FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL

The character of Sabina in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a direct reflection of the title. She lives life as if she knows it is short and to be relished in the moment. The result is a tendency to see relationships as temporary and disposable. As Kundera writes of Sabina, “Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.”

Whether any of the composers on this program betrayed anyone is not our concern. They certainly went off into the unknown, writing music of arresting originality and depth. Two of the works may be new to listeners — Paquito D’Rivera’s Three Pieces for Clarinet and Piano and Jean Sibelius’s Nights of Jealousy — while the improvisation featuring clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski and percussionist Jamey Haddad is sure to head into uncharted territory. The remaining two fantasies are familiar in one way or another. Carmen, who betrays Don José in Bizet’s opera and meets her doom, is a figure of endless fascination, as can be heard in Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie for violin and piano. In the last year of his life, Schubert composed a number of his greatest masterpieces, among them the Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands, a glorious immersion into darkness and lightness.

Paquito D’Rivera (born 1948) was a virtuoso saxophonist and clarinetist before adding composer to his list of accomplishments. For his contribution to the worlds of jazz, Latin, and classical music, he has won numerous Grammy Awards and received a 2005 National Medal of Arts. The Cuban-American composer wrote Three Pieces for Clarinet and Piano in the early 1990s, turning to music of his homeland and South America to generate these vibrant miniatures. The three movements take the instruments through dance forms based on old models. “Contradanza” hails from a country dance in 18th-century England that here sizzles with irresistible abandon, including foot stomps toward the end. The second movement, “Habanera,” is the first of two on this program. Originally a slow Cuban dance, it was adopted by Bizet for Carmen’s famously seductive aria, which makes a prominent appearance in the Waxman fantasia. D’Rivera heads further south to summon a swirling whirlwind in “Vals

Venezolano,” or Venezuelan waltz, complete with foot stomps by both players.

The German-born Franz Waxman (1906-1967) wrote a fair amount of concert music, including two oratorios, but he is best known for his Hollywood scores for such legendary films as Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, A Place in the Sun, and The Bride of Frankenstein. He composed the Carmen Fantasie — not to be confused with Pablo de Sarasate’s 1882 Carmen Fantasy — for the 1946 movie Humoresque as a vehicle for the protagonist, violinist Paul Boray, who is portrayed by actor John Garfield. All of the violin sequences in the film — including excerpts from the Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky concertos — show Garfield going through the masterly motions with inestimable help from the hands and artistry of Isaac Stern, who took over from the originally scheduled Jascha Heifetz. Waxman’s fantasia, which he expanded for concert purposes at Heifetz’s request, employs themes associated with the title character in Bizet’s opera that exploit the solo instrument’s expressive and pyrotechnical possibilities. It has long been a popular showpiece for intrepid violinists, in both Waxman’s duo and orchestral versions.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) is celebrated chiefly for his seven symphonies, tone poems, Violin Concerto, Finlandia, incidental music to plays, and other works featuring orchestra, but he also wrote a good deal of chamber music. This repertoire includes songs and instrumental pieces, among them an amalgam of the two in the extraordinary Svartsjukans nätter (Nights of Jealousy) for violin, cello, piano, soprano, and narrator. ChamberFest received permission from the Sibelius family to perform the unpublished 1893 score. The setting of a poem by the Finnish poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg — to be recited here in English — finds the narrator musing of his lost love, whom he encounters in a dream while walking in nature. The instruments open the piece with glistening gestures that hint at the ardor soon to be explored. As the narrator recalls his aching romance, a woman’s voice is heard in the distance — his former lover, Minna, who has become “another’s.”

The work precedes all of Sibelius’s symphonies, dating from the period when he was beginning to establish himself as Finland’s foremost composer with such tone poems as Kullervo, Four Legends from the Kalevala, and En saga. His series of melodramas range from the dramatic The Wood Nymph and Snöfrid to the intimate Svartsjukans nätter, written for a concert paying tribute to poet Runeberg (1804–1877). It is such an outpouring of passion and tenderness that one can only wonder why it has never been published. But Sibelius apparently recognized the value of what he had wrought: He drew several of its themes for the last two of his six impromptus for piano, which he also scored for string orchestra. The piano version has been championed by many major artists, including Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes.

[Text for Nights of Jealousy can be found on the next page.]

Music can be monumental without requiring monumental forces, as illustrated to supreme effect in Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands.

The seating of two pianists at one keyboard would appear to limit their ability to explore a world of expressive opportunities, but this couldn’t be further from the truth as conjured by Schubert. He wrote the work in early 1828 — he would die at the end of the year at age 31 — and played the premiere with Eduard von Bauernfeld in May. It is performed often and has been recorded by dozens of illustrious piano teams. In 1979, the choreographer Heinz Poll used the score to keen effect in his Fantasy in F minor for Ohio Ballet.

The Fantasie in F minor is cast in four movements, which proceed without pause, maintaining suspense throughout its evolution of moods and pianistic reciprocity. The opening movement’s dark theme gives way to the same music in F major before bursting into an angry section that will haunt the work. More vehemence arrives in the Largo, whose dotted and triple rhythms lead to a brief episode of Schubertian otherworldliness. The following Scherzo is a tripping waltz with clouds on the horizon that gradually take the pianists back to the first movement’s principal theme. But Schubert doesn’t merely repeat what he’s stated: He plunges the players into a massive fugue that builds in intensity, with lines echoed and transformed as they pass back and forth in agitated layers. Then a bar of silence intervenes before the opening movement’s two themes reappear and move tragically to the final bars, which contain what the musicologist Maurice Brown deems “the most remarkable cadence in the whole of Schubert’s work.”

There likely will be more than a few remarkable cadences — and other musical surprises — when clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski and percussionist Jamey Haddad embark on an improvisation with intrepid ChamberFest allies at concert’s end. Will these musicians be true to the concert’s title, choosing fidelity to certain themes and progressions or playfully betraying one another en route? Stay tuned.

© Donald Rosenberg

Nights of Jealousy

text by Johan Ludvig Runeberg

O dream, O heavenly, sweet, delightful dream! Of you shall I recount the earth’s barren fells, until their dissonant echo forgets the cry of pain they heard from me, and become accustomed to mutter merely A glad greeting to the astonished wanderer. So quieten, forests, your gentle sighing! And cease, brooks, your cheerful course for an instant! And cliffs, raise your greying brows, and all the spirits of the earth: listen – listen!

It was an evening, a Nordic summer evening, an evening when the sun did not retire within the earth’s embrace, but merely kissed her and then hastened back to the day’s delights; it was such an evening – the wide west lay and slumbered in a sea of gold and saffron, and over all the green hills in the east, like rose gardens in the blue stillness, the tattered, purple-tinged clouds gathered.

In dew and voluptuousness, nature lay still, and I – I wandered amid her wonders, silently, like nature herself. I knew no sorrow, but unconsciously within my heart dwelt a silent pain, like the hunter’s dart that in a wounded eagle’s side remains, yet when he later sits at the cliff edge, and mingles his blood with the sun’s rays, then he feels the torment within his breast but knows not from where it comes, nor when it shall cease; so with the melancholy I could not grasp, a riddle to myself, I walked among the field’s beauties, downcast and low.

When suddenly, from afar, a gentle sound, as if from lute strings lightly struck, dying in unison, reached my ears. I listened – another note, and again a sigh from the spirits within the lute, then later calm, a tranquility reigned, like the quiet of a dusky sound, when the last wave passes across the shoals and the rippling water shines like a mirror.

Then at once my pain had gone, and like a flower I felt at ease, just as the earth’s springs dry out, and the heavens rinse my tears, yet unconscious, like a flower, was my joy.

Carefree longing drew me hence to her, from whose embrace the sound had come, to her I hastened, as though borne on wings, and listened, and then listened more.

Then I came into an arbour, where each trunk raised verdant shields against the light, and not a breath of evening breeze disturbed the twilight sanctuary. No trace of footprints touched the ground, nor sign of working human hands, which seek to raise artistic crowns upon the ruined beauty of the land.

Every plant within the garden bloomed, each tree in sumer leaf arrayed; a flock of birds, air’s feathered children, sat, among the branches with their dreams, as their singing slumbered on their tongues.

I stopped, and there no longer knew, of suffering, or of naught else; my soul was like a ship at sea, stranded without stream or current, and no wind to fill its sails.

But then the heavenly sound came again, and at that instant every spring proclaimed a rich and solemn harmony, which filled melodically with a woman’s voice.

All that was silent in a trance sprang up, each bird then opened up its beak to sing, each leaf within the arbour shook, from every petal rained a gentle dew, and I, I heard the voice so close and near, and knew it then – for it was Minna’s voice.

If you had stood, wrapped in a haze upon a cliff, embraced by spring, and sensed the fragrant roses, even though their crimson hearts you had not seen, and in the warmth you bathed your limbs, although its source was out of sight, and you saw the fleeting storm dispel the hanging mist, as hills and valleys from the formlessness emerged, and if you saw with clarity the friends, who had your sensual joy supplied; then you knew what I became, at the moment Minna’s voice arose, and what I’d suffered, for so long, had sweetly taken, thought so true, within my soul such radiance shone, and love passed like the sun above.

Banished from my heart’s enchanted Eden was a single thought alone, that: Minna, Minna was another’s. Yet my happiness was all I felt, for us together; nothing more could dim my gladness as I ran to close the distance still between us and fall down before her feet.

But she, without surprise or fear, then looked at me with such a caring smile, as though I had been with her for an age; just like an angel to a child she seemed, as when the mother lays the cradle softly and in the dream the familiar sight appears.

But then the lute was heard no more. No broken word nor passing sigh was offered; but on the little bridge, and through the gaze between the heavens of our hearts, love, in all its myriad forms, was passed and pleasures and abodes exchanged.

Inseparable was our embrace, our lips could never be apart, and in her arms I lay and sensed the swelling of her breast, and drank the moisture from her cheeks and fainted from the ecstasy – and woke.

Translation © Daniel M. Grimley

sunday 18 june 11am-1pm