste after a drawing by Markus Pernhart (1824–1871)
release any music that was not of the highest quality. He simply burned anything that he did not want others to see. Little, therefore, is known about his methods of composition.) Brahms had long been wary of the difficulty in combining the lyrical nature of the violin with the powerful chordal writing that he favored for piano, and it was only with the Klavierstücke, op. 76, completed in 1878, that he developed a keyboard style lean enough to accommodate the violin as a partner. His other two violin sonatas followed within nine years. The First Sonata is a voluptuously songful and tenderly expressive testament to this important advance in Brahms’s creative development, the musical counterpart of his sylvan holiday at Pörtschach. His faithful friend and correspondent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg told him that the work “appeals to the affection as do few other things in the realm of music.” In his biography of the composer, Peter Latham noted, “Brahms has written nothing more spacious than these three sonatas, in which he never seeks grandeur, and woos rather than compels.” Brahms himself allowed that the sonata was almost too intimate for the concert hall. The work is one of his most endearing creations, and it did much to dispel the then widely held notion that his music was academic and
emotionally austere. “[The sonata] must have won Brahms almost more friends than any of his previous compositions,” judged J.A. Fuller-Maitland.
The Sonata no. 1 is warm and ingratiating, a 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 lightly kissed by the muse 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 hymn-like, 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 movement. 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.
BÉLA BARTÓK
Born March 25, 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania) Died September 26, 1945; New York City
Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano (Folk Dances)
COMPOSED 1928
In an essay “The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music” that appeared in the periodical Melos in 1920, Béla Bartók wrote of the issue central to his creative work:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a turning point in the history of modern music. The excesses of the romanticists began to be unbearable for many. . . . Invaluable help was given in this change (or rather, let us call it rejuvenation) by a kind of peasant
music unknown until then. The right type of peasant music is most varied and perfect in its forms. Its expressive power is amazing, and at the same time, it is devoid of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments. It is simple, sometimes primitive, but never silly. It is the ideal starting point for a musical renaissance, and a composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master. What is the best way for a composer to reap the full benefits of his studies in peasant music? It is to assimilate the idiom of peasant music so completely that he is able to forget all about it and use it as his musical mother tongue.
The question is, what are the ways in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into modern music? We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied, write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases. This kind of work would show a certain analogy to Bach’s treatment of chorales. . . . Another method by which peasant music becomes transmuted into modern music is the following: the composer does not make use of a real peasant melody but invents his own imitation of such melodies. . . . There is yet a third way in which the influence of peasant music can be traced in a composer’s work. Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music.
Among Bartók’s music, most overtly redolent of folk influences are his two rhapsodies for violin, into which he incorporated melodies from Romania, Hungary, and (in no. 2) Ruthenia, the eastern region of Hungary, bordering Ukraine. Each of these works consists of a pair of movements whose style and character derive from the Hungarian national dance, the czardas, alternating a slow
section—Lassú—and a fast one—Friss. Bartók settled on the generic title rhapsody for these pieces, a term that Franz Liszt had originally borrowed from literature for his series of works spawned by the czardas to describe their free structure and quick contrasts. Bartók dedicated each of the rhapsodies, composed quickly soon after he had returned from his first American tour early in 1928, to a noted violinist friend. The Rhapsody no. 1 was inscribed to the Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Szigeti, who had transcribed
opposite page: Béla Bartók, portrait, 1922. Library of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Switzerland | this page: Béla Bartók (right) and Zoltán Székely, 1920s, in the garden of Székely’s villa in Nijmegen, the Netherlands
some of Bartók’s pieces For Children for violin in 1926 so satisfactorily that the composer agreed to give a joint recital with him in Budapest the following year. Bartók and Szigeti remained steadfast musical allies—they performed together on numerous occasions (including a memorable recital at the Library of Congress in 1940, Bartók’s first appearance after immigrating to this country, whose recording remains an important document of twentieth-century music). Szigeti was instrumental in arranging both the 1938 commission from clarinetist Benny Goodman that resulted in Contrasts (also inspired by Hungarian folk idioms) and the 1943 commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation that allowed Bartók to compose the Concerto for Orchestra. The Rhapsody no. 2 was dedicated to Zoltán Székely, who concertized frequently with Bartók in the 1920s and ’30s and whose Hungarian Quartet championed and recorded the composer’s chamber works; the Violin Concerto no. 2 of 1938 was commissioned and premiered by and dedicated to Székely. In addition
to their original piano-accompanied versions, Bartók also created orchestral arrangements of both rhapsodies; the first also exists in a transcription for cello and piano.
The scalar tune given above a dronelike accompaniment that serves as the main theme of the first movement (Lassú) of the Rhapsody no. 1 exhibits a certain Romani influence in its sharply dotted rhythms and exotic melodic leadings. Thematic contrast is provided by the mournful strain, marked by snapping short-long figurations, that comprises the central section. The scalar tune returns to round out the movement. The second movement (Friss) is a brilliant procession of vibrant dance melodies, often requiring considerable feats of virtuosity from the violinist. The rhapsody ends with the return of the scalar melody 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.
SYMPHONY CENTER PRESENTS
Jeff Alexander Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association President
Cristina Rocca Vice President for Artistic Administration
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Chair
James M. Fahey Senior Director, Programming, Symphony Center Presents
Lena Breitkreuz Artist Manager, Symphony Center Presents
Michael Lavin Assistant Director, Operations, Symphony Center Presents & Rental Events
Joseph Sherman Production Manager, Symphony Center Presents & Rental Events
