Matthew Hagle Brahms and His Contemporaries 11.5.22

2022 2023 NICHOLS CONCERT HALL PRESENTS

MATTHEW HAGLE

Brahms and His Contemporaries

November 5, 2022

S E A S O N S P O N S O R S

NICHOLS CONCERT HALL 2022-2023 The Music Institute of Chicago is grateful to the following sponsors, whose generous support helps us to entertain, inspire, and educate through live music performed by both new emerging artists and the most established artists of our time.

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DEAR FRIENDS, Welcome! The 2022-23 season is one of spectacular diversity including chamber music, a Gospel tribute, romantic era piano repertoire, a family concert, MLK celebration, elegant jazz, and dynamic alumni performers – truly something for everyone.

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You can learn more about MIC’s many activities, register for lessons, and purchase tickets by visiting www.musicinst.org. I look forward to seeing you and your friends throughout the year at Nichols Concert Hall!

Mark George President and CEO Music Institute of Chicago

ONE COMPOSER, ONE COMMUNITY First launched in 2021, One Composer, One Community (OCOC) focuses on the life and work of a single, often underrepresented BIPOC composer over the course of an academic year. This composer’s work is featured on the Nichols Concert Hall series as well as in other special events, including gatherings to discuss aspects of the composer’s life and music through autobiographical, biographical, or critical writing, as well as though active music listening.

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS (1887-1959) This year we celebrate the life and work of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Considered the single most significant creative figure in 20th century Brazilian art music, Villa-Lobos synthesized contemporary European techniques with elements of national music to create his unique compositional style. A prolific composer, Villa-Lobos penned more than 2,000 orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and vocal works.

ABOUT THE CONCERT This concert came out of a personal project: to learn and play the complete late piano music of Johannes Brahms, six collections of shorter pieces, of varying lengths and moods.

Along the way, it occurred to me that Brahms’s interest in the short “character piece,” as it is called, was shared by other composers alive during Brahms’s life or shortly after, and that hints of the Brahmsian voice might be found in some surprising places. Moreover, looking at Brahms in combination with these composers might provide a bridge from the 19th to the 20th century, from late Romanticism to early Modernism. This concert is a sampling from three longer programs that I put together for potential radio performance. In creating tonight’s particular program, I wanted to take you through a stylistic and emotional space that I associate with late Brahms: lyricism, introspection, craftsmanship, awkwardness, heroism, agitation, and consolation are all here in these works by these composers. I hope they give you as much pleasure and thought as they have given me.

Thank you for being here. I would also like to thank John Piepgras and Mark George for their support with this project.

- Matthew Hagle

MUSICIANSHIP PROGRAM Led by Director Matthew Hagle, the Music Institute of Chicago offers in-person and online musicianship classes for students age five through adult.

WHAT’S MUSICIANSHIP? Musicianship includes sight-singing, rhythmic reading, dictation and keyboard skills as well as music theory, history, and literature.

MUSICIANSHIP HELPS ALL THE MUSICAL PUZZLE PIECES FALL INTO PLACE! • Achieve greater competency and enjoyment playing your instrument • Increase your critical thinking skills • Express musical ideas more effectively

Registration Deadline: November 15, 2022 Info & Registration at: www.musicinst.org/musicianship

MATTHEW HAGLE Brahms and His Contemporaries Saturday, November 5 at 7:30 pm

PROGRAM Each half of the program will be performed without pause.

No applause between works.

Intermezzo in A Minor, Op. 118, No. 1

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Intermezzo in E Major, Op. 116, No. 4

Johannes Brahms

Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 116, No. 5

Johannes Brahms

Nocturne No. 11 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 104, No. 1

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) Leicht, Zart (Lightly, tenderly) Langsam (Slow) Sehr langsame (Very slow) Rasch, aber leicht (Fast, but light) Etwas rasch (Somewhat fast) Sehr langsam (Very slow) From Out of Doors Béla Bartók(1881-1945) “With Drums and Pipes” From Próle do Bébé Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) “A Pobresinha” (The Rag Doll)

Intermezzo in E Major, Op. 116, No. 6

Johannes Brahms

Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1

Johannes Brahms

Tale in B Minor, Op. 20, No. 2 (“Campanella”)

Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951)

INTERMISSION Intermezzo in B Minor, Op. 119, No. 1 From In the Mists Andantino Presto

Johannes Brahms Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)

Tale in C-sharp Minor, Op. 35, No. 4

Nikolai Medtner

Nocturne No. 6 in D-flat Major, Op. 63 From Images, Book 1 Refléts dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water)

Gabriel Fauré Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Intermezzo in E-flat Minor, Op.118, No. 6

Johannes Brahms

Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op.119, No. 4

Johannes Brahms

This evening’s concert is made possible, in part, by support from John and Kathy Piepgras

MATTHEW HAGLE, PIANO Pianist Matthew Hagle is a musician of great versatility and depth, whose performances are a rare mixture of musical understanding, imaginative programming, pianistic command and beauty of sound. In solo performance he often tries to shed new light on the piano repertoire, using thoughtful programming and committed performance to present lesser-known works and to illuminate the traditional canon. In a more conventional vein, he has also performed all of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas in a series of live radio recitals, and he is currently in the process of exploring the complete later pieces of Brahms. Hagle is also highly valued as a collaborator by many other artists. With violinist Rachel Barton Pine, he has released three acclaimed CDs on the Cedille label, and performed many recitals in North and South America. His piano duo performances with Mio Isoda-Hagle have been highlights of the annual Chicago Duo Piano Festival.

Other chamber music partners have been the Parker Quartet, the Avalon Quartet, Quintet Attacca, and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Matthew Hagle has been heard in concert halls throughout the United States, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Symphony Space in New York, and in concert at the United States Supreme Court. Outside of the U.S., he has performed at venues in England, Canada, Brazil, Australia and Japan. A resident of the Chicago area, Hagle performs frequently at local spaces including the Ravinia Festival, Symphony Center, and the Chicago Cultural Center. Hagle can often be heard on radio station WFMT in Chicago, and has also been heard on NPR’s Performance Today and Minnesota Public Radio’s St. Paul Sunday Morning programs. Among others, the New York Times has described him as “a sensitive pianist,” Clavier magazine praised the “rare clarity and sweetness”of his playing, and the Springfield (MA) Republican remarked that he “played with unaffected brilliance and profound understanding.” Hagle’s performance of Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata in the Sydney International Piano Competition received special notice and favorable commentary in Australian national radio’s coverage of the competition.

Hagle is a dedicated teacher of piano, music theory, and composition, whose students have won high honorsin local and national competitions and gone on to study music at some of the country’s finest music schools. He is currently on the faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago, where he is director of the Musicianship program in addition to his teaching duties. In the past he has taught at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and at Elmhurst College. His own studies were with Robert Weirich and Donald Currier at the Peabody Conservatory, with Claude Frank at the Yale School of Music (where he received the DMA), and with Maria Curcio Diamand in London as a Fulbright Scholar. A comfortable speaker on diverse musical subjects, Hagle likes to use this ability to draw connections between very new and older music, or between music and other art forms. In his spare time he likes to read on a variety of subjects, to try to learn other languages, and to spend time with his two children.

PROGRAM NOTES BRAHMS: The Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 1 begins the program with the turbulent mood and spinning pianistic figurations that are associated with the keyboard music of Robert Schumann. Schumann, towards the end of his life, was a mentor to the young Brahms and a potent inspiration to his creativity. To the older composer’s imagination and idealism, Brahms added a care for structure that led unsympathetic observers to call him cautious and overly traditional. The turbulence dies down and the piece ends quietly, leading to the Intermezzo Op. 116, No. 4 - a lyrical and enigmatic work. It starts with a series of three questioning notes (B - B# - C#) that are answered by a melody above; these two strands return and are developed by the composer into a composition that is mysterious but ultimately tranquil. The Intermezzo Op. 116, No. 5 takes the first two notes from the “questioning” pattern, and puts them in a minor key, creating fragmented 2-note gestures that accumulate a rolling motion, and gradually subside. This 2-note pattern takes us into the next piece, and also into the next century.

FAURÉ: The French composer’s Nocturne No. 11 in F-sharp Minor is from his later years, in which a style that had once been elegant and expressive became more austere and reserved. This piece, dedicated “in memory of Noémie Lalo,” uses the 2-note figure, expanded here into a melody, along with a repeated single note accompaniment, to express the composer’s grief at the death of a friend.

SCHÖNBERG: The 6 Short Piano Pieces, Op. 19 are the culmination of a trend towards abstraction (fragmentary melodies, chromatic harmony) that can be followed through the earlier Brahms and Fauré pieces to this point. In this case, the trend is one the composer cultivated deliberately, as Schönberg admired Brahms and used him as a point of departure, an anchor for his modernistic experiments.

These pieces are all brief, some of them less than a minute, and very expressive, but expressive of a strange, intense, and sometimes unsettling psychological world. The first piece is the longest; it darts fleetingly from one short melody to another. The second piece is held together by a slightly obsessive repeated pattern, while the third is an exaggeration of the expressive gestures of Wagner and his successors. The fourth piece starts with a dancelike melody and ends by spitting out a violent flurry of notes; the fifth piece vaguely resembles a waltz. The

sixth piece is one of the most unusual of its time: built around two chords, it uses fewer notes to greater effect than had ever been done before. The piece ends with two low notes, marked “like a sigh” in the music.

BARTÓK: “With Drums and Pipes” is the first movement of his Out of Doors suite; both these instruments are imitated in the jaunty, dance-like music of this short piece. Certainly very different from the dreamy and introspective music that precedes it in this program, this shows how far the character piece and use of the piano had changed from Brahms’s usage. And yet there is a muscularity and use of the lower registers of the piano that can be found in some Brahms pieces that we will hear later.

VILLA-LOBOS: “A Pobresinha (The Rag Doll)” from Prole dô Bebe, Book I has a kind of melancholy charm. This quality, and its harmony, centered around E, like the pieces before and after it, make it a good transition from the Bartók to the Brahms that will follow.

BRAHMS: The Intermezzo, Op. 116, No. 6 links back to the two earlier pieces that used the “question” (B-B#-C#) and is perhaps the most straightforward and lyrical of the three. It is followed by the Rhapsody, Op. 79, No.1, the longest piece on the first half, and a piece in Brahms’s heroic voice, with a wider variety of moods and sounds and a greater physicality in the piano writing.

MEDTNER: The first half ends with the Tale Op. 20, No. 2 “Campanella” by the Russian composer Nikolay Medtner. Medtner was careful to specify that this “Song of the Bell” was not music about bells, but rather the “tale told by the bell”; presumably a village bell that had seen disturbing events, for the music is dramatic and rather menacing. Like Brahms, Medtner had a conservative streak and was a scrupulous craftsman; both composers were fond of the process of canon or contrapuntal imitation, where the same melody is played starting at different times, producing a full and complex musical texture. Medtner’s title in Russian for this piece is “Skaszki,” which was a literary genre used earlier

by Pushkin, among others, with many fantastic and grotesque elements. This background gives Medtner’s piece a theatricality that is a little different from what Brahms generally did in this genre. The piece ends with a deep, resonant, bell-like low B.

BRAHMS: The Intermezzo Op. 119, No. 1 is, typically for this composer, a multifaceted creation: a deeply and uniquely personal expression of sorrow, a daring exploration in the use of new harmonies, and a display of time-honored craft. By piling one third above another, Brahms creates unusual and poignant sonorities: the “eleventh” and “thirteenth” chords that became basic vocabulary for the next generation of composers. But where these composers reveled in the new sounds, Brahms still played “by the rules,” resolving the dissonances in traditional fashion, but bending tradition so that the interplay of dissonance and resolution became ambiguous, creating an effect that was both disquieting and stable, sorrowful and accepting.

JANÁČEK: The next two pieces are the final movements of the great Czech composer’s suite In the Mists, written in 1912. The music’s emotional territory of melancholy and nostalgia is one that Brahms also explored to great effect, but produced with a different technical means. Janáček had a traditional training at the Leipzig and Vienna Conservatories, which he disowned in order to search for a personal style based on Czech music and speech. The 3rd movement gives some indication of how beautiful, direct, and ineffably strange this style could be. The movement is built around a simple, folk-like melody, which is interrupted by a dissonant echo of itself (never resolved).

This type of interruption is typical of impressionist or modernist composers, but none of the other composers who write in this way also have Janáček’s gift of naive lyricism; the combination is a powerful one. The movement develops the simple melody but then restates it at the end, with the dissonant echo still unresolved. This leads into the fourth movement, which begins with a whirling, improvisatory melody. Janacek returns to this melody several times in this movement, eventually ending with it; in between, we hear a series of related episodes, each one becoming progressively more intense.

MEDTNER: Medtner’s Tale in C-sharp Minor, Op. 35, No. 4 is prefaced in the score with a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Lear, from the speech in Act III where the insane king shouts defiantly at the wind and rain. Medtner’s piece is storm music in the great tradition of Chopin and Liszt; at the same time, it is full of the intricate counterpoint that both Medtner and Brahms were fond of using.

FAURÉ: The Nocturne, No. 6 in D-flat Major is considered by many to be the high point of his piano works, and one of the greatest pieces of French piano music in the repertoire. Fauré has been referred to as a “French Brahms” and this piece highlights both the similarities and differences between the two composers. It is structurally intricate: there are three main melodies, but each new section doubles back on itself to a previous one, creating a stream-of-consciousness

effect that was to become even more prominent in the next generation.

DEBUSSY: Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water) is the first movement of the suite Images, Book 1. The key and general mood of intimacy are similar to Fauré’s Nocturne No. 6, and in this case Fauré’s stream of consciousness is taken even farther: there is a feeling of freedom and improvisation, even as the music returns to a few key ideas. In this case, the melodies are more fragmentary, the harmonies stranger, and the use of the instrument even more creative and novel, than what Fauré had done. This would seem to be classic “Impressionism” (a term the composer disliked), very far from Brahms, and even so, Brahms can be found working in this general area, as the next piece will show.

BRAHMS: The program will finish with two of Brahms’s most distinctive short piano works. The Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 6 is music of great emotional power - it has been said that Brahms put music of orchestral color and symphonic scope in a piano piece of a few minutes’ length. The beginning sections are very soft, and make use of the indistinct piano figurations and pedaling that would later be called “Impressionistic” when used by Debussy and Ravel; Brahms uses these as accompaniments to an elegaic melody that, eventually, will grow into a climax of great intensity, subsiding near the end to music that resembles the beginning. The Rhapsody Op. 119, No. 4 is also music of great range, but of very different overall character. The term “Rhapsody,” when applied in these later pieces by Brahms, usually indicates music with powerful chordal writing, constructed in numerous strongly contrasting sections, and possessing a heroic or epic quality. All of this is true here. The piece returns momentarily to its beginning before veering off to a dramatic, surprising ending.

Program notes by Matthew Hagle

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