N INET Y-THI R D SEASON Friday, November 10, 2023, at 7:30
Chamber Music Series MAXIM VENGEROV & POLINA OSETINSKAYA Maxim Vengerov Violin Polina Osetinskaya Piano C. SCHUMANN
Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 Andante molto Allegretto Passionately fast
BRAHMS Scherzo for Violin and Piano in C Minor
(from the F.A.E. Sonata), WoO 2
R. SCHUMANN
Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano in A Minor Very slow—Lively Lively Intermezzo: Moving, not too fast Finale: Marked, fairly lively
INTERMISSION
PROKOFIEV
Five Melodies for Violin and Piano, Op. 35b Andante Lento, ma non troppo Animato, ma non allegro Allegretto leggero e scherzando Andante non troppo
PROKOFIEV Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in D Major,
Op. 94a
Moderato Scherzo Andante Allegro con brio This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda CLARA SCHUMANN Born September 13, 1819; Leipzig, Germany Died May 20, 1896; Frankfurt, Germany
Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 COMPOSED
1853
Goethe called her “a noble phenomenon”; Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s greatest poet and a sensitive musician, was inspired to write a poem titled “When She Played Beethoven’s F minor Sonata”; the prestigious journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music) ranked her as the third greatest pianist of the day behind only Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg. The object of these encomia was a teenage girl from Leipzig, a dazzling wunderkind who possessed not only flawless keyboard technique but also extraordinary artistic sensitivity and unswerving dedication to the most elevated principles of the musical art—Clara Wieck. Clara’s father, Friedrich, a noted teacher of piano and voice, operator of a music-lending library and a piano store, and a former preacher, vowed even before the girl was born that he would develop her into a consummate artist, and he showed considerable restraint by not beginning her lessons until she
was five. His instruction fell upon a fertile talent—Clara made her public debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on October 20, 1828 (she was nine years old), gave her first complete recital two years later, and made her debut international tour the following season. By 1835 she was acclaimed throughout Europe as a child prodigy. In 1829 the nineteen-year-old Robert Schumann met Friedrich Wieck, and he was accepted by the pedagogue as a student; the following year, Robert moved into the Wieck household. He was at first amused by his teacher’s gifted daughter, but over the course of the following years, the couple’s relationship developed into true love (“Clara grows more charming, inwardly, outwardly, every day, every hour,” Robert wrote in 1835) and became one of the great romances of the nineteenth century. That story—Papa Wieck’s nearly irrational resistance to the union, the lovers’ court battle to receive legal permission to marry, their passionate devotion to each other during their sixteen years of wedded life, Robert’s mental collapse and untimely death in 1856—is well-known and carefully
t h i s pa g e : Clara Schumann, photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl (1804–1877), ca. 1850 | o p p o s i t e pa g e : 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)
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chronicled in a half-dozen books. Clara put her domestic duties before her professional ambitions during those years (she gave birth to eight children between 1841 and 1854), concertizing only occasionally and composing just a piano trio, the romances for violin and piano, and a handful of songs and solo piano pieces, including her Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann in 1853. Following her husband’s death in 1856, she resumed touring and teaching but never composed again. In 1853 Clara and Robert met Johannes Brahms, a promising twenty-year-old pianist and composer from Hamburg, and violinist Joseph Joachim, who had just been appointed concertmaster of the Hanover Court Orchestra and would soon become recognized as one of the finest musicians of his generation. Both became lifelong friends and professional colleagues. Clara’s first composition of 1853 was the set of variations (op. 20) on a theme from Robert’s Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves, op. 99) that she wrote as a gift for her husband’s forty-third birthday, on June 8. Her next project was the Three Romances for Violin and Piano (op. 22) that she composed for Joachim, her only extant chamber work other than the Piano Trio in G minor from 1846. Composer and violinist performed the romances several times together, once before King George V of Hanover (Joachim reported that the music-loving monarch was “completely ecstatic” upon hearing them), and they were published by the prestigious Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel in 1855. “All three pieces display
an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate and fragrant hand,” declared the reviewer of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung. “The violin melodies are simple and handled very effectively, with interesting harmonies and accompaniments as well as contrasting melodies, all without exaggeration.” The first Romance (D-flat major) is lyrical and bucolic, qualities thrown into relief by a brief, agitated passage at the movement’s center. Romance no. 2 (G minor) is more wistful, with formal and expressive balance provided by a vernal central section embellished with avian trills. The final Romance (B-flat major) is rhapsodic in its outer portions, with an expressive melody shared by violin and piano at its center. CS O.O RG
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COMMENTS
JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Scherzo in C Minor (from the F.A.E. Sonata), WoO 2 COMPOSED
1853
In April 1853, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms set out from his native Hamburg for a concert tour of Germany with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. The following month in Hanover, they met the violinist Joseph Joachim, whom Brahms had heard give an inspiring performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto five years earlier in Hamburg. Brahms was at first somewhat shy in the presence of the celebrated virtuoso, but the two men warmed to each other when the young composer began to play some of his recent music at the piano. Before the interview was done, Joachim had been overwhelmed by his visitor: Brahms has an altogether exceptional talent for composition, a gift which is further enhanced by the unaffected modesty of his character. His playing, too, gives every presage of a great artistic career, full of fire and energy. . . . In brief,
he is the most considerable musician of his age that I have ever met. The following summer, Brahms and Joachim spent eight weeks at Göttingen discussing music, studying scores, playing chamber works together, and setting the foundation for a creative friendship that would last for almost half a century. Joachim learned of Brahms’s desire to take a walking tour through the Rhine Valley, and he arranged a joint recital to raise enough money to finance the trip. Along with the proceeds of the gate, Joachim gave Brahms as a parting gift several letters of introduction, including one to Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. On the last day of September 1853, Brahms met the Schumanns for the first time. “Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God,” Clara recorded in her diary. Brahms was introduced around town, and among those he befriended was the young composer and conductor Albert Dietrich, a favorite student of Schumann and a frequent visitor to his home. Joachim was scheduled for an appearance in Düsseldorf at the end of October to give the premiere
t h i s pa g e : Johannes Brahms, lithograph portrait, ca. 1865, by Georg Engelbach (1817–1894). Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky | o p p o s i t e pa g e : Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) and Clara Schumann in performance. Reproduction of a pastel by Adolph von Menzel (1815–1905), 1854
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of Schumann’s Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (op. 131) as part of the Lower Rhine Music Festival, with the composer conducting. As a surprise for the violinist, Schumann, Dietrich, and Brahms each agreed to contribute to a sonata for violin and piano and then challenge Joachim to guess the respective authors. Dietrich was assigned the opening movement, Schumann volunteered an intermezzo and finale, and Brahms offered to supply the scherzo. They dubbed the project the F.A.E. Sonata, after the phrase that Joachim had taken as his motto: Frei aber einsam (Free but alone). The music was finished quickly, assembled into a performing edition, and inscribed with a reversed-initial dedication: “In expectation of the arrival of an honored and beloved friend.” Joachim was delighted with the gift, played the entire sonata through immediately with Clara at the keyboard, and correctly announced each movement’s composer without a moment of hesitation. He kept the score for the rest of his life, and only in 1906, just a year before his death, did he finally allow Brahms’s scherzo to be published.
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he scherzo is Brahms’s earliest extant piece for violin and piano, though he had already composed at least one full sonata for that instrumental combination that either he or Schumann lost on its way to the publisher. The piece (“good fun—and harmless,” according to William Murdoch in his study of Brahms) follows traditional three-part scherzo form, with a rather stormy C minor paragraph at the beginning and end, surrounding a more lyrical central trio. Though written when Brahms was still very young, the music bears his characteristic qualities: rich harmonic vocabulary, insistent rhythmic vitality, a sure sense of motific growth, and full textures.
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COMMENTS
ROBERT SCHUMANN Born June 8, 1810; Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856; Endenich, near Bonn, Germany
Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano in A Minor COMPOSED
1853
The day after Joachim’s performance of the F.A.E. Sonata, Schumann began expanding his contribution of an intermezzo and finale into a full sonata with the addition of an opening movement and a scherzo. The two new movements were finished in three days (!), but Schumann’s breakdown and attempted suicide (by throwing himself into the Rhine) in February threw his affairs into disorder. The sonata, his third for violin and piano, was never prepared for publication, though it was played informally before Schumann’s death three years later. The score was not published until 1956 and formally premiered on March 20, 1956, at Wigmore Hall in London in a performance by violinist Gerhard Seitz and pianist Margaret Kitchin.
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he first movement uses as its main theme a strong chordal motif— previewed in the slow introduction that opens the sonata—which erupts in tempestuous, wide-ranging figurations. A brief moment of lyrical
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contrast serves as the second theme. The development section explores the dramatic potential of the themes. An abrupt silence and the main theme’s forceful return mark the recapitulation’s beginning. The scherzo is built around a rocket arpeggio in the piano that the violin sometimes shares but more often arches above. The central trio is a duet between the violin and the piano’s bass line, for which the right hand provides a fluttering background. The intermezzo is a tender, wordless song whose theme encompasses the widely spaced intervals produced by Joachim’s F.A.E motto. The sonata-form finale begins with stern chords (F–A–E in the bass), introducing the restless main theme, which combines short lyrical phrases with tense, snapping dotted rhythms. The snapping figures propel the music into its second theme, a downward-leaping violin melody that incorporates the dotted rhythms. The compact development section deals mainly with the main theme before the recapitulation arrives upon the crest of an expressive climax. The second theme soars higher and brighter on its return, and the sonata culminates in a brilliant virtuosic display of dazzling passagework for both violin and piano.
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SERGEI PROKOFIEV Born April 23, 1891; Sontsovka, Ukraine Died March 5, 1953; Moscow, Russia
Five Melodies for Violin and Piano, Op. 35b COMPOSED
1920
One of the coups of Sergei Prokofiev’s two years in America, from 1918 to 1920, was winning a commission from the Lyric Opera of Chicago to write The Love for Three Oranges. The death of the company’s manager in December 1919, however, threw plans for the new production into disarray, and in April, Prokofiev went off to try his luck in France. He came back to the United States in the autumn to push along preparations for the opera’s staging, but he was stymied by a contract dispute with the company and so tried to turn the trip to some advantage by arranging a long concert tour as a pianist, including six weeks in California. Though his recitals excited little interest, he found the West Coast
delightful, not least because there he met Lina Llubera, a young Spanish singer who had spent part of her childhood in Russia, and fell in love for the first time in his life as far as anyone had noticed. Some of the initial flush of emotion over Lina was poured into a set of expressive vocalises—wordless songs—written in December 1920 for performance with the Kyiv-born soprano Nina Koshetz, an eminent interpreter of Russian songs (especially those of Rachmaninov) whom Prokofiev intended to originate the role of Fata Morgana in The Love for Three Oranges. After giving these Five Melodies with Mme Koshetz in New York City on March 27, 1921, however, he decided that “the form proved to be impractical” and rewrote them for violin and piano during his American tour of 1925 with the help of the noted Polish violinist Paul Kochanski, who was then teaching at the Juilliard School.
o p p o s i t e pa g e : Robert Schumann, daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner, 1850. Hamburg, Germany t h i s pa g e : Sergei Prokofiev, ca. 1918, New York City. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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COMMENTS
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in D Major, Op. 94a COMPOSED
1942–43
Prokofiev conceived a special fondness for the flute during his stay in the 1920s in the United States, where he encountered what he called the “heavenly sound” of the French virtuoso Georges Barrère, solo flutist of the New York Symphony Orchestra and teacher at the Juilliard School. Two decades later, during some of the darkest days of World War II in the Soviet Union, Prokofiev turned to the flute as the inspiration for one of his most halcyon compositions. “I had long wished to write music for the flute,” he said, “an instrument which I felt had been undeservedly neglected. I wanted to write a sonata in delicate, fluid classical style.” The Sonata for Flute and Piano in D major, his only such work for a wind instrument, was begun in September 1942 in Alma-Ata, where he and many other Russian artists had been evacuated as a precaution against the invading German armies. Indeed, the city served as an important movie production site for the country at that time, and Prokofiev worked there with director Sergei Eisenstein on their adaptation of the tale of Ivan the Terrible as a
successor to their brilliant Alexander Nevsky of 1938. It was as something of a diversion from the rigors and subject matter of Ivan that Prokofiev undertook the Sonata for Flute, telling his fellow composer Nikolai Myaskovsky that creating such a cheerful, abstract work during the uncertainties of war was “perhaps inappropriate at the moment, but pleasurable.” Early in 1943, Prokofiev moved to Perm in the Urals, and it was in the relative calm of that city that the sonata was completed during the summer. When the work was premiered in Moscow on December 7, 1943, by flutist Nikolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, it drew as much attention from violinists as flutists. David Oistrakh persuaded the composer to make an adaptation for violin, which that master string player and Lev Oborin introduced on June 17, 1944, as the Violin Sonata no. 2, op. 94a. (Though Prokofiev’s only other sonata for violin, begun in 1938, was not completed until 1946, he dubbed it no. 1.) The D major sonata has since come to be regarded equally as the province of wind and string recitalists. Israel Nestyev called this sonata “the sunniest and most serene of [Prokofiev’s] wartime compositions,” and Dmitri Shostakovich allowed that it was “a perfectly magnificent work.” The
a b o v e : Sergei Prokofiev, in a portrait by Pyotr Konchalovsky (1876–1956), 1934
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piece has frequently been compared in its formal lucidity and immediate appeal to the classical symphony, though the sly, youthful insouciance of the earlier work is here replaced by a mature, comfortably settled mode of expression. “The character of the sonata’s principal images,” Nestyev continued, “the quiet, gentle lyricism of the first and third movements, the capricious merriment of the second movement, and the playful dance quality of the finale suit the color of the instruments splendidly.”
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ach of the four movements is erected upon a classical formal model. The main theme of the opening sonata-form Andantino is almost wistful in the simplicity with which it outlines the principal tonality of the work. A transition of greater animation leads to the subsidiary subject, whose wide range and dotted rhythms do not inhibit its lyricism. In
typical classical fashion, the exposition is marked to be repeated. The development elaborates both themes and adds to them a quick triplet figure played by the violin to begin the section. A full recapitulation, with appropriately adjusted keys, rounds out the movement. The second movement is a brilliantly virtuosic scherzo whose strongly contrasting trio is a lyrical strain in duple meter. The Andante follows a three-part form (A–B–A), with a skittering central section providing formal balance for the lovely song of the outer paragraphs. The finale is a joyous rondo based on the dancing melody given by the violin in the opening measures.
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.
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PROFILES Maxim Vengerov Violin Universally hailed as one of the world’s finest musicians and often referred to as the greatest living string player in the world today, Grammy Award winner Maxim Vengerov enjoys international acclaim as a conductor and one of the most in-demand soloists. He began his career as solo violinist at age five and won the Wieniawski and Carl Flesch international competitions at ages ten and fifteen, respectively. He studied with Galina Tourchaninova and Zakhar Bron, making his first recording at ten, and went on to record extensively for high-profile labels, including Melodiya, Teldec, and EMI. In 2007, following in the footsteps of his mentor, the late Mstislav Rostropovich, Vengerov turned his attention to conducting and, in 2010, was appointed the first chief conductor of the Gstaad Festival Orchestra. The 2022–23 season saw him on an extensive recital tour in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He performed as soloist with orchestras in Montreal, Vienna, London, Paris, and Taipei and chamber music concerts at Carnegie Hall and in Switzerland. He also joined the Aspen and Bravo! Vail Festival in the United States this summer in recital, master classes, and concerto performance and celebrated forty years onstage at the
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Royal Albert Hall in a big gala concert in April 2023. In 2023–24 Vengerov opens the Shanghai International Arts Festival with Christoph Eschenbach, embarks on another worldwide recital tour around North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and performs orchestra concerts in Vienna, Paris, and Milan, among others. In 2020 he became Classic FM’s first solo artist-in-residence, releasing a new recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, works by Saint-Säens and Ravel, and a live recital from Carnegie Hall. Passionate about teaching and encouraging young talent, Vengerov is a professor at the Mozarteum University Salzburg and the Royal College of Music in London. In 2018 he became the goodwill ambassador for the Musica Mundi School, a unique institution supporting young talents. In his effort to make music learning accessible to everyone, in January 2021 he launched his online platform, www.maximvengerov.com, impacting 170 countries and reaching over 190 million people. Vengerov has been profiled in a series of documentaries, including Playing by Heart, recorded by Channel Four Television and screened at the TV Festival de Cannes in 1999, and Living the Dream, released worldwide and receiving the Gramophone Award for Best Documentary in 2008. In 2012 Maxim Vengerov was awarded an honorary visiting fellowship at Trinity College Oxford, and in 2019, he P H OTO BY D I A G O M A R I OT TA M E N D E Z
P ROF I L ES
received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Music London and the Order of Cultural Merit from the Princely Palace of Monaco. He has received numerous awards, including a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance, two Gramophone awards, a Classical Brit Award, five Edison Classical Music awards, two ECHO awards, and a World Economic Forum Crystal Award, the latter honoring artists who have used their art to improve the state of the world. He plays the “Kreutzer” Stradivarius violin of 1727.
Polina Osetinskaya Piano Internationally acclaimed pianist Polina Osetinskaya began her career at age five and was soon hailed as a wunderkind in the former Soviet Union at the same time as contemporary Maxim Vengerov. She gave her first concert at age six and entered the Central School of Music of the Moscow Conservatory at seven. Osetinskaya continued her studies at the Leningrad Conservatory under Marina Wolf and later at the Moscow Conservatory under the famous Vera Gornostaeva. She has performed on most major stages, including Vienna’s Musikverein, London’s Barbican Centre, Rome’s Teatro Argentina, and other venues in Germany, Poland, the United States, P H OTO E L E N A G A L I A S K A R O VA
Russia, and Israel. Osetinskaya has appeared with musicAeterna, Mariinsky Orchestra, Evgeny Svetlanov Symphony Orchestra, and Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. This season, she performs with the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, and National Chamber Orchestra of Moldova. Polina Osetinskaya has worked with conductors such as Teodor Currentzis, Andrey Boreyko, Tugan Sokhiev, Laurent Petitgirard, Yan Pascal Tortelier, and Alexander Sladkovsky. In recital, Osetinskaya is known for her experimental programs, juxtaposing works by contemporary composers with traditional classical works. She is also very much at home with the post-avantgarde composers such as Valentin Silvestrov, Leonid Desyatnikov, and Arvo Pärt and presented a few projects as an actress and pianist at the same time. Polina Osetinskaya has collaborated with many recording companies, including Quartz, Naxos, Sony Music, Bel Air, and Melodiya. She has been awarded the Maly Triumph Prize and wrote her bestseller autobiography, Farewell, Sadness, an account of her wunderkind years. In the 2023–24 season, Polina Osetinskaya makes her solo debuts at the Berlin Philharmonic, the National Gallery in London, and Laeiszhalle in Hamburg. She also performs in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Cyprus, the United States, and South America and returns to Carnegie Hall in a duo recital with Maxim Vengerov. CS O.O RG
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