2018 Program Book by tippetrise

2018 SUMMER MUSIC PROGR AM

“

would like this to be a place of collaboration, of creation, of permanent change, the opposite of a museum, which is a place for preserving works of art in one definite place. The museum part, which represents permanence, is but a small part of the overall project. All the activities taking place around these works of art are much more important than the museum part, and they give life to the art. Because of these activities, the works of art continue to live because they communicate their message and dialogue with the public.” — Aimé Maeght

2018 SUMMER MUSIC PROGR AM July 6â&#x20AC;&#x201D;September 8 Fishtail, Montana

The Founders

Cathy and Peter Halstead have known each other

since they were 16 years old. They both grew up in families that for generations have sought to bring art and education to communities both in the United States and abroad. Cathy is an abstract painter who has shown around the world. Peter is a pianist, photographer, and poet. Some of his poetry is on adrianbrinkerhoffpoetryfoundation.org. Six piano albums are on pianistlost.com. A Winter Ride and Tippet Rise from Princeton Architectural Press are available at Tippet Rise. Cathy and Peter are trustees of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, which makes more than 90 grants annually to charities in the United States and England. They were inspired to found Tippet Rise by Hudson Valleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Storm King Art Center, Englandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Snape Maltings concert hall, and the many institutions they have been lucky enough to work with, as a way to share all the things they love: music, sculpture, poetry, and nature.

About Tippet Rise

Tippet Rise Art Center Set on a 10,260-acre working sheep and cattle

ranch, Tippet Rise hosts classical chamber music and recitals and exhibits large-scale, outdoor sculptures. Concerts are held on summer weekends in the Olivier Music Barn, or outdoors under the Domo. Sculptures can be toured by van, bicycle, and on foot. Tippet Rise is located in Fishtail, Montana, in the rolling foothills of the Beartooth Mountains.

2018 Summer Season

2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome To Tippet Rise 8

Before Tippet Rise 26

The Tiara Story 44

Looking for Paradise 10

Sustainability 28

The Evolution of Olivier Hall 46

The Philosophy of Tippet Rise 12

Working Ranch 30

The Pianos at Tippet Rise 60

The Ecosystem of Tippet Rise 18

The Sculptors of Tippet Rise 34

Week One July 6-7 88

The Canyons of Tippet Rise 20

The Sculptures of Tippet Rise 36

Week Two July 13-14 112

CLICK ON ANY PHOTO TO GO TO THAT PAGE 6

About Tippet Rise

TIPPET RISE ART CENTER Week Three July 20-21 136

Week Eight September 7-8 240

Tippet Rise and the Community 300

Week Four August 3-4 154

Desert Island Albums 262

Tippet Rise Partnerships 302

Week Five August 10-11 174

Works to Live by 264

The Team at Tippet Rise 304

Week Six August 17-18 194

Artist Profiles 268

The Romance of the Piano 310

Week Seven August 24-25 212

Educational Programs 298

Staff and Credits 316

VIEW A SELECTION OF OUR 2018 VIDEOS ON PAGE 314 2018 Summer Season

Welcome to Tippet Rise from Cathy and Peter Halstead

We were raised in New England, with its smattering of Thoreau, Whitman, and Transcendentalism, its upstanding small clapboard communities with their church spires lending a sense of honesty and devotion to the Currier & Ives winterscape.

In Montana we share a great affinity with the values of our Puritan ancestors. We have the gift of the land, with the sense of awe and humility it inspires in all of us. There is nothing finer than a day spent in hard work on the land, chopping wood, shoveling snow,

About Tippet Rise

driving a tractor, or tending cattle, to return to the delights of family and hearth. Throw in a few good books and a poem before bedtime, and you have the essence of a life well spent. In Montana we are lucky to be far away from the noise and distractions which intrude on this bucolic American dream. Our cities are just the right size, and always close to the outdoors. We are free to pursue the Teddy Roosevelt concept of rugged individualism, life at our own pace, in our own time, with plenty of nature around.

The one thing missing from this idyll was being able to go next door and hear a concert. With our third season at Tippet Rise, our friends and neighbors can do that. We can be a gathering place, with good food and fellow feeling. Everyone here feels immensely lucky to have been taken into this wonderful community, and to be able to add that one more ingredient to a magical childhood, as Isabelle Johnson slyly snuck in the south of France to her paintings of Stillwater County, to broaden our sense of the way we see ourselves. The way we add a croissant to our breakfast, or English tea to our afternoons, we can add Mozart to our Saturday mornings.

Everyone who played music in Fishtail last summer wanted to come back, and they will, spread out over a few years to make room for new friends and new ways of integrating music into our evenings. People from all over have been tempted to take part in the spirit of the hills here, a shiver of warmth and excitement that wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen without our visitors who have traveled great distances to experience the exhilaration of our small, big-hearted community, or without you, our friends and neighbors, who make it real.

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Looking for Paradise by Cathy and Peter Halstead

About Tippet Rise

We had heard that Montana was the last frontier. We owed it to ourselves to see it

before we settled for something less open. And it was true. Montana put every place we’d looked at to shame. We looked all over the state, from grassy plains on the Hi-Line to river ranches in Paradise and Gallatin Valleys to the isolated prairies of the Rocky Mountain Front to more wooded smaller ranches around Glacier National Park. We always liked the rolling parts of every ranch we looked at, but they were usually small parts of each ranch, with the rest of the land unusable for our purposes. We wanted to be able to hide sculptures in gentle canyons. Finally, we found Bev Hall’s ranch in Fishtail; it was exactly what we’d been looking for. It had no bad parts; it was 100% good parts. It was all deeply rolling: our favorite kind of terrain. It was covered in tall grass and sage, which brought back the Scottish Highlands and our many summers in Nantucket. It had few trees, so it wouldn’t be subject to the mountain pine bark beetle kill, which was turning much of the West into a fire trap. It was under the Beartooths, which were a revelation: alpine tundra feet from the road, Gothic mountains surrounded by tarns and meadows, which usually would take days to access but were here minutes away, all on the road to Yellowstone’s vast valleys and prehistoric wildlife. There were a few other abutting ranches available, and ultimately, we put together twelve places to make one contiguous area. There must be spots equally beautiful somewhere; but in years of looking, this was the most amazing landscape we ever found. In this part of the state, the land lightens. It goes from dark pines to endless horizons of hay. The air becomes radiant, as if it carried grasses from the plains in it. The mountains become somehow comforting, accessible, while also being completely Jurassic. We decided to name the ranch Tippet Rise. A sheep’s coat slows its growth in winter, but in the spring new growth resumes. This soft new growth is called the rise, and is easier for shepherds to roo, that is, to comb the wool from the sheep. We have always felt that sheep were natural accomplices of outdoor art, maybe inspired by Henry Moore’s sculpture park at Much Hadham, where ewes huddle around the art, or the sheep in the fields around the Glyndebourne Opera, where the audience strolls during the hopefully golden intermission. A rise is also a gradual up-thrusting bench, as our ranch is. A tippet is not only the twine that ties the lure to the fishing line, but it was Cathy’s nickname for her mother. Cathy had been reading a book about a cat called Tippy, which she couldn’t pronounce. One day she called her mother “Tippet,” and it stuck. All of the kids who surrounded Tippet called her that. She was a mentor to all of us. Sadly, she died very young. We thought it was about time she came back again; it is her spirit which has been the standard with which we’ve conducted our lives. The people we love never really die. They rise again out of memory, out of dreams. 2018 Summer Season

The Philosophy of Tippet Rise by Peter Halstead

What people mention most about Tippet Rise

is its alchemy, where the atmosphere dictates the interplay between people and sculpture, between sculpture and music. Lucas Debargue, the young French pianist who was the audience favorite at the last Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, made his American debut at Tippet Rise last summer. Before he played, he asked to have a tour of the ranch because he said he felt the atmosphere, and he wanted to learn more about it so he could put it into his playing. Art involves not just a work, but the atmosphere which the work creates, the atmosphere which supports the work. In the way Stonehenge evokes a lost civilization based on the stars, the atmosphere of a sculpture park is a unique collaboration among the art, the land, and the sky. What Tippet Rise tries to create is a correspondence among the elements, a metaphor. 12

About Tippet Rise

Tippet Rise is a metaphor in a way, where the synergy among music, landscape, sky, and art makes something else, a kind of poetry. Ensamble Studio, who have three works on Tippet Rise, have arranged their pieces like star charts, to map the sky onto the land, to bring constellations down to earth, where we can see them. When we started Tippet Rise some seven years ago, Arup Engineers said we were at the forefront of the new direction towards small halls where music has a more immediate effect on the audience. With Arupâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s advice, we returned to the original divine ratio, the dimensions of the temple of Solomon, of the Parthenon, of the jewelboxes where Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn performed. This shape enlarges and focuses the sound of classical music; it brings it closer to what the composers expected. We wanted sculptures that fit the land, to annotate the music, to connect with the sky, to illustrate the sense of working with the land. The way this works

is that it was snowing at Tippet Rise, and the young French pianist Julien Brocal was visiting. He wrote a piece for himself and the young violinist Caroline Goulding called Snowing on the Moon, which in turn inspired me to write a poem, and both the piece and the poem were made into a film by Mickey Houlihan and Kathy Kasic, using footage from NASA, reflecting planets on the Calder sculpture Stainless Stealer. Calder’s mobiles are about unseen unifying forces, so we projected planets on his metal wings. The film is on our website, and is called Stainless Stealer Steals the Universe, because its reflecting steel absorbs the NASA footage and reflects it back, the way Timon of Athens accused everything of being a thief: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun… (Timon of Athens, Act IV, scene iii) Baudelaire has said that nature is a forest of metaphor, where the symbols of words, scents, and colors become flesh. So there’s a sense of metaphor, of poetry, to music

and sculpture at Tippet Rise. Metaphor is a bridge; it’s the space between sound and sky, between music in the air and concrete structures on the land. At Tippet Rise, we’re trying to make our values visible, for our grandchildren, for everyone’s grandchildren, and for the world. We’re trying to make poetry come true: the correlations, the conspiracies, among place, music, and art that pass the human spirit into the future. At the end of this essay is one of three translations of Baudelaire’s poem Correspondances, which illustrates some of this. To explicate some of its images: Leaves are snapshots of the summer. Their ragged edges trace the summer, as we ourselves are tracings of our passage through books, moviesand meadows. The reality of a photograph becomes imaginary as the photo fades and becomes more of a trick Escher illusion. The dying leaves of autumn are summer’s shadow, its ectoplasm, spread out on the ground, accidental documentaries which bring the phloem and xylem of a tree,

2018 Summer Season

its history, out into view. As much as leaves are an emblem of the hidden spirit of the tree, so nature is the edge of a hidden world which supports us, although we can’t see without instruments its small atoms or its enormous nebulae. But it is the lattice of the world, the energy grid which underlies everything, which transmutes thought, which parallels time, which permits the transmigration of matter, which the music of the spheres references. Music itself is energy made flesh, variants of equations, orbits, atomic spins, which manifest themselves as frequencies, along with other unhearable frequencies such as ultraviolet rays, gamma rays, solar flares, the Northern Lights. When you drive under power lines you can feel the fizz of the frequencies. Sometimes you feel the tingle of a cosmic ray passing through your body. These mysterious single events are accidental windows into the larger world of atomic structure, which is what creates the scaffolding on which our lives are hung. Music is a harbinger, an avatar, an eidolon of this invisible world of whizzing atom tails and magnetic relationships. Music exists in the small window of hearable harmonies. On either side of these harmonies are the overtones and undertones of a larger cosmos, just as there are millions more colors than our eyes can see, millions more galaxies than even a telescope can make out. There are computer pieces which are composed out of tones beyond our hearing, vibrations both too low and too high for our ears’ very limited range. These notes, however, produce sympathetic vibrations within the gamut of our hearing, and these accidental neighbor notes become what we hear, and the piece the composer intends us to hear, 14

About Tippet Rise

although he wrote something else entirely: a piece calculated to produce ghost tones that become in fact the human translation of his ethereal scientific computer program. Goethe painted a work which, when you stared at its colors, produced a totally different image of complementary colors on your eyelid when you closed your eyes. It was this image which Goethe intended you to see. Goethe, a great scientist, wanted to illustrate how the vast invisible world creates “neighbor” relationships which intrude upon our more limited vision, and how we see only a small part of what’s there, as if we saw a corner of a vast painting of waterlilies. In fact, Monet’s paintings of water lilies were intended to be hung together in an enormous grouping of panels which, put together, illustrated his entire pond. When we see only one of the panels, we are seeing just a bit of what Monet wanted us to see. These panels have almost never been assembled in their entirety, so we effectively can never see what Monet saw (although we can see reduced versions of it in books and on the web). This is where virtual reality will eventually be able to bring us into such integrated environments. Monet chose to paint without his glasses, so he could see the blurred (and thus impressionist) world that he was used to, rather than a world corrected by science. Cameras existed at this time, and Monet took pictures to help plan his gardens, but the final product was a more romantic version of reality, which Monet preferred to the more clinical view of the camera. When I was in Venice, I took a vaporetti, a water taxi, and photographed Venice reflected in a metal fender on the boat for several hours. The floating palaces superimposed themselves on one another as the boat moved, and the complex reflections were much more

baroque than the poor reality. After a while, every tourist on the boat began photographing the fender themselves, although I’m not sure they saw the same mirage my telephoto and polarized lens captured. Such a lens can also see collages in a rear view mirror of a car which the eye can’t. And so there is a syzygy, an alignment of planets and stars, a synthesis, which becomes visible to us under certain conditions, which presents the world in a more Cubist way, with light reflected off formerly unnoticed bezels, with reflections in store windows

merging with the brain’s memory of what it saw in the last minute. I believe that we don’t so much see as collate, combining remembered views of our lives that include memories of friends, postcards, snapshots, a kind of Instagram where we brand the world and our travel through it to our own liking. This is what music is: bits and pieces, overheard snatches of sound, found art reassembled into a jumble of fractal, Cubist, Impressionist, Expressionist 2018 Summer Season

angles and colors. The more we know of painting and photography (such as neo-realism, photo reality, and such), the more techniques we bring to our personal paintings of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s complex synergies.

sonorous pianos. We always adopt the sharpest and most colorful television screens, the most useful computer touchscreens. Art should present itself with as many dimensions as possible.

When I was at Columbia University during the riots of 1968, I was the lone student on a faculty committee of scholars, sociologists, biographers, and musicologists who were trying to reinvent education, to formulate ways that learning could be made attractive to distracted students. Other colleges, such as Brown, devised curricula that students could assemble themselves. Columbia decided that classes should be interdisciplinary, so that art could be taught alongside music and literature. Bringing stories to music fleshes it out. A musician plays her own biography. She plays the stories the composer has planted in the music. He understands the subliminal texts, the hidden narrations, and he conveys those through phrasing, voicing, silences, pauses, emphases. The more you know of what happened the week the piece was composed, the more you can re-create the mood of the composer. Music requires multiple disciplines to define it, just as writing is amplified by photos and painting profits from a soundtrack.

Thus sculptures show themselves most variously when embedded in the complexities of nature, and music gains color when heard in a sculptural atmosphere. Our videos present a facsimile of performances, but they also try to add visual poetry to the narration. We will eventually add reality as a way of complementing the reality of our concerts. Poetry itself is a shortcut to the underlying meaning of a moment, of a life.

Increasingly in our culture we prefer videos to mere audios. We prefer stereo to mono, and surround sound to stereo. We will eventually demand virtual reality films and holographic computers, the way Beethoven always preferred the newer, more

Tippet Rise is an adventure in multitasking, a collage of experiences that we hope will flesh out nature through art, and music through nature, reality through technology, as the leaves below are a metaphor through which we see ourselves.

About Tippet Rise

All these disciplines are metaphors of one processing the world. Master classes explain the music, and may in fact be more multidimensional ways of enjoying music. We hope that everyone will read our programs and also watch the videos after the concerts, so enjoyable moments can be fixed in their minds. Google Institute uses surround videography to capture more of a work of art. We should use whatever techniques magnify the artistic experience.

LEAVES

Nature is a trick whose trees Are the root of our conspiracies: Trompe lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;oeil hints and pseudonyms With the future in their limbs:

Nature is a trick whose trees Softconspiracies: as night and dark as rhyme: Are the root of our Ancient snapshots stained by time, Trompe lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;oeil hints and pseudonyms Now-imaginary places With the future inWhose theirfaded limbs: edges trace us, as skin, Soft as night andEdges darkinnocent as rhyme: And some, original as sin, Ancient snapshots stained time, Light as autumnby on our face, Emblems spread out into space, Now-imaginary places Whose faded edges trace us, Incidental woodland scents Which turn our spirit into sense.

Edges innocent as skin, And some, original as sin, Light as autumn on our face, Emblems spread out into space, Incidental woodland scents Which turn our spirit into sense.

by Peter Halstead

2018 Summer Season

The Ecosystem of Tippet Rise

Tippet Rise is at the north end of the Greater

Yellowstone Ecosystem, some 22.6 million acres acting as a single unit around the immense caldera of the park. Montana science writer David Quammen put together a wonderful book on this in 2016 called Yellowstone, along with the photographers of National Geographic, who spent a year in the park. Tippet Rise is buffered on the west and north by the Beartooth Mountains, rising to the highest summits in Montana. This volcanism is forced to travel elsewhere such as up the Madison and Gallatin river valleys farther west, where Quake Lake, 6 miles long and 190 feet deep, was created in less than a month by an 80-million-ton landslide, which dammed the Madison River, all of it stemming from a seismic tremblor. Red Lodge is a small ski and mountain town at the lesserknown fifth entrance to Yellowstone. From Red Lodge you wind upwards through the many switchbacks of the Beartooth Highway to a succession of high tundra plateaus on top of the world, exposed to sudden squalls, summer blizzards, temperature drops-all the exhilarating benefits of the alpine world. This is the most easily accessed high mountain wilderness and the largest true high elevation plateau in the United States, yet it is uncrowded.

About Tippet Rise

Millions of people descend on Yellowstone in the summer, but few discover the neighboring Beartooths, a million acres of Gothic spires set among hundreds of large alpine tarns, lakes formed by snowmelt from the glaciers. Unlike similar high mountain environments in Europe, the Andes, and the Himalayas, this unique area can be driven through. Cars can be used to access mountain bases. The highway was built in the 1930s, opening to the public in 1936. When Charles Kuralt drove the Beartooth Highway for his “On the Road” segment for CBS, he called it the most beautiful road in America. Some years, 50-foot walls of snow enclose the road immediately after it is plowed in late May, to be replaced by rolling fields of wildflowers in summer. As the snow melts in July, trails into high mountain meadows open. Benign fall weather continues until early October, when sudden blizzards close the area until next May. The common explanation of the name Beartooth hangs on the spire hidden among massifs just north of the highway’s summit pass. Just as impressive are the vertically tilted beds of Bighorn dolomite, Jefferson limestone, and Madison limestone that announce the Beartooths from the plains. Pinched upwards by the Laramide uplift some 70 million years

ago, these layers of rock strata rise like hands in prayer, or like the pinnate vanes along a Stegosaurus’s tail. They could be giant sharks’ teeth, or bears’ teeth. The famous basalt dike in New York along the Hudson River just north of Manhattan is called a palisade, after fort walls built by soldiers during the colonial period. But these palisades are just chapters from that longer book. The uplifted sediments have eroded, leaving only incidents, platelets, wings sticking up. Some are almost 300 feet tall, and thin. They pop up in inaccessible places, like Godzilla emerging from the deep, but also along the road leading to the Red Lodge ski area, and along the Beartooth Front. Five hundred million years ago, the entire region was below the sea. Seventy million years ago, the ocean began to recede. You can still find fish fossilized in the cliffs. More than two miles of sediment from the ocean was left behind. Fossilized trees are buried in the sediment around the highest points of Tippet Rise.

Tippet Rise got its distinctive shapes. However, the Beartooth Mountains still retain an estimated 107 cirque glaciers (tucked into the base of mountains) and 390 rock glaciers, more glaciers than Glacier National Park. Into this geologic showplace rose the limestone remains of the ocean sediment which we call the palisades, and which give the Beartooth Range its teeth. The teeth are reflected in Ensamble Studio’s Portals, which rise like Stone Age erratics from the soil beneath them. Tippet Rise, at the northern tip of this 22.6 million-acre ecosystem, is further buffered on the west by the Gallatin National Forest, which may have trees but which is really a million-acre roadless wilderness anchored by the Absaroka Mountains.

Much of the current landscape was sculpted by glaciation that moved down the Beartooth Front, eroding the uplifted mountainscape to create cirques, arêtes, and hanging valleys, which can all be observed above the gorgeous East and West Rosebud canyons.

To the south run the legacy ranches: the Switchback Ranch which begins in Sunlight Basin and encompasses large swaths of land all the way up and around the toe of the Beartooths to Roscoe; the Lazy E-L Ranch, run by the MacKays since 1901; the Padlock Ranch; and the Bench Ranch. Quite a lot of this region is mandated for ranching. The rolling grasslands have been scraped raw of soil and trees by wind and fire until grazing has become the best use of the land, so cows are mainly what you see for 50 miles as you drive to Red Lodge from Fishtail.

A glacier is like a snowplow; it pushes sediment in front and to the sides of it. The material that gets pushed to the side forms a lateral moraine. The two parallel moraines on either side of the glacier form a valley with steep moraines or walls on either side. Kettle lakes, kames, eskers, and outwash plains are left behind when the glacier’s plow finally melts and disappears, which is how the land around

What you see at Tippet Rise is only the tip of an immense system, a microclimate of cloud patterns, wild Chinook thermals, sudden squalls and blizzards, in the rainshadow of Yellowstone and the Beartooths, all of which contribute to the otherworldly light, the soothing breezes, and the long lines of the land created by one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth. 2018 Summer Season

The Canyons of Tippet Rise

About Tippet Rise

Box Canyon

We are fortunate to have five large named canyons, and innumerable smaller ones.

Box Canyon This isn’t a true box canyon, as the stream that winds through it seasonally has cut its way down a narrow path ending in a pond. It has an adjacent small canyon, the North Fork of Box Canyon, over which stone cliffs lower. The trail here winds down from Beethoven’s Quartet to the cowboy cabin rebuilt by Ben Wynthein in the winter of 2017. This has a fountain fed by a well through which we filter potable meltwater. Box Canyon also has Mark di Suvero’s 60-foot-tall sculpture Proverb, which for 12 years was next to the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. Mark put it together here in a windstorm, its compass legs dangling from an enormous crane. Proverb changes the dynamics of the canyon. It anchors it, while the canyon echoes Proverb’s wild side. Both seem less without each other, now that they have married. A path continues to a bench above the cabin, where once our summer tent had to be tied to a Unimog to keep it from blowing away. From there, the path winds up to the ridge road which runs between Box and Arney canyons. Arney Canyon Immediately to the north of Box, Arney is our soft, walker-friendly canyon, with its gentle bowl and waving grasses. At its head is Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Beethoven’s Quartet, created in homage to the mysterious artifacts of art, which measure 2018 Summer Season

the achievement of humanity as much as any other method, such as science or math. The shining steel Moebius strip hanging from its iron sawhorse is the unknowable offspring of the Industrial Revolution. Hanging from iron girders, it is a cold bend, having been bent into its other-dimensional curves by Mark with a crane over a period of a year, one of the great advances in modern sculpture and a milestone in Mark’s career. The road winds east along the ridge and crosses the canyon down below at a small pond, out of sight of the sculpture, where strange Aku-Aku rock shapes can be observed. A walking trail winds to the north around the large knoll to the Domo, a path which gives you a small taste of the vast wilderness surrounding the sculptures. Canyons and hills continue north on the ranch to the Stillwater Road, on the other side of which is a million-acre portion of the Gallatin National Forest, which continues over the Absaroka Mountains to Paradise Valley. Murphy Canyon You can take the tour van out of Arney Canyon and around the rolling hills to Ensamble Studio’s Domo, a Stone Age dolmen where we hold outdoor concerts. Just to the north of the Domo is the head of Murphy Canyon. This is a magical place, strewn with glacial erratics, boulders left over from the ice sheet which once covered the area. Continuing across the bottom of the creek and up an unnamed valley, there is a long rock dike which seems to have faces embedded in its angles. If you look long enough, you can see Beethoven’s Quartet on a ridge top to the west. A half a mile later, there is a bowl and then a second bowl, a perfect site for outdoor concerts. Cows graze on one side. You can see eight mountain ranges. Other than the cooling breeze which waves through the grass, everything is completely still. 22

About Tippet Rise

Murphy Canyon Murphy Canyon

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Midnight Canyon Overlook

About Tippet Rise

To the west, there are high meadows and the Midnight Canyon Overlook. Midnight Canyon is a miniature version of the Grand Canyon. To the east is the wilderness of Murphy Canyon, where the cliffs rise hundreds of feet. This is habitat for wolves and eagles. Even if you see nothing, you are being watched by a hundred eyes. The Northern Canyons To the north are farther canyons through which run the south and north forks of Grove Creek. This is wild land, occasionally populated by elk or a herd of horses. It abuts Midnight Canyon Ranch. We intend to keep our northern canyons as we found them, to preserve the sense of adventure when we stumble on new pastures and high meadows. We want to be able to conserve a sense of discovery for ourselves and our visitors, so we all feel the way we felt the first time we turned a corner and saw a new world in front of us.

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About Tippet Rise

2018 Summer Season

About Tippet Rise

Sustainability at Tippet Rise

by Pete Hinmon

We want to leave as little impact on the land as

possible. This ideal has guided every decision weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve made in planning the art center. Prior to construction, Tippet Rise commissioned a three-year comprehensive study of the ranch from Arup, headed locally by DOWL Engineers, before siting buildings, infrastructure, and art. To offset our reliance on well water, we installed surface and rainwater reclamation systems. These systems can store up to 100,000 gallons for graywater and irrigation use. Eight thousand square feet of bifacial solar panels were erected to produce power for the Olivier Music Barnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recording and light facilities; the panels also provide shade and charge our hybrid tour shuttles. Tippet Rise has partnered with Beartooth Electric through net metering; any excess power we produce is pushed back onto the local grid. The heating and air-conditioning system in the Olivier Music Barn was designed by Arup and MKK Consulting Engineers and utilizes ground source geothermal to heat and cool the building. Air passes through oversized, noiseless ducts to maintain ideal acoustics while heating and cooling. The Music Barn is climate-controlled by state-of-the-art systems that keep its humidity and temperature within two degrees of the ideal. We hope to achieve LEED Gold certification for the Olivier Music Barn and the Cottonwood Campus through the use of these and other sustainable design and building practices. Our staff is on hand to answer any questions you may have about sustainability at Tippet Rise. 2018 Summer Season

Tippet Rise Is a Working Ranch R

by Ben Wynthein

anching at Tippet Rise? A question often heard. The answer: Absolutely. Tippet Rise is 10,260 acres of ranch land in south central Montana. We believe that the rangeland we live on needs to be cared for with the utmost quality and stewardshipâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not only as a moral obligation to care for the health of the land itself but also for our guests to enjoy and experience. It also allows us to partake in and share in Montanaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rich historical and cultural tradition of ranching. Part of that care is the needed grazing of the range with ungulates, as has been done here for thousands of years. This integration of grazing animals allows fresh regeneration of the plants and animals that

About Tippet Rise

grow here, and helps us to better manage the risk of damaging fires in our landscape Portions of Tippet Rise are leased to the Lehfeldt family, a longstanding ranch family engaged in the Rambouillet sheep industry. The Lehfeldts bring 1,200 or so ewes annually to Tippet Rise to aid us with the control of noxious weeds. They also bring to the ranch, every June through September, 300 head of cow calf pairs to be run on the north side of the ranch. In this time frame the sheep are herded onto areas with noxious weed species, where they can eat and digest the seeds to help limit their spread to

new areas. The cattle are often rotated from area to area within the ranch to graze the grasses to the appropriate amount. Tippet Rise also leases a portion of its land to John Carrol and family, a local ranch family with a proven record of land stewardship and quality ranching integrity. In spring their cattle are brought to Tippet Rise and combined with Tippet’s own cattle and are run on the south side of Tippet Rise. In the fall Tippet’s cow herd and John’s return to John’s ranch north of Columbus, Montana, for the winter. Tippet’s calves, however, stay right here at that time and are raised to weight right on the ranch. In the following summer

some of those calves become beef for our guests to enjoy while they are here. The best of the heifers are saved to become permanent members of the herd: a true ranchland-to-plate experience for our guests to enjoy. Tippet Rise’s cattle wear the state-registered quarter circle T lazy R brand on the their left hip. Perhaps it stands for “Tippet Rise under Domo.” The Domo, which is a slightly curved dolmen in the shape of that quarter circle, is our highest sculpture in elevation. In the winter much of the ranch goes into total dormancy and quietness. We leave plenty of grass and natural feed on the ridges and meadows, where the chinook winds through the winter keep the ridges free from heavy snow.

2018 Summer Season

During the winter this allows the elk and deer to migrate to these areas from their summer homes in the surrounding mountains. At this time, they are allowed to eat and maintain body condition with less effort than if they stayed in the mountains, where the snow lies much heavier and the feed requires much more energy to find. One important resource Tippet Rise is also constantly working to improve upon is management of our water resources. Included in this challenge is the constant improvement of drinking water for ungulates, wild and domestic. Since the beginning we have completed 34 major water improvements that help increase even livestock stock distribution on the land, as well as reducing pressure on the riparian areas we do have. In 2018 look to see six more important livestock watering systems to be built. That will incorporate roughly 13,000 feet of underground pipeline stemming from existing wells recently drilled, running to areas of the ranch that are inaccessible to well water. Several of these systems for livestock water also do double duty as key and strategically placed locations for fire trucks to rapidly fill in the event of a wildland fire. All of the water systems are hidden as well as possible within the landscape, so as to also maintain the very open, rugged, and wild feeling we hope to preserve. We look forward to the future of ranching, as well as providing a landscape our guests and artists can visit, experience, and thrive withinâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a healthy landscape that is the cutting edge of art, as well as deeply involved in land stewardship and the Montana ranching tradition, a tradition that can only survive through the art of good stewardship of the land around it.

About Tippet Rise

We are enormously lucky to have the talents,

experience, wisdom, diligence, and probity of Ben Wynthein as the steward of the ranch, the cattle, the sheep, the flora, the soil, the water, the roads, and the wildlife on the ranch. The quality of the land on all the ranches in Stillwater and Carbon Counties affects all of us, and Ben has turned Tippet Rise into a model environment for the area. He is working to bring solid innovation to the vital traditions of American ranching. The new wells which Ben has installed contribute to our ability to water livestock, prevent fires, and cultivate healthy grasses.

Ben is masterminding our constant road improvements, repairing and adjusting fence lines, and overseeing our first herd of heifers raised entirely on Tippet Rise. He has led our film crew and visitors to appreciate and film wildlife. He built the replacement cabin in Box Canyon and has marshalled the outfiitters who operate out of it. Benâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wonderful wife and charming children add the most important part of the ranch: a warm family which brings a great sense of spirit to our team, our visitors, and our community.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Peter and Cathy Halstead

2018 Summer Season

The Sculptors of Tippet Rise

Patrick Dougherty As one of today’s most admired living sculptors, Patrick Dougherty composes with nature: wielding saplings and sticks to build monumental structures that echo, play, and tussle with the land. Dougherty literally worked with nature at Tippet Rise, crafting his sculpture Daydreams from local willows. Partially enclosed and protected from the Montana elements by a replica frontier-period schoolhouse, Daydreams seeks to materialize the dream synapses of students. Learn more at www.stickwork.net.

Stephen Talasnik With ongoing installations around the world, sculptor Stephen Talasnik describes himself as a structural artist. He draws inspiration from imaginary architectural worlds like Piranesi’s, which he materializes into natural sculptures that fold into and accentuate the contours of the surrounding landscape. At Tippet Rise, Talasnik created Satellite #5: Pioneer to bring NASA’s mapping of the sky down to earth. Models of his proposed sculptures for Tippet Rise, Galaxy and Archaeology, are on display in the Olivier Music Barn. Learn more at www.stephentalasnik.com. Mark di Suvero Widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation to emerge from the Abstract Expressionist era, Mark di Suvero revolutionized the world of sculpture and profoundly influenced fields such as modernist architecture, design, and land art. His large-scale steel sculptures, breaking away from the walls of museums, are meant to be experienced outside. His work probes time and space. Tippet Rise is proud to present two of di Suvero’s pieces: Proverb, a meditation on the tiny tools we use to measure infinity, and Beethoven’s Quartet, a clever commentary on the composer’s seminal work. Learn more at www.spacetimecc.com. 34

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Ensamble Studio Partners Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa lead the team at Ensamble Studio that blurs the lines between land, art, architecture, structure, and sculpture. Using found materials, their work transcends architectural boundaries and time periods to produce a pure and direct emotional impact. At Tippet Rise, Ensamble has created structures cast from the soil beneath them that map a constellation on the land. Equal parts concert space, sculpture, and land art, the structures emerge autochthonously from the earth, visceral manifestations of nature. Their primitive vocabulary, rawness, and geological qualities derive from the landscape around them. Learn more at www.ensamble.info. Alexander Calder Alexander Calder, whose illustrious career spanned much of the 20th century, is one of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of our time. Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained, artists, Calder utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. In the 1920s, he began by developing a new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire; he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. From the 1950s onward, Calder devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted sheet steel. Today, these stately titans grace public plazas in cities throughout the world. A large Calder hung over Cathy’s living room as a child, and she was given a small Calder when she was born. Calder also painted wonderful colorful circles, one of which we’ve lived with for many years.

“Tippet Rise presents unique opportunities for the display of sculpture,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “At a time when art is being experienced as much in the digital realm as in person, it is wonderful to be able to welcome a breathtaking new physical destination that is devoted to the private contemplation of solitary works—and the landscape that enfolds them. As part of its mission, the Hirshhorn maintains a

robust loan program through which we share the national treasure that is our collection with institutions around the country and around the world. We are honored to be part of the inaugural installation at Tippet Rise and to introduce these works to the people of Montana. The Hirshhorn looks forward to many more curatorial and programming collaborations with Tippet Rise in the months and years to come.”

The Sculptures of Tippet Rise

Creating Unique Relationships Between Land and Sky

The art center’s rolling 10,260 acres are home to an extraordinary diversity of native grasses, wildflowers and wildlife, bucolic herds of sheep and cattle, and eight mammoth works of art. Two Discs is on gracious loan to Tippet Rise from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of international modern and contemporary art, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. With dark steel arches that invite viewers to walk beneath it, the monumental sculpture is a cornerstone of the Hirshhorn’s collection. As it was the first work of art encountered for many decades by visitors to the Hirshhorn, it is the first to greet visitors to Tippet Rise. The Stainless Stealer (1966) is the second work by Alexander Calder at Tippet Rise, also on gracious loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A large mobile, 15 feet across, hangs above the concert area in the Olivier Music Hall. Most of Calder’s mobiles are painted, but this one reflects the human condition around it. Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams is made from willows gathered by Pete Hinmon and Ben Wynthein from neighboring ranches and streams over several months in the spring and then soaked in a pond to prevent the saplings from sprouting, so Patrick could work with smooth willows. Patrick’s weavings are like Van Gogh’s frenzied strokes of oil paint, but calmly reasoned and

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patiently bent into place, anchored around key branches. Patrick had the idea that a schoolhouse would be the perfect canvas, so the contractor, Max Anthon of JxM, copied a nearby structure, down to its missing shingles, which was then recrafted by CTA Architects of Bozeman. The shapes of the lounging students are also reminiscent of Provençal bories. Patrick’s labyrinths lie on the surface of his mazes. The Inverted Portal was the second of three sculptures created by Ensamble Studio for Tippet Rise. Equal parts shelter, sculpture, and landscape, The Inverted Portal was made from the land beneath it. Its primitive quality, rawness, and geological expression inspire a fascinating exchange with the natural surroundings. Each side of The Inverted Portal weighs over 200 tons. In making this piece, the largest cranes in Montana held the two sides of the sculpture in place while they were fastened together by steel pins.

The Domo is the final installment of Ensamble Studio’s three works for Tippet Rise. Although it seems a part of nature, the Domo was acoustically designed for superior sound projection for our outdoor performances. As a Stone Age plinth, it is the equivalent of a pyramid: an elegant transport into the new life of whatever is placed inside it. It was poured into the land and then excavated by bulldozers. Plastic tarps were used to create the folds in the stone, like a cloak by da Vinci. The top of the Domo has been covered with Montana soil and seeded with native grass species to grow and stretch out toward the big sky.

Mark di Suvero’s Beethoven’s Quartet is about the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, which, like Stonehenge, do double service as both objects and tools by which the universe can be uncovered. Di Suvero invites his audience to complete the connection of music, art, and landscape by playing the sculpture with the rubber mallets he left behind. This piece was originally housed at Storm King Art Center in Hudson Valley, one hour north of New York City. Mark di Suvero’s Proverb, with its pendulum element that moves in the breeze, is a metronome made vast. Originally next to the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, this monumental work brightly contrasts against the Tippet Rise landscape. Stephen Talasnik’s Satellite #5: Pioneer is one of a series, this one named for the satellite launched in 1973. Of Pioneer, Talasnik has said, “It was important to try to make the connection between manifest destiny of both those situations, the idea of human beings wanting to go beyond what they knew, to risk everything to go, and that somehow the risk-reward was really what it was about. Whether it was the early settlers coming to a wonderful place like this or the satellites and eventually, people, astronauts, who would go out into space, there were similarities to me. . . .” Talasnik spends about a quarter of his studio time creating a growing collection of architectural model pieces. Two of these, Galaxy and Archaeology, are on display in the Olivier Music Hall.

Music at Tippet Rise

Featuring Performers and Compositions of Unlimited Musical Horizons

Each summer Tippet Rise offers live classical chamber music and recitals performed indoors and out by some of today’s most celebrated musicians. Concerts take place in the Olivier Music Hall, inspired by the performance spaces for which Haydn and Mozart composed their works, and outdoors under the Domo, an acoustically rich sculptural structure designed by Ensamble Studio. The 2018 music season features new and returning artists, established soloists, and rising stars, presenting works ranging in date from the early 18th century through today. Pre-concert lectures are offered at the Tiara, an acoustic shell without walls that offers 360-degree views of the rolling Tippet Rise landscape. The 2018 season begins July 6 and concludes September 8. 2018 Summer Season

Sculpture Tours Placed atop knolls and nestled into valleys across the art center’s 10,260 acres, our sculptures can be toured by van, by bicycle, and on foot. Art Van Tours Two van tour options are available during the 2018 season: the full tour, which visits all of the art center’s sculptures and lasts approximately 2.5 hours, and the half tour, which visits a pre-selected route and number of sculptures and lasts approximately 75 minutes. All sculptures are visible from the van; however, the van will stop at each sculpture site. Guests are welcome to walk to the sculptures to stretch their legs, shoot photos, and take a closer look.

Satellite #5: Pioneer by Stephen Talasnik 2016 Yellow cedar and steel 50' x 25' x 35' (h)

Van tours are $10 per person and require reservations in advance available on our website, tippetrise.org. Hiking and Bicycling Bring your bike or your hiking shoes, and tour the sculptures and the land on your own. Roughly 9 miles of trails and 13 miles of gravel road connect the sculptures at Tippet Rise. Distances between each sculpture vary from a half mile to 3 miles on hilly terrain with very steep grades. Hiking and bicycling tours are free of charge but require reservations, which are available on our website, tippetrise.org.

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The Beartooth Portal by Ensamble Studio 2016 Concrete 32’ 6 1/2” x 25’ 3 1/4” x 26’ 5 1/2”

The Inverted Portal by Ensamble Studio 2016 Concrete 40’ 2 1/4” x 17’ 11 3/4” x 22’ 5 1/2”

Beethoven’s Quartet by Mark di Suvero 2003 Steel and stainless steel 25’ x 30’ x 23’ 25,000 pounds

Two Discs by Alexander Calder (1898 –1976) 1965 Steel and paint 25' 5" x 27’ x 17’

The Domo by Ensamble Studio 2016 98’ 5” x 49’ 2 1/2” x 13’ 1 1/2” 1000 cubic yards of concrete

Proverb by Mark di Suvero 2002 Steel and stainless steel 60’ x 25’ x 35’

Daydreams by Patrick Dougherty 2015 Willows were gathered locally by Tippet Rise team members.

2018 Summer Season

Art at Tippet Rise

Isabelle Johnson

We discovered after a while that the mysterious

Johnson ranch was actually one of three ranches owned by Isabelle Johnson and her two sisters, where they hayed and ran cattle. She always considered herself a rancher first. But secondly she was Montana’s first Modernist painter. She lived down by the Stillwater River, but she came up to what is now part of Tippet Rise and did many of her great paintings in the meadows, in the snow, among the wildflowers. The land hasn’t changed much since Isabelle Johnson painted it. Not much has happened to Fishtail. But what really happened to Fishtail was that Isabelle Johnson went to Paris. She went to New York, and Rome. And she brought home the light from distant worlds. The Hudson River light of Thomas Moran, the chalk glaze of Cézanne, the yellowed clay of the Camargue, the arid, blockish hills and riverish fields of Winslow Homer. After Isabelle Johnson, Western light could finally be described in terms of other civilizations, of New Jersey industrial haze and Norwegian angst. When you look at the barren folds of glaciated wastes around Fishtail

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with her eyes, you come to see the erasures, the gaps. You see her idea of how the world worked, her personal mechanics of wheat and cottonwoods. Leger, cut out from faded newspapers; Stuart Davis, the polluted pastels of the industrial revolution; the faded pera of Giotto; the angularity of Thomas Hart Benton—all worked their way into her sandstone arroyos, coulees edged with Corot pinyons: what the West came to mean to people who had never gone West, to workers in East Coast factories, to existentialists in European cafés, to people at John Ford movies. Such Western pentimenti are nothing that can be seen; they are hidden under guidebook photos, accumulated over the years, suggested in silos, smelled in the pollution of big city sunsets, mixed into ordinary fields of grain by ions in the clouds, the way you can smell the rain before you see it. You can’t visit the Alpilles around Les Baux without seeing them the way Cézanne did. In the same way, Isabelle Johnson lent Mondrian angles and Kandinsky chords to tufts in the Stillwater River, which flowed through her ranch in Fishtail. Johnson’s West is the whorl in the hay, the sharp edge between the bales and the sky. Valleys howl with gouache, the knife slathers on the evening dark while morning continues to bend in the wheat, and sun beats on the trunk. She saw nature as an adversary, the early winter that cuts in half the benefice of fall, the vast cumulus that rots the harvest with the scythe of storm light, the early flood that carries summer seeds into distant valleys: volcanic folds in the land that are gorgeous but sprung from ruin.

The recurrent droughts, the blizzards, the quakes, the notorious Arctic fronts have cleared the high plains of all but the most determined. Ranchers chip a living out of the depleted soil on its way towards desert; artists hammer a sky out of a Provençal palette, forge a winter out of borrowed fire. Isabelle Johnson did both. And so her colors harbor a harder edge than their cousins on the palmate French coast. Her trees howl with deprivation, the stronger heirs of St. Rémy orchards limp in the Mediterranean heat. She brought foreign suns to frozen tundra, dichotomies that even now don’t fit into the easy sweep of the brush, that aren’t natural to the lazy hand of the landscaper. She muscles the hiker’s eye onto a ridge, a bush, a cow in bursts of light like Vermeer’s, that guide the day into unnatural balances. She notices how boughs interlock in mad scenes of wind, how cows blend into bursts of glare bouncing off the hay, how pines, snow, and sandstone, born out of extremes, merge into cozy, controlled patterns on the land.

When you travel outside Fishtail today, you see tractors frozen in amber set against the Magritte gray of a supercell sky; you see the campfire marshmallows of mountains superimposed on the pumpkin orange of lost hayfields. You see them because a woman who hayed her father’s ranch, who birthed calves, who shot sick horses also saw something deeper than what cameras see. Isabelle Johnson saw the future, the industrial modernist palette in fields, flowers, and valleys that even today remain planted firmly in the agrarian past. But if you look closely, the details have changed. A lot more is on the breeze and in the leaves, because of Isabelle Johnson. Tippet Rise is extremely fortunate to have recently been able to purchase the two Isabelle Johnson paintings. These two works will be on permanent display in the Olivier Music Hall.

—Portions excerpted from “Photographing Isabelle,” by Peter Halstead in A Lonely Business: Isabelle Johnson’s Montana, Yellowstone Art Museum, 2015.

2018 Summer Season

Performance Spaces The Olivier Music Barn

With a direct view onto the Beartooth Mountains, the Olivier Music Barn is inspired by the intimate performance spaces where composers like Haydn and Bach would premiere their compositions. The pitched roof creates an elevated, ethereal sound, and the barn’s humble nature creates an informal space that breaks the barrier between performers and audience members, enabling powerful, direct musical experiences. The Music Barn is also home to Tippet Rise’s Visitor Center and a state-of-the-art screening room equipped for 4K high-definition film projection and 3D immersive sound installations. The building and its systems are designed to achieve LEED Gold certification.

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Architect Laura Viklund led the Olivier Music Barn’s architectural design. Acoustician Alban Bassuet managed the project and crafted the acoustics of the performance space. Gunnstock Timber Frames, with help from local craftsmen, constructed the barn using traditional mortise and tenon joinery. Oehme, van Sweden (OvS) landscape architects designed the siting of the Music Barn, its orientation to the mountains, and its relationship to the surrounding environment.

The Tiara Acoustic Shell The Tiara is a portable acoustic shell that invites listeners to enjoy performances while being enveloped by the Tippet Rise landscape. The Tiara’s sound-reflecting surfaces sit above musicians, rather than surrounding them, like a room with no walls. Sound is reflected from corners above the audience, sending sound from the stage around the audience’s heads. Opening up the wall space of a typical bandshell allows for views of the art center’s rolling hills and the mountains in the distance. These acoustic and visual approaches create an intimate and enveloping concert experience for up to 100 audience members. Alban Bassuet and Willem Boning designed the Tiara, with Arup Engineers, Gunnstock Timber Frames, and Fire Tower Engineered Timber.

Will’s Shed Designed by Laura Viklund and crafted by Gunnstock Timber Frames and On Site Management, Will’s Shed is the most recent addition to Tippet Rise, nestled between the Olivier Music Barn and the Artist Residences. In keeping with the spirit of the surrounding buildings and the region’s agricultural heritage, the structure employs a classic barn form and is traditionally timber framed out of Douglas fir. Whereas the Olivier Music Barn is designed forsublime musical experiences, Will’s Shed provides a more casual space for dining, education, and community events. Two sides of the building are clad in operable doors, allowing the structure to close in inclement weather without sacrificing the incredible views of the Beartooth Mountains. 2018 Summer Season

The Tiara Story We had been talking with Arup Engineers in New

York for years about various outdoor pavilions they’d designed. Finally, I designed my own, because we had a lot of leftover doors, and I saw them as a great way of bouncing sound to an outdoor audience. Alban Bassuet was so horrified by my Rube Goldberg version that he leapt into action and, with Willem Boning at Arup, designed what is now the Tiara Acoustic Shell, a wall-less, roofless shed that bounces music to an outdoor crowd using only the top corners of an otherwise invisible room.

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You can see from the acoustic studies how the sound lines carom off the walls. If you add in a slight overlap from a partial roof, the secondary and tertiary sound-bounces intensify. Alban and Willem discovered that 90% of concert sound comes from the top edge of the walls, where they meet the ceiling. Laura Viklund and her husband, Chris Gunn, built this “shell” in a month in Cody, Wyoming, out of plywood, drove it up to Fishtail in pieces, and put it together in a very frantic week. We’ve since moved it to another gorgeous location closer to the Olivier Music Barn.

We asked the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City Strings to play the Dvořák “American” Quartet in it. The result is on the website, tippetrise.org. The “American” Quartet was the perfect piece: Dvořák wrote it for the underdogs, for Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants. Dvořák himself, as a Czech, was regarded as a gypsy by the Prague Symphony, and had to fight prejudice all his life to become the legendary composer he suspected he might be. The uniquely American spirituals, hymns, and the sheer freedom of our wide-open ranges are evident throughout the piece, as is the scarlet tanager in the third movement, a bird which was

bothering Dvořák in his studio, so he wrote it into the quartet and it became an asset (a great way of dealing with difficulties). The musicians were astonished, because they heard the supportive reverberation of a small, wood-paneled concert hall, as did the audience. But you could see everywhere around you, and the presence of the American West on every side of and above the musicians was the final psycho-acoustic contribution of the land to the music, as Dvořák’s “American” Quartet, written in 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, has for so many years contributed to the myth of the American West. 2018 Summer Season

The Evolution of Olivier Hall

he Olivier Hall was the result of a collaboration with Arup and its lead acoustician Alban Bassuet (later the first director of Tippet Rise). Arup modified Snape Maltings, an old malt storage barn, into a concert hall for Benjamin Brittenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operas in his home town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, some three hours north of London. They extended the roof area to create a space where sound bounced around before it drifted back down softly on the audience, a radical concept at the time which has never been bettered. Arup also developed the Halo, a ledge running around

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Wigmore Hall in London, to catch the first sounds of a concert and project them back at the audience, another innovation which improved the sound of concert halls. We embodied both of these inventions in a hall shaped in the dimensions of the classic Haydn jewelbox, based in turn on the supposedly divine proportions of the Temple of Solomon and the inner chamber of the Parthenon. These were the sanctuaries from which oracles spoke, where Homer was chanted, and from which the modern concert environment sprang.

Only later, at the beginning of the 20th century, did concert halls expand to reach beyond the ability of solo instruments to fill them, in order to accommodate the larger Romantic orchestras of Berlioz, Mahler, and Bruckner. These halls were perfect for spectacles and outsized groups, but too large to project the closer harmonies of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, or the personal acoustics of the small drawing rooms in which Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach mostly performed.

The Olivier Hall is built entirely of larch, with a concrete floor, which produces a very supportive sound for piano, strings, woodwinds, chamber music, and small ensembles. Its size provides a lushness, closeness, responsiveness, quick bounce, and woody timbre. Its acoustic resembles the gorgeous rasp and warmth of an ancient viola. The stiffness of the underlying cement and the empathy of the post and beam construction is filtered through the reverberant grain of the larch, a fairly immortal wood resistant to aging, damp, and insects. Larch buildings 1,000 years old can still be found in Siberia. It is similar in sound to rosewood. Western larch is projective and crisp in sound and is sometimes used for the tops of guitars. 2018 Summer Season

We experimented with room shapes in the Arup Sound Lab in New York, which can simulate the sound of any dimensions entered into its computer. As you move a wall, your chosen piano or quartet sound changes to reflect the dynamics of your altered room. In this way, you can hear the room before you build it. Rather than a larger hall, which would have sounded more distant, we chose the closer jewelbox dimensions. We then visited similar rooms in Europe to understand the reality of the sound. Arup arranged for us to visit Sevenoaks School, where they had designed a modified Snape Maltings roof in a lovely small hall. The school staged a concert for us with a wonderful young pianist, so we could hear the acoustics with an audience present. By visiting Snape Maltings in Suffolk itself, we were able to inspect the hall design with the Arup acousticians who had worked on it and understand how to create a room with intensely enveloping acoustics. We revisited with Arup performance spaces around London which they had designed with a Snape Maltings roof, such as Wigmore Hall and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Wigmore’s perfect shoebox dimensions influenced the shape of Olivier Hall strongly.

Snape Maltings Concert Hall , UK 48

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We have long attended the Glyndebourne Opera’s summer productions in the beautiful hall which Arup designed for the Christies. This 1,200-seat hall was the first to suggest that modern spaces did not need to be as huge as traditional civic trophy halls, allowing for more detailed and nuanced productions, as the sound would not be lost in cavernous hangars. Arup has built most of the significant acoustic opera and concert spaces in the United Kingdom, as well as the Sydney Opera House, the Oslo Opera House, and Iceland’s Opera House. They build dozens more every year. Here are a few of their current projects: www.arupassociates.com/en/projects. Peter had lived in Boston for over a decade while he studied music with Russell Sherman, and went often to friends’ concerts in Jordan Hall and Symphony Hall. We had lived in New York and often went to concerts at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, the Met, and elsewhere. While we lived in Paris for nine years, we went to concerts at the Rothschild Museum in Paris, the Salle Gaveau, la Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Opéra Comique, and other fine halls around Europe such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Zurich Tonhalle.

Music Room, Esterházy Palace

after construction, however, was put off until our second year, as we opened only an hour after the last nail was puttied.

Rendering of the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise

We lived in Colorado after New York, and prized the Vilar Center in Beaver Creek, and the Harris Hall in Aspen, as well as the new performance spaces at the campus of the Aspen Music School. We think these are the finest-sounding halls in America, along with Tippet Rise, precisely because they are small and focus the sound very effectively. So the evolution of the sound of Olivier Hall wasn’t just from three years of visiting Arup halls in Europe, but from a lifetime of concert listening. The Olivier Hall was the seventh studio environment we had built, so we had been hands-on with framing, floors, insulation, wiring, sound isolation. You cannot really fix a hall if it is built imperfectly. You have to tear it down and start again. The sound of the Olivier Hall as we built it is ultimately like playing inside a cello, and is essentially the same from any seat in the room. Even if you have a perfect hall, it always needs fine-tuning after it is built. You can’t tell before construction every last frequency which will need reinforcement or softening, or how the hall will sound with a full audience. The tuning we would have done

To maximize the woodiness of the sound during fine-tuning, we placed wood on top of a quarter of the concert floor. The initial plans called for a full wooden floor, but we discovered that too much oak on the floor diminished the sound slightly, so we put enough wood to round the edges of the reflections without damping any frequencies. We also eliminated all right angles in the room with wooden panels, and added cushions to the side benches. We added more wood, more diffusors, and more cushions, and then eliminated them item by item until the sound was completely perfect. Now every frequency from each instrument can be heard to its fullest, without any harshness or listener fatigue, or any cancellations of tones from too many similar bounces. On our opening day, our neighbor rancher Susan Heyneman said, “I’ve heard Bach all my life in many places, but this is the first time I really heard him.” She meant that she could hear each instrument in the Brandenburg Concertos separately, and also hear how they blended together without losing their individuality. That is the sign of a successful hall. Audiophile Audition praised the hall’s “pantheistic colors” in its review of the Pentatone album of our first season, Opus 2016: www.audaud.com/ domo-tippet-rise-opus-2016-various-works-by-scriabin-abril-rachmaninov-stravinsky-chopin-pentatone. We have some twelve concert grand Steinway Ds at Tippet Rise, including Vladimir Horowitz’s CD-18, which he and Eugene Istomin used for their legendary recordings of the Rachmaninoff concertos. 2018 Summer Season

As the fine pianist Svetlana Smolina said: Something one can only imagine in dreams—it was here in reality! The sound production and the touch of this Hamburg Steinway was the closest thing to divinity for a pianist. It was pure bliss to experience the gorgeous, powerful, distinctively elegant, overwhelmingly sensitive, feminine and at same time deeply masculine sound this Steinway could produce—it was an infinite cosmos of colors, expressions and emotions—all in one instrument. I felt it expressed the ideas of Scriabin; his leitmotifs and his philosophy. The legendary pianist Stephen Hough has said:

To play at Tippet Rise is to be reminded that the earth was making music before human beings learned their scales. The performer shares the wings with singing birds; the soundproofing, like the roof, is only required to exclude a storm; and beyond the stage, through the sky-lit eye of a vast window, the landscape dances in more complex rhythms than could be imagined by even the most sophisticated artist.

In the Olivier Hall we tried to design an ideal recording facility, with state-of-the-art equipment for both audio and video. It offers seven 4K ultra-resolution video cameras, eighteen channels of mics, and both Pro Tools/ Avid 12 and Merging Technologies’ Pyramix and Horus Virtual Studio 32/374 (DXD), which is 100 times CD-quality sound, with CEDAR plug-ins, and 3D immersive audio, used by the studios around the world we most admire (such as the New World Symphony in Miami, the Dallas Symphony, the Pure Audio 3D Blu-ray makers, NHK 50

About Tippet Rise

in Japan, 2L in Norway, and Bob Ludwigâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gateway Mastering (Bob did my first Digital Audio Disc). We produce our tracks in 9.1 Auro (which has sound coming from above you and as well as around you). www.merging.com/news/news-stories/pyramixstorms-the-56th-grammy--award-nominations. There are currently around 500 movie theaters in the world which are equipped to play all of this technology. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s used primarily for action movies. We work with By Experience, which does the Met HD Live, to bring other products to their theaters, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, starring the late, wonderful Brian Bedford on Broadway. We provide grants to universities so they can buy the equipment to show the files to student audiences. We had worked over the years with large format 64-track Mitsubishi and 24-track Studer reel-to-reel decks and Ampex magnetic tape, with Sony VHS Betamax and DAT tape (all long since orphaned), and after 1989, computer recording programs such as Sonic Solutions and Pro Tools. As new technologies arose, we used them to produce discs on many labels for more than 30 years before we began to outfit Olivier Hall. Our goal has always been to produce music ahead of the curve, to be ready for the next wave of digital theater sound, nine-channel surround sound, holographic sound. Our audio and video files are distributed through various media channels and institutional partnerships, such as Performance Today, the Google Cultural Institute, Apple Music, the Hirshhorn Museum, Vimeo, YouTube, our own website, and shown around the country at universities and conservatories.

2018 Summer Season

Music and Place As wine tastes better out of thin glass, and food

somehow tastes better when you cook it yourself or eat it under an arbor in the hills around Lake Locarno, with its Nabokovian echoes, as opera at the baths of Caracalla outside Rome changes your life, as that one concert did when Pogorelich asked us to stand on the stage while he played during a rainstorm at Caramoor, music in the surreal Hindu Kush-like hills just under the Beartooths shivers with the sudden chill of the Northern Lights, with the ghosts of Native American vision quests, with John Wayne films, with the mythic fogs of Bierstadt paintings, with the Romantic ice scapes of Caspar David Friedrich, with the pastels of Cézanne introduced by our famous Montana modernist painter, Isabelle Johnson.

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Double rainbows and orange light grow out of the ice particles in the air in a late summer sunset as Stephen Hough plays his Trinitas. The air itself turns purple during a concert of a late Beethoven quartet at Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Beethoven’s Quartet. We walk through purple air surrounded by giant raw monadnocks under the high glacier fields of the Hellroaring Plateau: the sleet comes in sideways, as we feel that the sculpture has liquidified into the evening. After Patrick Dougherty finishes his sculpture Daydreams, there’s the second full moon in one month, a blue moon, two planets visible in the early dusk, and the sounds of Copland’s Appalachian Spring echo in the schoolhouse.

John Luther Adams and his wife Cindy walk around in the purple sunset under Calder’s Two Discs while the drums from Strange and Sacred Noise fill the coulees around us. Even photos of the land reveal the strange northern clarity of the light, the absolute emptiness of the waves of grain, the stillness of the sky. Music is itself a connotation: a series of metaphors produced by hieroglyphic scratches on a piece of paper which creates twilight in the Prater in fin de siècle Vienna, or the Sunday light on the Île de la Grande Jatte in Paris, or a Mahler Symphony on the shores of Lake Attersee, or Grieg’s cabin at Troldhaugen on the lake at Bergen. Music comes from these places,

from the offing just around the corner from what you can see, or just below the surface of the horizon. Music is a metaphor that doesn’t come from notes or instruments or concert halls, but from calving glaciers and Brocken spectres and the shadows of séracs on the ice. It’s an intangible cloud that strange hermits bring down to earth on certain occasions—not dependably, not daily—that colors our minds, washes out the normal angles of the afternoon, replaces the video feed with augmented reality hallucinations, plays dinosaurs on the brain’s blue screen. We build concert halls to keep the world out so we can concentrate on music. But maybe we should let the world back in, so music can compose it. 2018 Summer Season

The Story of the Tippet Rise Logo

About Tippet Rise

The day she was born, Cathy was given a Calder

mobile by friends of her parents. Her mother was friends with Henry Moore, and Cathy grew up with four beautiful Moore maquettes in the living room. Her mother, Tippet, after whom Tippet Rise is named, discovered the artist Yaacov Agam on the Riviera. Her father, Sidney, manufactured his art for many decades. Together they introduced him to Walter Annenberg and to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (both of whom have Agams in their collections). Agam now has a room in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a sculpture outside Juilliard, and is an established Israeli sculptor, one of the founders of the kinetic art movement which Denise René fomented out of her Paris gallery. As an abstract artist, Cathy has shown in galleries, in Los Angeles, New York City, Haifa, Chicago, among other cities, and has been in both Art Basel and Art Miami. Her acrylics are represented in major collections on both coasts. Her paintings have been done in series, inspired by electron microscope photography of cellular structures, the Hubble space telescope, Caribbean plants, architecture on the Greek islands of Naxos and Paros, by rocks from the woods behind our house when we lived for many decades in Bedford, New York, and by the marble rocks we brought home from the Paros quarries, which were used for the construction of the Parthenon, the Medici Venus, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Napoleon’s tomb. The Tippet Rise logo is a skeletal version of one of these rock paintings, which are 12' x 8' and in blue on cream canvas.

2018 Summer Season

Artistic Integrity

Integrity is another word for the self. Integrity is what the self does when we aren’t looking.

were spared because of it. Those are the stakes that musicians play for.

The simple title of Lionel Trilling’s book Sincerity and Authenticity set out in the 1970s the simple definition of what the self needs to be taken seriously, and to take itself seriously.

We make art to save our own lives, and to save other people’s lives. A culture without art can’t call itself a culture. As William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem “Asphodel”:

Ethics happens when a civilization develops an instinctive form of decency. No one has to think about how to act.

But integrity isn’t conformity to a national standard of conduct; it’s conforming to what your own heart suggests. Integrity doesn’t come naturally, though. It has to be taught. It has to be learned. During my formative years, art for art’s sake was the cry. Art must never be commercial, although it might earn money by accident. Much of the most accessible self is unintentional. Frost wrote the poem "The Road Not Taken” as a gentle gibe to his friend the poet Edward Thomas, who always insisted while out walking that it would have been better if they had taken the other fork. The poem became universal, but it was meant to be personal. Integrity is the ultimate form of being personal. My teacher, the pianist Russell Sherman, always insisted that every note must be life or death; nothing less was valid. I think of the pianists Natalia Karp and Władysław Szpilman, both of whom played Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 for German officers, both of whom 56

About Tippet Rise

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

I always think of the advice Polonius gave to his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Integrity (or the lack of it) is what you do when no one is looking. Left alone at a computer, a poet will write poetry, rather than sign on to online gambling. Because we know there isn’t a second to lose. If you are desperate to do something to the exclusion of all else, that is your integrity. Every day we fail at getting it right. What is important is that we try again tomorrow. All young people play at being artists. A real artist is someone who is still an artist after 40. Integrity is trying to get beneath the surface of things, to get at the meaning of a musical note or a word of poetry. As someone said of the pianist Artur Schnabel, music was just the start of it.

A brush stroke, a line of poetry, a musical phrase has to reveal as much truth as you can summon on any given day. And then you have to see if it’s still true the next day. So integrity isn’t a one-off. It’s a constant process of straightening, balancing, rearranging, questioning to get it right. Integrity isn’t momentary, or transitory. It’s a life lived in the pursuit of the things which matter to us. Each of

us has a different goal; integrity is not getting distracted from it. Integrity is measuring our failures at being deep, at being true, at being kind, and resolving to do better. Integrity isn’t arriving at perfection. It’s walking in the right direction. Integrity is picking the best role model, the best poem, the best performance as our minimum standard. Integrity is simple when we are children, and becomes harder to hold onto as we age. 2018 Summer Season

Integrity isn’t an instinct. It isn’t innocence. It’s a conscious decision. It’s taking what we’ve lost, what experience has taken away from us, and fighting to get it back over a long life. Integrity isn’t a cliché or a statement. It’s too tough to be easily reduced. Integrity is what happens between the lines.

RAKING LEAVES

Face your dreams, The ones with flying apes As themes. Put away The toys, the fears, The desolate unmarried

Years. Let what seems To be take hold. Shape The scene with day. Put away the souvenirs Of truth, the harried

Glaze of war, The tokens of your injured Youth, clichéd in time To rainy afternoons And broken lives.

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Focus rather on the roar Of sun, the random bird, Falling snow, the rhyme And ripple in the dunes, The throw that drives

The game, accidents Of fortune, twists Of flame, burning shadows Into night, The turn of chance,

Island air that hints Of sea and mists, Solar haloes, The certain light Of stars that dance

Like curtains in the wind The dreams of women, Filled with presents, Food, and children— And realize

—Peter Halstead

That leaves begin In deeper seasons: An accumulated essence, A cosmic sermon, Broken lessons in the skies.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

PIANOS

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ianos are woods in miniature. Forests unwind out of them. Their soundboards are histories of storms, drought, heat, blizzards, wound into wood. Their cases provide the discipline, the rigor, which focuses history. Small details like the iron bell below the plate or the way they are strung give them specific sounds: the fin-de-siècle languors of 1900, the fuzzy Sehnsucht (nostalgia) of the uneven string lengths of Brahms around 1880, the iron strength of the locomotive and its ringing train tracks in the plate, specially shaped in the Steinway factory in the early years. Out of these onomatopoetic contrivances Messiaen birds sing, Lisztian waves surge, Poulenc cars honk, Moog synthesizers quaver. The sounds of pianos imitate the sounds of life: of leisure, of industry, of love. The Industrial Revolution introduced roaring engines, belching smokestacks, clanging trolleys, honking horns. Before it, there was only wind in the leaves, water flowing in

the river, mountain distances descended to ruffle the grass in the late afternoon. In between the sonic events that shape our modern anxieties come the restful nights of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, the moonlit lagoons of L’Elisir d’Amore, the enchanted forest of Arden in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The storms of Beethoven, the fairies of Mendelssohn are replaced by the musique d’ameublement of Erik Satie, the airplane propellers of Georges Antheil, the city noises of Bangkok or New York in Darius Milhaud, the fast car rides and gamelans of John Adams, the world music of Paul Simon. The role of sound in our lives is well catalogued in The Sonic Boom, by Beckerman and Gray. Later the monastic sanctuaries of Arvo Pärt, the musica celestis of Aaron Jay Kernis, and the snow-covered tundra of John Luther Adams return the world to its primal stillness.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

Throughout it all, the piano has taken on the elements of its surrounding landscape. John Cage developed the prepared piano to respond to the deadening of sound, the untuning of the sky. Keyboards and sampling libraries have added every known sound to the composer's palette. But the challenge remains to imitate the orchestra of the world with the relatively limited toolkit of the old-fashioned piano, still the most human, the most sonorous of devices made for translating the soul of the world into sonic metaphors. In my poem "Piano Maker," I evoke the attributes and mechanisms of the piano which we weave into synonyms for the human spirit. Soundboard, key bed, chord and cord, ebony dies, key ivories, maple sounding-board crowns, and glue mix with human limbs, fingers, bed and board, growth and sound to deepen the collusion of tree body and human body, piano wood and forest wood, body shape and piano shape, piano maker and poem maker, so that both human and celestial hands are heard together on the tree bark of the keyboard. Since the advent of the “well-tempered” tuning system, harmony has been an organized trellis, using logarithmic surds to structure notes. "Piano Maker" is an ordered sonnet, but more modern, conversational mid-rhymes and meters dominate its more formal form, as a person or a pianist tries to rise beyond even the most complex structures in nature or in music:

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PIANO MAKER Gnarls and boles, whatever woodwork words Can turn or blur to use, to glue, to growth Of board or bed, I know: I use their surds And darkened boughs like fingers, so that both Our hands are heard together on the keyboard Bark; no sounds but branches rise To leaf through breezes in the scattered cord Of sheaves and limbs, inking in the dyes, The ivories of silence on the evening's rose And shade; twisting up the wires of a day's Old sun and funneling the body's splay Of music into crowns of maple and god knows, I wind up nature's miniature keys To play out, on a bed of vines, The tune of my own trees.

—Peter Halstead

A 9-foot concert Steinway has more than 12,000 parts. Its strings are under 20 tons of pressure. So it has an effect immeasurably beyond its size, as big as it is. It is a church organ in disguise. Although each piano is made in exactly the same way by the same people, each one is completely different. Each piano has its own DNA. On the morning of John Paulson’s purchase of Steinway & Sons in September of 2013, we were very lucky to be offered by the company a choice of thirteen of their best pianos at the factory. Each one was better than the next. I have never

heard so many great pianos in one room. I’ve played Rubinstein’s piano given to him by Israel, a gorgeous mezzo beast, and a few of Horowitz’s instruments, all of them shimmering, with extraordinary rises. But this morning was a synthesis of every instrument I had been lucky enough to play. Rise is the sudden lift or break of the tenor’s voice, the passaggio from a normal tenor steel into a sfogo, the ethereal and impossibly thrilling vocal realm where the sun is unleashed, which only the greatest tenors can produce, the eco sonora of Pavarotti, Caruso, Bjoerling, Schipa, Gigli, Corelli, di Stéfano. This squillo, or ringing voice, rises above entire orchestras and is the most chilling and sublime operatic experience imaginable. In a piano, the rise is a moment when the power of the accumulated volume of a piano being played fairly loudly exceeds the sum of

its parts and takes off into the stratosphere, astonishing and thrilling everyone, including the pianist. It is when a piano jumps beyond its earth-bound tonalities into a world above the clouds, where the sun is unstoppable and the blue of the sky is almost black. Pavarotti called it the “solar” moment. Like the greatest tenors, only the greatest pianos have this ability to lift into another voice entirely at a certain point. It isn’t just the treble, as it is with tenors. With a piano, it’s all three registers. It’s the ability of the bass to growl beyond mere notes, until it becomes a wolf, an animal. It’s the ability of the treble to ring with extreme brilliance without breaking up or becoming shrill. Most important, it’s the ability of the mid-range, the baritone range of the piano, where most human voices fall, to sing out with a steely timbre that cuts to your heart. Like the caramel taste of a great Meursault, a Romanée-Conti Montrachet, or a Peter Michael 2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

Belle Côte, a rise in a piano comes along once in a decade. No one knows how to ensure its creation. It can’t be finessed or coaxed if it isn’t there from the start. The art of great pianos had risen so high by 2013 that Steinways were at their historic peak. Steinway had decided to end the contest between their two locations, Hamburg and New York, by replacing U.S. action parts with the German parts made by the Renner Company, eliminating the complaint that the American action was stiffer than the German. Just as significant was the thickening of felts on the hammers from 17-pound to 21-pound weights, and the pre-hardening of the felts in the factory, so the hammers produced a brilliant, singing tone right out of the gate. Cosmetically, the New York piano case itself was brushed with the glossy polyester finish used by the Germans, and the New York wheel casters were swapped for the impressive German double-brass monsters. The only way you can now tell the difference between the American and German Steinway is that American piano cases still have a rectangular edge on either side of the keyboard. So the great pianos are not only the ones from the 1890s or the 1930s, but from the Golden Year of 2013. Tippet Rise has two of these shiny 2013 super-Steinways. The polyester finish is the same used by Ferrari. It is glistening but fragile. The extraordinary Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 was used by Vladimir Horowitz for his legendary performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which is available on video as well as on CD. 64

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His good friend Eugene Istomin was the only person Horowitz would lend the piano to, and Istomin used it for his own legendary recording of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, also with Eugene Ormandy, but with Ormandy’s famous Phildelphia Orchestra, famous for its lush Russian violin section. After Horowitz died, Istomin bought the piano and used it for 17 years on his famous tours to the small towns of the United States. This was before people had stereos. They had RCA monophonic turntables with the famous Listening Dog horn attached. So many people in North America heard their first classical music concerts from this piano. Eugene Istomin ran the great Casals Festival in Puerto Rico and in Spain for many years with his wife, Casals’s widow, Marta Casals Istomin. Marta had become the artistic advisor of the Kennedy Center in Washington, and has been for many years at the center of the classical world. She was friends with the piano technician for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Tali Mahanor, who had traveled with Eugene Istomin around the country for many years, maintaining CD-18. It was through our friendship with Tali that Marta heard of Tippet Rise. We had been introduced to Tali by Wu Han, the co-director of the Lincoln Center Chamber Players. Tali is more than a technician; she has been for most of her life the true wizard of every aspect of how music is reproduced by the antique behemoths which to this day are the ultimate barometer of how we experience sound. Only a few years ago, Marta Istomin made the astonishing decision to let Tippet Rise acquire the great Istomin-Horowitz CD-18, one of the legendary pianos of the last century, and the

recognized king of the piano concerto. Many well-known pianists have played it at Tippet Rise in concert and on film; it has been treated gingerly and lovingly by all of us, in recognition of its history and its immensity. Like a big Stradivarius, CD-18 isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t for everyone; it takes enormous power to make it shine. But in recognition of this, Tali Mahanor has provided it with two actions. The first is the original action, with the original keyboard, which is slightly bigger than a normal keyboard (so you need a big hand to play it). It has a modern American Steinway action and Renner hammers. It is elegant and massive in its power, a piano for rising above orchestras. The second action has a modern Renner action with standard plastic keys and American hammers. So the sound has immense finesse and the action is easier to play for more mortal pianists. This gives it the feel of a German Steinway, but the intense, neurotic complex harmonies of the American hammers. We have a Hamburg Steinway as well, last played

in Germany by Elisabeth Leonskaja, whose ethereal Schubert sonatas, seeming to float above the audience, were the reason we contacted Arup Engineers to design a hall similar to Snape Maltings, where we had heard the luminous Leonskaja play. This Hamburg Steinway has steel, power, speed, and is easy to play. Stephen Hough felt it would present the brilliantine surfaces of his own compositions more accurately, and many pianists have chosen it for its ability to perform virtuoso ĂŠtudes impressively. It is the height of what Liszt would have wanted from a Hungarian Rhapsody or his Totentanz, the frightening dance of death where the piano explodes with satanic colors. Pianists are often judged not by their abilities but by the abilities of the piano they choose. You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t play Liszt on a Mozart piano, or Beethoven on a Haydn piano. Immaculate, delicate, refined Viennese pianos present filigree and softness with great complexity, but you need a different instrument to raise the devil. So we have pianos for all seasons, all composers, and all moods. Pianos for angels and for devils.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

Two of our pianos date from 1897, shortly after the invention of the modern Steinway; their sound is like Proust’s madeleine, evoking a relatively more meditative world, where instruments were almost human, walls were burled with Circassian walnut wainscoting, and drawing rooms produced sounds like the inside of a violin, multiple layers of aged wood resonating around the divine ratios of an architecture which still remembered the Parthenon, where music meant a soirée in a rococo jewelbox specially designed for it. The filigree, the moldings, the niches were not just decorative but today would be called absorbers, diffusors, and reflectors, clever shapes to deflect and augment the many frequencies which have to arrive simultaneously or variously at the ear in order to move us.

A piano being worked on for us by Tali will be the only 9-foot Chickering capable of combining the feather touch which Liszt prized with the deeper frequencies of modern concert mechanisms. It will play scales and arpeggios like the wind, as Chopin intended, but be able to shake the hall with the armageddons of Beethoven. It will allow virtuosic feats performed by Thalberg, Meyerbeer, or Gottschalk to regain their sweep and panache, without sacrificing the cries from the depths which Romantic playing demands. Many musicians who grew up in the 1950s and '60s learned to play on their household Chickering: Stephen Hough, Charles Hamlen, even myself. We knew the easy action, the bite, and the power of the instruments we beat to death.

We are also lucky to have on these Brahmsian pianos certain innovations devised by Tali, the great magician of the instrument, which change pianos in significant ways, and which we honor as her secret sauce.

So Tippet Rise is piano heaven. We have something for everyone. Pianists sometimes switch pianos at intermission, so a Liszt spectacular can morph into a Schubert soirée on the same night. These are just a few of the tens of thousands of voices which pianos acquire as they mature, and we hope our concerts and videos will continue to illustrate the many shapes that music can assume, like light sparkling off a summer pond.

These pianos take you back to the day of four-inhand carriages, of exotic fogs that hovered around the Thames and the Seine and infused many of the photos of the day by Atget, Brassai, Man Ray, Marville. They are the sound the world wanted to savor from before the Industrial Revolution, when there were no loud noises, when a chord by Beethoven was the only cataclysm you were likely to hear in your life, before there were bright lights, or planes constantly in the night sky.

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—Peter Halstead

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

PIANO VOICES

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The great technician for the Chamber Music

Society of Lincoln Center, Tali Mahanor, gives the Lincoln Center pianos names. They are always women’s names: Chantal, Darcelle, Nola, Dorabella. The 1897 Steinway D she restored for us is called Seraphina. Its baby cousin B from 1897 is Beatrice (after Dante’s love). The Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 was once called Kira. We call the new Hamburg Steinway Véra, after the great Véra Nabokov, without whom her husband Vladimir would never have had the time or space to write. When my teacher Russell Sherman and I flew to Berlin to choose the number-two piano at the Berlin Philharmonic for the recording we were making of the Beethoven Concerti with Václav Neumann and the Czech Philharmonic, Sherman called the piano Lola Montez. It was sultry, silky, but also treacherous, slippery, insidious.

Pianos have intrinsic natures, deep in their bones. It isn’t just the voicing of the felts on the hammers, or the way the touch is regulated by the technician. It’s a natural voice they’re born with, something deep inside the iron plate, or buried in the seventeen layers of the bent-wood rim, or caught up by the metal bell suspended beneath the soundboard. Each soundboard is also different, and when boards die after many decades, the new board will bring a new identity into being. Each piano is made exactly the same way with the same parts by the same craftsmen in the same factory in either Hamburg or Queens, and yet one piano will be dull and meandering, and another will be powerful and focused, while a third will be dreamy and poetic. Pianists are often judged by their pianos, whose sound they can nuance, but whose nature is beyond their control. So pianists will try to choose a brilliant piano if they are playing Liszt, a profound piano for Beethoven, or a singing, amber-throated piano for Schubert or Brahms.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

Viennese pianos have wooden rims, and so rarely have the power to cut through an orchestra with the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. Viennese pianos have rounded tones, so each note of a Mozart or Haydn sonata will glisten. But often the harmonics, the tonalities won’t mingle, and so the dialogue between the chords is cut short, making a piano unsuitable for a Rachmaninoff sonata where the sonorities must pile up into a tsunami, a welter of voices. Occasionally a piano has everything. This is true of our 2016 New York Steinways, of the Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 Steinway, of Véra, our Hamburg Steinway, and of Seraphina, our Brahmsian 1897 Steinway. All these pianos are Ds, or concert grand 9-foot Steinways. Each of these pianos has fast, stunning actions, where whatever a pianist dreams comes true a second later on the keyboard. Each has an ideal gamut: that is, the entire range of the keyboard sounds as perfect in every part as a piano can sound: the trebles are intense and biting; the midranges are like tenors or sopranos; the basses are growling, wrapped in vibrating iron bells. But beyond that, each one is different.To describe just three of them: The Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 has two actions. 70

About Tippet Rise

The older action has a massive sound, slightly wider keys, and demands enormous muscularity to bring out its waterfalls and chasms. It is like a Bierstadt painting, with Photoshopped, apocalyptic sunsets, immense cataracts spilling over jagged cliffs, boreal forests in which lurk trolls and centaurs. Thar be dragons. This is Horowitz playing the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, possibly the most gargantuan, complex, explosive collection of attacks and crescendi, the most grotesque and crenellated cathedral of sound imaginable. You’d better be ready to sustain your fingers for over an hour of trench warfare, of bomb runs, of octaves unlike anything ever written, of lightning scales, endurance tests of staggered chords where all ten fingers perform at the peak of human potential for more than an hour. It’s like Hamlet: you are always on stage, and every word you speak is fireworks. The second action is more human: normal, modern-sized keys, a lighter action. Your fingers can relax a bit, and let the piano itself do the singing. But the beast beneath the hammers is the same: a Kraken emerging from the deep sea, the king of the dragons devastating the land, spikes on every scale. This is a piano to choose when you want to make an entrance, to peal out the great stops of the grand cathedral

organ, to pull up a church from beneath the sea. On this piano the gargoyles dance, the gnomes fly, and hell itself breathes forth. To choose its opposite next: Véra, the elegant, steely virtuoso, its solid brass notes perfectly pitched to resolve any confusion in an étude: every note is clear, sung out, thrown to the far walls. Like a perfectly dressed hussar, or one of the Viennese Lipizzaner stallions, every foot is placed exactly right, every nuance of a note can be phrased and voiced with the most exacting accuracy. Voices can be separated from the crowd of chords: a child soprano can be heard in the middle of the Wagnerian chorus. The sun shines brightly over the entire countryside. Gone are the storms and lightning strikes of CD-18, and in its place the brisk air of autumn tints the leaves with Chopinesque filigree. And then the opposite of both Véra and Kira: the murmurs and feather boas, the canons and carriages, the oboes and bassoons of the expressive Seraphina, the odalisque of the drawing room, where samovars scent the air and candlelight tinges a distant tapestry. Anything is possible in the haze that surrounds her bells and strings; more than all our pianos, Seraphina responds instantly to any touch, to every desire. Somewhere children dance around a bandstand in the Prater at dusk, and silverware clinks under the chandeliers in the Blaue Bar of the Hotel Sacher. Where the Hapsburg Empire was slowly waltzing its way to war, Hofmannsthal’s distant planets silently falling. The bygone lassitudes of Grillparzer, the salons of the golden houses, the twilight of the Magyars, all of whom had estates of not less than 1,400 acres, reverberate from every note in Brahms, and many measures in Schubert and Schumann.

By 1900 the nobility had retreated into its country estates, and a new middle class had emerged, in whose drawing rooms a piano like Seraphina might have been found. Markets had crashed, the prosperity of the Empire had foundered, and revolution had been in the air for half a century, along with the seeds of National Socialism, directed against exactly the cultured Jewish society which produced the paintings, sonatas, buildings, and novels by which we remember that era. So the purpose of Seraphina, built in memory of an era already vanished, was to evoke the past, to keep alive the memory of those idle days in the Viennese woods, of those lost chords in the Biedermeier ballrooms of the Liberal Age. A musician like Brahms was a recidivist, dedicated to the vanishing values which sustained his salary, that kept alive the illusions with which he buttressed his Rhapsodies. Rachmaninoff, too, carried the vanished world with him until, in the pink stucco greenhouses of Hollywood, it disappeared, along with the roots of his genius. Italian opera kept the old world alive well into the 1930s, until the new Russians like Stravinsky migrated to America, buried it forever. Pianos are made for the society which will buy them, and it wasn’t long before the new middle class wanted pianos that invoked Strauss waltzes, and the latest compositions which imitated the sounds of industry, of the airplane, the siren, the railroad. The alpine naiveté, the Gemütlichkeit, the Sehnsucht, the Weltschmerz, all tinged with the premonition of their own demise, was gone. But with Seraphina, singer of Bavarian folk songs, painter of Klimt’s gilt and Kokoschka’s colored chaos, it lives again. —Peter Halstead 2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

PIANO BIOS

About Tippet Rise

Véra (Hamburg) is the youngest of the Tippet

Rise pianos. Completed in Hamburg, Germany in 2016, it enjoyed a brief string of concerts in a famed European concert hall before traveling across the Atlantic, all the way to the rolling hills of Fishtail, Montana. Though far from the urban hustle and bustle of its birth city, Véra has found itself at home under the European-inspired architecture of the Olivier Music Barn. When selecting a piano, artists gravitate toward Véra’s sensitive action and capacity for speed. It performs a versatile repertoire with ease, flawlessly executing everything from delicate arias to virtuosic and bombastic cadenzas. Above its technical precision floats an ethereal tone, which shimmers in the lofty rafters of the hall. While a natural soloist, Véra does not

play exclusively in the center spotlight. Whether paired with a solo violin, wind quintet, or colleague pianos CD-18 and Seraphina, Véra shines just as brightly in chamber performances. This piano’s flexible character has proven to be its forte at Tippet Rise, both on and off stage. Some instruments might waver from perfection in less than ideal climates, but Véra adapts without complaint to the bitter cold or the bone-dryheat of the fickle Montana weather, playing consistently in all seasons. Recent performances include Alessandro Deljavan’s studio recording of Bach’s complete Goldberg Variations and selections from Liszt, as well as summer recitals by David Fung, Natasha Paremski, and Yevgeny Sudbin.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

eraphina has been captivating living-room audiences ever since the turn of the century. This piano’s story begins on November 4, 1897, when it was sold to a Mrs. J.C.C. Thorton of New York City. Historical records are sparse, but we can speculate that the instrument entertained in private recitals at Mrs. Thorton’s mansion, which overlooked the southern end of Central Park. In the 1950s, Seraphina relocated to another domestic parlor in the city of Northport, Long Island. In this quiet seaside neighborhood, Seraphina was the family piano for two generations of the Lauer family. After more than 100 years in New York, Seraphina moved yet again, this time trading ocean breezes for mountain air. Piano technician Tali Mahanor discovered Seraphina on an eBay listing, puchased and restored the instrument, and sent it out to Tippet Rise. Outfitted with replacement strings, a new soundboard, a fresh lacquer finish, and

About Tippet Rise

period-style legs, Seraphina arrived at Tippet Rise in nearly new condition. Only its original rim, metal plate, and ivory and ebony keys hint at its deeper history. Seraphina’s beauty extends beyond its elegant appearance. Though the exact nature of complex sound is hard to pinpoint, artists are drawn to the broad spectrum of its rich orchestral overtones. The piano’s 120-year-old voice sings to jazz— with intricate, earthy tones. Underneath the vast Montana skies, Seraphina’s music seems to draw inspiration from the landscape itself. Recent performances include summer recitals by Jenny Chen, Jeffrey Kahane, George Li, and Pedja Muzijevic. Seraphina is also featured in a studio recording of Aaron Jay Kernis’s 2017 commission First Club Date.

rom the start, CD-18 (Horowitz) was a piano destined for the spotlight. As soon as the instrument was completed in 1940, acclaimed pianist Vladimir Horowitz reserved the piano exclusively for his professional concerto recordings and concerts. Horowitz eased into retirement in the 1950s, and CD-18 was passed along to the next piano superstar, Eugene Istomin, who swiftly fell in love with the instrument. While still in partnership with Istomin, CD-18 also took the spotlight as the house piano for Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic (now David Geffen) Hall in Lincoln Center. In the 1980s and early '90s, CD-18 went on tour. Istomin, piano technician Tali Mahanor, and CD18 hit the road, traversing the midwestern United States and bringing to rural communities what might have been the first classical concerts ever performed in their small towns. When CD-18 returned to New York in the early 1990s, it resumed its life of big-city glamour. With pianist John Browning and conductor Leonard Slatkin, it performed and recorded the Barber Piano Concerto, first in St. Louis and then in New York. CD-18 remained the loyal and lifelong piano of Istomin until his death in 2003. It then passed into Tali’s care, who, with the enthusiastic blessing of

Istomin’s equally legendary widow, Marta Casals Istomin, brought it out west and into a new spotlight at Tippet Rise. Whether because of its legacy or its unparalleled palette of sound colors, CD-18’s reputation as a legendary piano continues at Tippet Rise. From the delicate pastels of Haydn’s sonatas, to John Luther Adams's towering mountains of sound, to the watery depths of Medtner’s mythical Improvisation No. 2, the musical landscapes that CD-18 paints are extraordinarily diverse. Its exchangeable action adds yet another dimension to its sonic possibilities. Like a violinist who chooses between bows, pianists can select from CD-18’s two sets of hammers. The denser German hammers activate high harmonics for a crystal-blue clarity, while the softer American hammers evoke a tone brimming with warmth and roundness. CD-18 is also outfitted with custom bass strings that bring a thunderous depth to its lowest registers. Recent performances include summer recitals by Michael Brown, Vicky Chow, and Anne-Marie McDermott. CD-18 also made its film debut in Kathy Kasic’s The Stainless Stealer Steals the Universe, with music improvised by Julien Brocal.

2018 Summer Season

THE HISTORY OF

THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE

SOPHIE'S CHOICE

About Tippet Rise

o prefer one piano over the other is Sophie’s Choice. When you love them all, all pianos become equal. At that stage, choosing one over the other reflects on us, not on them. To say that any beauty might have permission to pass sentence on a cowering, sensate beast which lives to serve her is to denigrate the skein of secrets, the history of private triumphs, the inner life of dreams, the childhood of monsters, the iceberg which towers beneath its tip in all of us, and in pianos alike. They do not fail us; we fail them. A pianist once said to me, “Why worry about the concert? Give the piano its head. Let it do the talking. It’s been there before; it knows where to go.” On the other side is Don Quixote:

PARABLE I read how Quixote in his random ride Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose The purity of chance, would not decide Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose. For glory lay wherever turned the fable. His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes Were heavy, and he headed for the stable. —Richard Wilbur

Pianos require a certain amount of intervention to direct their innate memories. But much of a performance rests with the moment itself. Lightning strikes randomly (assuming the electricity is there in the first place). A great concert happens as often in a practice session as onstage. Music flows in the moment. The novels which we write nightly are often better than the ones we read. Pianists play differently in every concert. What is a piano to do? They serve fickle masters. Fortunately, pianos do not talk back, so we can blame everything on them, and they will treat us beautifully tomorrow, or as our moods deserve. But we all know when there is something special in the air, when the sunset is filled with tropical drinks, when everything—the light, the night, the music, the mood—just clicks. There is more to those moments than any string, any key, or any finger. The great recorded operas of Pavarotti and Sutherland, the recordings of Magdalena Kožená, capture throughout just that sublime moment, forever. Sometimes everyone can feel the shiver in the sky, but at other times you hope that someone in the audience heard what just happened, and that it will change their life, as some musician at some time has changed ours.

2018 Summer Season

2018 Summer Music Season

The Music at Tippet Rise

This Music Season at Tippet Rise features eight

weekends of classical chamber music and recitals. Performances take place indoors and out: within the larch-lined walls of the 150-seat Olivier Music Hall, and beneath the Domo and the big Montana sky. This, our third season, features new and returning artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;rising stars, established soloists, and ensemblesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;presenting works ranging in date from the early 18th century through this very summer. We hope you enjoy our summer season as much as we have enjoyed creating it.

2018 Summer Season

Charles Hamlen is one of the most respected

professionals in the world of arts management. Together with business partner Edna Landau, he founded Hamlen/Landau Management in 1979. Five years later, the company was acquired by the International Management Group, becoming IMG Artists, where Charles served as co-director from 1984 to 1992, overseeing the careers of artists, including violinists Joshua Bell, Leila Josefowicz, and Itzhak Perlman; the Emerson String Quartet; and pianists Stephen Hough, Evgeny Kissin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and André Watts. In 1993 Charles left IMG Artists to found Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS. After 16 years at the helm of Classical Action, he returned to IMG Artists, where he served as chairman until 2012. He is currently Artistic Advisor to New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s and has served as Artistic Advisor to Tippet Rise since the autumn of 2016. His numerous honors include the 1998 Jerry Willis Award from the Western Arts Alliance, the 2000 Eos Orchestra’s Michael Palm Award, the International Society for the Performing Arts’ 2004 Angel Award, and the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Charles was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2004.

The Music at Tippet Rise

CHARLES HAMLEN

A R T I S T I C A DV I SO R

2018 Summer Season

FRIDAY, JULY 6, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, JULY 7, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, JULY 7, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, JULY 13, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano

SATURDAY, JULY 14, 11:00 AM The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble

SATURDAY, JULY 14, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, JULY 20, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, JULY 21, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, JULY 21, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Julien Brocal, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Jeffrey Kahane, piano

The Domo Gabriel Kahane, voice, guitar Dover Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Julien Brocal, piano Caroline Goulding, violin

The Olivier Music Barn St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble

The Olivier Music Barn Timo Andres, piano Gabriel Kahane, piano Jeffrey Kahane, piano Dover Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello

The Domo Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Ingrid Fliter, piano

The Domo Caroline Goulding, violin

The Music at Tippet Rise

The Domo Anton Dressler, clarinet Escher String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello

The Olivier Music Barn Ingrid Fliter, piano Anton Dressler, clarinet Escher String Quartet

2018 CONCERT SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, AUGUST 17, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 6:30 PM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 6:30 PM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 11:00 AM The Olivier Music Barn

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 6:30 PM

Wu Han, piano Orion Weiss, piano

The Olivier Music Barn Wu Han, piano Orion Weiss, piano David Finckel, cello

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 11:00 AM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Wu Han, piano David Finckel, cello

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

The Domo Borromeo String Quartet

The Domo Tara Helen O'Connor, flute Calidore String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Borromeo String Quartet

The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Aaron Boyd, violin Daniel Phillips, violin Xavier Foley, double bass Tara Helen O’Connor, flute Calidore String Quartet

Additional • Please, no food or beverages inside the concert hall. information for • Photography is not allowed in the concert hall or during outdoor performances. concertgoers: • Montana’s weather conditions can change rapidly. Please bring warm layers and

an umbrella or rain jacket to outdoor performances. • Our plentiful and very warm sunshine can also dehydrate you quickly. Always bring a bottle of water to outdoor performances. • If the weather is inclement, outdoor concerts will be moved to the Olivier Music Barn. 2018 Summer Season

WEEK ONE

PRE-CONCERT READING PETER HALSTEAD

Julien Brocal and Caroline Goulding are two young

performers who disrupt the traditional expectations of scores with ground-breaking new interpretations without affecting the notes written by the composer. In many ways their representations are closer than ever to the musicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intentions. But a new wind is blowing; we are on the edge of a revolution in performance technique that transcends simple fidelity to the notes and which instead evokes the meaning, the mood, the landscape behind the score. A score is like a set of blocks with which we build structures to complement the terrain. Some people build mud huts, some Bauhaus and Brutalist boxes, some maritime sails and waves. And some have such vision that we cannot even begin to understand how their shapes will lead us into the future. Julien is a pianist. As a composer, he is the child of Ravel and Mompou, both of whom he plays tonight. His own pieces share the same gentle ghosts of immanence, conjuring up the yearning of a fog or a wind, creating moods where music has never gone, and yet moods we recognize as being our deepest, most private emotions. Notes are merely clues of

The Music at Tippet Rise

the essence that lies beyond them. A composer can suggest that hyperreality, but performers either make it surreal, ultra real, or, when all else fails, simple. Julien believes in gardening his pieces like flowers: planting them in the soil of a mind which has absorbed the landscape of the composer, his sufferings, his triumphs, his silencesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and then letting them flourish in the French countryside, in the soft autumn and stark winters of Catalonia, among the bells and birds, in the dark night of the soul of the great mystic Juan de la Cruz. His melodies are incantations, chants, meditations on being. They do not intrude or impress: they flow with the winds of dawn, they summon up the voices of silence, a nostalgia for imaginary places. He finds in the music of Ravel and Chopin the suggestions of these mythical kingdoms. His Chopin is on a level with the warmth and perfection of Dinu Lipatti. Critics have tried to pigeonhole the surreal Impressionism of Brocal or Mompou as being somehow lesser than the fire-breathing chords of the Russian and German traditions, but this misses the new world of meditative thinking

JULIEN BROCAL AND CAROLINE GOULDING

which reaches back to Gregorian chant, to the earliest modes of sound, which is now at the forefront of musical philosophy: Aaron Copland, Stefan Wolpe, Arvo Pärt, John Luther Adams are a few of the voices for whom music has become an expression of the underlying forces which structure the universe with the stillness of primordial rhythms. Caroline is a violinist and a prodigy, playing on stages since she was 13. Her first recording was released when she was 16. Having won the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, having played in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Louvre, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Caroline has moved beyond the concept of playing into the realms of channeling everything she has absorbed from life into every note, of bringing the structure of the universe into the shape of the music, of surrendering to the wash of tides, to the solar waves, to the energy that holds space together with its harmonies, and letting all of it infuse her playing simultaneously. Like the great writers, she throws the kitchen sink into the mix. Rather than narrowing her discipline down to the notes, she accepts everything in her mind

as an influence on the narrative. As she has said:

When you’re surrendering, you’re letting go of that narrative you’ve told yourself a million times over and over again. It could still be there in the background—it’s not like you get to a point and it’s like "Oh, it’s not there anymore, it’s all perfect." You’re surrendering that illusion of who you’ve been or who you are for the reality of the moment, which is the only reality that we ever have. You’re becoming embodied. You’re becoming in harmony with everything there is....

There is no boundary. You’re transcending the illusion of boundaries because you realize there are no boundaries at that level and there never have been.

Caroline’s vocabulary is a spiritual one, encompassing Tibetan Buddhism, Western philosophy, themes of transcendence. But she is also capable of weaving thought, natural sounds, into shapes on the violin that just happen to coincide with existing compositions. To listen to her is to hear Bach or BartÓk improvising.

2018 Summer Season

CONVERSATION WITH JULIEN BROCAL

After composing and recording the music for several Tippet Rise films, including “The Stainless Stealer Steals the Universe” and “Reflections,” pianist, composer, and improviser Julien Brocal joins us to present the first concert of the summer season.

Devanney Haruta: What inspired the theme for the program title, “Reflections Between Man and Nature”? Julien Brocal: My roots from my family come from the soil, from the peasants. Recently, this strong interest for what is growing came back to me. I started a garden project, where I grow my own food. This is a big step in my life to gain autonomy with what I am eating. So, the music was the reflection of my own research in my life. Of course, Ravel and Mompou didn’t have a garden and grow their vegetables and things like that, but they were interested in showing the beauty that is surrounding us.

The Music at Tippet Rise

DH: How does your practice with improvisation influence your approach to giving a concert performance? JB: Concerts have to be made in the way that the music came for the first time in your fingers and in your ears. You’re discovering and hearing at the same time as the audience, for the first time. It’s the same with improvisation. Improvisation can be something you have in your mind for a while. You have these sounds that are disturbing your nights. Even though you had them in your mind, when you put your fingers on the keyboard, it will be the first time you play them. So, for me, the concert time is like an improvisation, because every time will be different. It can’t be every time the same, it has to be every time unique.

DH: You’ve collaborated with Caroline Goulding in the past. Can you describe what it’s like to work with her and what you are looking forward to in this upcoming concert? JB: When I first met with Caroline it was very funny

because I didn’t expect us to meet. I was at Tippet Rise working with Kathy Kasic and Mickey Houlihan on the “Stainless Stealer” film. We finished the shooting, and Mickey told me, “There is this young violinist, Caroline Goulding. She is arriving tomorrow. Do you have a small composition of yours that you would like to play together?” And I said, “No, but I will think about it.” And then Caroline arrived, and for an afternoon, we developed ideas together.

I wrote on the day a piece for us to play. After this, we recorded it. It was a very touching experience. I’m really grateful to Caroline to have joined this creative process. Normally in my world, musicians that I’ve been working with are preparing the score, they come for the rehearsal, and we play. Of course, we can work together, we can have ideas, but Caroline and I have been on this creative process. For the first time in my life, I experienced something that completely changed my perspective of the musical relationship that you can develop. After this afternoon, it was as if we already knew each other for our whole life. It was this kind of… wow. Nothing was written, and that’s the beauty of it. I like to see that, the continuity of an improvisation in the real life.

2018 Summer Season

WEEK ONE

The Music at Tippet Rise

FRIDAY, JULY 6, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Julien Brocal, piano

Reflections Between Man and Nature

FEDERICO MOMPOU: Paisajes (Landscapes) La fuente y la campana (The Fountain and the Bells) El lago (The Lake) Carros de Galicia (Carts of Galicia) SERGEI BORTKIEWICZ: Seven Preludes, Op. 40 No. 1 in F-sharp Major: Allegretto No. 2 in B Minor: Andante No. 3 in E Major: Con moto No. 4 in F-sharp Major: Sostenuto No. 5 in D Major: Allegro No. 6 in F-sharp Minor: Andantino dolente No. 7 in E Major: Appassionato

FEDERICO MOMPOU: Variations on a Theme by Chopin Theme: Andantino – Tranquillo e molto amabile – Gracioso – Lento – Espressivo – Tempo di Mazurka – Recitativo – Allegro leggiero – Andante dolce e espressivo – Valse – Évocation: Cantabile molto espressivo – Lento dolce e legato – Galope y Epílogo INTERMISSION MAURICE RAVEL: Sonatine Modéré Mouvement de menuet Animé MAURICE RAVEL: Miroirs Noctuelles (Moths) Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds) Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean) Alborada del gracioso (The Jester’s Aubade) La vallée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells) 2018 Summer Season

ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD Every piece that Julien plays is cut from the same fabric as Julien’s own sense of languid evening, rainy afternoon, and sun-dappled morning. Mompou, Bortkiewicz, Ravel are Julien. Julien’s own compositions are echoes of Sundays in the park, slow lunches under the village chestnut tree, summer nights filled with the songs of crickets.

FEDERICO MOMPOU (1893–1987) Paisajes (Landscapes) Federico Mompou is the great unknown Impressionist, the philosopher of desolate and lavish countrysides trapped inside urban courtyards, the way he felt himself trapped in cities. His family made bells, and the sound never left him. At one point he tried to revive their foundry. He never left the playground, the beach, the park. His world was one of children, tinged with the sadness of having grown up. Paisajes (Landscapes) is in three parts, written in 1942, 1947, and 1960. La fuente y la campana (The Fountain and the Bell): Although we use both to judge the passing of time, the linearity of minutes flowing around us, Mompou understands that time has no signature. There is no prescribed tempo for existence. It simply exists. As the saying goes, only man divides time into sections; man is the great divider. For Mompou, time condemns us, removes us from the innocence of childhood, and so time must be resisted. There are no demands made; you don’t have to get home in time or be turned into a pumpkin. Landscapes don’t have to be finished. Mompou isn’t describing a courtyard (with its bell and fountain) in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona near the cathedral where he was strolling with his girlfriend, later his wife. He was 64, she was 34, and they heard the cathedral’s chimes 90

The Music at Tippet Rise

at midnight, which Orson Welles would use in his film, Chimes at Midnight, about the carousing of the peripheral characters who surrounded Prince Hal’s intemperate youth. Falstaff states: “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.” Shakespeare, Welles, and Mompou see through the sensuousness of the metaphor to its underlying suggestion of mortality. We have heard the chimes in the past, but they’re over. Mompou is meditating on the sounds of children playing, on the quality of the light on the stone, on the calm of the water, on the timbre of the bell. And what Mompou has discovered in the air of that jubilant and frenetic district is a music unlike any other. Like Frédéric Chopin or Dylan Thomas, there is no precedent for Mompou; he has no school, and no followers. (Although he has found a home in the soul of Julien Brocal, whose own pieces live in the same airy countryside.) El lago (The Lake) was inspired by Barcelona’s Montjuïc Park. It isn’t so much a lake as the way wind becomes visible on it, the way it reflects the surrounding landscape. Debussy’s and Ravel’s rain is onomatopoetic, an imitation of water striking a surface; but Mompou’s water is a song sung by the leaves reflected on it, briefly disrupted by ripples. Carros de Galicia (Carts of Galicia) was inspired by the rural, autonomous community in northwestern Spain. It was the homeland of the Gallaeci, a Celtic people, and was later ruled by the Romans, the Visigoths, and for a time was its own kingdom. Here is the creaking of the lumbering carts of the farmland paths of this otherwise oceanic region, ending with a flashback from the fountain.

SERGEI BORTKIEWICZ (1877–1952) Seven Preludes, Op. 40 Sergei Bortkiewicz spent his childhood on the countryside Ukrainian estate of his noble Polish parents and studied

with Anatoly Lyadov, himself a student of Liszt’s, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. This was where Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev studied. The great composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov taught there for 40 years, and taught Lyadov. Lyadov in turn taught Prokofiev and Bortkiewicz. Rachmaninoff began his studies there. This was the nerve center of Russian music, along with the Moscow Conservatory. St. Petersburg is and always was the most elegant city in Russia, built from scratch with slave labor by Czar Peter the Great, who then had the architect killed. It is a city of fancies and follies: Smolny and Trinity Cathedrals, the immense Winter Palace, St. Michael’s Castle, Peterhof, the Church of the Savior. Because of its canals, it is called the Venice of the North. Its culture was very French, and you can hear that influence in Bortkiewicz’s Preludes. Nevsky Prospect is possibly the greatest grand promenade in the world. Bely’s great novel St. Petersburg intricately captures the feeling of this magical city. Nabokov and Rachmaninoff, Dostoyevsky and Mussorgsky came of age in it. Having an estate in the Ukraine was the equivalent of having a ranch in Montana: Ukraine was the unspoiled countryside of which every city dweller dreams, an immense plain riven with streams and woods, where the nobility could dream of utopia, where composers had the time and space to think of nothing but composing. Lyadov lived on his wife’s Ukraine estate and came into town to teach, but basically lived and composed in the deep countryside. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory paints a heartbreakingly gorgeous picture of the summer idyll of Ukraine, before the Revolution eliminated the White Russian intelligentsia overnight, which had been Europeanized by Peter the Great. In the same way, Hitler wiped out the great artistic culture that Germany and Austria had become, overnight creating a Viennese culture in the United States, where most of the exiles settled. Like other aristocratic Russians, Bortkiewicz was driven

from Ukraine to Istanbul, then to Vienna, then driven from Vienna by the Nazis. He returned to Vienna in time for World War II, which brought him to the brink of ruin. All his compositions (along with his publishers) were destroyed in bombing raids, but by the end of the war he obtained a small position at the Vienna City Conservatory where he eked out a living and composed his late great Preludes, his Piano Concerto, and his First Symphony, when his friends realized they had a great composer in their midst. He was 75. Shortly after performing what would be his last pieces at the Musikverein in Vienna, he died of a stomach flu. Running from the world, he composed to the end in the style of the late 1890s, as did Rachmaninoff. Their music was frozen by the unraveling of the social fabric in which they had grown up. Bortkiewicz based his music on Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin, and Ukrainian folksongs. The preludes from his Op. 40 are pure Chopin, and ideally suited to Julien’s sense of the gossamer, the mournful, the evanescent. Nothing lasts more than three minutes. You could be in a Paris salon on a rainy evening around 1840, or at a Liszt concert in the 1850s. The fifth prelude might be from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The sixth might be early Scriabin. The last prelude might be Liszt, with a very brief (one measure) jazz riff before the concluding octaves of the coda (Rhapsody in Blue had been written seven years earlier). Rachmaninoff would also integrate the occasional Gershwin into his Byzantine friezes. But Rachmaninoff was living in Hollywood. For Bortkiewicz, time has stopped, or gone backwards. Despite being in exile all his life, despite poverty, fear, having no sense of country because of constant persecution—a life on the run—Bortkiewicz has preserved an inner core of gentle days in a Viennese park, the chords of his childhood (although he was 54 before he wrote his Op. 40), and a gentle nostalgia for the life in the countryside taken from him by the accident of living in the wrong place at the wrong time. 2018 Summer Season

Performances of his music are very rare, especially by major pianists; we hope you enjoy this special soirée, this interlude in St. Petersburg, Paris, and Weimar.

FEDERICO MOMPOU Variations on a Theme by Chopin With these twelve variations, we return to Federico Mompou, who is so rarely programmed even once on a program, let alone twice. The piece takes its theme from the Prelude in A Major, Op. 28, No. 7 by Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), and puts it through the filters of modernity and Mompou’s own, original harmonic sensibility. Some variations verge on Impressionism and even near-Jazz, while others, like the Tempo di Mazurka and Valse, double down on Chopin’s style. A few other Chopin pieces are paraphrased, including the Fantaisie-Impromptu and Prelude No. 4 in E Minor. Mompou began to write the Chopin Variations in 1938 as a cello and piano piece, but stopped after completing just three variations. He returned to the project in 1957, this time to fulfill a ballet commission, but it never reached the stage—leaving us with just the piano version we hear today. — Benjamin Pesetsky

MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937) Sonatine and Miroirs Ravel wrote this charming early Sonatine under the pseudonym “Verla,” an anagram of Ravel. He was 28. The first movement was written for a competition specifying that it couldn’t be longer than 75 bars. (But Ravel puts in a repeat, so the pianist gets to develop the initial lyrical theme by playing it differently. Or maybe we just get to know it better by hearing it again.) This short melody features the uniquely 92

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modern modulations which imitated Monet’s Impressionist brush strokes. It also contains a phrase which is a wave hello to Debussy’s Sarabande of 1902, which Ravel later orchestrated. For both Debussy and Ravel this was a phrase which, in its three-note resignation to life, is the essence of childhood. Ravel used it also in “Vallée des cloches.” Ravel was 13 years younger than Debussy and was obviously emulating him, but Ravel’s compositions began to influence Debussy as well. The first movement has a chord structure similar to his Pavane for a Dead Princess of four years before, which was also influenced by Debussy’s Sarabande. However, these strange modulations come from the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. Mahler called Chabrier’s pieces the beginnings of modern music. Ravel said that Chabrier changed the course of harmony in France. His friendship with both Monet and Manet led Chabrier into imitating the “neighbor note” changes in keys, as Monet’s brush strokes juxtaposed contradictory colors next to one another. Soon Ravel, in Miroirs, began using abrupt juxtapositions of different tempi, and of major and minor modes. In the same way, John Luther Adams has used the painter Mark Rothko’s translucent fields of white as a template for blurring the harmonies of his music, until “there are no lines left—only slowly changing light on a timeless white field,” like the sun on the snow. Great artists use other disciplines as metaphors to spark their own creativity, which is why musicians should learn about painting, and vice versa. Critics have noted the similarities of Ravel’s Sonatine to his Miroirs, which he wrote just afterwards. This was a period known as “l’affaire Ravel,” when he tried and failed four times to win the Prix de Rome, being thoroughly rejected by the musical establishment of the Paris Conservatory. Ravel wrote, “a sentence by Shakespeare helped me to formulate a completely opposite position [to mere description]: ‘the eye sees not itself / but by reflection, by some other things’ (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2).” Or, as Oscar Wilde said, a mask tells us more than a face. Or, again, Freud:

we see ourselves as others see us. That is, we catch glimpses of ourselves through reflections in store windows, superimposed over pots and pans. Ravel dedicated these pieces to members of Les Apaches, a musical society he more or less led. Although the Apaches took a while to understand the works dedicated to them, Miroirs changed modern music, building on Emmanuel Chabrier’s base. They are all highly virtuosic and use techniques begun by Liszt to convey the colors of Impressionist painting. Noctuelles (Moths): Intricate rhythmic patterns depict the frenzied wheeling and fluttering of these pests. Occasional szforzandi are either collisions or impetuous swattings by the composer. Ravel may have put them into Miroirs to get rid of them, the way Dvořák put the scarlet tanager into his “American” Quartet, because it was annoying him. Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds): Ravel described this as “birds lost in the torpor of a dark forest during the hottest summer hours.” Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean): Arpeggios stand in for waves. The simple title camouflages this immense paean to the ocean. Alborada del gracioso (The Jester’s Aubade): An aubade is a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. (A serenade is a song about lovers separating in the evening.) Chabrier had written an aubade in 1883, inspired by his four-month trip to Spain. John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” is an aubade. Debussy would five years later write a similar jaunty episode, “Général Lavine—eccentric,” a deconstructed cakewalk about an American clown who appeared in the Marigny Theatre in Paris in 1910.

he uses an operatic narrative recitative to isolate important themes, the way Rachmaninoff used single notes on rare occasions (such as the beginning of the Piano Concerto No. 3) to highlight his underlying themes. La vallée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells): This is an exploration of bell sonorities. Mompou’s family made bells. Russian bell chimers played on un-tuned bells. Peter the Great introduced Hemony bells into Russia, French-tuned bells used in carillons, the rows of bells found in bell towers. Bells were used frequently by Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky. In Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Rublev, an enormous bell is cast, an iconic scene, representative of the soul of Russia. The Tsar Kolokol III, or king of bells, located at the Kremlin, weighs more than 445,000 pounds. In Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral,” you can hear the cathedral bells of the lost city of Ys, even though it is submerged beneath the waves. Ys was the birthplace of Isolde. Nicholson Baker, in Traveling Sprinkler, says that such bell pieces are about “all sunken frightening beautiful artful ruined human things.” It’s about the sunken cathedral in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the ruined underwater abbey in H.G. Wells’s story “In the Abyss,” Swinburne’s crumbling wave-gnawed town of Dunwich, the article Proust wrote in 1904 about the death of cathedrals, and the watery bells in the song Brahms wrote in 1860 on Müller’s poem about the mythic city on the Baltic, Vineta.

In this Aubade, Ravel uses a moto perpetuo framework on which he hangs bursts of Spanish themes. A single-note recitative in the middle is reminiscent of Liszt’s Légends, where 2018 Summer Season

WEEK ONE

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SATURDAY, JULY 7, 11:00 AM The Domo Caroline Goulding, violin

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 (arr. for violin solo) PHILIP GLASS: Partita VI: Evening Song PHILIP GLASS: “I Enjoyed the Laughter” from Book of Longing BÉLA BARTÓK: Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB 124 Tempo di ciaccona Fuga: Risoluto, non troppo vivo Melodia: Adagio Presto PHILIP GLASS: Knee Play 2 from Einstein on the Beach HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ VON BIBER: Passacaglia for Solo Violin in G Minor GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN: Fantasie for Solo Violin No. 5 in A Major, TWV 40:18 Allegro Andante Allegro NICOLÒ PAGANINI: Sonata for Solo Violin in A Major Allegro Moderato Adagio non tanto Andantino EUGÈNE YSAŸE: Sonata for Solo Violin No. 5 in G Major, Op. 27 L’aurore: Lento assai Danse rustique: Allegro giocoso molto moderato – Moderato amabile

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD This is an extraordinary and demanding survey of the great modern and Baroque classics of the violin repertoire. The program itself demands immense stamina, technique, and imagination. It is a very large picture window into the exhaustive brilliance of the great repository of civilization epitomized by the accumulated genius of works like these. It takes an exhilarated madness to plan a concert as monumental as this. It is like having Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, and Einstein at dinner together.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 (arr. for violin solo) Like the great Bach Chaconne for solo violin (the last movement of Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin), this immense and legendary work is also in D minor. It was originally written for the organ. When I was a 13-year-old organist at my local church, I used to play it. It was the theme of the Lon Chaney film The Phantom of the Opera, and so I would lurch around the keyboards trying to imitate Chaney. The audience would always gasp. The priests told me that Bach wasn’t allowed in church. But my grandfather had built the church, so they were stuck with me (and Bach). But I was the last unpaid organist they ever had. Bach is fortunately allowed at Tippet Rise. I also used to play the Busch-Reisinger organ at Harvard, made by the Dutch company Flentrop in 1957 at the behest of the great organist E. Power Biggs, a replica of the Baroque organ which Bach used to play at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750. He is buried there. His organ no longer exists, and has been replaced twice. 96

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The Flentrop is a tracker organ, where the keys connect directly to the pipes, so the fingers on the keys open the pipes and allow the wind from the bellows to flow into them, thus creating the sound. It has around 61 stops, or special sounds, so these were the voices Bach had at his disposal for this piece. When the inventor of the Ampico piano roll asked Schnabel to record on it, he asked how many touches it had. “Eleven,” said the inventor proudly. “Too bad,” said Schnabel. “I have twelve.” And he put off making a piano roll. Schnabel said, “Great music is better than it can be played.” I would add that every time you listen to a great piece, it’s always different. Bach’s Toccata is based on the world’s most famous mordent, specifically a lower mordent, where you play the note that’s written, the note below it, and then the note on which you started. In this case, Bach wrote an A, so you play A-G-A. The tradition is to play it slowly, not rapidly, so it sounds quite threatening. The notes that follow the mordent are almost inconsequential. You could call them an expanded mordent, where you have a quick scale down to the note below D, and then the figure ends on D. So it’s the same thing as the opening, but extended. This Toccata is simply a bunch of tricks around the notes of A and D, in the key of D minor, where A and D are two of the three notes in the D-minor triad. The whole point of this bravura introduction is just to shout D! It’s in D minor! The fugue then sneaks in afterwards, with its trembling message, a simple wavering theme using A as a constantly repeating note in between the melody. On an organ, this can be varied endlessly by changing the timbres, or the stops. You can start as a flute, then play it as an oboe, then come in with the bourdon in the deep pedaled bass, and so on. Even the piano (in the Busoni transcription) has more possible tricks to keep it interesting.

But the violin has only intonation to vary the theme, which repeats constantly. This is then the challenge for the player: can you play the same thing twenty different ways and make it sound more complex each time?

PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937) Partita VI: Evening Song Glass wrote his Seven Partitas for Solo Violin based on Bach’s. Often when you play a Bach piece, its stringent and rigid structures mask an inner melody which is quite personal or emotional, contradicting its apparent structure. Glass has picked up on these hidden, almost popular songs couched in more formal forms. In Bach’s Sixth Partita, Glass has found a beautiful melody which he stresses, placing a repeated note under it, rather than above it. Similarities can be found with Bach’s own keyboard Partita No. 6 in E Minor. In the Air and the Gavotte, the extremes of the melody make similar intervals to Glass’s. But it would be petty to suggest a methodology; Glass has taken the ends of phrases in general, high and low, and juxtaposed them in his own way to create a poignant, Bach-like ostinato, interwoven with scales to fabricate a modern response to Bach’s repose, stillness, silence, until the ostinato slows and only single notes remain. It is Schenkerian Bach, where only the structural elements remain, and the song captures Bach’s underlying sadness in a way that is as effective and structural as Bach himself. What mad joy and desperate grief will the violinist discover in the interstices between the two giants?

PHILIP GLASS Knee Play 2 from Einstein on the Beach Knee Plays are the five entr’actes, or interludes, joining the nine scenes of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, the way the knee joins the leg together. They allow time to change

the sets, but also provide a continuity between the four acts. Knee Play 2 is a Bach-like scale played endlessly and finally desperately (theoretically by Einstein himself, who was a renowned Bach violinist) during the opera’s abstract monologues about buying glasses and during the song “Mr. Bojangles.”

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945) Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB124 This is one of the most difficult pieces ever written. Its poignant and inventive harmonies are a narrative of the hardship and poverty endured by Bartók, struggling to support his family while he was dying of leukemia in America. You can hear the pain of his realization that he was at the time the greatest living composer, but completely neglected in a strange land, fighting for his and his family’s survival. Bartók had been hired by Columbia University during his last years from 1940 to 1945 to transcribe certain Yugoslavian folk music which only Columbia had. Bartók was in any case desperate to leave Hungary because of Hitler. Columbia paid him so little that on weekends his recreation was to ride the subway with his family. He was relatively unknown in America and could get only about eight concerts a year, and so lived in abysmal poverty. His arthritis was so bad that he couldn’t play the piano, which affected his will to compose. He was dying of leukemia, and weighed only 90 pounds when he collapsed during a speech at Harvard. Harvard stepped in and paid for his hospitalization, and ASCAP paid for his later care. The wealthy and brilliant conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, hired him to compose his final piece, the Concerto for Orchestra, which renewed Bartók’s enthusiasm for composition.

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When Menuhin was planning to play Bartók’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano at Carnegie Hall, he played it first for Bartók, who said, “I didn’t think music could be played like that until long after the composer was dead.” A friendship sprang up, and Menuhin commissioned and premiered the solo violin sonata:

I knew he was in financial straits, that he was too proud to accept handouts, that he was the greatest of living composers. Unwilling to waste a moment, I asked him on the afternoon of our first meeting if I might commission him to compose a work for me. It didn’t have to be anything large-scale, I urged; I was not hoping for a third concerto, just a work for violin alone.

Bartók gratefully accepted $500 for the work, which he finished in six weeks. Not hearing from Menuhin, he sent the manuscript to Rudolf Kolisch, the founder of the Kolisch Quartet, which debuted works by the great Viennese composers of the day: Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, and Bartók (Arnold Schoenberg was married to Kolisch’s sister). When he taught at Darmstadt, Kolisch was friends with Eduard Steuermann and the Marxist musical theorist Theodor Adorno. My own teacher, Russell Sherman, was a student of Steuermann’s, and a friend of Gunther Schuller, who brought both Kolisch and Sherman to the New England Conservatory of Music. Kolisch felt the piece was playable. Menuhin felt he could play it only if he changed the notes in the moto perpetuo Presto to half-tone (chromatic) notes rather than quarter tones, which Menuhin never felt competent to play.

Very much like the Glass pieces, this work was based on Bach. The first movement translates the last movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor into a Hungarian mode. The fugue in the second movement follows Bach’s structure in the Sonata No. 1 for Solo Violin.

PHILIP GLASS “I Enjoyed the Laughter” from Book of Longing Glass’s entire song cycle is about 90 minutes long, and combines Leonard Cohen’s recorded voice reading his poetry from The Book of Longing, four artists singing the poems to Glass’s music, and eight instrumentalists with featured solos. Cohen recorded all the poems in the book and left it to Glass to choose which ones should be included in the song cycle. “I Enjoyed the Laughter” is for solo violin. Composed of triplets and rapidly bowed strokes, it is one of Glass’s many paeans to J.S. Bach, with simple accompaniments replacing melodies, as Bach’s ostinatos were as significant as his actual cadences. Often the melody lies in the accompaniment. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata begins with exactly these triplets, which are an accompaniment treated as the melody.

I enjoyed the laughter old poets as you welcomed me but I won’t be staying here for long You won’t be either.

Bartók died shortly after Menuhin debuted the Sonata. This is a monumental and intimidating piece. It uses every trick in the book, such as enormous leaps; a melody played with the bow while the left hand plucks the accompaniment; and double, triple, and quadruple stops (that is, chords of two, three, and four notes played on several strings at once). 98

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HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ VON BIBER (1644–1704) Passacaglia for Solo Violin in G Minor This monumental piece is the last “Mystery” or “Rosary” Sonata (No. 16) by Biber, one of the earliest known pieces for solo violin. Each sonata portrays a different mystery of

the rosary; as Biber worked for bishops, his main focus was sacred music. The Mysteries are similar to the Stations of the Cross, except there are glorious, joyful, and luminous, as well as sorrowful meditations on the life of Christ. There are 15 Mysteries in all; for instance, some of the Luminous Mysteries are the Baptism, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes at the Wedding Feast in Cana, and the Eucharist (the immanence of God’s body present in the Host, and his blood in the wine). The Passacaglia is the final, separate culmination of this litany, the way the cross anchors the rosary. Each sonata has an accompanying “picture text,” traditionally used by the Catholic Church as aids in meditating; in the case of the Passacaglia, the sketch is of the Guardian Angel with a child. Only the Passacaglia (which ends the cycle) and the first sonata use normal tuning. (The 15th Sonata contains the famous theme later used by Paganini, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and Liszt.) Biber was one of the early innovators of violin technique, while being simultaneously one of the violin’s great melodic geniuses. Violin technique is anchored in its early innovators, such as Biber of the Dresden school and Corelli of the Italian school. Biber introduced multiple “stops,” where the fingers play broken chords with as many as three strings bowed simultaneously. He used scordatura, or alternative tunings, number symbolism, and Affektenlehre, a theory of the Baroque era where the passions (affections) could be represented by the correspondences of certain colors or notes. For instance, sorrow was considered a contraction of vapors in the body, and thus should be symbolized by smaller spaces between notes. Biber was the primary Austrian practitioner of stylus fantasticus, the root of aleatoric music, structures without structure, freeform notes being used to show off the technique of the musician, as in Bach toccatas and Mozart fantasias. Along with Bach’s D-minor Chaconne, this is one of the great and passionate towers of the Baroque violin repertoire.

GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681–1767) Fantasie for Solo Violin No. 5 in A Major, TWV 40:18 Telemann wrote more compositions than Bach and Handel combined. He knew both of them; he was the godfather of Bach’s witty son C.P.E. Bach, and Handel studied his works. Considered their equal for centuries, he was abandoned in the 19th century for writing too many works (the way painters were ostracized in mid 20th-century New York for working in color). Bach’s biographers Philipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer praised many Bach pieces which turned out to have been written by Telemann, whom they belittled. Telemann wrote an opera when he was 12. He lived and worked indefatigably in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt, and finally landed in Hamburg, where he taught and composed endlessly. He may have been motivated by the almost immediate death of his first wife and then by the life of his second wife (with whom he had nine children and was initially blissfully happy), who cheated on him, accumulated greater gambling debts than his salary, and then left him. He turned down the job of director at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche because of the salary; the job then famously went to Bach, whose greatest compositions were written there. In addition to writing more than 3,000 compositions, he was a fanatic gardener (as was Handel, as is Julien Brocal). There was a tendency in his age to write music with one voice only, imitating plainsong or Gregorian chant. But Telemann added the voices of the Italians, the French, and the Polish to German forms, and the Fantasie for Solo Violin No. 5 is polyphonic. As T.S. Eliot said, quoting Dickens, “He do the police in different voices.” Telemann himself said he “clothed the savage Polish manner in Italian garb.” 2018 Summer Season

NICOLÒ PAGANINI (1782–1840) Sonata for Solo Violin in A Major As Liszt was the Paganini of the piano, Paganini was the Liszt of the violin. Marfan syndrome (or spider fingers) likely ensured that his long and bony fingers were double-jointed, and could do contortionist things that no one else could do. Locatelli had written 24 Caprices for the violin with the same innovations which Paganini, by showmanship, later owned with his own 24 Caprices. Critics had ostracized such technical progress precisely because of the difficulties which later made them famous, once the public espoused them. When he was 13, Paganini went to study in Parma, where the teachers decided they could do nothing to improve him. After Biber, Bach, Corelli, Vivaldi, and Tartini, it was Paganini who added Locatelli’s tricks to the history of violin technique. The secret seemed to be not so much the notes as wearing black, being very thin, having syphilis, playing very fast, and affecting satanic mannerisms. Rumors of him having sold his soul to the devil and having spent time in prison for murder were helped by the way he held his bow high up in the air before bringing it down on the strings. He would also cut the strings so he was forced to play on two or even one string. To this day breaking a string in Carnegie Hall is a great way to make a career. He developed the ricochet, where the bow bounces from one side to the other of the fingerboard. Feigning insane energy to the point of craziness is its own technique, as half your energy goes into the theatrics, making it harder to play well. Adapting Locatelli’s Caprices brought Paganini his signature success, as he turned the pieces into extraordinary fantasies of scales, pizzicatos, double stops, in between which he inserted the beleaguered themes. Both Pablo de Sarasate and Eugène Ysaÿe based their virtuosic compositions and displays successfully on Paganini’s. Despite his tricks, which in a later age would have guaranteed him failure in front of competition juries, he 100

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could play very movingly with an operatic bel canto breadth, although accusations of schmaltz would today fail to move the critics (although audiences have always responded to it; witness David Garrett, André Rieu, Vanessa-Mae, and Lindsey Stirling). During the period of his conquest of the heights with the Caprices, when he was appointed court violinist at Lucca by Napoleon’s sister, he also wrote his very simple sonatas for violin and guitar accompaniment (Paganini also played the guitar and the mandolin brilliantly). Here the concept of human speech, of breathing, of letting melodies flex, rather than metronomically rhyme, reveals his own book of longing. One often suspects during the slow movements of his Concertos, or in the Caprice No. 5, or in these sonatas, that, like Rachmaninoff, Paganini developed his technique so that people would listen at last to his soul. Both the Telemann and the Paganini A-major sonatas seem to be calmed by the key itself, although I myself have always thought of A Major as a somewhat militaristic mode, as in Chopin’s “Military” Polonaise. But Liszt’s Concerto No. 2 in A Major starts with a yearning oboe theme, accompanied by slow tzigane Lisztian arpeggios in the piano. Liszt simplified it in 1861, as he did in his Transcendental Etudes, realizing that his sensibility lay in simplicity. As Pope said, “simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.”

EUGÈNE YSAŸE (1858–1931) Sonata for Solo Violin No. 5 in G Major, Op. 27 Ysaÿe came from the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing, epitomized by Henri Vieuxtemps and Henryk Wieniawski, under both of whom he had studied. Ysaÿe taught Josef Gingold, Nathan Milstein, and the violist William Primrose,

who became the great performers and teachers of the last generation. Their playing was elegant and full-toned, made possible by the invention of the modern bow by François Tourte. They drew the full length of the bow smoothly across the strings, using the whole forearm while keeping both the wrist and upper arm quiet, as opposed to the Russian school of Leopold Auer (and later David Oistrakh and Itzhak Perlman) which used the whole arm, and the German style of using the wrist and Cramer’s Mannheim School bow. The bow you used told musicians who you were, and which composers you preferred (Beethoven instead of Debussy, for instance).

He seemed to get more color out of a violin than any of his contemporaries.”

Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Franck, and Chausson dedicated pieces to Ysaÿe. Ysaÿe used Chopin’s ideas of rubato. As Sir Henry Wood said, “Whenever he stole time from one note, he faithfully paid it back within four bars.” Wood also noted that his “quality of tone was ravishingly beautiful. . . .

Caroline Goulding excels in the onomatopoeia of nature, translating notes into the genuine frissons of a cicada’s tymbals or a leafy whirlwind of fourths in the rustic dance.

In the first movement, dawn leads gradually to the full light of day, through the quavering ostinatos of waking insects and wind in the bushes. Sforzando octaves and fourths intrude on the gradual pastoral crescendo of the light. This sonata was dedicated to Jacques Thibaud and written in his style. Thibaud played in a legendary trio with the cellist Pablo Casals and the pianist Alfred Cortot, which was noted for its grace, lightness, passion, fire, and legato.

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SATURDAY, JULY 7, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Julien Brocal, piano Caroline Goulding, violin

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor Allegro vivo Intermède: fantasque et léger Finale: très animé KAROL SZYMANOWSKI: Mythes, Op. 30 La Fontaine d’Aréthuse Narcisse Dryades et Pan MAURICE RAVEL: Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré INTERMISSION MAURICE RAVEL: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (Posthumous) ERNEST BLOCH: Nuit exotique ERNEST BLOCH: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, Poème mystique Andante moderato Animato L’istesso tempo Animato

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor This is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Debussy has invented his own serialism. In the case of Schoenberg, serialism was a system of composition which involved using a tone row, the 12 notes which make up an octave, in a pre-chosen order, which persists throughout the piece, similar to the way Bach would invent a melody and then base a fugue on varying it. So Debussy invented his own serialism. Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) had thrown down the gauntlet to old-fashioned harmony, and demanded a new formula be applied to composition. The resulting methodology didn’t necessarily produce particularly compelling music, but it was espoused by German academics who, when they fled Hitler, brought it to America, and it is still a major part of many composers’ vocabularies. Systems of creation usually substitute for a lack of inspiration, an inability to create a traditional melody, a resignation that all the good melodies had already been used, or even that there was only one melody, and everything else was just a re-arranging of it. Yeats used as his poetic systems the 28 phases of the moon, the tinctures of gradation on the moon from dark to light, and the double helix of geometric gyres. John Donne had alchemy. James Merrill imitated Dante’s Divine Comedy while consulting the Ouija board (which Yeats had done before him). Shaw infused his plays with socialism. Shakespeare spent half his life rewriting Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Braque, Gris, and Picasso spent some twelve years on synthetic cubism, breaking down three-dimensional objects into flattened and fragmented collages. 104

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Another system used by Puccini, Debussy, Monet, and Manet was Orientalism, or chinoiserie, introducing Asian design, color, and tonalities into their work. You can hear this in Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” Fourths and fifths used as constant intervals bring a Mikado-like atmosphere to the music of the era, most obvious in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Turandot. Puccini has his Turkish janissary chord, heard before moments of great beauty in La bohème and Tosca, where a cymbal and a triangle and a special chord announce a musical or thematic revelation. So this is a schizophrenic sonata, with the left part, or bass, played by the piano, being the Germans or Russians, and the right part, the treble of the violin, being the French. Debussy further divides the two sides into the circle of fourths and the circle of thirds, whereby chords or keys move up the scale in intervals of four and down the scale in threes. The fourths convey a Russian, Kazak, Tatar, Moorish harmony, as one would find in Glinka or Rachmaninoff, and the thirds are more Mozartean, or Austrian. Debussy is evenly split in his influences between the German-Austrian-French system and Russian-Asian-Moorish harmonies. So when you play either voice, it makes perfect harmonic sense and is melodic and lovely. But when you put them together, they contradict each other in every way. The violin plays thirds; the piano plays fourths. When the piano plays in C, the violin plays in D. Such close keys make for cacophony. These contrary motion and contradictory time frames were used much later by Elliott Carter and by Charles Ives in many pieces, such as Ives’s Three Places in New England, where two marching bands playing different music create an amusing confusion. This idea was used later by the French director Philippe de Broca in his wonderful anti-war film, King of Hearts, where a French band is marching out of town when a German band marches in. The last French musician

turns around and spots the Germans, a battle breaks out, and everyone dies.

future; he wrote the last movement first, so the war was still going on at the time.

Guglielmo Marconi broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. It may have been that Debussy heard two radios playing different programs in separate apartments and realized that technology had fragmented the world. Cubism was a response to the time-lapse aspects of motion made possible by cameras, and Impressionism was a deliberate pushback against the clinical realism of photography. Monet deliberately painted with his glasses off, so he could see the world through the imperfections he was born with, rather than correcting it artificially with glasses.

Most critics have thought this sonata represents the opposite: Debussy’s disregard of the world around him in favor of pure art. But they miss the deeper sign language in its conflicting modalities.

As Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” of 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

The fragmentation of society since the beginning of the 20th century had led to dramatic adaptations in art. The double vision of myopia had been falsely rectified by glasses; the imperfect vision of painters had been fixed by cameras. The schizophrenia of double visions is reflected here in Debussy’s two contradictory voices. War is about two people playing different melodies, speaking different languages, believing in different philosophies. Republicans and Democrats. He signed the score: “Claude Debussy—musicien français.”

Debussy was dying, depressed by the increasing pain and difficulty of composing, and depressed as well by the global depression wrought by the war in his friends. He must have been feeling that the world was changing around him in terrible ways. This was his dying attempt to address modernism and conflict. It was the last piece he would ever write, and it was instrumental in codifying the way French composers faced the new century. With characteristic understatement, Debussy said:

I only wrote this sonata to be rid of the thing, spurred on by my dear publisher. This sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.

A few notes: The initial chords, G minor followed by C major, are the ones used by Rachmaninoff in his Barcarolle, the Op. 10 of 1893. This kind of “strangification,” a surreal juxtaposition of chords, is a very Russian thing. In the waltz-like midsection of the first movement, fifths emerge from the almost unaccompanied piano in surreal chord changes (E, D, F, G; and C, B-flat, D-flat, E-flat) as the sonata briefly harks back to the old Debussy of "Sunken Cathedral" and the Sarabande.

This is then Debussy’s own response, begun in 1916, to the First World War, juxtaposing national harmonies into final chaos. The optimism of the ending was his hope for the 2018 Summer Season

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KAROL SZYMANOWSKI (1882–1937) Mythes, Op. 30 Despite being rejected by the conservative musical elite, even though he was briefly director of the Warsaw Conservatory, Karol Szymanowski later became the most celebrated Polish composer of the early 20th century, thanks to a determined crusade by his friends, such as the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the composer Witold Lutosławski. After the Conservatory was shut down by the government in 1930, he moved to the Villa Atma (“Soul” in Sanskrit), now the Szymanowski Museum, a beautiful wooden mountain chalet in Zakopane, a ski resort at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. He was determined to create a Polish national voice by adapting the folk songs of his native Carpathian Mountains before he died of tuberculosis seven years later. Even in 1915, in the thick of the First World War, he felt that he had begun this voice in Mythes. As would happen to Rachmaninoff, the Bolsheviks would in three years, in 1918, destroy Szymanowski’s family estate in the Ukraine, where he composed Mythes. The piano would be thrown in the lake. His youth, his gestation period, would be over. His country and his home taken from him, like Rachmaninoff, like Mann, like Nabokov, he set out to create a new one out of art. But he was dying of tuberculosis. He didn’t have much time. Mythes is a sonata, with the usual fast-slow-fast movements, with a descriptive program involving various kinds of water imagery. Programmatic music had been forsaken by the Romantics, but Wagner, and on the other side of the hill, Stravinsky, had continued its traditions. The piece evolved out of his travels to the port of Syracuse on Sicily, the source of Arethusa’s spring. In “The Fountain of Arethusa,” the nymph Arethusa is turned into a spring by the god Artemis to save her from 106

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the advances of the river god Alpheus. Like Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, water frames Arethusa anxiously, cascading down a mountain stream on the piano, over which the nymph’s descending chromatic torch song vibrates on the violin’s high E string. You can hear the chase of Alpheus in the frenetic midsection, until only Arethusa’s song remains, all tremolos and glissandi, where the finger sweeps up the violin neck. In the second movement, “Narcissus,” a beautiful young man falls in love with himself and drowns in his own reflection in the still water. Water swirls around him, although less frantically than it does Arethusa. This is a cantilena, a song for the violin, with meditative glissandi and chromaticism. In the third movement, “Dryads and Pan,” the violin imitates the thousand voices of the trees, the murmur of insects, the hot summer night, the wind in the leaves. And Dryads dancing. Szymanowski achieves his exoticism by layering keys over each other, by mixing in Debussy, Ravel, late Scriabin, and eastern Mediterranean and Asian harmonies until he creates his own eclectic style. Pan’s eerie flute creates a sudden calm, after which the night insects buzz, and the wild dance resumes, but calms down in the sunrise like the smiles of a summer night. The violin (masquerading as the flute) uses two-note trills, tremolos, glissandi, left-hand pizzicatos and quarter tones, before dying away over the deep trembling of the piano. The universal lattice of myth bears witness above to the antics of its characters—gods, dryads, nymphs, and narcissists—and in the end, the deep river winds on. In my end is my beginning.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937) Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré

ERNEST BLOCH (1880–1959) Nuit exotique

This is in the long tradition of turning a name into its musical equivalents and basing a piece on it. Liszt had written a fugue on the name of Bach, and Ravel also wrote a minuet on the name of Haydn.

Bloch was born in Geneva and studied with the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, giving him the understanding of the limits of the violin, and filling his later compositions with immense technical demands.

Ravel’s somnolent cradle song is similar to Fauré’s own ingenuous Dolly Suite theme of 1896, with the same innocently rocking children’s music-box melody.

Bloch became an American citizen in 1924 and taught George Antheil and Roger Sessions, both of whom went on to shape American music. He taught at Mannes and was briefly director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory, and in later years was at University of California, Berkeley.

The violin uses a mute to muffle itself, removing the theme further from notice and pushing it back into the dim nostalgic haze of childhood, as unassuming as Fauré himself. The gentler, lyric Ravel here acknowledges how much he owed his teacher, Fauré.

MAURICE RAVEL Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (Posthumous) This is the lesser known of Ravel’s two violin sonatas, and the first written, though it wasn't published until 1975, long after his death. The piece has only one movement, but a letter by Ravel mentions that he planned more before abandoning the sonata. Ravel wrote the movement in 1897, around the time he enrolled in the Paris Conservatory as a composition student, two years after dropping out as a piano student. It is in a traditional sonata form—exposition, development, and recapitulation—but already shows Ravel’s distinctive color palette and knack for explorative melody. In this piece, you can hear the young Ravel as his teachers heard him: this was the kind of music that convinced Gabriel Fauré of his student’s promise. — Benjamin Pesetsky

This rarely heard piece is similar to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and is strongly connected to Bartók’s Night Music, where an atmosphere of hushed expectation and vast open space is filled with imitations of birdsong and sporadic croaking of frogs and cicadas, which Milan Kundera called “melodic motives of a rare strangeness.” Bartók, Debussy, and Ravel all experimented with the concept of evoking nature through mood, rather than with specific notes. They and Bloch sometimes used notes as a jumping-off point to effects and moods, rather than traditional structural note-based melodies, a philosophy which Caroline Goulding has brought to scale in her onomatopoetic techniques, moving beyond standard intonations into an attempt not to imitate nature, but to be the insects and birds the notes only suggest. Notes are an imperfect translation of essences beyond their shadows, as words can only hint at the ideas that summon them. Bartók was inspired by summer nights at his sister’s estate in Békés county in the Great Hungarian Plain, Nagy Alföld. He felt that only Slovakian folk songs could convey such surroundings, that only the people who lived in nature and sang of it were in touch with its moods, with the way it changed human nature. This is especially relevant at Tippet Rise, where days and nights are swept with mysteries, with 2018 Summer Season

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the stark northern light and cloud shadows of a mythical Nordic landscape. The way in which a land is lived on and cared for contributes to its atmosphere. The lagoons of Rahway in New Jersey, while preternatural, are occluded by the orphic addition of skyways, smokestacks, clandestine taverns, and strange underworld rumors. The sculptures at Tippet Rise add a triangulation to the land, where music and the nature of the land itself form a synthesis of shapes and moods to produce unexplained angles of light, pyrotechnics out of the earth. Sculpture is a kind of poem, where industrial and sophisticated forms, resonant with the history of their discipline, also contain a mysterious empathy with the outdoors. When they are placed in nature, they unwind, the way sunlight unwinds from a log in a fireplace, to wrap the air in deeper sounds, in strange shadows, in unspoken words that conjure up lost planets and mystical kingdoms. Bloch’s strange sound world makes extreme timbral demands of a violinist, and requires a performer adept in disciplines other than mere technique.

ERNEST BLOCH Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, Poème mystique Bloch was aware that audiences were bewildered by his first sonata, and that he needed to get his message across in more traditional and spiritual ways. Bloch felt this single-movement sonata was “the world as it should be: the world of which we dream; a world full of idealism, faith, fervor, hope, where Jewish themes go side by side with the Credo and the Gloria of the Gregorian Chant.” The composition of the Poème mystique was triggered by a dream that Bloch had after a mild overdose of Veronal, following a period of intense crisis and illness. 108

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The “Kyrie fons bonitatis” (All Hail, Fount of Goodness) used by Bloch is the second variant of the Kyriale (the Ordinary of the Mass in Gregorian Chant), intended to be used on high holy days such as the Epiphany (the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child), the Ascension into Heaven (40 days after Easter Sunday), and Pentecost (49 days after Easter, when the Holy Ghost descends upon the Apostles; this is the day the Catholic Church was founded). Bloch is stating that Christianity and Judaism are alike at their deepest levels. Some of the melodies are Celtic, and much of the music is incantatory, rhapsodic, and transcendent: a musical epiphany. The language is the sentimental one of the much later Korngold Violin Concerto from 1945. Bloch himself influenced film scores for decades: this is the music

Hollywood came to use for crashing surf, sunsets, and moments of passionate truth, but we are distant enough from that era of early epic cinema to restore Bloch to his original message: faith unites all of us. And to appreciate his timeless quest: how do you compose transcendence? How do you put a voice to epiphanies you can barely put a name to? How do you make people feel dependably every time what you have felt once in your life? How do you portray Saul’s revelation on his horse to a skeptical future? Music is filled with examples of composers who have done this successfully. Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis. John Luther Adams’s Four Thousand Holes. Verdi’s Requiem. Mozart’s Requiem. Fauré’s

Requiem. Arvo Pärt’s Salve Regina, his Tintinnabuli in Stabat Mater (really anything by Pärt), Mozart’s Alleluia, all of Mozart’s Magic Flute, where the young lovers have to run the gauntlet between their parents’ values in order to become themselves. Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga, Handel’s Ah, mio cor! (sung by Kožená), Mozart’s “Ruhe sanft.” The revelations go on. Music, at its heart, is a quest for the great unexpected mystical glories of sudden enlightenment. So this is Bloch’s frenetic vision, his attempt to reach into the clouds and pull out lightning, to manifest divinity. His success lies in the prophetic hands of Julien and Caroline, in their ability to see past the music into the core of the world, to ascend to heaven.

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CONVERSATION WITH PEDJA MUZIJE VIC

For pianist Pedja Muzijevic, music is more than just playing notes on the page. In this interview, he shares his passion for the music’s historical context and its influence in our everyday lives.

Devanney Haruta: How does knowing the music’s history influence how you approach performance? Pedja Muzijevic: We performers always function in the past, whether it’s a work written a few days ago, or three weeks ago, or 300 years ago. For me, any information surrounding the time and the music is relevant. It helps me get into the mindset of the composer, the performer who might have played it at the time, and equally important, the audience for which it was written. Looking through all of

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that historical background is immensely interesting to me. Sometimes it’s just trivia, or sometimes it’s a substantial piece of information. Was it written for a small room or a big hall? Was it a commission? Was it something somebody wrote as a love letter? What were the circumstances? I’m also interested in the instruments. Anything before the 1890s, which is when the piano as we know it today was fully formed, was written for a different model of the piano. What did they feel like? What did they sound like? I don’t force it upon my interpretation, but I let it seep through the music that I play.

DH: You often share this background information with the audience. How do you think knowing that historical knowledge influences how the audience hears the music?

PM: Well, that’s a question you’ll have to ask the audience!

That’s hard for me to answer. I always refer to music as a narrative in an abstract language. It’s a language that we are surrounded with; music is in anything from heartbeat onwards. But at the same time, when you speak about “art music” or “classical music,” people will often say, “I don’t know enough about it. I don’t know what to think of it.” So, I try to set the scene in which I open the door to what I play with facts that anybody might understand: the setting, the time. . . . I let music speak its own language, but I try to open the door through which somebody can hopefully experience it in a more welcoming way.

DH: Of all the things in life, why did you choose to play piano?

PM: I started playing when I was nine, relatively late by

music standards. I was fascinated by music. I heard it on the radio and television. Why did I want to play piano as opposed to violin or cello? I have no idea, but somehow, I did. I would say it was not conscious. It was something I did because I loved it. As I go on now, I look at what I do in a much larger picture. In other words, I’m getting away from the piano. And I don’t mean not to play, I mean I’m interested in seeing the larger picture. How do piano, music, arts fit into society? And what is it we contribute to the world? I don’t mean in any grandiose way, but just on a Wednesday at five o’clock, what is it I can offer to an attorney leaving an office? While I love the piano in and of itself, it’s not my main interest. My main interest is music and more so, how it fits into the everyday world. So, in a funny way, I rarely think about the piano as an end. The piano is just a tool, and a wonderful one.

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WEEK TWO

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FRIDAY, JULY 13, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano

DOMENICO SCARLATTI: Sonata in F Minor, K. 519 Sonata in C-sharp Minor, K. 247 Sonata in F Major, K. 17 HENRY COWELL: Aeolian Harp ENRIQUE GRANADOS: “Coloquio en la Reja” (Conversation at the Window) from Goyescas ERIK SATIE: Les trois valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté (Three Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy) CLAUDE DEBUSSY: L’isle joyeuse INTERMISSION JOHN CAGE: In a Landscape ROBERT SCHUMANN: Carnaval, Op. 9 Préambule – Pierrot – Arlequin – Valse noble – Eusebius – Florestan – Coquette – Réplique – Papillons – A.S.C.H.-S.C.H.A (Lettres dansantes) – Chiarina – Chopin – Estrella – Reconnaissance – Pantalon et Colombine – Valse Allemande – Paganini – Aveu – Promenade – Pause – Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685–1757) Sonata in F Minor, K. 519 Sonata in C-sharp Minor, K. 247 Sonata in F Major, K. 17 The keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti comes down to us in hand-copied volumes made for his patron and student, Princess Maria Bárbara of Portugal, who later became queen of Spain. Upon her death, she left them to Farinelli, the castrato, and they now rest in libraries in Venice and Parma. Some collections were published in Scarlatti’s lifetime— both in legitimate and pirated copies—and a small number of his pieces were known and appreciated by 19th-century pianists, including Clementi, Liszt, and Clara Schumann. But until his sonatas were collected and edited by 20thcentury scholars, Scarlatti was better known by historical reputation than for his actual body of work. Born in 1685 (the same year as Bach and Handel), Domenico was the sixth child of Alessandro Scarlatti, who was also a renowned composer. Domenico made his early career in his native Naples, as well as in other Italian cities. One story describes him meeting Handel in Venice, where they engaged in a friendly musical contest. The audience decided that Handel was the superior organist, while Scarlatti had a slight edge on harpsichord. The story is plausible and prescient: while Handel and Bach were champions of all the keyboards, Scarlatti was more narrowly influential in the history of domestic stringed keyboard instruments. His sonatas were intended for cembalo (harpsichord) or clavichord (a smaller, softer instrument), and he was also familiar with the very earliest pianos made by Bartolomeo Cristofori. In 1719, Scarlatti moved to Lisbon, where he took up a royal appointment for João V of Portugal. He taught Princess Bárbara, a gifted student of music, and later followed her to Spain, where she married Ferdinand VI and became queen. 114

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The three sonatas on today’s program come from different sources and different periods of Scarlatti’s life, though they can’t be precisely dated. The Sonatas in F Minor and C-sharp Minor are found in Bárbara’s manuscript volumes, suggesting that they were written for her and composed—or at least compiled—late in Scarlatti’s life. The Sonata in F Major, published in a collection of 30 Essercizi (exercises) dedicated to João V in 1738, is probably an earlier composition. Scarlatti’s sonatas predate the classical idea of the sonata as a large-scale, multi-movement work. He never indicated particular groupings of pieces, perhaps suggesting that performers should curate their own. The F-minor Sonata, K. 519 has a sense of urgency—rushing forward, then settling into a gallop. The Sonata in C-sharp Minor, K. 247 is more cerebral, showing Scarlatti’s inventive wanderings and musical questioning. The F-major Sonata, K. 17 has two contrasting voices: one exuberant and feisty, the other slinky and coy.

HENRY COWELL (1897–1965) Aeolian Harp Henry Cowell was one of the first composers to ask pianists to directly manipulate the piano strings as a kind of harp. This discovery (or at least, legitimization of what troublesome piano students do naturally) built on his earlier invention of tone clusters (fists or elbows hitting adjacent piano keys) and predated John Cage’s more radical development of prepared piano (placing objects on the strings) by 15 years. In 1923, Cowell published Aeolian Harp, the first of his “string piano” pieces. The sound production technique is avant-garde—the pianist silently holds down keys while strumming the strings, allowing the specified chords to resonate. But the music itself feels antiquarian, built

around a descending harmonic sequence repeated three times, with just a little development (a whole step higher and slightly different progression) the middle time. The effect is ambient, like the sound of the winds chimes the piece is named for, or like overhearing someone practice a snippet of especially beautiful harmony. Cowell would move on from the string piano, chasing a wide variety of techniques and styles—some conventional, others experimental. His life was as eccentric as his music, and sometimes as difficult. Born in 1897 to anarchist parents in Menlo Park, California, he fled the Bay Area with his newly divorced mother following the earthquake of 1906. As a young adult, Cowell established himself as a composer in both California and New York and became involved with theosophical societies and utopian communities on both coasts. In 1936, he was arrested in California for a sexual encounter with a young man, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison—an unusual and vicious sentence, even for the time. He was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, where he taught music and continued to compose for four years, until friends petitioned for his parole. Later in life, he received a pardon, performed and traveled widely, and was enormously influential in American music through his teaching and artistic advocacy.

ENRIQUE GRANADOS (1867–1916) Coloquio en la Reja (Conversation at the Window) from Goyescas

paintings of Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Though specific correspondences to paintings aren’t known, the art in question belongs to a series of tapestry “cartoons.” Goya may be known best for his unnerving depictions of war, destitution, and depravity, but these paintings are entirely different: they’re sunny pictures of leisure activities enjoyed by majos and majas, flamboyantly dressed members of Spain’s lower class. Coloquio en la Reja is the second piece in the set. It depicts a conversation, presumably between a man and a woman, in a window; the music is marked con sentimento amoroso. Granados writes with improvisational flair in a billowing Romantic style enhanced by intricate Baroque details. After the success of the piano suite in Barcelona, Paris, and Madrid, Granados decided to adapt Goyescas, rather improbably, as an opera. This would lead to his death under circumstances appalling enough to be a different kind of Goya painting. After the opera’s 1916 premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he was invited to meet President Woodrow Wilson at the White House. This caused him and his wife, Amparo, to miss their scheduled voyage back to Europe, so they rebooked through England. During their passage from England to France, their ferry, the SS Sussex, was torpedoed by a U-boat, throwing them both into the water. Granados was rescued by a lifeboat, but abandoned it in an attempt to save Amparo; the couple drowned in the English Channel.

Enrique Granados was born in Barcelona and became known as an improvising pianist, chamber musician, and composer. He brushed shoulders with Fauré, Saint-Saëns, and Pablo Casals and was hailed abroad as an emblematic musician of Spain. Goyescas—a set of six pieces—is his most famous work, begun in 1909, premiered in 1911, and inspired by the

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ERIK SATIE (1866–1925) Les trois valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté (Three Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy) It’s not safe to assume these pieces are actually about a jaded dandy—the connection between title, music, and meaning in Erik Satie’s work is always humorous and obscure. In fact, the three brief waltzes are barely waltzes at all: while a triple pulse or lilt is often present, the tempos vary and there is no formal meter. Satie wrote Les trois valses in 1914, apparently one each day between July 21 and 23, according to the score. Each movement’s title refers to something belonging to the Dandy: Sa taille (his waist), Son binocle (his spectacles), Ses jambes (his legs). What does it mean? A 1918 Vanity Fair profile of the Parisian composer noted:

His titles ordinarily seem to have nothing to do with the music, which is frequently exquisite, and never programmatic. True ironist that he is, he conceals his diffidence under these fantastical titles. He ridicules his own emotion at just the point at which the auditor is about to discover it. He also protects himself against the pedants and the philistines by raising these titular and descriptive barriers.

Satie also laced eccentric instructions, or bits of narrative, into his scores. In the first waltz, for example, it is written: “He hums an air of the 15th century. . . . Then he addresses a most measured compliment. . . . Who dares to say he is not the most handsome? . . . Is his heart not tender? . . . He holds himself by the waist. . . . For him, it is a rapture. . . .” Sa taille contrasts impish fragments with brightly spun tunes and darker murmurings. Son binocle lies somewhere between elegy and lullaby with an unplaceable tune and a simple, but affecting, shift to the

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harmony in the middle. Ses jambes is a splashy romp. Each movement is also prefaced by a quote from Jean de La Bruyère, Cicero, or Cato. Between text and music, there’s a lot going on—especially for a set of pieces just three minutes long.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) L’isle joyeuse Claude Debussy is the composer most closely associated with Impressionism in music, but L’isle joyeuse is tied not to Impressionist art, but rather to earlier Rococo and Romantic paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère, found in the Louvre, was one inspiration for Debussy. The painting shows three couples and assorted partygoers departing from the island of Cythera, the traditional birthplace of Venus. Another inspiration was a gallery of Turner’s paintings, mostly landscapes and seascapes, which Debussy visited at the National Gallery in London in 1903. L’isle joyeuse marked Debussy’s return to writing piano music after a period of success with larger works. In 1904, he had a new publishing deal and was enjoying growing fame as he entered his 40s. It was also a time of transition: he would soon leave his wife, Lilly, for Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker. They eloped in Jersey (an island sometimes erroneously identified as an inspiration for L’isle joyeuse) before they finalized their divorces in 1905. Ten years later, when asked by a musician for advice on interpreting the piece, Debussy responded, rather dryly, “It seems to me that the title L’isle joyeuse can provide clues.” But listening closely yields something more specific: chaotic joy—coalescing and dissolving in raptures.

JOHN CAGE (1912–1992) In a Landscape In a Landscape will surprise listeners who know John Cage only by his reputation as an iconoclast. This piece was written to accompany choreography by the dancer Louise Lippold, and Cage premiered it with her in August 1948 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. That summer Cage also offered a festival of Satie’s music, which he championed and sometimes echoed. This is a gentle and immersive piece—perhaps unfocused, even anodyne. The only element of indeterminacy (Cage’s technique of leaving some musical elements up to the performer, or to chance) is that it may be played on either piano or harp. The only unusual effect is that if played on piano, the sustain pedal is held the whole time, and the last chord is silently depressed for its resonance.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856) Carnaval, Op. 9 Schumann’s Carnaval is a colorful suite built on a complex web of personal, psychological, and literary associations. Of all the pieces on this program, it benefits the most from some explanation: though its 22 fragmentary movements fly by, filled with engaging music, the piece as a whole can seem unintuitive or even esoteric. If Carnaval is puzzling, it might be in part because there is an actual puzzle at its center. Much of the musical material derives from the name “Asch,” referring to the Bohemian hometown of Ernestine von Fricken, who was briefly Schumann’s fiancée prior to his relationship with Clara Wieck. In the German musical notation system, A-SC-H is equivalent to the notes A, E-flat, C, B-flat.

It also spells out Schumann’s middle initial (A for Alexander) followed by the beginning of his last name. Schumann called these ciphers “sphinxes,” and provided a key to unraveling them between the eighth and ninth movements of the score. The movement titles reference Commedia dell’arte characters, friends of Schumann, and significant musicians like Chopin and Paganini. “Eusebius” and “Florestan” were Schumann’s terms for aspects of his own temperament: “Eusebius” represented his contemplative, inward-looking side, and “Florestan” represented his passionate, extroverted side. Schumann began writing Carnaval in 1835, when he was known primarily as a music critic and a promising pianist (though not at the virtuosic level of Clara Wieck and Franz Liszt). That same year, he edited the first official issue of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal that served as the mouthpiece of Schumann’s “Davidsbündler”: a vaguely formulated literary society that included both real and fictional members. He was engaged to Ernestine, but already shifting his attention toward Clara, the teenaged daughter of his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck. In Carnaval, “Chiarina” represents Clara while “Estrella” represents Ernestine. The finale imagines members of the “Davidsbündler” marching against musical Philistines. It might be tempting to explain the idiosyncrasies of this suite as early reflections of Schumann’s mental illness, which would land him in an asylum two decades later—from 1854 until his death in 1856. But they can be better justified as part of a coherent, if perhaps fantastical, artistic project to unite music with literature and criticism. Setting aside its “Sphinxes,” Carnaval grasps at a large-scale, novelistic form built from fragmentary portraits of real and fictional characters, as imagined by a young artist at a conflicted moment in his life.

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SATURDAY, JULY 14, 11:00 AM

The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble Krista Bennion Feeney, violin Myron Lutzke, cello Stewart Rose, horn

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Suite No. 2 for Solo Cello in D Minor, BWV 1008 Prelude Allemande Courante Sarabande Menuett I – Menuett II Gigue LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Horn and Piano in F Major, Op. 17 Allegro moderato Poco Adagio, quasi Andante Rondo: Allegro moderato JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D Minor, BWV 1004 Allemande Courante Sarabande Gigue Ciaccona

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) Suite No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Cello, BWV 1008 Bach’s six solo suites are the companions of every modern cellist. Some are simple enough to play after just a few years of study, others wait for a higher level of technical mastery. But none of them are ever static in a cellist’s mind or fingers: they change and grow from concert to concert and from year to year. They also combine musical sophistication with convenience. A cellist needs nothing but a cello to play them, indoors or outside, at weddings and memorials, in conservatories and concert halls, in airports and hotel rooms. Each suite has a different mood, and there is one to fit any occasion imaginable. The Suite No. 2 in D Minor may be the broodiest and most lonesome of the set. The Prelude is filled with questions, quite unlike the First Suite’s famous opening with its comforting rolling harmonies. The Allemande is stark, building toward the urgent Courante. These first three movements are especially close, conspiring together on a forward trajectory. The Sarabande takes a step back. Like all Bach’s Sarabandes, it is poised and contemplative, but this one is especially glum, carrying only the faintest erotic charge of the original Spanish dance, which had roots in colonial South America. Next come two Minuets: the first heavy-footed and reproachful, the second lithe in the parallel major key. A handful of low notes suggests a bass line, nudging the melody forward with wide dissonances. The Minuet I is repeated after Minuet II. The Gigue seems to answer the Prelude’s questions, though it doesn’t offer a particularly comforting conclusion. The minor 120

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key casts pessimistically over this vigorous dance, which visits the relative major just briefly in the second half. It ends on an upward arpeggio: the only one of the six suites to end on an ascent and not be brought down to earth. Bach wrote the cello suites sometime before 1720, likely during his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though they may have earlier origins. In Köthen he worked for Prince Leopold, a young aristocrat Bach said “both loved and knew music.” Though his principality was small, Leopold built one of the finest instrumental ensembles in Europe, hiring six accomplished musicians, including at least one cellist, from Berlin four years before Bach’s arrival. In the previous decades, the cello had rapidly developed from a hulking bass violin into an elegant, medium-sized instrument. The invention of wire-wound gut strings made it possible to produce lower pitches at shorter, more manageable lengths, allowing for nimble solo playing. Bach was clearly writing for a skilled cellist with the latest equipment, and in Köthen he had such players close: the musicians in Prince Leopold’s Kapelle were a tight-knit bunch who rehearsed in Bach’s apartment. Around 1721, Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, copied out the cello suites, leaving us with one of two important sources for them (the other by Johann Peter Kellner, Bach’s student). Only a copy of the Fifth Suite, in an embellished transcription for lute, survives in Bach’s own ink. Ambiguities in the sources, and small differences between them, contribute to the suites’ reputation for interpretive puzzles. Still, this perception is a bit misplaced, emphasizing less than the primary concern of most players. The suites are clear in their ideas even when particular details are thin on the page. Cellists are more likely to ask what they can do with these ideas, how they can shape and clarify them, both for themselves and for their listeners in the setting at hand.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Sonata for Horn and Piano in F Major, Op. 17 Vienna must have tantalized the young Beethoven, who was born and raised in Bonn, a relatively sleepy city far to the northwest. Meanwhile Vienna was a musical capital where a young composer-virtuoso could make a splash in the wake of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven tested the waters with a visit in 1787, but was called back to Bonn upon the death of his mother and had to remain there to protect his brothers from their abusive, alcoholic father. But by 1792 his family obligations lifted and he moved to Vienna “in fulfillment of . . . long-frustrated wishes,” as his patron Count Waldstein described it. Beethoven wrote the Sonata for Horn and Piano eight years into his Viennese career, on the tail end of his exuberant youth. His hearing had declined, but he was still performing as a pianist, and the piece sprung from a collaboration with Johann Wenzel Stitch, a virtuoso horn player he admired. Stitch, who preferred to be called Signor Punto, had perfected the technique of hand-stopping, which allowed him to play more notes on the horn than could normally be produced before the invention of valves around 1814. Without valves, the natural horn is acoustically limited to the notes in the overtone series, which gives hunting horn calls their distinctive character. But some players found they could fill out the notes in-between by manipulating their hand in the bell, making the horn a truly melodic instrument. Punto was a pioneer of this art. Beethoven and Punto premiered the Sonata on April 18, 1800 during a recital at Vienna’s Burgtheater. Beethoven claimed to have written the horn part only the night before and to have improvised the piano accompaniment live at the concert. The audience demanded to hear it a second time, and so they repeated it with Beethoven improvising again. He may have exaggerated the story, but it points to the spontaneity and

musical daring of the time. (Performers today would call this being unprepared, nothing to brag about.) The duo took the Sonata to Budapest the following month but had a falling out and called off the rest of their tour. In March 1801, Beethoven released the Sonata as his Op. 17 with the publisher Tranquillo Mollo. Because the piece was written with Punto’s exceptional ability in mind and faced a small market of equally proficient horn players, Beethoven included an alternate cello part to improve its commercial prospects. As a horn piece, it is the only sonata for a wind or brass instrument Beethoven ever wrote. All three movements include prominent parts for both horn and piano—Beethoven was clearly showing off his piano playing, too. The first movement, Allegro moderato, is built around simple horn calls, but elaborates with the chromatics Punto specialized in. The Poco Adagio lies lyrically in F minor, a key which has a particularly veiled color on the natural horn. The slow movement’s brevity is a bit suspicious—perhaps the result of Beethoven’s rush to finish the piece—but he disguises its abrupt ending with a blink-and-you-miss-it transition to the Rondo finale.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D Minor, BWV 1004 Like the cello suites, Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin date from his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though they too may have earlier origins. While the cello suites are immaculately organized, all following the same six-movement plan, the solo violin works vary in four, five, or six movements. The cello sonatas are a tighter set; the violin pieces are more individually conceived. The Partita No. 2 in D Minor especially stands out: the first four movements could reasonably be complete on their 2018 Summer Season

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own—Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. But they are just a preface to what comes next: the Ciaccona, often known simply as the Chaconne. Nearly as long as the opening movements combined, it gives the Second Partita a peculiar asymmetry. A chaconne is related to the Sarabande, also descending from a racy Spanish dance, but encompasses a sort of mantric repetition. By Bach’s time, it was understood more decorously as a variation form built on a repeated ground bass. In the strictest sense, this is impossible to convey on the violin, as it can’t play a bassline or sustain two independent voices on its own. But shrewd writing with chords and arpeggios can give the impression of multiple things happening at once, channeling the power of an ensemble through the narrow conduit of a violinist. Earlier composers had written similar solo pieces, the Passacaglia from Biber’s “Mystery” Sonatas being one exceptional precedent in the German tradition of polyphonic violin writing. But for most listeners, Bach’s Chaconne is the pinnacle, more affecting than anything before or after. Some ascribe celestial perfection to the piece, others a tragic romanticism. Like many masterpieces, it has attracted its share of theories: historical, theoretical, and esoteric—all distrustful of the notion that it could be created without some scheme or stimulus behind it. One story ties the Chaconne to the death of Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, in 1720—the same year he copied out (though didn’t necessarily write) the Sonatas and Partitas. Returning to Köthen after a lengthy stay in the Bohemian resort town of Carlsbad with Prince Leopold, Bach found his wife “dead and buried, though he had left her healthy and hearty on his departure.” This is as their son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, recalled it in his father’s obituary years 122

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later. “The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.” The story resonates with the grief many people sense in the Chaconne, though only the thinnest circumstantial evidence actually connects the piece with Bach’s sudden loss. He might have written it in response, or might not have. Would it make a difference to know for sure? A more nuanced understanding can come from within the music itself. Consider the form of the Chaconne: elaborate variations over a repeated chord progression, sometimes present, sometimes only implied. At its heart is the opposition between uniformity and variety, between staying and going, between confinement and release. You can hear it any number of ways, but here are two: it could be an explorative dance around a sturdy center, or a mournful dance trying to shed an ineluctable weight.

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SATURDAY, JULY 14, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Pedja Muzijevic, piano St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble Krista Bennion Feeney, violin Myron Lutzke, cello Stewart Rose, horn

JOHANNES BRAHMS: Sonatensatz (Scherzo) for Violin and Piano in C Minor ROBERT SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 Mit Energie und Leidenschaft Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung – Mit Feuer CLARA SCHUMANN: Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 Andante molto Allegretto: Mit zartem Vortrage Leidenschaftlich schnell JOHANNES BRAHMS: Trio for Piano, Violin, and Horn in E-flat Major, Op. 40 Andante Scherzo: Allegro Adagio mesto Allegro con brio

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Sonatensatz (Scherzo) for Violin and Piano in C Minor This agitated scherzo was Brahms’s contribution to the F A E Sonata, a piece he wrote collaboratively with Robert Schumann and the lesser-known composer Albert Dietrich. They wrote the piece as a gift for the violinist Joseph Joachim, their mutual friend, whose motto was frei aber einsam: “free but lonely.” At Schumann’s suggestion, they each hid the notes F-A-E in the music. In October 1853, Joachim visited Düsseldorf to perform with the municipal orchestra, which Schumann conducted. The day after the concert, Joachim was given a basket of flowers with the Sonata hidden underneath. When he found the music, he was asked to read through it, and to guess who had written each movement. And so he immediately played it with Clara Schumann at the piano, and correctly identified which of his friends had written each part. Only the month before, Joachim had introduced the 20year-old Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann, a landmark in their lives as well as in the history of music. Robert’s influence helped Brahms gain recognition as a young composer, and Brahms’s lifelong friendship with Clara would be of great personal importance. Brahms’s Sonatensatz—with all its interconnections—makes a fitting introduction for this concert, in which Robert and Clara, Schumann, Brahms, and Joachim are recurring characters.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856) Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 Somewhere past the five-minute mark in the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, there is a 126

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sudden shift in timbre. The violin and cello shimmer, bowing low against their bridges, while the piano plays high, like little bells. In addition to the new color, it is also a new theme, introduced at a late point in the movement when it would be far more typical only to develop established material. This moment is simply one of the most striking in a piece full of surprises, but the kind of surprises that are the result of an artist’s careful planning, rather than the result of spontaneous improvisation. “I used to compose almost all my shorter pieces in the heat of inspiration,” Schumann wrote in a diary entry. “Only from the year 1845 onwards, when I started to work out everything in my head, did a completely new manner of composing begin to develop.” The Piano Trio in D Minor, composed in 1847, reflects Schumann’s “new manner.” Between 1843 and 1844 his work had been sidelined by illness and depression, and when his health improved he began to study counterpoint and fugue alongside his wife, Clara. In 1846, Clara wrote a piano trio of her own (Op. 17 in G minor), which inspired Robert to write two trios, perhaps revealing the competitive element in the couple’s work and marriage. Compared to his earlier work, Schumann’s “new manner” relies less on literary influences and idiosyncratic references. It’s intuitively expressive, and in some ways more traditionally rigorous, but continuously finds unique solutions to the old problems of classical form. The Trio’s urgent first movement has several distinct themes, connected by liquid pianism and delineated by blocky chordal arrivals. The second movement is built around stepped inclines, which the three fleet-footed instruments skip up together. It concludes with a false ending and a surprise coda. The slow movement, marked “Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung” (Slowly, with tender feeling), finds the violin and cello going their separate ways, speaking in dialogue

rather than working together in consort. The lush finale is filled with sinewy strings and rippling piano. Sometimes it lurks uneasily, or settles into a hypnotic groove, but in the end it finds an optimistic outlook in D major. The movement is marked “Mit Feuer”—but it’s not a dangerous fire, more a warm fire of the soul.

CLARA SCHUMANN (1819–1896) Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 Clara Schumann may be best known today as the wife of Robert Schumann, but there was a time when Robert Schumann was best known as the husband of the great pianist Clara Wieck. Though the piano had long been a favorite instrument of virtuosos, Clara Schumann was one of the first to give solo recitals with loftier goals, playing music by a variety of composers and emphasizing seriousness over spectacle. Many earlier musicians had played the piano, but Clara Schumann was among the first true pianists. Unlike many girls of the time, whose families saw musical training only as an asset to marriage, Clara’s professional ambitions were driven by her father, even brutally so. Friedrich Wieck was an educator first, a musician second. His success as a piano teacher had no basis in a performing career of his own—he had studied theology and worked as a private tutor before opening a piano shop and teaching studio in Leipzig. In 1825 he divorced Clara’s mother, Marianne, and took custody of their five-year-old daughter. When she was seven, he gave Clara a diary in which he wrote many entries himself, bizarrely assuming his daughter’s voice. At age 11, she made her solo debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. At age 12, she toured Paris. At age 18, Vienna.

questioned and her ability to write showpieces was admired, but it was widely believed that a woman could contribute nothing when it came to more expressive, artistically ambitious composition. Friedrich Wieck thought otherwise, but even Clara was partially resigned to the idea, writing in 1839:

I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not wish to compose—there was never one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that. That was something with which only my father tempted me in former days. But I soon gave up believing this.

Except she didn’t give it up, as she published 23 pieces intermittently between 1831 and 1856. Robert’s composing was always the family’s priority, but in September 1852 they moved into a new apartment in Düsseldorf, where Clara had her own room with her own piano. There she wrote her last four published works, including the Three Romances for Violin and Piano. After Robert’s death in 1856, she truly stopped composing. The Three Romances were written for Joseph Joachim (just two months before he introduced Clara and Robert to Brahms). Over the years, Joachim and Clara gave hundreds of concerts together across Europe, performing the Romances six times between 1854 and 1869. In 1855, they were published by Boosey & Hawkes. In these last pieces, filled with long lines and undulating pianism, it seems Clara finally wrote the kind of music she most wanted to play.

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JOHANNES BRAHMS Trio for Piano, Violin, and Horn in E-flat Major, Op. 40 Brahms’s Horn Trio is at once nostalgic and strangely modern, masking a rough earthiness with a Romantic warmth while also shedding conventions of form and instrumentation. The combination of horn and violin would seem to pose problems of blend and balance, but Brahms recognized that they could be complementary, and the result is as natural as it is unique. The piece is a monument: not an entry in a genre, not a number among many in a catalog. Its only peer is György Ligeti’s Horn Trio of 1982, a fitting modern tribute to Brahms, which similarly rises above the conventional landscape. The Brahms Trio rejects the traditional first-movement sonata form—with its two themes, intricate development, and recapitulation—in favor of a streamlined theme set against two contrasting sections. In the beginning, the violin and horn float on the piano’s murky darkness, rocking together uneasily. At times, the piano emerges through ominous ripples, clearing the depths, prompting the stifled pleas of horn and violin which punctuate the movement. The theme returns twice, finally steadied in the last measures. The Scherzo explodes with real joy, only tempered by a dreamy middle. The Adagio opens with a dimly lit chorale, then grows dramatically, finding bright clarity near the end before a cathartic release and retreat into dusk. The finale is a jumble of ideas, tied together by a brisk pace and rustic horn calls. It releases the tension of the earlier movements, without questioning their seriousness. Some endings reveal that everything was actually all right all along: fears were misplaced, doubts were only the result of misunderstandings. Other endings, like this one, are true resolutions. 128

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Brahms wrote the Horn Trio in the late summer months of 1865, having left Vienna for a working vacation in Baden, near the Black Forest. There he rented an apartment with mountain views and began to imagine the Horn Trio while walking in the woods. His mother, Christiane, had died the previous February in Hamburg, and he had missed his last chance to see her by two days. He seems to have put his goodbyes into music, first in the German Requiem, and then in the Trio. The piece’s instrumentation harkens back to his youth: the horn was his father’s instrument and Brahms played it a bit himself as a young man. He especially wanted the Trio to be performed on natural horn—the German Waldhorn—even though it was an increasingly antiquated instrument, largely replaced by new models with valves. He said the older horn would better balance with the violin, but he might simply have wanted to hear the piece on the instrument of his childhood. Of all the instruments, the horn mediates the least between its player and the world of acoustical physics. As players put lips to cold metal, they are acutely aware of the harmonic series, they are constrained by its mathematics. But the horn is also visceral and warm-blooded, with ancestral roots in the hunt. Brahms’s Trio magnifies this merging of the abstract and the elemental. It abandons elaborate rhetoric for a more linear, logical procession of ideas. At the same time, it calls out from a place of unexamined instinct, stirred by familial love and loss.

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CONVERSATION WITH GABRIEL K AHANE

Singer-songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane brings to Tippet Rise a program of music rich with storytelling.

Devanney Haruta: A lot of your music reflects places that you’ve visited or lived, such as New York City or Los Angeles. What about these places is so influential? Gabriel Kahane: I would say it’s less about places

that I’ve lived—I actually haven’t lived in Los Angeles since I was a toddler. In the case of The Ambassador, I have become really fascinated by Los Angeles architecture and the perception of LA as being superficial, when in fact there’s this incredible literary history behind it and a history of architecture, albeit mostly in private rather than public

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spaces. I’ve had a fascination with buildings and the physical structures that frame an experience, and place is so essential to how we frame an experience. My pop psychology hypothesis about why I write about place so much is that I had a rootless childhood and moved around a fair bit. I think place felt a little bit more ephemeral and fragile to me than to someone who grows up in one city.

DH: How is music a good medium for telling stories? GK: Songwriting has two planes simultaneously: there’s

the plane of the music, and then there’s the plane of the text. That allows for these emotional vectors to occur where you’re communicating one thing through the music and not necessarily communicating the same thing through the

text. Music behaves like a language in some ways, and in other ways it stands outside of a rational grammar. It feels like there’s this ballet between words and music that allows me to communicate a series of registers of emotion to an audience at once.

DH: Through your many musical collaborations, how has your relationship with Timo Andres changed over the years? GK: We’ve seen each other grow up and mature musically. Watching Timo’s music grow from being pretty clearly reflective of his early influences and then in the last five years really developing into a language that’s fundamentally his own has been really exciting. And also, getting to know

him as a pianist as well, because I think he and I are pretty fundamentally different. He’s pretty Apollonian and I’m pretty Dionysian, which is not to say that his music-making is cold in any way, but I think he’s someone who achieves emotional catharsis from the outside in, and I go more from the inside out. He’s such a beautiful player, and I’ve learned a lot from him, even though he’s four years younger than I am. It’s always a pleasure to work with him.

DH: Whether you’re performing or composing, what is the most rewarding part about making music? GK: Giving people an emotionally authentic experience. Offering people an entry point into empathy for something that they either didn’t know they cared about or didn’t know that they could care about is deeply rewarding.

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CONVERSATION WITH JEFFREY K AHANE

From conducting orchestras to playing piano in solo and chamber recitals, Jeffrey Kahane cannot remember a time when he was not passionate about making music.

Devanney Haruta: In addition to being a concert pianist, you’re also a conductor. How do these two roles influence each other? Jeffrey Kahane: Being a conductor and thinking in terms of orchestral textures encourages thinking about the sound of the piano in an orchestral way. When I play music on the piano, I often am thinking not just as a pianist, but also as someone who deals with orchestral sonorities all the time. And similarly, chamber music is a more complicated texture sonically than solo piano music because it involves

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multiple instruments. So, there is a carry-over, I suppose, between thinking as a conductor and thinking as a chamber musician. Conversely, when I am conducting an orchestra, I often think the way a pianist thinks in terms of orchestral textures, meaning I’m very concerned with clarity and balance. I try also to bring a certain kind of spontaneity that carries over from the way that I play.

DH: How would you describe the differences between a solo and a chamber recital? JK: I think, especially for a pianist, a solo recital is proba-

bly the single-most demanding thing because it’s just you for two or two-and-a-half hours. It requires much more intense preparation; it’s a little like training for a marathon. Playing

chamber music is demanding in a different way, but certainly it’s a more relaxed experience. It’s very interactive; it’s much more of a social experience, both for the musicians and for the audience. Chamber music is really about interaction, while playing a solo recital is like having a conversation with the composer.

DH: What is it like for you to play side by side with your son Gabriel in concert? JK: It’s a great deal of fun. We love playing together. We

don’t get to do it very often. We’re lucky if it happens twice a year because he lives in New York and I live in Los Angeles, and our careers are extremely different. For the most part, I play traditional classical music, whereas Gabe does all kinds

of other things. But when we have the opportunity to work together, it’s something we love to do. We really admire each other’s work. It’s very stimulating and challenging, and mostly, it’s a lot of fun.

DH: Of all the things you could do in life, why choose music? JK: I don’t even know how to answer that question,

honestly, because it’s just who I am. I was just in love with it from the first opportunity that I ever had. There was always music in my home. My parents were not musicians, but they loved to listen to music. There’s never been a time in my life when I did not want to be making music in one way or another, whether it was playing or conducting or teaching. It’s a tremendous gift to be able to spend one’s life doing something that one really loves.

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CONVERSATION WITH

TIMO ANDRES

Timo Andres is a Brooklyn-based composer and pianist whose work is often influenced by close personal collaborations.

Devanney Haruta: How has learning and playing piano shaped the way you approach composition? Timo Andres: To me, they’re inseparable to the point

of almost feeling as though they’re the same thing. I don’t think I would be able to do one without the other. A lot of what I write is inspired by music that I’ve been working on as a performer. That process of learning, interpreting, and performing the music is the best way I’ve found to study and absorb music that I love. And similarly, one of the jobs of a classical performer is to put yourself in the place of the composer and interpret the music through a compositional lens. You’re not simply following the set of written instructions on the page; you’re also trying to figure out:

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why are those instructions written in a certain way, and how can I convey the overarching idea that the composer had in mind? Of course, especially when the composer happens to be no longer alive, it’s hard to know. I think being a composer gives me a little bit of a leg up on that.

DH: Do you collaborate with the musicians for whom you compose? TA: It really has to do with the situation, the logistics, and

where people live in terms of how much collaboration you end up doing. Sometimes people ask me to write a piece, and our roles are very distinct: I write it, I deliver it, and they play it. Other times, it’s really hands on: I’m in the room with the performers, trying out different things and workshopping the piece as I’m writing it. I find it especially helpful to do hands-on workshopping with instruments that I’m not as familiar with or with a very specific performer situation. For me, especially with vocal music, it’s very

important to do that because you never write for a generic voice; you write for a certain singer. For instance, for pieces I’ve written for Gabe [Kahane], I want to tailor that music as closely as I can to his style and his strengths. I do think there’s an aspect to which the pieces I’ve collaborated on most closely are stronger pieces, in a way. They’re more specific in terms of sound and sound production.

cert ever since, and over the years have done a number of incarnations of it. Even some of the pieces that we’re doing on our Tippet Rise show—some of the Britten songs—we performed on our very first show together. Over the years, we’ve ended up writing a good deal of music for each other. I feel very familiar with his style at this point, and I think he would say the same about my music.

DH: How did you and Gabriel Kahane start working together?

DH: If anything, what would you say to the audience before they listen to your music?

TA: Gabe and I have been friends for a while now, and I think it’ll be eight years this summer. We matched up because we both live in Brooklyn. Gabe was doing some curation work, and he heard my music and suggested we meet up. We immediately realized that we had a lot of shared musical background and musical affinities. I think it was the season of 2010/11 that we started planning our first concert together. We’ve been evolving that first con-

TA: I’m trying to articulate a length of time in terms of

musical structure, especially a harmonic journey. For me, harmony is at the root of everything I do. So, listen to my music like you would to any other music that works roughly in that same way. I hope that you’re able to get a sense of a structural arc, an emotional journey, and hopefully an emotional payoff!

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FRIDAY, JULY 20, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jeffrey Kahane

An Introduction to the Goldberg Variations INTERMISSION JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 Variation 16 Ouverture Aria Variation 17 Variation 1 Variation 18 Canone alla Sesta Variation 2 Variation 19 Variation 3 Canone all’Unisono Variation 20 Variation 4  Variation 21 Canone alla Settima Variation 5  Variation 22 Alla breva Variation 6 Canone alla Seconda Variation 23 Variation 7 Al tempo di Giga Variation 24 Canone all’Ottava Variation 8 Variation 25 Adagio Variation 9 Canone alla Terza Variation 26 Variation 10 Fughetta Variation 27 Canone alla Nona Variation 11 Variation 28 Variation 12 Canone alla Quarta Variation 29 Variation 13 Variation 30 Quodlibet Variation 14 Aria da capo Variation 15 Canone alla Quinta: Andante

For Peter Halstead’s program notes on the Goldberg Variations, see page 238

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SATURDAY, JULY 21, 11:00 AM The Domo Gabriel Kahane, voice Dover Quartet

TIMO ANDRES: Early to Rise Dover Quartet GABRIEL KAHANE: Come On All You Ghosts The Prelude Letter to a Lover April Snow Gabriel Kahane, voice Dover Quartet ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK: String Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105 Dover Quartet

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

TIMO ANDRES (b. 1985) Early to Rise Timo Andres was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up in rural Connecticut, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. He wrote Early to Rise, a roughly ten-minute string quartet, in spring 2013 on a commission from the Library of Congress for the Attacca Quartet. In his program note, Andres writes:

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Early to Rise is very productive within a short span of time. . . . It’s also the most recent in a series of Schumann-inspired pieces I’ve written; this time, the seed is a five-note accompanimental figure from his late piano cycle Gesänge der Frühe (Morning Songs). At first, Early to Rise uses this figure in a canon, gently cycling through harmonies while its rhythms rub against each other in expanding and contracting patterns.

The following three sections are all built on long crescendi, increasing in register and intensity until they reach “tipping points.”

The first violin instigates the second section with a sped-up version of the five-note figure, forced constantly to modulate by the lower strings’ contrary motion. A chaconne is the foundation of the third movement, though unlike traditional chaconnes, it modulates with each repetition, forming longer, upward-striving wedges.

In the final section, momentum builds in the opposite direction with a simple downwarddrifting chorale, picking up speed until it reaches a frenetic conclusion.

The Music at Tippet Rise

GABRIEL KAHANE (b. 1981) Come On All You Ghosts Gabriel Kahane is a singer-songwriter, pianist, theater artist, and composer who lives in Brooklyn. He was born in Venice Beach, California, and is the son of pianist Jeffrey Kahane and his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist. Come On All You Ghosts sets three poems by the San Francisco poet Matthew Zapruder (b. 1967). Kahane wrote the piece in 2011 on a commission from Bravo! Vail Valley Chamber Music Festival and sang it himself with the Calder Quartet at its premiere. It also appears on his album The Fiction Issue, performed with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. In his program note, Kahane writes: In each of the poems, Zapruder seems to me preoccupied with marrying the mundanity of contemporary life to spiritual and philosophical concerns. In the first poem, “The Prelude,” Zapruder turns on a dime from meditations on the qualities of Diet Coke to the existential loneliness of Samuel Coleridge. The epistolary “Letter to a Lover” begins with an homage to the opening bars of the exquisite slow movement of Thomas Adès’s string quartet Arcadiana, but develops into something of a pop ballad, albeit one accompanied by string quartet only. The last song is the jaunty “April Snow,” depicting a scene of a snowed-in airport terminal; its language is simultaneously naturalistic and absurd, psychologically grounded and yet surreal. The songs, like the poems, live in a kind of ecstatic purgatory between popular and classical idioms, and it’s my hope that I’ve honored Zapruder’s simultaneous commitment to irreverent and spiritual concerns in my setting of his work.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841—1904) String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major, Op. 105 Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major could be called his other “American” Quartet, as he began writing it in New York in March 1895, at the end of his three-year stay in the United States (the actual “American” Quartet is No. 12). But after completing just 70 measures of the new piece, he returned to Europe and set the draft aside. He wrote an entirely different quartet (No. 13—begun later, but finished first) before resuming work on No. 14, completing it in December 1895. This is his final string quartet and his last piece of chamber music. In the remaining years before his death, he would write only orchestral music and operas. In 1892, Dvořák had moved to America to take a job as artistic director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He was selected by the school’s president, the philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, largely because he was a champion of nationalist Czech music—she hoped he would spur an American musical movement in a similar spirit. The “American” Quartet and “New World” Symphony were his major gestures in that direction, but he was always ambivalent, feeling that American music should be in the hands of Americans, drawing from Black and Native American traditions. Meanwhile he was homesick for Bohemia, and the Panic of 1893 left the National Conservatory’s finances— and his salary—insecure. In February 1895, two months before he left America for good, Dvořák wrote rather bitterly in Harpers: Art, of course, must always go a-begging, but why should this country alone, which is so justly famed for the generosity and public spirit of its citizens, close its door to the poor beggar? . . . Not long ago a young man came to me and showed me his compositions. His talent seemed so promis-

ing that I at once offered him a scholarship in our school, but he sorrowfully confessed that he could not afford to become my pupil because he had to earn his living by keeping books in Brooklyn....I urged him to arrange the matter with his employer, but he only received the answer: “If you want to play, you can’t keep books. You will have to drop one or the other.” He dropped his music. . . . It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not “pay,” to use an American expression—at least, not in the beginning—and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.

This was his plea to America, which happily adopted his American-written works, but has been less than universally accepting of his critique. (Though he might be pleased to find more young composers than impoverished bookkeepers living in Brooklyn today.) America also seems to have had little lasting effect on Dvořák, as he turned his attention to solidly Czech music after returning home. But the String Quartet No. 14 is an exception: a transatlantic work that is neither affirmatively American nor Bohemian. It has qualities reminiscent of the more famous “American” Quartet, but here those qualities are more subtle, more digested. The first movement begins with a grim Adagio, which gives way to a sunnier Allegro. The Scherzo, marked Molto vivace, comes next, its dance rhythms set over turbulent textures. The slow movement is operatic, resembling at different points either a chorus or an aria. The Finale brims with Dvořákian devices—it’s the last movement of his last quartet and he makes it a greatest-hits reel of all his accomplishments in the genre. The Quartet No. 14 premiered at the Prague Conservatory on April 16, 1896. The concert was held on the one-year anniversary of Dvořák’s return home.

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SATURDAY, JULY 21, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Timo Andres, piano Gabriel Kahane, voice, piano, and electric guitar Jeffrey Kahane, piano Dover Quartet

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (trans. KURTÁG) Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 1085 Jeffrey Kahane and Gabriel Kahane, piano TIMO ANDRES: How can I live in your world of ideas? Timo Andres, piano Jeffrey Kahane, piano ROBERT SCHUMANN (trans. DEBUSSY) from Six Studies in Canonic Form, Op. 56 No. 1 in C Major: Nicht zu schnell No. 2 in A Minor: Mit innigem Ausdruck No. 3 in E Major: Andantino No. 6 in B Major: Adagio Jeffrey Kahane, piano Timo Andres, piano TIMO ANDRES: Clear and Cold Timo Andres, piano

GABRIEL KAHANE: Four Songs from The Ambassador Veda (1 Pierce Dr.) Bradbury Building (304 Broadway) Ambassador Hotel (3400 Wilshire Blvd.) Empire Liquor Mart (9127 S. Figueroa St.) Gabriel Kahane, voice, piano, and electric guitar Dover Quartet INTERMISSION BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Folksong Arrangements The Salley Gardens The Trees They Grow So High The Ash Grove O Waly, Waly Gabriel Kahane, voice Timo Andres, piano ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK: Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81 Allegro ma non tanto Dumka: Andante con moto Scherzo (Furiant): molto vivace Finale: Allegro

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

JOHANN SABASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) trans. GYÖRGY KURTÁG (b.1926) Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 O Lamm Gottes, unschildig, BWV 1085 György Kurtág, a contemporary Hungarian composer, transcribed these two chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach for piano four hands. Kurtág published them in a volume called Transcriptions from Machaut to J.S. Bach and recorded them with his wife, Márta, on a 1997 CD called Játékok (Games). In his own work, Kurtág is especially known for icy miniatures, well described by his aphorism, “one note is almost enough.” His transcriptions are likewise lean, bringing a judicious clarity to Bach’s music. Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God’s time is the best of all times) comes from the opening Sonatina of Actus Tragicus, BWV 106, one of Bach’s earliest cantatas. It was originally scored for two recorders, two violas da gamba, and basso continuo—an old-fashioned ensemble even in Bach’s day, harkening back to the music of the previous generation. All of Bach’s sacred cantatas were intended for use in Lutheran services, and this one was written for a funeral.

TIMO ANDRES (b. 1985) How can I live in your world of ideas? Timo Andres was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up in rural Connecticut, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. He wrote this piece between 2006 and 2007, and premiered it in New York that year. It was originally part of a two-piano album called Shy and Mighty, which was his senior thesis project at Yale and became his first CD release on Nonesuch in 2009. Andres writes about the solo piano version heard today: How can I live in your world of ideas? takes its unwieldy name from the caption of a cartoon I drew in college, which depicts a young penguin and his parents in a museum, looking at a painting of a naked woman. This piece starts out as a passacaglia or theme and variations, but is then gradually overtaken by extraneous material from somewhere else entirely. . . . I transcribed it for a solo pianist (myself) because I needed something to play at short notice; in its solo version, however, the pianist must work much more strenuously to denote the mercurial transitions (“needle-drops”) which characterize the piece.

O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig (O Lamb of God, innocent) is a Lutheran hymn that Bach used in several works, including in the opening of St. Matthew Passion. Kurtág made this transcription, however, from a little-known organ prelude that was lost for centuries and rediscovered in a collection at Yale University in 1984. Still uncatalogued at the time Kurtág picked it up, it is now designated BWV 1085. Cartoon by Timo Andres

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ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856) trans. CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) from Six Studies in Canonic Form, Op. 56 In 1845, Robert Schumann emerged from a lengthy illness and depression with a new, fervent interest in canons and fugues. He resumed his creative work by embarking on a study of these technical, contrapuntal forms. Robert and his wife, Clara (also a pianist and composer), wrote exercises back and forth, and some of Robert’s became published pieces. He wrote the Six Canonic Studies for pedal piano, an experimental model with a bass pedalboard like an organ. A musical canon is created by having two or more voices sing the same melody with staggered entrances, creating harmonies from the overlaps. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is the classic example from childhood. Schumann’s first study, Nicht zu schnell (Not too fast), has two voices, staggered at the half-measure and an octave apart, with a separate bassline below. The second canon, Mit innigem Ausdruck (With tender expression), also has two voices, staggered by a full measure, and this time in the same octave, creating an especially gossamer texture. This study is filled out with pulsing harmonies and is built above another bassline. The Andantino is a bit different—it is bookended by a brief, non-canonic introduction and coda. In between, the canonic voices are separated by the interval of a fifth, creating more complex interrelations. Each line also contains little gaps, so they interlock more than they overlap. The final Adagio actually has three different canons, the middle one resembling a four-voice fugue. With the pedal piano obsolete, Claude Debussy later transcribed Schumann’s studies for two standard pianos. Canons, above all, are musicians’ music, and Debussy must have taken pleasure in dissecting Schumann’s workmanship while making the transcriptions. But it is not all academic:

the cool logic of these pieces also gives them a beautiful, mesmerizing inevitability.

TIMO ANDRES Clear and Cold Andres wrote Clear and Cold in winter 2013 for the pianist Kristin Elgersma. In his note about the piece, he writes simply, “Clear and Cold is a short fantasia on mid-February New England weather, and on Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan [A Boat on the Ocean].”

GABRIEL KAHANE (b. 1981) Four Songs from The Ambassador Gabriel Kahane is a singer-songwriter, pianist, theater artist, and composer who lives in Brooklyn. He was born in Venice Beach, California, and is the son of pianist Jeffrey Kahane and his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist. Kahane left Los Angeles when he was just two years old, but the city of his birth inspired him to write The Ambassador. Each of the ten movements captures a building at a precise address in the city. For this program, he has selected four: “Veda,” inspired by a house in the 1945 Joan Crawford film Mildred Pierce; “Bradbury Building,” the ornate landmark used as a filming location for cult science-fiction film Blade Runner; “Ambassador Hotel,” for the historic, now-demolished hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated; and “Empire Liquor Mart,” where in 1991 an African-American 15-yearold named Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by a Korean store owner. In a 2014 interview with Mother Jones, Kahane explained: I was born in Los Angeles but I didn’t grow up there. As I started to go back as an adult, I found all the clichés to be false; besides the sunshine and 2018 Summer Season

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the film industry, there is this whole other texture to life that is so deeply felt and poignant and aching. [The Ambassador] was an effort to unpack those feelings and to juxtapose the mythological representation of LA in film, TV, and fiction with a physical city that is incredibly prone to earthquake and fire and flood. The buildings . . . sit at the intersection of those two LAs, because buildings are an aesthetic projection, a mythology, but they also burn down and crack in earthquakes. . . . The musical devices are really secondary to trying to get inside the characters that inhabit these buildings. I’m inventing an interior monologue for characters that exist in other pieces of popular culture, and there are characters who are invented who come out of an idea that is more sociopolitical or geographical. The Ambassador began as a theatrical commission from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Kahane debuted it in a staged version directed by John Tiffany in December 2014. The complete cycle is also available as an album from Sony Masterworks.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913–1976) from Folksong Arrangements Benjamin Britten arranged folksongs for voice and piano or guitar through most of his career, with the first volume published in 1943 and the last in 1976. He wrote most, if not all, for his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Britten’s interest in folksongs of the British Isles reflects his roots in seaside Suffolk. He was not, however, a folklorist or enterprising musicologist along the lines of Béla Bartók or Alan Lomax, who collected and recorded songs in the field. Instead, Britten found most of his folksongs in previously published collections; his interest was more to 146

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elevate them to the realm of art song with fully composed accompaniments. The result is still rustic, but with a tinge of the modern. All four songs selected here dwell on love (usually lost love). “The Salley Gardens” is based on a mashup of an old Irish tune and a more recent poem by W.B. Yeats. “The Trees They Grow So High” is a Scottish song that tells the story of young boy who was married too young. “The Ash Grove” comes from Wales, and the ash grove, naturally, is a gravesite. “O Waly, Waly” is another Scottish song, also known as “The Water is Wide.”

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841–1904) Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81 The piano quintet is a powerful and flexible ensemble: nearly every other standard chamber group is a subset of it. While it is most obviously a string quartet with an added piano, any one of the strings can play alone with the piano, or the first violin and cello can temporarily form a piano trio while the others sit out. Even the full quintet can give wildly different impressions depending on who is in the foreground and who is in the background: when the piano accompanies, the strings can unite in bold lines, with the viola and cello freed from bassline and inner-voice duties. And when the strings accompany, the piano becomes a soloist, almost like a concerto in miniature. Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major takes advantage of all these possibilities, and is filled with indelible melodies and lush textures. The first movement begins with a rolling theme in the cello and piano, starting peacefully in A major but soon inflecting toward minor, heralding the entry of the rest of the strings. Like much of the Quintet, this movement is built around contrasts: major and minor, loud and soft, arches and angles, folksiness and elegance.

The second movement, called a Dumka, alternates a somnolent refrain with up-tempo verses. The Dumka is a form of Slavic folk ballad defined by the contrast of slow and fast; Dvořák adapted it as a hallmark in several of his chamber pieces. This one prominently features the viola (Dvořák was a violist). The Scherzo is a quick dash with a more relaxed middle section. The Finale is bracing and winsome, with a coda that feels like a bittersweet farewell.

Dvořák wrote the Piano Quintet No. 2 in the late summer and fall of 1887, but it actually began as a project to revise his earlier Piano Quintet No. 1 in A Major, Op. 5, from 1872. Dvořák had destroyed that score after its premiere, but had second thoughts and reconstructed it from a friend’s copy 15 years later. Even after revisions, he was still unhappy with it, so he wrote the Quintet No. 2 in A Major, a fresh piece that has almost entirely superseded its predecessor.

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CONVERSATION WITH

JOHANNES MOSER

Cellist Johannes Moser’s joy for performance and passion for personal connections shines through his music.

Devanney Haruta: How do you approach a performance at an unfamiliar venue or in a new environment? Johannes Moser: It is basically learning by doing. I try to have enough rehearsal time and enough time to acclimatize. I remember when I was playing the first time at the Vienna Musikverein, I asked them if I could have the hall to myself for an hour, and they said, “Absolutely! We have a spot between 2:30 and 3:30 AM.” (They’re 24-hours, so that was not an unusual request at all.) Just to

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spend that time there by myself not only trying the acoustics but also feeling the place is something that I like to do. And Tippet Rise is going to be no exception. Usually I approach a venue or concert hall like it’s an extension of my instrument because it’s an environment that I have to make vibrate and I have to fill with life. It takes some time, but it’s a process that I enjoy.

DH: How does your practice of overcoming performance anxiety with psychological training carry over into other areas of your life? JM: Through all the work that I’ve done, talking about

performance anxiety and actually turning it into performance

happiness—because I don’t have performance anxiety anymore—has led to an overall huge increase of life quality for me. Being more at ease with myself onstage means that I’m more at ease with myself in real life. To understand that the audience is not your enemy, but actually an integral and very crucial part of performance . . . I’m very grateful to have gotten through that process of understanding that performance is not a moment that should create anxiety, but actually should create a feeling of community and a lot of happiness.

DH: Of all the things you could do in life, why play the cello? JM: Like every other human being, I’m interested in

communication, and the cello has enabled me to have a life of interaction and connection. Now, why the cello specifically? I fell in love with the instrument because of the low frequencies. I started violin when I was five, and I was really terrible. Then I switched over to the cello, and playing these low frequencies—even on the tiny cello that I had at the time—was so satisfying. I’m in love with the sound of the instrument. You have the deep bass frequencies, so you can accompany in Bach or Handel oratorios. You have the possibilities of the highest registers, which allow you to play solo concerts. But I think really the long-term answer is the first one, that the interaction and communication through music, with music, and whatever is enabled through music is really wonderful. It’s addicting, I must say. I’m hooked. I’m not going anywhere else.

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CONVERSATION WITH VA D I M G LUZ M A N

Violinist Vadim Gluzman plays an instrument that was built in 1690 and passed down through the hands of extraordinary musicians.

Devanney Haruta: Can you tell us about the history of your violin? Vadim Gluzman: I feel that with this instrument,

I’m carrying on the torch, in a way. Leopold Auer was at the time the professor at the conservatory in St. Petersburg, and also the czar’s violinist, which means he was the violinist of the court. It is awe-inspiring just to think that not only Leopold Auer played it himself, but also his students who later became the greatest violinists who ever lived: Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman . . . The list goes

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on. That is really humbling, in a way, to remember that all these great composers—Tchaikovsky, for example—wrote for this violin when it was played by Auer. All these great solos that we hear in Tchaikovsky’s ballet—every violin solo in Nutcracker, in Swan Lake—they were all written for Auer and played on this violin. When I play Tchaikovsky, especially, I feel like I am closing a historical circle.

DH: Musical styles have certainly changed since 1690. How has the violin adapted to the changes over the years? VG: It’s a step by step process, it doesn’t happen overnight. When it was built, all it could play is what we call today

Baroque music. Then slowly came in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Mahler, you name it. And here we are in the 21st century playing Gubaidulina. Of course, the violin as an instrument has physically adapted to the demands of the modern repertoire. We use different strings, the bridge is different, the angle of the neck has been changed, the neck itself has been changed. It’s amazing to think that the violin was built in 1690. We’re now in 2018. The builder could never dream that his violin would make sounds like it does now. I think the violin shows the genius of the maker. One of the indications of the genius is being able to be ahead of your time. A gentleman in Cremona, Italy in 1690 built an instrument that is used for three-anda-half centuries after that, and meets demands that were unthinkable at the time. I think it’s extraordinary.

DH: Has your playing changed because of the instrument? VG: The violin inspires me, and I’ve been playing it now

for 21 years. The violin has character, has personality, has opinions and moods. It’s like a relationship with a human being. Do you dance? That’s the only parallel I could give you. It’s feeling your partner and being able to lead while following, and vice versa. It’s being able to find greater depths of sound, each and every time you play. By depths I don’t necessarily mean volume. I mean shades of colors and degrees of intensity. The intensity could be a whisper that is overwhelming. It could be a scream that is barely heard. I know that I’m not the same player I was 20 years ago in many ways, thanks to the instrument.

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CONVERSATION WITH YE VGENY SUDBIN

Whether onstage, in the recording studio, or with a camera outdoors in nature, professional pianist and brilliant photographer Yevgeny Sudbin is passionate about capturing moments in time.

Devanney Haruta: Could you tell us about your collaboration with Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser? Yevgeny Sudbin: We’ve known each other for a while, but we never played together. We actually had this project in mind at least two-and-a-half years ago, but because everyone is busy, it’s really hard to find a period of time which works for everybody. This autumn was the first time we got together and played. We took three weeks to perform together, and we did a European tour, mainly in Germany, England, Switzerland, Spain . . . They are wonderful musicians, and it was really nice to collaborate together. We played almost every day for three weeks, and

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then we did also a recording together at the end of the tour. So, actually, it all was quite intense. But very exciting, very exhilarating. I quite like it, because as a soloist, I have to always travel on my own, and it was refreshing to not have to be on the road by yourself all the time. It was kind of relaxing, and just more fun.

DH: How would you compare the experiences of playing for a recording session and playing for a live concert? YS: The performance is something that’s like life, you can’t really get a grip on it. You can practice the piece and polish it, but when you are in the hall, when you have the atmosphere and all the people there, it just happens spontaneously. You have to know the notes, but that’s about it. I feel with recording, you can go deeper into a piece than in a performance. The moment is captured in time as something

that’s permanent. With a recording, you can listen back, and if you thought you misheard something you can always come back and hear it again. You can hear more detail, and you can also work on more detail. It’s not possible always to perceive so much from an audience point of view when you sit in a concert hall than when you listen with high resolution equipment to every single note. It’s as if you are in the best possible seat whenever you listen to a recording. In some ways, I prefer recordings. But then in other ways, I need performances just because I also enjoy performing. They are two different art forms, almost.

DH: In addition to being a professional concert pianist, you’re also a very talented photographer. Have you found any connections between those two aspects of your life?

lots of pictures. I don’t know if there is a connection between photography and music, but for me they are slightly opposite. Performance is very momentary. It’s over in an hour or two, but a photograph is a moment that you capture in the camera, something you can hold on to. In a way, it’s more like making a music recording. One of my anxieties about life is that moments pass, and you don’t have a possibility to hold on to them. I think making recordings and having a camera are two possibilities to capture a moment in time. I take lots of pictures of my family, of people, of life, but one of my most special interests is just being in nature with a camera. It’s a little bit like meditation. It’s very calming. It’s a nice way for me to wind down after a concert, if I just go out and take photos. I think I need it just to stay sane.

YS: Well, I don’t know about talented . . . I just take

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, K. 301 Allegro con spirito Allegro SOFIA GUBAIDULINA: Rejoice! Sonata for Violin and Cello Your Joy No Man Can Taketh from You Rejoice with Them That Do Rejoice Rejoice, Rabbi! And He Returned to His Home Listen to the Small Voice Within INTERMISSION DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40 Allegro non troppo Allegro Largo Allegro ALFRED SCHNITTKE (trans. SUDBIN): Tango from Life with an Idiot

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY then—after a brief intrusion—the instruments switch, with

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, K. 301 In 1772, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was named Konzertmeister to the Salzburg Court, a title he had held in an honorary capacity since 1769, when he was just 13 years old. But in 1777 he grew dissatisfied with the post and asked permission to leave. The Archbishop reacted badly, unceremoniously firing both Wolfgang and his father, Leopold Mozart, who also worked as a court musician and had not intended to leave. Fortunately the situation was soon smoothed over: Leopold was reappointed, and Wolfgang was granted leave to seek employment elsewhere. Acting on Leopold’s instructions, Mozart and his mother, Maria Anna, left Salzburg to search for a new position elsewhere in Europe. Their first stop was Munich, where Mozart was introduced to a set of violin sonatas by the composer Joseph Schuster (1748–1812). He sent a copy home to his sister Nannerl with a note: “I have often played them here; they are by no means bad. If I remain long enough, I intend to compose six in this style, for it is much liked here.” However, he soon left Munich without a job offer and traveled on to Mannheim, where he aspired to a job at its “famous court, whose rays like those of the sun illuminate the whole of Germany,” as Leopold floridly described it. In Mannheim, Mozart began a set of new violin sonatas modeled after those of Schuster. These give greater prominence to the violin, in contrast to Mozart’s earlier violin sonatas, which placed more emphasis on the piano. The Violin Sonata No. 18 in G Major is Mozart’s first in the newer style, and remains one of his warmest, most recognizable violin pieces. The first movement immediately proclaims the equality of violin and piano: the amiable melody is first presented in the violin with keyboard accompaniment, but 156

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the piano playing the melody and the violin accompanying. The second movement rolls along with similar exchanges, its recurring theme set between varied episodes in a rondo form. Like many of Mozart’s violin sonatas, the piece has just two movements. Still without a job offer, Mozart left Mannheim in March 1778 and continued on to Paris with his mother. There he published the Sonata No. 18 as part of his Op. 1 collection. The trip, however, took a tragic turn as his mother suddenly grew ill and died on July 3, far from home in the French capital. Mozart wrote to a family friend in Salzburg, who broke the news to Leopold in person. Mozart left Paris alone and once again without a job, and returned to Salzburg where he resumed working for the court he had hoped to leave. He stayed another three years before moving to Vienna in 1781 to freelance—after Salzburg, he would never again hold a full-time salaried position.

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931) Rejoice! Sonata for Violin and Cello The music of Sofia Gubaidulina emanates from the inner reaches of the far out. Her pieces inhabit worlds of extreme timbres and veer off on eccentric tangents, but they are also deeply felt, rooted in the Russian musical tradition and in her spiritual convictions. Born in 1931 in Chistopol, a town in the Tatar Republic of the USSR, Gubaidulina graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954 and then studied at the Moscow Conservatory. There she met Dmitri Shostakovich, who in a defining moment told her, “my wish for you is that you should continue on your own ‘incorrect’ path.”

Though Gubaidulina came of age in the post-Stalin era, as Nikita Khrushchev relaxed artistic restrictions and allowed greater freedom of speech, the “incorrect” path was still a difficult one. This was especially true for a composer whose musical interests leaned toward the Western avant-garde and who found meaning in Russian Orthodox mysticism. She joined the Composers’ Union in 1961 and worked as a film composer while also delving into electronic music and folk styles. Her international fame grew in the 1980s, largely on account of her violin concerto Offertorium, and by the end of the Cold War she was among the most recognized living Russian composers. In 1992 she moved to Germany, where she now lives in the mountains outside Hamburg. Rejoice! (Raduysya! in Russian, Freue dich! in German) was written in 1981 for Oleg Kagan and Natalia Gutman, a married violin-and-cello duo. The couple premiered a revised version in 1988 in Kuhmo, Finland. At first hearing, the piece would not seem to match the title’s exhortation, at least not in the way that might be expected by someone unfamiliar with Gubaidulina’s thinking. She explains, “it should not be assumed that I wanted to illustrate the theme of joy in my music . . . the religious theme is experienced metaphorically.” Specifically, she intends a musical metaphor: A metaphor for the transition into an “other” reality through the juxtaposition of normal sound with that of harmonics. The possibility for string instruments to derive pitches of various heights at once and the same place on the string can be experienced in music as the transition to another plane of existence. And that is joy. Of course, the sounds of harmonics have been used a thousand times, and there is nothing special in it. But the idea is to experience them not as timbre or coloration . . . but as its essence, the essence of its form, as transfiguration. Harmonics are played by lightly touching the string at certain points along its length (the nodes of the harmonic

series), creating a higher, crystalline pitch different from the one produced by fully depressing the string at the same spot. As Gubaidulina points out, it’s an age-old string player’s technique, but here she makes novel use of it to suggest ascension through the physicality of its execution. The titles of the five movements come from the teachings of Grigory Skovoroda (1722–1794), a Ukrainian philosopher and theologian. The first movement, “Your Joy No Man Can Taketh from You,” begins with a sighing motif in the violin, contrasting normal notes with piercing harmonics. The cello enters later, clamoring below before sliding upward to meet the violin. The second movement, “Rejoice with Them That Do Rejoice,” murmurs and buzzes urgently, while the third, “Rejoice, Rabbi!” features cello trills, harmonics, and pizzicatos, joined later by the violin. The fourth movement, “And He Returned to His Home,” brings a new clarity with sustained notes in the highest registers. The final movement, “Listen to the Small Voice Within,” is the most traditionally musical, with a recurring, gibing motif in the violin over uneasy cello lines. Unlike Shostakovich, whose works often draw us into a frightening world, there is something removed and performance-like about the music of Gubaidulina. There is a sense of witnessing events from the outside that you struggle to understand—but it can be spellbinding to try to do so.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40 Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata is a relatively early work, written in 1934 before his first denunciation by Stalin. His worries at the time were simpler and more intimate: two years into his marriage to Nina Varzar, in the summer of 2018 Summer Season

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1934, he fell in love with a 20-year-old student named Yelena Konstantinovskaya. Though he and Nina had an open marriage, this was outside the bounds of their agreement. They divorced, but soon remarried after learning she was pregnant with their first child. “Remaining in Leningrad. Nina pregnant. Remarried,” he telegrammed a friend. In a more reflective letter, he confessed, “I have only now realized and fathomed what a remarkable woman she is.” During their brief divorce, he wrote the Cello Sonata to fulfill a request from Viktor Kubatsky, the principal cellist of the Bolshoi Theatre. Shostakovich began work on the piece in August 1934, and premiered it with Kubatsky on December 25. Shostakovich felt that Soviet composers neglected chamber music in favor of orchestral music, and the Cello Sonata was partly an effort to counter that tendency. Stylistically, it is a bit of an outlier for Shostakovich: classical in form, more subdued than much of his early output, but still without the harrowing atmosphere of his later style. Critics divide on whether his affair and divorce are reflected in the piece: some think his passionate romance with Konstantinovskaya shines through, others are surprised he could write such whimsical, lyrical music at such a fraught moment in his life. The first movement is in sonata form, modeled on older Romantic music. Still, there are surprises: tempos grind to a halt at dramatic transitions, and in the end the original theme is transformed into a dirge. The second movement is a raucous scherzo, making extensive use of glissando harmonics (here as a coloristic effect, quite unlike Gubaidulina’s later use as metaphor). The slow movement is dusky and resonant, with an endlessly unfurling cello line that grows more and more discomforted: if Shostakovich grieves for his marriage in this piece, it would be here. The brisk finale is filled with dense counterpoint which is repeatedly brought back to a rather rigid dance theme. Later in life, Shostakovich accompanied his new favored cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, in a recording of the Sonata. (Rostropovich, who premiered both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos, was still a child when the Sonata was written.) In 158

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another recording from 1962, Rostropovich plays it with their mutual friend, the composer Benjamin Britten, at the piano.

ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934–1998) trans. YEVGENY SUDBIN (b. 1980) Tango from Life with an Idiot Together with Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke was a leading Soviet composer of the generation after Shostakovich. He was born in 1934 in Engels, Russia, to a German-Jewish father and a Volga-German mother. Like Gubaidulina, he wrote film music, struggled in the Soviet system, received international attention in the last decade of the Cold War, and moved to Germany thereafter. He suffered from poor health after a series of strokes and died in Hamburg in 1998, at age 63. Schnittke is known for his “polystylistic” idiom, epitomized by his 1977 Concerto Grosso No. 1, which he built from “formulae and forms of Baroque music; free chromaticism and micro-intervals; and banal popular music which enters as if it were from the outside with a disruptive effect.” The tango we hear today first appeared as some of that intentionally “banal popular music” in the Rondo movement of the Concerto Grosso. Schnittke later adapted it as an intermezzo for his 1992 opera Life with an Idiot, a grotesque comic sendup of the Soviet Union in which a man and his wife are forced to choose an “idiot” from an asylum to take into their home. The opera was premiered in Amsterdam in 1992 by the Netherlands Opera and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. The version performed on this concert was arranged for piano trio by Yevgeny Sudbin, who comments, “it’s reminiscent of a forlorn, dystopian world where everyone has lost their sanity.”

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 11:00 AM The Domo Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: THE FIRST CELLO SUITE, NO. 1 IN G MAJOR, BWV 1007 Prélude Allemande Courante Sarabande Menuett I Menuett II Gigue JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B Minor, BWV 1002 Allemanda – Double Courante – Double (Presto) Sarabande – Double Tempo di Bourrée – Double HENNING KRAGGERUD: Variation Suite for Violin and Cello

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: The First Cello Suite, No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 (1720). To quote Eric Siblin’s take on the beginnings of each of the suites, the prélude: Bach’s préludes are virtuosic scene-setters that give each suite personality. They are fantastias that operate outside the rigid tempos goerning the other movements: they stop, start, and stray, soar to dizzying heights, hold their breath, and come crashing down. The essence of the story told by each suite is concentrated in the prélude. …the sarabande [is] the spiritual center of each cello suite…. The…galanterie movements (minuets, bourées, gavottes): there is a spring in their step, a joyous bounce, especially coming as they do on the heels of the wistful sarabande. Every suite ends with a gigue. It is the sound of jaunty exclamation marks, a fiddling ditty. One hears the devil-may- care merriment of a tavern player: here is the tune; dance to it - tomorrow another Thirty Years’ War may be upon us.

—Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites

Schubert, Haydn, and Mozart also ended often very serious sonatas or symphonies with the merry dance. Especially for Vienna, it was the urge to waltz on the grave, to take some joy in the midst of surrounding catastrophe (meditated on in the slow movements). These dances are very confusing to structuralists, as they have nothing to do with structure. The composer just gets in the car and goes to the beach. Schubert especially was always up for a good dance. Plays over the last few years in London have been ending with a song and a dance, often unconnected with the play. Shakespeare ended some of his plays with a nonchalant song or recitation. 162

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The last words to The Tempest: PROSPERO Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. Most famously from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: PUCK If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend. And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearnèd luck Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.

It’s essential to put it all behind us, whatever it is, and have a laugh and a good jig. These bittersweet odes from Shakespeare sum up the atmosphere of the Bach gigue quite well. Siblin discovered, along with Casals and his father, in 1890 the only dependable version of the Bach cello suites tucked into a dark corner of a store in Barcelona. It was Bach’s wife’s copy in her own handwriting, the only way we really know what Bach intended. Siblin spends much discussing Casals, Bach, Anna Magdalena, and cellos. Anyone interested in the drama and the detail of the Suites, the summit of classical achievement even now, should read his excellent narrative. —Peter Halstead

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B Minor, BWV 1002 Johann Sebastian Bach’s manuscript of the Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas dates from 1720, during his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though their inception probably goes back to his first time in Weimar in 1703. There he met the composer Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656–1705), whose 1696 Solo Violin Partitas are important precedents, and probably inspirations, for Bach’s more famous set. Westhoff was a leading violinist and composer in the generation before Bach, and was among the first to write polyphonic music for solo violin, devising ways for a lone violinist to play multiple independent lines at the same time. This required both an inspired compositional mind and a virtuoso’s understanding of the instrument. Bach, like Westhoff, was a violinist as well as a composer, and so was perfectly equipped to continue developing what, at the time, must have seemed an impossibly modern style. In the early Baroque, the title “partita” referred to a variation form, usually based on Lutheran chorale melodies. Bach and Westhoff were among the first to apply the title to dance suites. In Köthen, Bach had time to focus on such secular forms: his employer, Prince Leopold, was a Calvinist and had no need for elaborate liturgical music. Bach, a Lutheran, spent most of his career specializing in exactly such music—but for his six years in Köthen, turned to mostly secular music, which he happily wrote for the skilled musicians of Leopold’s court. The arrangement led to some of Bach’s greatest instrumental pieces: the solo works for violin and cello, the French keyboard suites, the orchestral suites, and the Brandenburg Concertos.

a unique movement structure: it is the only one where each dance is immediately followed by a double: a fast, French style of variation that elaborates on the music just heard. The Allemanda was a French impression of a German dance, which Germans like Bach reclaimed when they wrote dance suites. The Courante was once a noble courtship dance, which typically involved two partners stepping toward each other and then away. The Sarabande came from the New World via Spain: what was once a fast, bawdy dance was transformed into a slow seductive one as it reached northern Europe. The Bourrée—which Bach uses in the First Partita in place of the more typical Gigue—was a rustic peasant dance. (By Bach’s day, none of these dances were intended to be danced: they were only for listening.) The doubles, meanwhile, are pointillistic, offering a second look at each of the movements, as if through a scattering lens.

HENNING KRAGGERUD (b. 1973) Variation Suite for Violin and Cello Henning Kraggerud is a Norwegian violinist, composer, and artistic director of the Arctic Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. He often writes pieces for himself to perform: the Variation Suite we hear today dates from 1994, and Kraggerud still plays it as an encore, usually with the principal cellist of whatever orchestra he is soloing with. The Suite has four movements, beginning with a lyrical theme and then continuing with a Scherzo, Waltz, Jig (played entirely in pizzicato), and Stick Dance. Like so many violinist-composers of the past—whose works were originally written for their own performances, but later taken up by others—Kraggerud’s works are now being borrowed by his colleagues.

Just as the enormous Chaconne in the Partita No. 2 sets that piece apart from the rest of the set, the Partita No. 1 also has 2018 Summer Season

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Vadim Gluzman, violin Johannes Moser, cello Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

FRANZ SCHUBERT: Notturno in E-flat Major, Op. 148, D. 897 ARNO BABADJANIAN: Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor Allegro Andante Allegro vivace INTERMISSION PYOTR Il’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50 Pezzo elegiaco: Moderato assai — Allegro giusto Tema con variazioni: Andante con moto — Variazione finale e coda

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD AND BENJAMIN PESETSKY

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Notturno in E-flat Major, Op. 148, D. 897 This piece will make you cry. This gorgeous aubade, rising above a summer of gorgeous pieces, for piano, violin, and cello, is the epitome of midnight stillness. It is the dream of everything that is Schubert and Vienna and the dusky pastel of an imaginary world that should have lasted forever. Rachmaninoff’s Barcarolle learned a lot from it and its pulled Viennese waltz rhythms. Here the Viennese countryside smiles down in the moonlight on all the graces of the Biedermeier era: simplicity, security, and Gemütlichkeit. This piece should be the theme of Tippet Rise: when the theme returns in triumph, accompanied by frenzied arpeggios on the piano; or afterwards, when the trio subsides into an awed reverie while the stately theme glides by on the piano; or maybe the pizzicato moment when the strings pluck like Pachelbel’s Canon behind the piano theme; or the expansive return of the moon immediately afterwards. I don’t know—at any point in its transcendent procession, this piece is one of the great exultations anywhere. If you had thought of this theme and how to frame it in its entwined tableau vivant, its frozen Friedrich aurora, you would know that at some point in history the world would discover that genuine greatness had walked silently through it, and you would sleep soundly, despite all your frustrations, misgivings, false starts, and merely mortal pains. If the world had ever discovered this music, it would be the stuff of sneaker commercials and elevators—but maybe it can’t be heard by an industrial world, because it is too pastoral to be taken up by machines.

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At the end the piano trills over the renewed revelations of the theme, as it modulates out of the forest into the night sky—the moon in all her splendor!—and subsides into the stillness, with the piano’s breeze, frozen in the sublime clarity only possible in moonlight, making one final waft around the comfortable E-flat branch of the high suspended strings, one witty yet seraphic gute Nacht at the end of a celestial spectacle. — Peter Halstead

ARNO BABADJANIAN (1921–1983) Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor Arno Babadjanian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1921 and was a much-admired pianist and composer during the Soviet era. (His name also appears in English as “Babajanian” or “Babadzhanyan,” among other variants.) He studied at the Yerevan Conservatory before moving on to Moscow, then returned to Yerevan where he taught piano and continued to compose and perform. He wrote the Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor in 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, and premiered it in Moscow alongside David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, luminaries of the violin and cello, respectively. From the 1940s to the early 1950s, artistic expression was severely limited in the Soviet Union. In 1948, Dmitri Shostakovich was denounced for a second time, alongside Sergei Prokofiev and the leading Armenian composer of the day, Aram Khachaturian. Any music deemed “formalist,” or without a social purpose in line with Soviet goals, was forbidden. The most restrictive ideology, called beskonfliktnost (“conflictless-ness”) by its later critics, proclaimed Soviet society to be so advanced that “bad” and “good” were no longer operative concepts: there was only “good” and “best.”

For a time, this meant that any sense of tension, conflict, or despair was discouraged in music. There were few ways for a composer to write anything expressively complex or emotionally truthful under such constraints. One acceptable way to cultivate an individual voice, however, was to draw from regional musical traditions. This was considered acceptable given Stalin’s idea that “the development of cultures national in form and socialist in content is necessary for their ultimate fusion into one General Culture, socialist in form and content.” In other words, nationalistic music in familiar local styles was permissible as an interim step toward a later homogenous society. Whether or not any composer seriously embraced this idea, it provided cover for some degree of stylistic variety. It especially benefited composers from the outer Soviet republics, including Babadjanian, whose Piano Trio evokes Armenian folk music within an aching, late-Romantic style reminiscent of Rachmaninoff. The three movements progress from a nostalgic Largo that blossoms into an impassioned Maestoso, to an elegiac Andante that floats a violin melody (joined later by the cello) over tolling piano chords, to the delightfully rugged Allegro vivace. The piece was enthusiastically received at its premiere, and Babadjanian was named a People’s Artist of the USSR in 1971. His small catalogue of works and primary occupation as a pianist likely helped him avoid official scrutiny during his lifetime, but have also left him with a modest legacy. The Piano Trio, however, is a magnificent work ready for rediscovery. — Benjamin Pesetsky

PYOTR IL’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–1893) Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50 In October 1880, Nadezhda von Meck, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky’s patron and confidante, wrote to ask: “Pyotr Il’yich, why have you not written a single trio? I regret this every day because every day they play me a trio, and I always sigh because you have not composed a single one.” She enclosed a photograph of the resident musicians she employed, including the young pianist Claude Debussy. Neither the photo nor the letter immediately inspired Tchaikovsky to write a trio, but it put the thought in his mind, and the following year another event would prompt him to write the piece we hear today. Tchaikovsky had been kept extraordinarily busy in Moscow: he had so many performances that one critic declared, “the last week of the 1880 Moscow musical season might truly be called Tchaikovsky week.” In March of the following year, while resting in Italy, he received word that the pianist Nikolay Rubinstein had died in Paris. Although their professional relationship had often been tumultuous, Rubinstein was Tchaikovsky’s greatest musical champion, and his death profoundly affected the composer. He decided to commemorate Rubinstein in a piece with a virtuosic piano part. By January 1882, he had worked out detailed sketches for the Piano Trio in A Minor, and was soon satisfied with the trio’s musical content but remained insecure about the practical handling of the violin and cello parts. He wrote to his publisher, “before you engrave it . . . It’s absolutely essential that a stringed instrument expert should give his attention to my bow markings and correct what is unsuitable.” The piece received a private performance at the Moscow Conservatory on the first anniversary of Rubinstein’s death; it was published the following fall with some revisions and the dedication “To the memory of a great artist.” 2018 Summer Season

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At its first public performance in October 1882, the critical reception was mixed, but Tchaikovsky was heartened by the comments of the pianist and composer Sergei Taneyev, who said, “I can’t remember ever having experienced more pleasure when learning a new piece . . . Most musicians are delighted with the Trio. It has also pleased the public.” The trio’s first movement, Pezzo elegiac, begins with rushing piano chords above which the cello and then violin enter. The piano then takes up the heart-tugging chords that characterize much of the piece. The second movement, Tema con variazioni, begins with a simple theme in the piano followed by eleven variations and a coda. The first variation brings in the strings, while the second variation takes off at a brisk pace. The third variation features string pizzicato and cheerful piano writing. The fourth contrasts brooding passion with whimsical moments and segues directly into the striking fifth variation, which uses belllike piano above droning strings and ends quietly with the strings alone. The sixth variation features the cello and violin in succession, while the seventh contains large piano chords and quick runs in the strings. The eighth variation uses low piano writing and vigorous violin and cello lines, and the ninth begins with decorative piano runs and a mournful violin tune, ending with an almost deathly cello note. The tenth variation is once again in the cheerful major mode but is briefly inflected with minor. The final variation features cello pizzicato and a soaring violin melody, ending with calm piano chords. The coda begins vigorously with running lines between the three instruments, and there is a firm restatement of the theme from the first movement before the work disappears back into mourning.

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WEEK FIVE PETER HALSTEAD

Night Music When I think of Chopin’s Nocturnes I think of that despairing French photo, maybe by René-Jacques, when the world was in black and white and every kiss was a matter of life or death, coming just after the war when the universal instinct was to make love in the ruins, and Paris was in ruins, as were people, so I think of that photo of the night flying down some rain-soaked stairs to the dark dirty banks of the Seine, dank underworld highways of sex and failure which surround us in our trench coats, glistening in the rain, on the run from the night, like Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, losers with lamplit halos, lovers of lost color, of daylight and dead music, trapped in the steel of cities destroyed by their own technologies, by the engines of war, knowing that leaves have been dead in the countryside for months, that nothing will come of the spring, that first love is the beginning of betrayal, but still the camera flies down the Fritz Lang steps of the storm, holding back all that despair, the small rooms of the night, renounced by the vast clueless rage that moves the world, yet rhyming still the mesh of perfect marriages with dappled carriages, even though rhymes no longer matter to a society blown apart by weapons and the rain of rust, fog hurling

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itself around those filthy river walks where transvestites shiver in the litter, hoping even now that the chilling, stripping rain will bring auras to the street lamps and that somewhere in the mist someone sings for real, all the decades of deceit ripped away, and there the photo stands, listening to night, waiting for morning, for the flirting, restorative day, aiming at tenderness despite the baggage of camp, the sniggers of the broken, strangifying and strangling the walking dumb, the busted, the aficionados disgusted with their own expertise, their inability to start over—it’s all there in that photo, in the music of night, the Kantian echo of black and white, where everything is either true or false, before philosophers started to dicker, to recant (as Freud, Jung, Sartre, and Eliot all did), too late as always, their doubts hushed by acolytes who were already profiting from their youthful mistakes: well, here’s Chopin’s rain again, washing out sores, and let’s hope it scours all of us. In this most naked of confessions entrusted over the masking river swell of warm certainty where the conclusion of the right hand is as affirming as the left, what moves me are

the harmonies sprung out of older leftovers, new subtleties invented from already dying notes, cascading and spiraling stairways entirely independent of rhythm, the busy demands of reality overcome with invention, the right hand in its own world, anchoring itself just in time in the river on the bottom, the gently flowing Danube of the salons never descending into those embarrassing gallery-opening clichés, keeping its own company and consequently its timelessness: never imitated, never solved, still hanging, small fragile scents in the summer air, too personal to become a slogan, a motto, a movement, too inner to be a theme. Chopin was never part of a school, a group, which explains perhaps his inability to be explained, uncovered, espoused, exposed, exhumed. No defense is the best defense, as grass bends to wind, as someone said of Chopin: flowers and cannons, where chords are as indefinable as clouds, too airy to be earthy; where tonality defies reduction—to clarify it is to ruin it, the way roads destroy the delicate tapestry of fields, the way a flashlight illuminates the obvious and erases the subtle, diminishing as it enlarges. Let me become hysterical here.

Musicians often keep pictures or stories in their minds to help them capture the mood they want, or conversely capture the mood by ignoring the piece, a bit like inner tennis where a mantra’s purpose is to distract the player so the body can go about its business, that is, play it straight. So we by indirections find directions out. But to what extent do our inner programs, rather than distracting us, focus us on the programs themselves, which then replicate in the music, as if Marilyn Monroe, while pretending to be a peach to forget her fear, actually became a peach? In the D-flat Nocturne, from the start to the end, the constant bass notes descend like snow on a quiet Swiss village, while the melody imitates that bass with exactly the same notes, give or take a few, so that you can see Chopin in the process of inventing his melody from his accompaniment, the way Michelangelo said he found his sculptures by chipping away the stone that didn’t belong to them. But maybe I am just snow-blind.

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PRE-CONCERT READING

WEEK FIVE PETER HALSTEAD

Dreams In Music My teacher Russell Sherman used to say that you couldn’t understand the past until you knew the future: you couldn’t play Mozart until you realized what kind of harmonies he was resisting: the atonalities of Schönberg. What lurks in the margins of future music, in its peripheral vision, provides the overtones of imagination which cosset, invent, and discipline the composer. This theory is possibly too clever for its own good, but in some ways it seems to me important to know the neighborhood before you venture onto the street. The dreams of Freud, Jung, and Nabokov, mixed with the night music of BartÓk, Strauss, Humperdinck, Schönberg, Mendelssohn, and John Luther Adams, together explicate and implicate the innocence of Chopin’s Nocturnes. Even Chopin’s later dreamy passages, the midsections of the Scherzos, the Sonatas, the Concerti, and the occasional etude, all stem from the material he accumulated over the years in the Nocturnes. John Field invented the form and the name, but Chopin extended the music into the bucolic realm of Virgil’s Eclogues, those dreamy pastoral odes and lullabies to the ancient Roman countryside where virtuosity and ego were dissolved in the moonlight of the languid id. Chopin wasn’t trying to paint the land, but to invoke the “trance state” in which many artists compose, letting the unconscious dictate the flow of words, notes, or brush strokes. The Nocturnes aren’t paintings of night, but conjurations of this dream state, the Inuit sweat-house-like rapture in which art is intuited. Freud and Jung brought night’s jumbled oneiric instincts into the daylight, making them an acceptable part of social discourse and artistic inspiration. 172

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Vladimir Nabokov wrote down his dreams on index cards to use them as material for his novels, and possibly to help break down his tendency towards well-made plots (the index cards have just been published in 2018). Below are some musical examples of a trance state, some inserted into the middle of otherwise harmonically chaotic structures, others freestanding, all composed concurrently to or after Chopin. All the pieces can be accessed on YouTube. The Nocturne in Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842) is an interlude between acts for English horn, depicting the sleeping lovers. It is a moment without momentum, representing absolute stillness in the woods. Note that Mendelssohn was 33, and Chopin 32 at this time. Another gorgeous example is Richard Strauss’ final trio in Der Rosenkavalier, “Hab mir’s gelobt” (1910), occurring during a complex maelstrom of musical and dramatic motifs. After he wrote it, Strauss realized this was the emotional center of the opera, and asked that it be played at his funeral, where all three of the singers broke down at different points singing it. Debussy focused on the moonlit aspects of night, translating Verlaine’s poems “Promenade sentimentale” and “Clair de lune” into the suspended chords of his piece, Clair de lune (1905), a modern nocturne. Here the form has grown beyond a meditative state into an active description, alabaster statues in a moonlit Paris park morphing suggestively into chords, rests, and arpeggios.

Debussy’s Rêverie (1890) has a soporific rhythm halfway between a nocturne and a boat song. Most of Frederico Mompou’s incantatory notes, written between 1920 and 1974, when he was 80, can qualify as nocturnes, hypnotic enchantments with almost no time signatures, cataleptic pauses in between heartbeats, removing their notes from the boundaries of meter. In the way Chopin inserted his quiet sections between more frenetic sonata-allegro forms in all of his pieces, Bartók inserted his pastoral “night music,” based on birdsong and the croaking of frogs, such as the adagio of the Piano Concerto No. 3, or in “The Night’s Music” from Out of Doors in the middle of his more cacophonous clustered structures. Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) of 1899 broke harmony into fractals, like sonic cubism. Society had become fractured by Industrialism, as the night was now disfigured by electric lights. This was a more anxious kind of nocturne, more of an oxymoron. John Luther Adams removes his night music even farther from time and space, wind and light summoning music by accelerometers and anemometers from computer memories, drafting nature as the performer. Pieces like Four Thousand Holes (2011) use xylophones to enhance the bell-like shimmer of the piano’s high chords, simulating the way night winds flicker starlight over the tundra. Before Adams, nocturnal forms had been played by flutes and strings, giving them a notational identity, rather than being summoned up by nature itself, so that the music now became transparent, part of the world, rather than an intrusive interface between invention and performance. Returning from the future to the mediumistic swoon of Chopin’s night music, written between 1827 and 1846 in a variety of locations (Paris, Nohant, Majorca, possibly Marienbad), we find the roots of creativity, of the oneiric lethargy, remarked on by his friends and students, trans-

lated into unconfrontational notation, murmurs, narcoses - the magnetism of sun storms, the susurration of the moon’s pale fire made into palpable forms not for virtuosic display but for personal fulfillment in the drawing room. Chopin wrote the Nocturnes from when he was 17 to three years before his death. (He died at 39.) As Will Crutchfield has pointed out, some of Chopin’s Nocturne melodies were paraphrases from Bellini and Donezetti. Opus 15, No. 1 in F was written after hearing the soprano Giuditta Pasta sing the “homesick aria” in Anna Bolena. This Nocturne also has similarities to Bellini’s “Casta diva” from Norma. Chopin had listened to Rossini, one of the three great bel canto composers, from childhood. He had studied the improvised ornamentation of the singers Maria Malibran, Laure Cinti-Damoreau, and Pauline Viardot, which had been written down and published in versions by Marco Bordogni, Alexis de Garaude, and Giulio Alari by 1825. The Gauraude “vocalises” sound very much like Chopin Nocturnes. Chopin’s “jeu perlé” descants imitate Rossini’s roulades: the main soprano aria from Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra is echoed in Chopin’s B major Nocturne (Op. 9, No. 3). The cadenza at the end copies the recorded improvisations of Adelaide Kemble and Pauline Viardot. So while Chopin’s Nocturnes are grounded in technique, bel canto, and the sonata form, they opened the way for abandoning form in favor of fantasia-like freedoms, providing templates from which closer approximations of nature have been derived. They have been one of the inspirations from which modernism, serialism, minimalism, and the tectonic composer John Luther Adams have woven their own versions of the night. 2018 Summer Season

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CONVERSATION WITH A N TON DR E SSLER

Clarinetist Anton Dressler explores landscapes of sound and geography in his music.

DH: How do you discover new sounds on your instrument?

Devanney Haruta: Can you tell us about your electronic clarinet music?

AD: It’s a mixed process. From one side, I’m improvising

Anton Dressler: It’s a very different output of

sound. I’m using guitar equipment, but I modify and reprogram the sounds for my clarinet needs. Basically, the feeling is of flying, of freedom, even if I am constrained in certain schematics that I cannot exceed. It is a nice principle where you are constrained on your sides; it actually gives you freedom to go forward. It’s 3D thinking; what you do now is going to influence what you do in the future. But this principle, the way the present is influencing the future, is actually a principle for any musician playing any piece. I think what I do is not that different from any musician playing music that they love.

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and finding all the different boundaries. When you discover your boundaries and your limits, that’s where you can push them. It starts as well with exploring the possibilities of technology, and they are limitless in their combination. It’s like discovering new territories. If you find a new land, you start by charting it and seeing where you can go. Then, the concept can be born out of improvisation. I almost never write down a piece exactly as it’s going to be. It might be a structure, might be a theme, might be nothing, might be just an idea. They are never repeated in the exact same way as they were in the performance before.

DH: It’s interesting that you use this landscape analogy, because in some of your YouTube videos, you set your own drone footage to your music. AD: In music nowadays, people often want an image together with the music. The abstract imagination has been put aside. On one hand, I think it’s a little bit disappointing because I would like people to be more abstract. I still think the Brahms Quintet has no need for image; we are able to perceive music as it is and be lost inside its world. But on the other hand, I cannot say that what I play with electronic music is not something that could be accompanied with images. I have these drones, and I like flying them. The footage that comes from them is very nice and needs music. Sometimes putting together things like that are exciting, and they complement each other. This sense of flight is coming

together here. And the particular music that I choose for the drone footage I think is okay for a combined viewing and listening experience.

DH: What is it like to collaborate and play with your wife, pianist Ingrid Fliter? AD: We are married and have been together for quite some time. We started playing together a long time ago, and we find that we are not fighting while rehearsing, which is a very positive start for being able to perform together. Our music views can be different sometimes, but mostly in the same direction. When we perform together, it’s fantastic. We try to do it as much as we can. She’s an amazing musician and pianist, and what else would I want in a musical partner?

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CONVERSATION WITH

INGRID FLITER

Pianist Ingrid Fliter brings to her brilliant piano performance unique perspectives from her international training and from her self-taught work in painting.

Devanney Haruta: Do you think that your broad international training— studying in Argentina, Germany, and Italy—has had an impact on who you are as a pianist? Ingrid Fliter: No doubt. Being in touch with other

cultures, with other people, and going out from your comfort zone always helps you to develop your personality. You discover more about how you react in different situations and how you adapt, as well. When I used to be a student, I enjoyed very much being in relationships with other people

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and putting myself in question. You ask yourself so many questions when you are alone, when you are far away from your comfort zone. At the time, it was easy because I was very young and full of enthusiasm and impulses . . . But looking backwards, it was not easy to leave home and all my family behind. But that’s part of who we are as musicians. You have to embrace the fact that you don’t have roots anywhere. You’re everywhere, those are your roots.

DH: With all the time spent traveling, how do you find time for your painting? IF: It’s hard to say, because in some periods I really

cannot find it at all. Lately, I haven’t painted for two or three months, which is terrible for me because it’s my therapy. The

freedom that I feel when I paint . . . it’s unique. I need it like air! But I try to find time. Sometimes I paint in hotel rooms, or in the planes I paint in my iPad. I’m actually doing an exhibition of my paintings during the Gilmore Festival this coming April and May. I’m sending all of my paintings from Italy to Michigan, so that’s exciting. It’s a big thing for me.

DH: Do you find any intersection between your music and your painting? IF: Discovering the possibility of having another way of

expression took a bit of the pressure away from the music. Also, I’m not reproducing something that someone else did, but I’m doing it myself from scratch. This kind of experimenting and improvisation I don’t do in music,

unfortunately. I didn’t have that training as a musician. Discovering the painting gave me this possibility, this freedom of improvising. It somehow enriched my musical expression, as well, because I try to reproduce in the piano the feeling that I have when I paint.

DH: What is it like to collaborate and play with your husband, clarinetist Anton Dressler? IF: We’ve been together for all our lives, more than 22

years, and we have played since the very beginning together. It’s kind of an extension of your own self after a while! Music is a mirror of who we are deep inside, and through music, you can understand so many things about the other person. You establish another level of communication. It’s very revealing, knowing each other more and more.

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Ingrid Fliter, piano

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Nocturnes No. 8 in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2 No. 9 in B Major, Op. 32, No. 1 No. 3 in B Major, Op. 9, No. 3 No. 6 in G Minor, Op. 15, No. 3 No. 12 in G Major, Op. 37, No. 2 No. 5 in F-sharp Major, Op. 15, No. 2 No. 13 in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1 No. 10 in A-flat Major, Op. 32, No. 2 No. 17 in B Major, Op. 62, No. 1 INTERMISSION No. 15 in F Minor, Op. 55, No. 1 No. 4 in F Major, Op. 15, No. 1 No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1 No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2 No. 16 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, No. 2 No. 14 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 48, No. 2 No. 7 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1 No. 11 in G Minor, Op. 37, No. 1 No. 18 in E Major, Op. 62, No. 2

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849) Nocturnes Chopin’s Nocturnes Revisited As Simon Callow has suggested, by re-ordering Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the story behind them is revealed. Possibly by changing the traditional numbering of Chopin’s Nocturnes, new profiles are unleashed. Chopin saw a different night than we do, in a different light, if you will. His night was filled with carriage wheels, the stench of corpses, the miasma of the Seine’s questionable effluvia, and a sky without interference from any motorized urban presence. His foray into the seamy underground world of transvestites in the Bois de Boulogne, thinly masked by the prettified salons given in wainscoted drawing rooms above Baron Haussmann’s broad avenues, was a highly successful attempt to revamp John Field’s eighteen schmaltzy works, generously called by Liszt “half-formed sighs” and “vague Aeolian harmonies.” Now Chopin’s 21 own fantasies of the night need to be rescued from a performance tradition which barely hears the music because of performance conventions. A vesper or a compline in Gregorian chant was a prayer chanted in the evening or just before midnight, when nocturnes were originally meant to be played. Like tribal masks on the doors of mud huts, such songs were meant to dispel the devil, to exorcise the demons of the day from sleep, the sleep of the righteous when monks spoke to the angels, which restored their faith.

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This summer, we will have the Goldberg Variations, meant by Bach to be played by his friend, the harpsichordist Johann Goldberg, to put Johann’s patron, Count Kaiserling, to sleep. We will have Schubert’s incantatory Notturno, referencing the Italian form from which later versions of the nocturne derive. We will have Mompou’s somnolent music, Ravel’s “Noctuelles,” and Aaron J. Kernis’s music of the spheres: newer versions of Chopin’s night vision. Perhaps we have the need to speak to our angels more than ever. Chopin’s inventive fantasies have no form at all, although many of them have a wilder midsection, the opposite of the slow movement in a sonata. Chopin was disrupting tradition. Of course, his schizophrenic inversions of classical form have now become their own traditions, and need to be themselves disrupted, in order to regain the stillness of a lost world. The Nocturnes have a schizophrenic quality because most of them become bored with their soporific dream state and digress into explosions of waking vitality, into energetic variations on the original quieter theme, before this dream of day subsides again into the lilting night of the initial melody, as if the underlying reality of the Parisian world was not day, but night. Artists are creatures of the night, well portrayed in Puccini’s opera La bohème of 1896 and in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show of 1975. Chopin lived, however, a very disciplined life. He rose at eight, took language lessons at ten, received students until noon, and practiced until two, after which he changed out of his dressing gown, went for walks, and eventually went to dinner. He wrote in 1848:

One has to sit two hours at table with the men, look at them talking and listen to them drink ing. I am bored to death (I am thinking of one thing and they of another, in spite of all their Rudolf Steiner felt that a deep sleep made it possible for courtesy and French remarks at table). Then I humans to touch the angels, to converse with their dead go to the drawing-room, where it takes all my beloveds, to channel the heavens through dreams. Without efforts to be a little animated—because then that energy, the next day would be almost lifeless. We have they usually want to hear me—; then my good all felt the exhaustion of a light sleep. Daniel carries me up to my bedroom (as you know The Music at Tippet Rise

that is usually upstairs here), undresses me, gets me to bed, leaves the light; and I am free to breathe and dream till it is time to begin all over again.

In a letter from Vienna to Jan Matuszyński in 1830:

After dinner black coffee is drunk in the best Kaffeehaus; that is the custom here. . . . Then I pay visits, return home at dusk, curl my hair, change my shoes and go out for the evening; about ten, eleven or sometimes midnight,—never later—I come back, play, weep, read, look, laugh, go to bed, put the light out and always dream about some of you.

So it would seem that Chopin wrote his music during his work day, in between visits from language masters and students. Professional artists don’t need inspiration to compose; they schedule genius like a haircut. Chopin didn’t need the night for his Nocturnes. And yet he was only the third composer to pay lavish attention to the form.

the freedom of the night as seen by many writers, such as Goethe strolling in Naples:

I can’t begin to tell you the glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares to the endless promenade of the Chiaia, and then walked up and down the sea- shore. I was quite overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.

Gothic literature, such as Dracula (1897), makes much of moonlight, as does the poetry of Verlaine, on which Debussy based his Clair de Lune of 1890. Clair de Lune was in turn a new take on Chopin’s Nocturnes, which were written between 1827 and 1846. As John Ruskin pointed out one night in 1844, moonlight over Mont Blanc obscures as much as it reveals, as the snow-covered slopes disappear into each other.

Paris is the city of night; gas lamps made it inviting; there was very little street crime in the 1800s, at least in the better arrondissements. And the countryside around it would be entirely dark. So nocturnes reflected a different world from the one we know, and maybe we can absorb a little of the reflected moonlight of the 19th century from the reflective interpretations of Ingrid Fliter. James Attlee, in his book, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, discusses how human beings in urban environments are “devolving,” losing their ability to relate to the natural world, a circumstance which we in Montana are ideally situated to avoid. Scheduling Chopin’s Night Music is a reminder to us all of a world of dreams which we want to treasure and preserve. It is not just the imaginary angels, Nabokov’s “misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs” who restore us in the night; it is moonlight itself which triggers temporal structures in the cycles of complex organisms on which they base their lives; we all apparently need the structure of night and day to integrate our own biologies into the universe. Attlee describes 2018 Summer Season

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 11:00 AM

The Domo Anton Dressler, clarinet Escher String Quartet

NED ROREM: String Quartet No. 4 Ugly and relentless Infinitely tender Very fast Absolutely strict Wistful Massive Very fast Cold and hot Like the wind Infinitely tender JOHANNES BRAHMS: Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 Allegro Adagio Andantino Con moto

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

NED ROREM (b. 1923) String Quartet No. 4 Ned Rorem is most widely known as an American composer of art songs, and is also a literary figure, having published volumes of diaries documenting his professional musical life, his youthful involvement in midcentury gay culture, and, more recently, his experiences as an aging artist. He is a keen observer of human behavior, a keen analyzer of creative efforts, and his work—both musical and literary—often grows from the intersection of these traits. Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1923 and grew up in Chicago. In the mid-1940s, he studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, enrolled at the Juilliard School, and traveled to Paris in 1949, where he lived intermittently through 1958. In 1976 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. (“If I die in a whorehouse, [my obituary] will still say, Pulitzer Prize winner, Ned Rorem,” he once told a journalist.) Today, at age 94, he lives on Nantucket. The Emerson String Quartet premiered Rorem’s String Quartet No. 4 in 1995 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Its ten movements were based on ten paintings by Pablo Picasso, but only “sort of,” Rorem cautioned in a published 1998 letter to a friend. He explains the “sort of ” in his program note: 184

Composers sometimes seek to conjoin their muse with other arts—with the poetry of song, for instance, or more exceptionally with the visual, by representing through sound their special Pictures at an Exhibition. I too have done so, giving graphic titles (Eagles, Sunday Morning, Pilgrims), complete with literary footnotes, to non-vocal compositions. Since music is the one art without provable meaning, a composer cannot

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expect you to know that his piece is about the sea, or hell, or a summer garden, or even about such generalities as love and weather, much less knives and forks, unless he tells you so in words.

Thus it was with the Fourth String Quartet. The ten sections were (I persuaded myself) inspired by ten pictures of a certain powerful painter, each section titled after a specific canvas. Indeed, until today, the Emerson Quartet programs listed these famous titles complete with my verbal descriptions.

Now I find the device irrelevant, in that no music irrefutably depicts other than itself. Henceforth listeners must make way for their own images. But these paragraphs are unfair to those who enjoy reading as they listen, so I’ll add that the music came rapidly, four of the movements being written in January of 1994, the six others during a fortnight at Yaddo [the artists’ colony] the following July. Most of the ten “pictures” are related themati- cally, and are all related, I pray, theatrically.

The paintings may have served as prompts for Rorem, but he wasn’t trying to make aural translations of the images—rather, he was using music as another way to get at the ideas behind the paintings. In the end, the music comes untethered from its original grounding, but still carries some inarticulable imprint of it. Rorem doesn’t want his audience to be guided by the paintings, or to try to reconstruct correspondences between music and image. While the original program (and CD booklet) for the quartet name the paintings, Rorem later retitled the movements with only the abstract descriptions used in this program. In keeping with the composer’s wishes, we will say no more here about the paintings. As for the music, listen for the ways Rorem contrasts activity with stasis: especially in the movements “Absolutely strict,” with its binding motif that circles without end, and “Cold and Hot,” with its impas-

sioned cello solo met by sterile, bleached chords. From beginning to end, there is great variety in this quartet: beautiful melodies, nervous energy, and a palette of harmonies ranging from lush to astringent.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 In December 1890, the 57-year-old Johannes Brahms decided to retire from composition. He finished his Viola Quintet in G Major and sent it off to his publisher with a note: “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music—because it is certainly time to leave off.” But just months later, on a trip to Meiningen, he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld play in a private recital and was dumbfounded by his artistry. Mühlfeld had originally joined the court of Saxe-Meiningen as a violinist in 1873, but practiced his secondary instrument, the clarinet, until he was accomplished enough to be named principal clarinetist of the court orchestra in 1879. The court conductor, Fritz Steinbach, took a special interest in his playing and arranged the audition for Brahms. Indeed, there must have been something exceptional about Mühlfeld: he inspired Brahms to write four clarinet pieces: the Clarinet Trio in A Minor, the Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, and two Sonatas in F Minor and E-flat Major.

tone, and dynamic control allow it to conceal itself inside the string quartet and then come in and out at will as a soloist. In Brahms’s hands, it is like a chilly breeze that tempers the warmth of the other instruments, while carrying a vanishing recollection of something past. The opening Allegro begins with a brief violin duet from which much of the piece grows. Wavering between major and minor, it builds to a staccato statement, driving the further revealing of a second theme. The concomitance of these two ideas, more poignant together than apart, forms the heart of the opening movement. The Adagio begins with a dreamy melody in the clarinet, tended to by the strings, and then the melody is taken by the violin, gently subverted by the clarinet. In the middle section, the clarinet cries out wildly, before the opening calmness returns. The Andantino is an easygoing pastorale that turns into an unrestrained Presto, quick and airy, evocative of the outdoors. A theme and five variations make up the finale, marked Con moto. In the fifth variation and coda, the opening of the first movement returns, first as a subtle presence, and then affirmatively—wistfully concluding the quintet with a memory of how it began.

Brahms wrote the Quintet in the summer of 1891, as he vacationed in Bad Ischl, a spa town near the Alps. Mühlfeld premiered the piece with the Joachim Quartet in Berlin on December 12, 1891, and it was instantly recognized as a deeply moving work. The audience applauded until the musicians repeated the Adagio as an encore. It may be a cliché to describe the piece as “autumnal,” as so many critics and commentators have, but it may also be the best word to describe how it feels. Of all the woodwinds, the clarinet blends most easily with strings: its wide range, liquid 2018 Summer Season

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Ingrid Fliter, piano Anton Dressler, clarinet Escher String Quartet

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11 Allegro con brio Adagio Tema con variazioni CARL MARIA VON WEBER: Grand Duo Concertant for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 48 Allegro con fuoco Andante con moto Rondo: Allegro INTERMISSION FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden” Allegro Andante con moto Scherzo: Allegro – Trio Presto – Prestissimo

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11 Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio in B-flat Major for clarinet, cello, and piano dates to 1798, when he was a young freelancer, still making his name in Vienna. The piece is in a light, cheerful vein and shows a composer eager to please: woodwind chamber music was something of a trend in Vienna at the time, and the trio’s last movement is a set of variations on a popular tune. Beethoven borrowed the melody from L’amor marinaro, a comic opera by the composer Joseph Weigl (1766–1846). The song, “Pria ch’io l’impegno” (Before I go to work, I must have something to eat), was a runaway hit, becoming a Viennese “Gassenhauer,” or alley song, whistled and sung by workers and buskers in the streets. Beethoven’s Op. 11, therefore, is sometimes known as the “Gassenhauertrio.” In addition to the popular-song finale, the trio includes a chipper Allegro and a beautiful, simple slow movement. Beethoven published the piece with an alternative violin part to increase sales, and it is sometimes performed with bassoon instead of cello. The trio also figures in a story from 1800, two years after its premiere, when it was performed by Beethoven at a private concert attended by another composer named Daniel Steibelt. Some of Beethoven’s friends thought Steibelt, who was known for his gaudy showmanship, was a professional threat to Beethoven. At a concert the following week, Steibelt played his own variations on the “Gassenhauer” theme, an ill-considered attempt at one-upmanship. This provoked Beethoven (after some prodding from the audience) to borrow the cello part to a piece by Steibelt, turn it upside down, and then improvise spectacularly on the ridiculously inverted theme. Steibelt, it is said, walked out, and refused to ever be in the same room with Beethoven again. 188

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CARL MARIA VON WEBER (1786–1826) Grand Duo Concertant for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 48 Carl Maria von Weber lived a troubled life that might be mistaken for a pastiche of composer-biography clichés. His ambitious father wanted him to be a child prodigy like Mozart; as a young man, he was arrested and fired from a court position (for a complicated embezzlement and draft-dodging scheme to resolve a debt); he was often ill and died of tuberculosis at 39. But he was also an earnest soul who swore to redeem himself after his arrest, and became an important artist: his opera Die Freischütz is the work that launched German Romantic opera, and his clarinet pieces especially are gems of the repertoire. By the time Weber completed the Grand Duo Concertant in 1816, he had already composed two clarinet concertos, a clarinet concertino, and a clarinet quintet. A cluster of solo works for a single instrument usually suggests an inspiring performer for which they were written: in this case, the culprit was Heinrich Baermann, the court clarinetist in Munich, whom Weber met in 1811. Weber wrote the second and third movements of the Grand Duo first, probably in 1815, though some sources suggest they might date back to 1812. Weber premiered those movements with Baermann in 1815 before adding the first movement the following year. The Grand Duo is an unusual piece that mixes virtuosic writing for both clarinet and piano into a concerto-like form of chamber-music size. Stylistically, it is neither a serious sonata nor exactly a light showpiece: while the opening Allegro con fuoco has a fleet-footed buoyancy, the plaintive Andante con moto adds weight, and the concluding Rondo has a sophisticated tension.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden”

Give me your hand, you fair and tender form! I am a friend and do not come to punish. Be of good cheer! I am not fierce, You shall sleep softly in my arms!

These words are from the poem “Der Tod und das Mädchen” by Matthias Claudius, which became Franz Schubert’s song “Death and the Maiden,” which became the basis for the second movement of his String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor. The unspeakable mystery lies in whether the claim is true: is death a gentle friend, or is it a terrible seduction? The D-minor Quartet, through all four movements, sits on the question and equivocates. Schubert gives even the grimmest passages a certain tenderness, beautiful and unsettling. In 1824, Schubert was quite ill, almost certainly in one of the later stages of syphilis. After a period of hospitalization, a new regimen of porridge, tea, and curative baths seemed to offer some improvement, and he soon wrote two quartets in quick succession between January and March: the Quartet No. 13 in A Minor, “Rosamunde,” and Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden.” On the last day of March, he wrote a letter to his friend Josef Kupelwieser:

I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair continually makes things worse and worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain at best, whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating variety) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? “My peace is

gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it nevermore” [quote from “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Schubert’s song on an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust]. I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday’s grief.

The music of the D-minor quartet, however, wallows less than the words of Schubert’s letter: it is a more sophisticated consideration of what he knew was to come. And though death was indeed not so far away, the piece was certainly not a last statement. Schubert continued to work ambitiously for another four years, completing a fifteenth quartet, two piano trios, and the “Great” C-major Symphony, among many other pieces, before death finally took him in 1828, at age 31. The first movement of the Quartet starts with a jolt, the string quartet equivalent of the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Schubert’s opening triplet figure generates much of the movement, providing both thematic material and a nervous pulse. The middle section starts with another jolt, in this case a surprising C-major chord, before continuing into frenetic development with sweeter interludes. A loose recapitulation leads to a chilling coda. The second movement, Andante con moto, takes its theme from the piano part of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” Schubert’s song from 1817. It was not unusual for Schubert to revisit music from earlier songs in later instrumental music, and he did not necessarily want listeners to make the connection back to the original text. Rather, it was a way to write with material he had already imbued with a certain feeling, lifting it from the literary realm into the splendid ambiguities of abstract music. (Which is not to say he made any secret of the source, which his friends would have immediately recognized.) Schubert leads the “Death and the Maiden” theme through five variations, the first reintroducing the triplet figure from the previous movement, the second giving the melody to the cello, the third uniting the quartet in fortissimo gestures, the fourth whimsically in G major, and 2018 Summer Season

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the fifth restoring the melodic clarity of the original theme. A sedate coda ends the movement in G major. The sharp Scherzo leads to a fanciful Trio section, filled with chirping first violin, before the Scherzo repeats. The concluding Presto follows the rhythms of the Italian tarantella, a feverish dance once thought to cure a certain kind of spider bite. The incessant pattern keeps disintegrating before coalescing again in unisons. In the Prestissimo coda, the quartet scurries toward its decisive conclusion. “Death and the Maiden” was first rehearsed in Vienna on January 29, 1826, by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, the same ensemble that premiered many of Beethoven’s middle and late quartets. They gave the piece a private premiere on February 1, and though Schubert’s reputation continued to grow even as his health declined, the quartet was not published until 1831, almost three years after his death.

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CONVERSATION WITH

JENNY CHEN

After finishing her doctorate degree at Eastman in May, Jenny is thrilled to return to Tippet Rise for her third summer. Her exuberance and buoyant enthusiasm bring a fresh energy to her performance.

Devanney Haruta: Your approach to classical music is uniquely creative, inventive, and exciting. Where do you find the inspiration for your new ideas? Jenny Chen: I wouldn’t consider myself a classical

pianist. I’m a musician of all kinds of music. Instead of just standard repertoire, I think of what can be the best way to give audiences a new, fresh feeling. This has been my third

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year doing my doctorate degree here at Eastman, and I’m very glad of my choice. It’s not just about fundamentals— you have improvisation, you have the jazz department . . . I am also studying African music this semester. I think learning African music really helps me to be more creative, more experimental. I learned a lot of musical instruments, such as mbira, djembe, percussive instruments. And then to put that element into piano, it’s one area that I really want to look at.

DH: In your concerts, you always engage with the audience by talking and telling stories. Why is this important to your performance? JC: I think nowadays playing music is not enough. Being

a great pianist is not enough. I think it’s always better to explain the piece more, so that this connection between art and audience is closer. In popular music, what I have observed is there’s so much interaction between the audience and the artist. For example, I’m always interested to watch Lady Gaga. She wears these high heels, and she always says, “Hey, how are you guys feeling today?” with the microphone pointing to the audience. It’s not as stiff as a classical concert, where you sit there, and even your breathing can be heard by the person sitting next to you. Why not bring the atmosphere from popular concerts, and then bring young generations into classical music? . . . It’s not only about touching people’s hearts but bringing everyone together into unity.

DH: What motivates you to keep classical music fresh? JC: Right now, especially, I’m overwhelmed with my coursework and so many things going on. But the ultimate goal is, what am I doing? I always have to have some contribution to society. I feel that is really what makes me happy, the meaning of what I do, what my life is. I’m always working towards this and trying to create more stories! And that makes me think about new ideas. I’m not a good dancer at all, and I would never dance in public, it’s very awkward. But I want to bring something fresh to the stage, whether it’s successful or even if I don’t have a good reaction. I always risk myself and go out of my comfort zone. Instead of just being very proper, why not bring the action?

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 17, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28 No. 13 in F-sharp Major: Lento No. 1 in C Major: Agitato No. 14 in E-flat Minor: Allegro No. 2 in A Minor: Lento No. 15 in D-flat Major: Sostenuto No. 3 in G Major: Vivace No. 16 in B-flat Minor: Presto con fuoco No. 4 in E Minor: Largo No. 17 in A-flat Major: Allegretto No. 5 in D Major: Molto allegro No. 18 in F Minor: Molto allegro No. 6 in B Minor: Lento assai No. 19 in E-flat Major: Vivace No. 7 in A Major: Andantino No. 20 in C Minor: Largo No. 8 in F-sharp Minor: Molto agitato No. 21 in B-flat Major: Cantabile No. 9 in E Major: Largo No. 22 in G Minor: Molto agitato No. 10 in C-sharp Minor: Molto allegro No. 23 in F Major: Moderato No. 11 in B Major: Vivace No. 24 in D Minor: Allegro appassionato No. 12 in G-sharp Minor: Presto INTERMISSION FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Three Mazurkas, Op. 59 No. 36 in A Minor: Moderato No. 37 in A-flat Major: Allegretto No. 38 in F-sharp Minor: Vivace FRITZ KREISLER (trans. RACHMANINOFF): Liebesfreud JOHANNES BRAHMS: Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor SERGE PROKOFIEV: Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 Allegro inquieto Andante caloroso Precipitato

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ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849) Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28 There are 24 Preludes in Frédéric Chopin’s Op. 28: one in each key. They proceed by the circle of fifths, alternating major with relative minor. The order matches common harmonic practice, suggesting that Chopin intended them as a cycle, rather than an anthology of selections. In some ways, the Preludes look back to earlier music: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier also covers all 24 keys and is an obvious touchstone (the Borromeo String Quartet plays selections on Saturday evening’s program). A forgotten set of 50 Preludes by Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) has also been identified as a model for Chopin. Chopin’s Preludes, however, were the first to liberate the prelude from its name, which suggests a strictly introductory piece. Chopin uses the title instead to signify a short movement, usually based on a single idea, without complex development. To call them miniatures would be a bit too diminutive, to call them sketches would also seem misplaced. Perhaps it was less a matter of re-contextualizing the traditional prelude, and more a matter of applying an old title to a new form. The Preludes are not all built on a common pattern, however. Some are especially fragmentary: the quick flash of No. 1, the gothic skulking of No. 2, the vanishing waltz of No. 7, the mournful tolling of No. 20 (later used as the subject of variations by Busoni and Rachmaninoff). Others are unusually extensive: the raucous No. 12, the twisty No. 19, the conclusive No. 24. The rest are of average length, but still distinct in character: No. 3 and No. 5 are etudes; No. 4 and No. 6 are elegies; No. 14, a passing hailstorm; No. 15, a nocturne that lasts through the night, through to the next morning’s awakening. 196

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Chopin completed the Preludes during the winter of 1838 and 1839, as he was staying in Majorca with his lover, the writer George Sand, and her two children. If it sounds like an idyllic getaway, it was not: the Mediterranean island was shrouded in dreary winter weather, and Chopin fell ill and was diagnosed with consumption. The locals feared contagion, and so he was forced to leave Palma to convalesce in an old Carthusian monastery. The Pleyel firm shipped him an upright piano to play there, which he used to finish the Preludes. In her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, Sand offers her impression of the pieces:

Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under the window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. . . . Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart.

She also recounts a story about finding Chopin at work on the Prelude No. 2 in A Minor, the most haunting of the set. With a novelist’s touch, she writes:

There is one prelude that came to him through an evening of dismal rain—it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. . . . We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” . . . He confessed to me that while

waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I interpret this in terms of imitative sounds.

Chopin wrote all his mature mazurkas in exile, reinterpreting a Polish folkdance for performance in Parisian salons and publishing them in Western Europe. The three Op. 59 Mazurkas are relatively late works, written in 1845, fifteen years after he last stepped foot on Polish soil (to which he would never return).

This is the Romantic image of Chopin, fashionably sick with tuberculosis, working in a narrow space between love and death. Of course, it is just that—an image—and one that undervalues many other aspects of his work and craftsmanship. Still, it is enticing to enjoy the Preludes in this guise, as even today they remain laden with mystery and hints of transgression.

The Mazurka in A Minor begins with a melody alone, then a halting accompaniment gradually insinuates itself. The Mazurka in A-flat Major begins with a firm pulse and a simple tune, but grows more fanciful as the music unfolds. Chopin gave the manuscript for this mazurka to Felix Mendelssohn, who gifted it to his wife, Cécile. Mendelssohn had written to Chopin to ask, quite charmingly: “Would you out of friendship write a few bars of music, sign your name at the bottom to show you wrote them for my wife, and send them to me? . . . Her favorite works are those you have written.”

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Three Mazurkas, Op. 59

Finally, the Mazurka in F-sharp Minor is an example of a fast mazurka, whirling in its outer sections, but slowing and hesitating in the middle, like an ecstatic dancer distracted by contemplative thoughts.

A mazurka is a Polish dance named for the Mazovia region: in a triple meter, it moves the accent to the second or third beat, like a waltz with a hitch in the middle. This characteristic rhythm can be brought to nearly any tempo, resulting in a taxonomy of traditional mazurkas from the exhausting oberek to the slinky kujawiak. On November 1, 1830, the young Chopin left Warsaw for a concert tour to Vienna and was abroad during the November Uprising against the Russian Empire. Months later, Chopin traveled to Stuttgart, where he was shocked to learn that the Polish rebellion had failed. He then made his way to Paris, joining thousands of Polish exiles, including many writers, artists, and musicians.

FRITZ KREISLER (1875–1962) trans. SERGE RACHMANINOFF (1873–1943) Liebesfreud This showpiece was originally for violin and piano, one of three Old Viennese Dances by the violinist Fritz Kreisler. The first two—Liebesleid (Love’s Sorrow) and Liebesfreud (Love’s Joy)— were loosely transcribed for solo piano by Serge Rachmaninoff in the 1920s. For Liebesfreud, Rachmaninoff added his own introduction, variations, and coda, resulting in a piece a bit heftier than Kreisler’s original. 2018 Summer Season

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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor Johannes Brahms’s 21 Hungarian Dances are among his most popular piano works, and were also transcribed for orchestra by Brahms and others. He first heard Hungarian music as a young man in Hamburg when Hungarian refugees passed through the port city on their way to America, and their off-kilter rhythms and flamboyant melodies made a great impression on him. The Hungarian Dance No. 1 was originally written for piano four hands, and was arranged and published in a piano solo version in 1872. On December 2, 1889, an assistant to Thomas Edison visited Brahms and recorded him playing an excerpt from the dance onto a wax cylinder. The primitive recording is barely audible, but is the only record of Brahms playing his own music.

SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 Serge Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata is the middle entry of his three so-called war sonatas. The earliest ideas for the sonata date to 1939 and Prokofiev completed the piece in 1942. It was written at the height of the Second World War, when its outcome was far from certain, but it was premiered in Moscow by Sviatoslav Richter on January 18, 1943, just as the Russian Army came within reach of victory at the Battle of Stalingrad. It is a ferocious piece: one of Prokofiev’s harshest and most dissonant, untempered by whimsy or subversive wit. It is also one of his most visceral and straightforward in meaning: the piece is exactly what it sounds like. 198

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Richter had just four days to learn and memorize the sonata, which he quickly did while staying in the Moscow flat of Henrich Neuhaus, another pianist. Neuhaus’s wife was sick at home with a fever as Richter practiced. “The piano was in her bedroom,” he recalled. “The poor woman had to submit to the onslaughts of the final movement for three or more hours at an end.” Imagine the sounds of the raucous sonata shaking a Moscow apartment building in midwinter of 1943. Richter then went to play the sonata for Prokofiev, who had just returned to Moscow from Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, where he had been evacuated to safety. Their meeting began with a mundane frustration:

There was a piano in his room, but it turned out that the pedal was not working, so Prokofiev said, “all right, let’s fix it.” We crawled under the piano and were straightening a piece of metal when we banged our heads together so hard that we both saw stars.

Richter remembered this as the most personable moment he ever shared with Prokofiev, a man he found remote and intimidating. Their interactions were otherwise strictly businesslike, limited to the music on the page. The sonata was hailed as a triumph at its premiere in Moscow’s Hall of the House of Trade Unions, with Prokofiev in the audience. It won him his first of six Stalin Prizes. The sonata unfolds in three movements. The first, Allegro inquieto (restless), starts with jagged lines, mostly in just two voices, punctuated by crunching, martial chords. Eventually a lyrical theme intercedes, but is subdued by the first idea. The lyrical theme returns once more, but is again subdued before the movement ends. The second, Andante caloroso (warmly), offers a reassuring alto melody, shadowed warmly in the bass. The middle section grows with active lines and incessant, bell-like

chordsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;punishing in volume, ominous in rhythm, even as the harmonies are sweet. The opening melody returns as an ending refrain. The finale, Precipitato (hurried), is brief, with jazzy syncopations popping out of frantic textures. The movement builds to cacophony, before a final run arrives at pure and decisive B-flat. Richter offered his own impression of the work:

We are brutally plunged into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its

balance. Chaos and uncertainty reign. We see murderous forces ahead. But this does not mean that what we lived by before thereby ceases to exist. We continue to feel and love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth. Together with our fellow men and women, we raise a voice in protest and share the common grief. We sweep everything before us, borne along by the will of victory. In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life-force.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 11:00 AM The Domo Borromeo String Quartet

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” Allegro con brio Allegretto ma non troppo – Allegro assai vivace ma serioso Larghetto espressivo

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 95, “Serioso” Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 95, is the last of his middle-period quartets, but it is also a premonition of his late quartets, a cliffhanger to those he would begin after a 14-year hiatus from the genre. Though it is grouped with the others written between 1805 and 1810 (including the three Op. 59 “Razumovsky” quartets and the Op. 74 “Harp”), it is stylistically closer to his Op. 127 and beyond: distilled ideas, stark juxtapositions, fugal writing, and unusual pacing and form. It is also the only quartet Beethoven blessed with a descriptive title of his own: “Serioso.” The name derives from the third movement’s tempo marking, Allegro assai vivace ma serioso, but applies sweepingly to the entire piece. Beethoven probably meant to affirm the work’s daring, or even to reassure doubtful musicians that, yes, he was “serious,” and everything about the piece was entirely intentional. Even to modern ears, the “Serioso” Quartet is disorienting. The musicologist Joseph Kerman describes it like this:

The F-minor Quartet is not a pretty piece, but it is terribly strong—and perhaps rather terrible... The piece stands aloof, preoccupied with its radical private war on every fibre of rhetoric and feeling that Beethoven knew or could invent. Everything falls victim, leaving a residue of extreme concentration, in dangerously high tension.

And all this is contained in the shortest quartet Beethoven ever wrote, clocking in at 20 minutes or a little less. Hearing it by itself, as we do on this concert, offers an even more focused experience: it may reverberate in your mind for some time, asking to be dwelt upon, deciphered, and discussed. 202

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Beethoven began the quartet in the summer of 1810 and completed it the following October. Two important things had recently happened in his life: first, in 1809, a group of noblemen granted him a 4,000 florin annual salary, with no conditions on the nature or amount of music he had to compose. Then, with this new financial security, he considered starting a family, writing to a friend: “Now you can help me look for a wife. Indeed you might find some beautiful girl . . . and one who would perhaps now and then grant a sigh to my harmonies.” In 1910, he proposed to the 19-year-old Therese Malfatti, a cousin of his doctor. She declined to marry him. Perhaps the rejection led Beethoven to care less about eliciting “sighs” through harmony, freeing him to embrace a new ugliness in the “Serioso” Quartet. It’s a facile connection, but might not be entirely baseless. In any case, he held onto the quartet for nearly four years before the Schupanzigh Quartet premiered it in Vienna in May 1814. After another two years, he allowed it to be published as his Op. 95. Upon its release, he wrote to Sir George Smart, an English musician: “the quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.” This is the only commentary we have from Beethoven himself, and it clearly marks the “Serioso” as something separate from the rest of his work up to that point. The first movement opens with an outburst, followed by a pause, followed by a reaction, then another pause, then a question—then a sweeter statement and an elongation of the outburst. As the music continues, it fills with frenzied crescendos, sudden retreats, and surprising returns. The end is quiet and inconclusive. The second movement gives the four instruments their independence—they play alone and seem to wander in and out of the picture on their own accord. In the beginning, the cello offers a hesitant bassline, and later the four instruments agree to collaborate on a fugue, imitating one another in counterpoint. The music unveils itself gradually, but never tells its secret. There is a hard cut to the third movement, which begins without pause. Another outburst, a reaction, and then the instruments join in lockstep.

A second, gentler theme offers some reprieve, but no escape from the oppressive rigidity of this movement. The fourth movement sets a new scene in a broader, more expansive space. Then it picks up a zealous lilt, which finally breaks out into an ecstatic, double-time coda, skittering to a dazzling end. The “Serioso” Quartet sheds the musical conventions of Beethoven’s day, and resists even the dramatic logic we so often look for in music. Instead, it draws you along through ideas that don’t connect in any accountable way, their contradictions working on your imagination.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 6:30 PM Saturday, August 18, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Borromeo String Quartet

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846 Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 847 Prelude and Fugue No. 3 in C-sharp Major, BWV 848 Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in C-sharp Minor, BWV 849 AARON JAY KERNIS: String Quartet No. 4 (oasis) 2018 Tippet Rise Commission for String Quartet and World Premiere Rising Portal Nightsong Oasis Mysterium INTERMISSION

FELIX MENDELSSOHN: String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 13 Adagio - Allegro vivace Adagio non lento Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto - Allegro di molto Presto - Adagio non lento

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ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) trans. NICHOLAS KITCHEN from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One In January 2015 in Beijing, 300 years and 4,600 miles removed from Johann Sebastian Bach, Nicholas Kitchen set to work transcribing the Well-Tempered Clavier for string quartet. He was on tour with the Borromeo and spending an inordinate amount of time stuck in the gridlock of the Chinese capital. “Every time we moved anywhere in the city to rehearse or play, we spent nearly an hour in traffic,” Kitchen said in an interview with 99.5 WCRB. “Not having to drive myself, I decided to dive into the project that had been waiting so long—arranging Book One for string quartet. And indeed, after a few more traffic jams, I had a good start.” You could say a different kind of traffic jam inspired Bach to write the Well-Tempered Clavier in the first place: the traffic jam of arranging twelve pitches into an octave while preventing them from sideswiping, colliding, or careening off the road. Though musical pitch is based in mathematics, it isn’t a smooth transition from theory to a practical tonal system. Purely tuned intervals, based on simple ratios between two pitches, sound beautiful alone, but often don’t work in combination. Three major thirds, for example, should add up to an octave (in an enharmonic system), but they actually fall short when purely tuned, the last note missing the exit off the freeway. A circle of perfect fifths should eventually come back around to the starting note (hence the circle), but when purely tuned, the last fifth overshoots the octave, skidding off into the outer shoulder of the rotary.

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Musical tuning, therefore, is an engineering problem more than a discovery of natural science. It is especially a challenge for harpsichords, organs, and pianos, which cannot be adjusted for intonation during a performance. The tuning setup of these instruments is called temperament, and all The Music at Tippet Rise

temperaments have advantages and drawbacks. Up until Bach’s time, meantone temperament was the most common. This system slightly compresses the fifths, and sounds good in several—but not all—keys. Well-tempered systems, meanwhile, were new developments of the early 18th century that allowed a keyboard to play pleasingly in all 24 major and minor keys without retuning in-between. (Each key still kept a somewhat distinct color, different from modern equal temperament, which has smoothed out all the differences.) This is all to say that Bach was the first composer to write a single collection of pieces in all 24 keys. The Well-Tempered Clavier was a celebration of this new possibility, a mission of discovery into unknown musical territory, and a demonstration of Bach’s mastery of the freedom of the prelude and the tight construction of the fugue. Unlike many Baroque musicians who wrote treatises, Bach folded his theoretical interests into artistic projects: he demonstrated rather than explained. His primary motivation was never academic, but rather “to make a well-sounding harmony to the honor of God and the permissible delectation of the spirit.” Bach completed Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722, toward the end of his time working for the princely court in Köthen. Some of the preludes were also included in the earlier Klavierbüchlein Bach compiled for his son, Wilhelm Friedemann. Twenty years later, he added Book Two of the Well-Tempered Clavier while working in Leipzig. On today’s concert, we hear the first four preludes and fugues from Book One. Bach begins in C major, the simplest key with no sharps or flats. He builds the Prelude from the undulating harmonies of the key’s most basic chords. The four-voice Fugue is like an awakening, springing to life. The C-minor Prelude and Fugue simmers with nervous anticipation. Its three-voice Fugue instills each part with its own character, like many people talking about the same thing at once. On the keyboard, the key of C-sharp major has a very different color than C major, though it lies only a half-step

away. On string instruments, too, it is has a distinct color: with seven sharps, no open strings are available, and the tone is shrouded. The musical character of the Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Major, however, is energetic, refusing to be subdued by the dampened tone. Finally, the Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor glows with extravagant solemnity. The Prelude dresses a lonesome setting with intricate decorations. Then the tight, five-voice Fugue opens chasms of range between the cello and upper voices and reaches upward toward the divine. The Borromeo String Quartet premiered Kitchen’s transcription of the Well-Tempered Clavier at Carnegie Hall in October 2017 and has recorded it for the Living Archive label.

AARON JAY KERNIS (b. 1960) String Quartet No. 4 (musica universalis) 2018 Tippet Rise Commission for String Quartet and World Premiere Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania in 1960 and has become one of the most frequently performed composers of his generation. He won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the 2002 Grawemeyer Award, and has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Toronto Symphony Orchestra, among many others. He serves on the faculty of Yale School of Music and founded the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute. His String Quartet No. 4 (musica universalis) is a 2018 commission from Tippet Rise and this is its first performance. While still at work on the piece in February 2018, Kernis offered this description:

Ever since I wrote my first quartet in 1990, I’d had a plan to base four quartets around concepts about music suggested by medieval mu-

sic theorists. The first turned out to be called musica celestis (celestial music) and includes a slow movement of that title that I arranged later for string orchestra—it is my most played work. The second quartet is musica instrumentalis (instrumental music, actually mostly related to dance). I’d hoped to write a work around the idea of music of the spheres for the third, but other ideas came to the forefront, so now I’ll be trying to address that daunting concept in the new musica universalis for Tippet Rise. It feels so approprate to be writing for the spaciousness of the land and sky of Montana, and my early winter return trip to Tippet did much to inspire with its vastness and a sky that seems infinite. As I prepare to write this work I will be going back to reading on cosmology, but I’ve decided to try an approach unique to this work: to ask the Borromeo Quartet members to record a sonic enviroment to be played while the quartet performs live, making the work, in effect, for string orchestra and live quartet. I could not see how I could match up my musical ideas without a much broader sense of sonic depth alongside the acoustic quartet. That is the starting place; the journey of the piece will come in good time.

CÉSAR FRANCK (1822–1890) String Quartet in D Major César Franck is the father of modern French music and the link between that tradition and 19th-century German composition. His music echoes Beethoven and anticipates Debussy and Ravel, even though they would later reject certain aspects of his style. Born in Liège to parents of German ancestry, he toured as child prodigy pianist at the urging of his ambitious and eccentric father. He studied at the Paris Conservatory after becoming a French national, a prerequisite for enrollment. 2018 Summer Season

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After his career as a prodigy fell apart, he made his living as a music teacher and church organist. In 1871 he was appointed organ professor at the Paris Conservatory, and his reputation began to grow as he turned his organ class into an unofficial composition seminar, attracting a circle of adoring students. Though Franck composed all his life, his most important works date from his last 20 years. It’s a small catalogue of pieces, usually just one in any given genre: the Symphony in D Minor, the Violin Sonata in A Major, the Piano Quintet in F Minor, the String Quartet in D Major. In 1906, one of Franck’s students, the composer Vincent D’Indy (1851–1931), published a fawning biography of his old teacher. It moves freely between anecdotes, musical analysis, and hagiography: the book clearly shows Franck’s influence on the next generation of French musicians, and also offers rare insight into a composer’s working process, documented by someone who witnessed it. Of the String Quartet in D Major, D’Indy recalled:

In 1888, when we used to see with astonishment his piano littered with the scores of quartets by Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, [Franck] did not get beyond the contemplation of the idea. The first actual sketches date only from the spring of 1889. The first movement, the dominating idea, caused him infinite trouble. Frequently he would start afresh, rubbing out with a nervous hand all that he had believed to be permanent the day before. He build up a good third of the opening section upon a melodic idea, of which he afterwards modified almost the whole elemental structure. He did not hesitate even then to cut out what was already written in clear copy, and to begin again according to a second version, which in its turn failed to satisfy him, and was destroyed and replaced by a third and last scheme.

The effort was evidently worth it, as D’Indy finds the first movement to be “the most wonderful piece of instrumental music which has been constructed since the last of 208

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Beethoven’s quartets.” Franck does indeed recall Beethoven in his confident use of contrasting ideas and handling of fugal passages. But he also establishes a distinctively French quality with ambiguous, floating harmonies and haunting, whispered textures. D’Indy explains: “Its form . . . consists of two musical ideas, each living its own life and possessing its own complete organism, which interpenetrate without becoming merged in each other, thanks to the perfect ordering of their various elements and diversions.” The second movement Scherzo is “a round danced by sylphs in a moonless landscape, as it would have been described during the Romantic period,” D’Indy says, evidently recognizing the end of the Romantic period by 1906. He reports that Franck wrote the Scherzo in ten days, and made barely any revisions, quite unlike the arduous work of the first movement. “The Larghetto is in B major—a favorite key of the composer’s,” D’Indy continues. “It is also a model of purity, grandeur, and melodic sincerity. . . . With what joy [Franck] called to me from the other end of his sitting-room, when I went to see him one day: ‘I have got it at last! It is a beautiful phrase; you must see for yourself!’ Without loss of time he hastened to the piano to make me share in his happiness.” D’Indy’s effusion slackens only slightly for the last movement, which he calls “well worth studying, although it is not so spontaneous in structure.” It reintroduces themes from the previous movements, an example of the inventive, cyclical forms Franck often used in his large works. The Quartet was premiered on April 19, 1890, by the Société Nationale de Musique, an organization founded by Camille Saint-Saëns to champion French music. Franck was elected president of the Société in 1886, and was succeeded by D’Indy upon his death. In the summer of 1890, Franck suffered a head injury when his carriage was hit by a horsedrawn trolley. Though he did not appear seriously hurt, his health quickly declined, and he died of a respiratory infection the following autumn.

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CONVERSATION WITH

D AV I D F I N C K E L & W U H A N For cello-piano duo David Finckel and Wu Han, food and music go hand-in-hand.

Devanney Haruta: When putting together a program, how do you decide which pieces to play? David Finckel: Making programs is kind of like

making dinner. There’s a first course, a second course, a third course, and then dessert sometimes, which is the encore. It’s just like when you make a good meal-you want one course to lead to the other. Which is easy to do in music because classical music is always an evolving art. By the time a composer finished writing one piece, they were already thinking about how they were going to evolve in their next piece. Depending on which ones you put next to each other, the juxtaposition of pieces intensifies their differences or cements their similarities in surprising ways. That’s why we enjoy putting together recital programs, because it’s like cooking a really creative dinner for friends.

DH: In past interviews and articles, you mention that food is an important part of your life. Can you tell us more about this? DF: Wow, that’s such a deep and far-reaching question! I think that eating is a genetic desire that was born into me. I grew up in a house where my father was a professional musician and my mother was an amateur musician and a great cook. As a family, we just lived for food. We would

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be having one meal, and while we were eating that meal, we would be talking about what we would be having for the next meal. When we’re on tour, we’re very lucky; we get to go to many places that have wonderful food, countries that have wonderful cuisines. Eating is the quickest way to immerse yourself in a new culture. Sometimes when I’m not too busy with other things, I feel like I’m killing time between meals.

Wu Han: I say that eating is a religion for David.

No question about it. The first thing he says when he wakes up is, “What’s for dinner?” As a musician, also, the sensation of food and joy is a very visceral experience. The enjoyment of your senses, from listening to watching to tasting, is very, very basic.

DF: But also a much more accessible, complete

satisfaction than music. I’m not a professional chef, but when I make a decent meal for friends and am done and everybody’s happy, I go to bed and think, “Wow, that was great.” But as a professional musician, no matter how well I play a concert, I’m always thinking, “I could have done that a little better,” and “next time I’ll have to change that.” As artists, we torture ourselves to improve and get better all the time—that’s what we’re born to do. But as a food lover, I really just live from one meal to the next, and if I make dinner and some things could have been better, I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it.

WH: There’s always another meal.

Pianist Wu Han gives an overview of each of the programs:

Friday night: The first program features the lyrical,

singing part of the cello, which for a cello recital, you can’t avoid. It is in the range of the human voice, so we want to take the best advantage of that. The Mendelssohn D-Major Sonata has a recitative part [in the slow movement] that sounds like a prayer or an aria. And then the Grieg Sonata is just pure joy and fantastic melodies, and it paints an incredible picture of the nature from the Norse, so it’s very fitting for playing in Tippet Rise. It’s the sound of the mountains and the hills and the weathers.

Saturday afternoon: We always want to have a

sense of discovery in all of our programming, so the Barber Souvenir is six little movements of the hustle and bustle of the New York scene. It’s lots and lots of fun, a dance piece, very Americana. And then you will hear Rhapsody in

Blue! How can you go wrong with Rhapsody in Blue? It’s very appropriate for an outdoor venue, appropriate for what Tippet Rise represents: the inventiveness of the American spirit!

Saturday night: The program “Unfolding” is very much a historical sound for people who might not know much about music. They can really discover the joys, the development of each period from the Baroque of Bach to the Classical of Beethoven. And then Schubert is a composer that bridged the Classical and the Romantic. On the second half, you will launch into the 20th century. You will hear the cello sound completely different than the first half. In the Britten Sonata is the most inventive cello technique. You will hear all kinds of weird sounds that you never imagined cello could make. And then in the Debussy Sonata, you will also hear the difference between French and English. It’s a fascinating way of using the cello-piano repertoire to explore the music history and the development of the cello sound.

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn David Finckel, cello Wu Han, piano

The Singing Cello LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Twelve Variations in G Major on “See the conqu’ring hero comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, WoO 45 FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 58 Allegro assai vivace Allegretto scherzando Adagio Molto Allegro e vivace INTERMISSION FELIX MENDELSSOHN: “Song without Words” for Cello and Piano, Op. 109 EDVARD GRIEG: Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Minor, Op. 36 Allegro agitato Andante molto tranquillo Allegro

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ABOUT THE PROGRAMPETER HALSTEAD We are delighted to welcome Wu Han and David Finckel on their inaugural visit to Tippet Rise. They have built up an enormous archive of amazing music at Lincoln Center over the decades, playing all of it themselves memorably, while running innumerable music festivals, while running the first website (since 1997) in digital history to bring music into the hands of the musicians themselves, artistled.com, where they have recorded nineteen albums. As joint artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they have raised the guilty secret of classical music (that chamber music is gorgeous and fun) to the stature it had lacked for centuries, where chamber musicians have attained the rank of soloists. Chamber music demands teamwork and listening, not just playing. It needs to breathe the way people do, and it grows in meaning the more human it gets. Wu Han and David Finckel appear each season in more than one hundred concerts at the most prestigious venues across the United States, Mexico, Canada, the Far East, and Europe to unanimous critical acclaim. They have also overseen the establishment and design of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s acclaimed CMS Studio and CMS Live labels, as well as the Society’s recording partnership with Deutsche Grammophon; and the much lauded Music@Menlo LIVE label. For many years the cellist of the legendary Emerson Quartet, David Finckel leads a multifaceted career as concert performer, recording artist, educator, arts administrator, and cultural entrepreneur. For many years, he and Wu Han taught alongside the late Isaac Stern at Carnegie Hall. Today he serves as professor of cello at the Juilliard School, artist-in-residence at Stony Brook University, and director of the LG Chamber Music School in Korea. He also leads the Finckel-Wu Han Chamber Music Studio at 214

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the Aspen Music Festival and the new Chamber Music Encounters program at CMS. He was the first American pupil of the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. He has won nine Grammy Awards. This year he and Wu Han are recipients of Musical America’s Musicians of the Year Award, one of the highest honors granted by the music industry. Wu Han’s international tours have led her to England, Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Japan, Korea, and her native Taiwan, and she appears regularly at the Aspen Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, the Sanibel Music Festival, the Caramoor Music Festival, the Savannah Music Festival, and Music@Menlo. Her teachers include Raymond Hanson, Rudolf Serkin, Herbert Stessin, Lilian Kallir, and Menahem Pressler, all of them legendary chamber pianists and soloists, placing her in a direct line from Harold Bauer, Arnold Schoenberg, and Jose Iturbi. This year she celebrates a ground-breaking Live from Lincoln Center broadcast; reunites with violinist Daniel Hope and violist Paul Neubauer for a series of nine concerts in Europe; makes long-awaited recital debuts in St. Petersburg and Hong Kong; returns to Seoul, South Korea for the sixth annual Chamber Music Today festival; leads a special patrons’ tour to St. Petersburg; continues the important work of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and launches Music@Menlo’s fifteenth anniversary season.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Twelve Variations in G Major on “See the conqu’ring hero comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, WoO 45 Beethoven wrote some 70 variations. While in Berlin in 1796, he wrote these variations and his two Op. 5 Cello Sonatas. At that point, Handel wasn’t as omnipresent as he

later became, so this was a chance for Beethoven to popularize Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus, written 50 years earlier, as well as to demonstrate his own facility at the piano. Beethoven performed this for the King of Prussia, and the cellist used the king’s cello. The “conquering hero” is the king himself. Beethoven wrote this and the two cello sonatas for the concert. The Handel oratorio celebrates the victory of the Jewish people over the Greek Seleucus, who was given Babylonia by Alexander the Great, which included Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and what is now Kuwait, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Some 200 years before Christ, Judas Maccabeus led the Jewish people to victory over Seleucus and into a partnership with Rome, which later, by the time of Christ, disintegrated. The Seleucids were overthrown by Pompey a hundred years before Christ. Handel’s idea of Jewish music is very different than Ernest Bloch’s, and this aria of victory sounds more like early Beethoven than anything Handelian or Jewish. Beethoven was 26, and already a great composer. The next year he wrote the great E-flat Piano Sonata, Op. 7, which also features repeated notes like the Maccabeus variations. Handel was a devout Lutheran. He had been hired from Germany to bring greatness to England. But while understood by royalty, who brought him over, he was vilified by the British public. He wrote the oratorios Solomon, Esther, Joseph and his Brethren, Saul, and Judas Maccabeus, as well as Israel in Egypt, possibly to wrench his work away from jealous Puritan criticism of his “profane” theatricality. When Handel wrote Israel in Egypt in 1739, its opening was desolate and running with blood and grief. When he rewrote it in 1756, it was filled with cymbals and acceptance. He wrote Israel in Egypt when his opera company had gone bankrupt, he had suffered a stroke and lived in great pain, and was the victim of plots to sabotage his career. Esther had been received with outrage by the Anglican church; the Bishop of London prohibited it from being performed. Still, Handel went ahead anyway, safe in the patronage of the royal family, who attended.

Israel in Egypt had its posters torn down and its perform mances disrupted by the devout. A minister described it as “the will of Satan.” Handel said, “I have read my Bible very well, and I will choose for myself.” But two years later he wrote Messiah, to a text by Charles Jennens (the author of Israel in Egypt), who had written it to fly in the face of the deists, who believed that Christ was not divine. Faced with debtors’ prison, Handel composed it in 24 days. The title was considered blasphemous and had to be dropped from the marquee. Jonathan Swift, the dean of St. Patrick’s, refused to allow it to be held in a church, and it opened in the Fishamble Street Music Hall. But four years later Handel was playing to empty houses and again facing bankruptcy. Blind and sick, he was restored to fortune that same year (1745) by Judas Maccabeus, because the British mistook it for an ode to England’s supremacy. In choosing to write variations on Judas 50 years later, Beethoven was choosing an unknown work with a deep history of triumph and tragedy. It was a subtle act of rebellion, of asserting his own genius despite his status at the time. He was playing for kings, but his great pieces were ahead of him. His Judas was transfixed with the joy of what must have been Handel’s recognition of his own greatness in the face of everything.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809—1847) Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 5 Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who wrote his most famous piece, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he was 17. Like Thomas Mann, he was raised in a cultured and wealthy family. Mann became a writer when his family lost their money, but Mendelssohn remained wealthy his entire life. The family’s private orchestra debuted his early symphonies. His uncle bought an estate so the family could adopt its Christian name (this is where the name Bartholdy comes from). 2018 Summer Season

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Mendelssohn studied with a pupil of Clementi’s, and his sister Fanny, an equally talented pianist, studied with the patron of the great C.P.E. Bach. Both siblings based their music on Bach’s, as a writer who grew up in the era of Nabokov would find it hard to escape that particular orbit of genius. When Mendelssohn was 12 he met Goethe, who said that, compared to Mendelssohn, Mozart’s music at the same age was “the prattle of a child.” At 15 Mendelssohn met the great piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who admitted that he had nothing to teach him. When he was 34, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory, where he hired Robert Schumann, Moscheles, and the violinist Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s great friend. Leipzig was the town where Schumann, still sane, had founded a magazine where he changed musical taste throughout Europe. Schumann gave Mendelssohn the manuscript of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, and Mendelssohn afterward single-handedly revived interest in Schubert in Germany. Leipzig was also where Bach had been the organist at the Thomaskirche, and thus it was a Bach chorale which Mendelssohn put into the third movement of this cello sonata, quoting as well from Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Mendelssohn was a perfect and fun composer, whose Songs Without Words and concertos remain among the great works in the repertoire. His enormous felicity, his ability to take on the guise of Mozart, Schubert, or Clementi, is apparent in this chameleonic work, which he wrote when he was 33. Without Mendelssohn, there would be no Saint-Saëns. Listen for the brilliant arpeggios and scales throughout and, of course, the infectious melodies. Unlike Beethoven, Mendelssohn was too conservative to rebel. Leipzig was a very conservative town, and the patrons and critics wanted exactly what they got: a perfect Romantic, without the excesses of Liszt or the unpleasant innovations of Wagner. 216

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Mendelssohn was at home with a Scherzo (witness the famous one from the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and the second movement is a perfect example of a classically perfect version. Whenever I hear Mendelssohn, I always think of those half-oval radios with the wicker speaker covers which sat on everyone’s table in the German, Italian, and Jewish houses in our neighborhood. As Protestants (although my mother was an Irish Catholic), we were too righteous for radios. I avenged myself on the congregation of our Catholic church, where I played Liszt on the organ. The fourth movement of this Sonata has a lot in common with Mendelssohn’s piano concertos: fun, singable themes, ribboned with virtuoso technique which weaves around the cello, which itself always anchors the flamboyant piano with a good-natured insistence on tone and melody, giving the pianist a hard time fitting in all the notes around the cello’s jaunty insistence on well-tempered fun. There was much interest at the time in reviving Germany’s greatness from the Middle Ages, which kept the aristocracy busy practicing medieval social rules. Klemens von Metternich kept the 40 city-states powerful, to prevent nationalism from destroying the Hapsburg empire, which happened anyway in a series of revolutions leading up to World War I. Mendelssohn spent many of his adult years as a conductor, traveling Europe and popularizing his peers. He died at 38.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN Song Without Words for Cello and Piano, Op. 109 The Songs Without Words for piano are small, lyrical, Romantic vignettes, melodies from a forgotten era, easy to play, impossible to forget, still one of the great monuments of the repertoire, despite their modesty. There are some 55 songs in eight volumes, written on and off between 1829 and 1845. Mendelssohn wrote an arrangement of them for four

hands; they have since been transcribed by others for violin, flute, and even orchestra. This piece was the last of the songs. It is an entirely separate piece: Mendelssohn’s farewell to the genre. It was the last piece he wrote for piano and cello. He died two years after he wrote it. It was discovered and published posthumously. As the last, it is hard not to see it as an innocent, always innocent, summary of the songs, even of his musical philosophy: decorum, structure, giving the audience exactly what it wants, with some subtle virtuosic passages to add some modest pianistic glory. Mendelssohn kept his genius in a box, and never seemed to regret it. He was a banker’s grandson, and he never forgot it. This is probably how Mendelssohn heard all his songs: sung not by the voice, but by the cello. After a lyrical beginning, a darker agitated midsection is the Rorschach blot inversion of the cheerful opening theme. Although the happy theme falls, the less cheerful one rises, which is the opposite of what you might expect. The piece alternates between its cheerful initial key and its relative minor, a more gradual way of varying its depth. Rachmaninoff would simply go from a major to a minor in two notes, a typically Tatar modulation (now beloved in science fiction film scores), but Mendelssohn, writing some 60 years earlier, attaches a slower fuse to his drama. At the end, the cello dips in its darkest register for a second before emerging into the sunlight to finish the initial theme, so both sections are combined into one sweeping phrase, the way Hitchcock was renowned for his continuous pans, so everything in a scene was shot without stopping or cutting. This last phrase is a “Hitchcock pan.” Everything is illuminated in an innocent light from abeautiful life in a beautiful era. Unlike the neurosis of Beethoven, this is the sheer lucidity of Mozart, without the darkness of Bach. It is interesting that the most autochthonous musicians, sprung from their own mold, were Mendelssohn and Chopin, who claimed no other influence than Bach.

Bach himself was, however, a creature of the age before him, who rethought what already existed into more complex structures. Bach lived on the shoulders of giants, but Mendelssohn and Chopin found Bach sufficient unto the day.

EDVARD GRIEG (1843-1907) Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Minor, Op. 36 It is interesting that Grieg borrows from himself both a wedding and a funeral march; maybe this sonata should be called One Wedding and a Funeral. As Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Piano and Cello is really a concerto where both piano and cello take turns being virtuoso soloists and virtuoso orchestras, Grieg’s monumental cello sonata could be his second piano concerto. It is the only piece he wrote for piano and cello. After my teacher, Russell Sherman, learned the Grieg piano concerto, he told me, “You know, it’s surprisingly good.” Everyone expects Grieg’s music to be Song of Norway, or The Sound of Music set in Lofoten, but, as Grieg said, “music which matters, however national it may be, is lifted high above the purely national level.” To quote Grieg from Wu Han’s and David Finckel’s own ArtistLed site: “Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on ethereal heights. My aim in my music is exactly what Ibsen says about his plays: ‘I want to build homes for the people in which they can be happy and contented.’” So that’s a triple quote: me quoting ArtistLed, quoting Grieg, quoting Ibsen. Let us now forget Grieg and delve into the fascinating life of Ibsen. (Digression is, after all, the soul of Romantic music.) But let me instead quote Ingmar Bergman, who said he wanted to be one of the craftsmen working his whole life building a gargoyle on the cathedral. Bergman’s modesty, 2018 Summer Season

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reminiscent of Grieg’s, is also what Dylan Thomas said:

Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.

Here is David Finckel’s very personal explication of the sonata you are about to hear, from the notes to his and Wu Han’s wonderful album, Grieg, Schumann, Chopin Sonatas: Allegro agitato: How quickly the first of many storms in this movement comes up! This is in no way the relatively calm La mer of Debussy, but crashing waves and howling winds of the north. The cello begins with the main theme quietly over the piano’s nervous accompaniment, but the piano, like the storm itself, soon rises to fever pitch and all but drowns the cello in crashing chords and octaves. All this is over in a few moments, closed by a brief and even more violent coda, and we are left in stunned silence. Then, magically, three peaceful C-major chords announce the arrival of fair weather (or the second subject, if you must). As the cello sings the over rich harmonies so typical of Grieg, one can feel the warmth of the sun or a glowing fire. An expressive dialogue between the instruments carries the theme through various keys before C major re-emerges, this time excitedly, and we are wept by cascades of arpeggios into the development. One senses trouble on hearing the second subject in a minor key and sure enough, big storm number two soon hits in F-sharp minor. Frantically, the cello and piano exchange lightning 218

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bolts in ever-quicker succession. This storm never totally dies, and reappears in full force again as the recapitulation. In the coda as expected, we are again drenched and blown about, hopefully lashed to the mast. Andante molto tranquillo: The gorgeous slow movement opens with one of the most poignantly beautiful chord progressions imaginable, as if the piano itself is dropping down from heaven. By the cello entrance we are seated on rich earth. I find particularly inspiring Grieg’s seemingly endless resource of harmonies which color the single, oft-repeated notes of the melody. Contentedness gives way to brooding, however, and tempers rise, giving way to succeeding violent outbursts, culminating in a passage where the pianist is called

upon to practically bang the piano to pieces. As if knocked unconscious, we hear, in pianississimo, a trace of the first theme, and gradually warmth begins to flow in our veins as the first theme returns, this time with an even more beautiful harmonization. After a climax worthy of Rachmaninoff, a delicate and sentimental coda concludes the movement. Allegro molto e marcato: Grieg’s finale is in folk-style, with a jumping, dancing theme. However, there is also a bit of mystery here in the ghostly little solo cello line which bridges from the slow movement. It’s like something that you know will come back to haunt you later, and it does! After an exuberant virtuosic episode, two big cantabile phrases in the piano and cello bring

in the second theme, which is actually made from the first subject slowed to half tempo. But how different it sounds! Would you have recognized it? Of course we’re still in Norway, so we must have some more storms and sailing before we get to a very curious passage which, although obviously out of Grieg’s imagination, seems like an explosion brewing in a nuclear reactor. When the blast finally comes it goes on and on, and, as if saved by aliens, we are transported out by the reappearance of the opening otherworldly melody, now harmonized. A full recapitulation follows, with a brilliant coda in which the mystery theme makes its final, triumphant, and ultimately dominating appearance.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 11:00 AM The Olivier Music Barn Wu Han, piano Orion Weiss, piano

SAMUEL BARBER: Souvenirs, Op. 28 Waltz Schottishche Pas de deux Two-step Hesitation tango Galop GEORGE GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in Blue

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ABOUT THE PROGRAMPETER HALSTEAD

SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981) Souvenirs, Op. 28

This is one of Samuel Barber’s ballet scores from the 1950s. Barber had been enormously successful with his Adagio for Strings (which was the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, which he arranged for string orchestra in 1936). Even in 2006, the Adagio was the highest-selling classical piece on iTunes. Barber’s Violin Concerto of 1939 became an instant part of the repertoire after its first two performances by Eugene Ormandy (although, scandalously, the teacher of the violinist who commissioned it said the last movement was “like placing a small basket of dainty flowers among tall cactus in a vast prairie,” and talked the violinist out of premiering it and the patron out of paying for it). Barber lived in a modern house in Mount Kisco (the town where I grew up) with Gian Carlo Menotti, later the founder of the Festival of Two Worlds in both Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston, South Carolina. Menotti was well known for his accessible and charming 1951 Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Vistors. Kids have idols when they’re young, and mine were Barber and Menotti (and Bernstein). To quote Thomas May in his excellent notes for the Kennedy Center:

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Souvenirs began as a bit of private musical enter- tainment for piano from 1952—the instrument for which Barber had first tried his hand at composing. That had been when he was a boy of seven; along with his piece young Barber sent his mother a note informing her that he had a “worrying secret,” namely, that he “was meant to be a composer.”

Barber’s biographer Barbara Heyman reports that the composer’s mother used to take her son to the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel for tea on trips to New York—memories he tapped into when he wrote a set of duets for himself and his friend Charles Turner (piano four hands) in the in the Palm Court in “about 1914, epoch of the first tangos,” observed the composer. But such souvenirs were “remembered with affection, not in

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irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.” This version of Souvenirs for piano became a favorite among Barber’s inner circle and was often trotted out at parties. (A two-piano version was also recorded by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, at the time a popular piano duo.) Lincoln Kirstein, the co-founder of New York City Ballet, commissioned Barber to orchestrate the pieces for a ballet. Budget problems and other interruptions delayed the premiere of the new ballet Souvenirs until 1955. In the meantime, one London critic of a performance of the orchestral version declared that Souvenirs was “likely to rival the Adagio for Strings in popularity, even if it is not one of the composer’s finest works, nor truly representative of his style.” Barber’s Souvenirs stylishly surveys the following dance types, in this order: the waltz, schottische, pas de deux, two-step, “hesitation tango” (Barber’s phrase), and galop. Anchoring these different dances in a setting reminiscent of the Palm Court and of a more innocent time in America, the choreographer, Todd Bolender, devised a cheeky and mischievous scenario of pantomime and dance in the silent film era. Bolender and the costume and set designer drew on imagery from early-20th-century fashion magazines to create a story set in a seaside resort hotel just before the start of World War One. Heyman quotes the response from the New York critic Francis Herridge, who described “a thoroughly engaging potpourri of Mack Sennett bathing girls, thin-mustached Lotharios and bloodthirsty vampires.” Along with a parody of “Irene Castle dance styles [the opening waltz],” the ballet unfolded in brief sketches involving a hotel hallway farce [the schottische], three wall flowers at a dance [the pas de deux, from “a corner of the ballroom”], a bedroom seduction [the hesitation tango], and an afternoon on the beach [“the next afternoon,” with its galop finale]. © Thomas May

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937) Rhapsody in Blue It was the jazz-band conductor Paul Whiteman’s idea to bring classical credibility to jazz by asking Gershwin to write a jazz “concerto” for piano and orchestra. This idea also brought jazz popularity to classical music, and solidified Gershwin’s reputation in both arenas, which was almost impossible to do (and still is). Gershwin went on to follow the Rhapsody with crossovers like Concerto in F and An American in Paris (which he wrote after Nadia Boulanger refused to teach him). Born to Russian parents, Moishe and Roza Gershowitz, on Brooklyn’s Snediker Avenue, Gershwin left school at 15 and became a song plugger, whose first published song two years later was “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em.” Three years later he wrote “Swanee.” The Rhapsody was his first major classical work. Gershwin wrote:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

Gershwin wrote the piece originally for two pianos. He called it American Rhapsody, but his brother Ira had just seen Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Arrangement in Grey and Black (also known as “Whistler’s Mother”), and suggested the idea of something blue, to go with the blues. At the first performance, Gershwin improvised the piano part, and only later wrote down what he’d played. So the piece was

composed after the performance. The New York Times critic felt that the cadenzas and the tuttis were too long. (A tutti is when “all” the orchestra plays, without the soloist.) The New York Tribune critic wrote:

How trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are; sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint! ... Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!

The Atlantic Monthly critic wrote: “[The music] runs off into empty passage-work and meaningless repetition.” The opening glissando was meant as a joke. In rehearsal, Whiteman’s clarinet player turned a scale into a glissando, leading up to the high note. In opera, this is called a scoop. Gershwin loved it, and asked that the player, Ross Gorman, do it all the time, only with a bit of a wail. This scale is the clarinet imitating a jazz trombone. Gershwin used street player and New Orleans piano styles, called song-plugger, stride, comic, and novelty. He used rhythms like syncopation, ragtime, blues, and Tin Pan Alley. He would go up to Harlem to watch jazz, and learned many of his left-hand techniques from Luckey Roberts. At age 12 he wrote an unpublished piece called “Ragging the Traumerei,” where he applied Joplin rhythms to Schumann’s otherwise stately piece. Joplin’s rags were traditionally played metronomically, with very rigid rhythms so people could dance to them. Gershwin felt that jazz needed to breathe, to be more flexible rhythmically, so he used rubato, where you slow down for effect. Rubato means “robbed” in Italian, so you rob some time from the piece. Chopin said that when he robbed time here, he paid it back. There was a feeling that a piece had to add up to 100, and any slowing down needed to be counteracted with a commensurate speeding up, so that things came out evenly. Music structure, scales, and tonality are based on equations, but it doesn’t always do for the cart to lead the horse. Fences have to bend to let people through. Three years later, Whiteman’s recording of the Rhapsody had sold a million copies. 2018 Summer Season

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn David Finckel, cello Wu Han, piano Orion Weiss, piano

The Unfolding of Music JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Sonata No. 1 in G Major for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, BWV 1027 Adagio Allegro ma non tanto Andante Allegro moderato LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 4 in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1 Andante – Allegro vivace Adagio – Allegro vivace FRANZ SCHUBERT: Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four Hands, Op. 103, D. 940 Allegro molto moderato – Largo – Allegro Vivace – Allegro molto moderato INTERMISSION CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Petite suite for Piano Four Hands En bateau Cortège Menuet Ballet BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 65 Dialogo: Allegro Scherzo-Pizzicato: Allegretto Elegia: Lento Marcia: Energico Moto perpetuo: Presto 2018 Summer Season

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ABOUT THE PROGRAMPETER HALSTEAD

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) Sonata No. 1 in G Major for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, BWV 1027 Bach adapted his Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Basso Continuo in G Major, BWV 1039, composed around the same time, giving the basso continuo rote figuration a dynamic and innovative identity, turning the harpsichord into an equal partner and not just an accompanist, although here the cello’s lyrical inventiveness initially shocks the piano into collaborative trills and repetitions of the cello theme. A basso continuo is a figured bass, or through-bass, a kind of paint by numbers or a guitar “fake book,” where chord symbols or numbers indicate the proper key, but leave it up to the performer to decide exactly which notes might fulfill the command. There were unspoken rules, however, as to how far you could go, so often the accompaniment would take the path of least resistance, such as single notes or, later, an Alberti bass, most famously used by Mozart in his wellknown Sonata No. 16 in C Major, K. 545. (Glenn Gould said he recorded the Mozart Sonatas so he would never have to think of them again. Every pianist grows up playing each one of them to death; the way Gould tried to make them fresh was to play the slow parts fast, and vice versa.) When both instruments end the first movement in a mutual trill, an agreement has been reached, and the piano suggests the theme for the joyous second movement.

So the history of the piano and cello (or cembalo and viola da gamba) has been a struggle for equality, championed by unique soloists to forge a partnership which we now take for granted, but which has always been dependent on players whose talent has transcended the traditions of their time. The fourth movement is a moto perpetuo where the cello wittily intrudes its syncopated comments where it can amongst the frenzied scales and arpeggios of the piano. The balance has shifted between these instruments over history. A viola da gamba was mightier than a cembalo, and its brief sallies would put the busier cembalo, clavier, or harpsichord in its place. The cellos of Stradivari or Sam Zygmuntowicz (David Finckel has both) are immense, and dominated the weak-spined spinets and virginals, even the French design of the Érards and Pleyels. Broadwoods brought a more robust sound to the equation. Beethoven took delivery of his six-octave Broadwood in 1818, which he kept all his life, and felt the need to write more powerfully for the cello because of the newfound power of the piano. Even so, piano harmonics remained on the thin side. Needless to say, the available instruments affected the way composers wrote and performers played, until the Chickering and the modern Steinway gave Stradivarian strings a worthy partner and made it easier to volley phrases back and forth effortlessly, so the well-matched sparring we hear today (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night; Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday; Burton and Taylor or Olivier and Leigh in Noel Coward’s Private Lives) is 300 years in the making.

Later the cello became an accompanist, and it was Beethoven who, in his third Cello and Piano Sonata, brought the cello back to the point where it initiated melodies rather than just repeated what the piano had invented. 226

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 4 in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1 Beethoven was deaf. As the silence grew inside him, his mind expanded beyond what the world around him heard, or was capable of hearing. What he heard was the future. Music out of time. A world closer to Schoenberg than to Mozart. It was only around a hundred years to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. But Beethoven already knew the Verklärte Nacht of Schoenberg, if you listen closely to his “Hammerklavier” Sonata. (Or to certain versions of it, such as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s, which makes the connections apparent.) This sonata has two movements; both start slowly, followed by a fast section. (This itself is an homage to Handel, but I don’t want to give away its secrets quite yet.) In a way the first movement in its entirety is an introduction to the short Adagio. Beethoven had given up introductions, modulations. If he wanted to go somewhere, he just went there, without preamble, or politeness. He was a man in a hurry. And yet the long sweetness of the beginning Andante takes its time, with trills left over from the Bach Sonata in G we have just heard, and an anticipatory arpeggio leads Beethoven to where he wants to be: a melody sprung from the introduction pushed so insistently by the piano that it combines sforzando octaves repeatedly, at the beginning of a triplet. It is as if Beethoven is writing shorthand: a Schenkerian melody stripped of its decorations and frills to make it palatable. You search for clues in the gentler cello part as to what Beethoven means. The piano is too unforgiving, but the cello part is softly accessible, providing tempting windows into the darker recesses. As with much of Beethoven’s evolving world of blind and blinding insight, many of the clues give no answer. A brief, almost Schubertian Sehnsucht transfixes the beginning of the second movement, before a brief pause leads to the bullying incidental triplets repeated from the end of the first movement, which in the last section become playful.

Those three notes are from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus, which was being performed at the time in the Berlin court of Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, Elector of Brandenburg, and nephew of Frederick the Great. He was not only Beethoven’s patron, but he had also commissioned pieces from Mozart and Boccheriniso so Beethoven was aware that this was a great moment in musical history. Its double-dotted skipping rhythms are an homage to the French overture that begins Handel’s oratorio. Suddenly the placement of Beethoven’s Maccabeus Variations at the beginning of the weekend makes sense. As Beethoven makes an entire sonata out of the first few notes that come to his mind, so Handel would similarly convey immense tragedy with a few notes. Beethoven modeled his enormous structures on this facility which Handel had to compress history into shorthand, to remove the extraneous notes. Judas was always interpreted by the British as an homage to their martial prowess in the French Revolutionary Wars, and Beethoven here borrows that sense of glory to commend the Rhine Campaign, the War of the First Coalition, and the Partition of Poland, in which Friedrich Wilhelm, with 189,000 infantry and 48,000 cavalry at his command, had revealed himself to be a better cellist than military strategist. So the king needed to be seen as Handel’s conquering hero in his own highly cultured court, if nowhere else. Courts gossip, and Beethoven must have known of the low esteem in which Frederick the Great held his nephew. Napoleon was to capture Berlin in a decade. This Judas triplet lies at the heart of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4, which is a final Judas variation disguised as a sonata, played in that extraordinary week of a Handel oratorio and multiple Beethoven cello sonatas premiered by the king’s own teacher, the great cellist Jean-Pierre Duport. Being a fine cellist and a great lover of Handel’s Judas, the king would appreciate the Judas pun Beethoven was making. 2018 Summer Season

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A merry dance ensues, and the strangeness of the Handelian clues scattered throughout the early parts of the Sonata becomes apparent as they are transfigured by hope. Beethoven had been living in Vienna, where the great tradition was to leave them laughing—Schubert’s long, mournful sonatas fade away in transparent, luminous dances. Beethoven often ends his pieces with apocalyptic fury, vast fugues, Mahlerian transfigurations, but almost never with Schubertian dances. Here, having left Vienna behind for a five-month concert tour, he may feel safe to act Viennese. The threats, the clouds, the suspense, the sheer stormy opacity of the rest of the Sonata is now revealed as needless worry, and the interplay between the instruments is revealed as a form of hide and seek, of tag, a child’s game played by adults with themes from Handel as props. You can almost hear the king’s “aha” as he must have realized at last what the clues meant, and could celebrate with Beethoven and Handel the greatness of empire which was coded into the oratorio and Beethoven’s multiple homages to it.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four Hands, Op. 103, D. 940 Schubert wrote this Fantasia the last year of his life, the same year he wrote his last, great B-flat Sonata, D. 960, as he was dying of syphilis. Like Proust, who rewrote as he was dying his passages on death in his great novel In Search of Lost Time, Schubert was summing up his feelings about existence as they became not just theories, but matters of literal life and death. What fantasia has four movements? Most fantasies are one-movement rhapsodies, maybe with defined sections, but not entire movements. This is a clue that this piece is in fact 228

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a symphony in disguise, reduced to its Schenkerian simplicities and played as if by two children on the piano. But this is not a child’s piece, and its seemingly simple melodies disguise enormous depths, rhythmic complexities, and eschatological revelations. Schenker was a German musicologist who believed that Beethoven could be reduced to a skeleton of important motifs, so that his message could be separated from the extraneous filigree with which he surrounded his truths, which he may have felt were too frightening just to blurt out. Yeats said the same thing about his poetry:

A COAT I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.

At a certain stage in life, we realize that we’ve been trying to be polite about what we mean to say, and it’s time to dispense with politesse and just come out with it. Yeats was obsessed with mythological justifications for himself and for Ireland, with systems of poetry, and he realized at last that systems are like inner tennis: they distract us with large ideas so we can just hit the ball. At the end, we have to let the curtain drop away, forget the Wizard, and just be the old man of Oz. It is a great miracle how Schubert starts with the most innocent of melodies, and builds it into a great cathedral. The water gets deep very fast. The maelstrom on the second page is very different from the nursery rhyme of the first page.

Between January and April 1828, the year of his death, Schubert wrote this last Fantasy that seems to answer his first composition which bears the same title. But this time we are in the presence of a kind of testament. It is a farewell to numerous characters and to all the things Schubert loved. Schubert died at 31. He began this piece in January of 1828, finished it in March, performed it in May, wrote the Schwanengesang in May and the B-flat Sonata in September, and died in November. He wrote it for Karoline Esterházy, with whom he had first fallen in love when she was eleven. (Shades of Schumann.) As she grew up, Karoline began to notice his awkward silences. She asked him if he would dedicate a piece to her. “What would be the use?” he said. “All that I do is dedicated to you.” But he dedicated this to her, and no doubt played it with her frequently. So in a way it is a very complex love song, which begins and ends with a theme of unrequited passion (plus an extremely brief and muted Viennese coda: there is no dancing tonight).

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) Petite suite for Piano Four Hands For those who want to know about the creative background of this gorgeous music, read on. But the greatest pleasure lies in simply listening to its rapturous melodies, which transcend their provenance. This is one of the most endearing and enduring of all piano duets. It is Monet in music. En bateau: Both parts, for the treble and bass pianists, are evenly matched. As the melodies sway between the pianists, the “accompaniment” remains musically compelling, so the entire range of the piano is consistently taken up with an immense palette of lush harmonies, like a garden overgrown with vines and spring blossoms.

Both En bateau and Cortège are poems from Paul Verlaine’s second book of poems, Fêtes galantes (1869). Verlaine was the prototype of the French poet of the late 1800s. A complete failure, a social and sexual outcast, he was abhorred by decent society, and none of his books sold. But at a certain point he became immensely celebrated for everything that had ruined him. No one wanted to know him; he died, at age 52, in poverty, in the home of a courtesan. But 3,000 people attended his funeral. Verlaine’s poems are closely rhymed (Il pleure dans mon coeur . . .) and notorious for putting sound before sense, so that their music often eludes an English translation. Their inner music lends itself to outer melody (although such literal equivalents are hard to translate effectively into sounds). Debussy wrote to the composer Ernest Chausson about the difficulty of translating non-essential ornamentation into music:

One would gain more, it seems to me . . . by finding the perfect design for an idea and only going as far as necessary with ornamentation. . . . Look at the scarcity of symbol concealed in some of Mallarmé’s last sonnets, where nevertheless the artful skill is taken to its outer limits, and look at Bach, where everything works fantastically toward highlighting the main idea, where the lightness of the inner parts never absorbs the principal theme. . .

Debussy in fact wanted to escape the rigid structures of the past, such as sonata form, regular rhythms, and harmonies based on outmoded conventions, such as the circle of fifths. As with late Beethoven, if Debussy wanted to go from A to G, he ignored the steps in between and just went there directly. Rather than having well-defined keys that modulate gradually to other well-defined keys, Debussy blurred everything together, as people’s motives are never apparent, as the sounds of cities aren’t in one key at a time.

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And why should melodies be slaves to those standard chord modulations—“those magic changes,” to quote Grease? Melodies should go their own way, not chained to the chords beneath them. So symbolist poetry, which had the same goal of breaking the rules and using language not for its sense, but for its sound, was ideally suited to Debussy’s own sense of disrupting classic modes. But rather than using dehumanized mathematical formulae to set new rules, as happened later in Germany, Debussy and the symbolist poets still maintained a strong attachment to traditional melodies uniting the chaos beneath. En bateau has the kind of melody a popular French song would kill for. It’s more like an aria by Delibes, Massenet, or Bizet. This is more of a cradle than a boat, while suggesting at the same time the soothing rock of a barque on a great sea. But the poem by Verlaine is about a bunch of disreputable artists traveling by boat to the island of love. The boat is an afterthought, like a milk bottle in Vermeer or the glass of milk in Notorious. Those who seek love by unorthodox means risk their soul in order to gain it.

I do not seek, I find. It is a risk, a holy adventure. The uncertainty of such ventures can only be taken on by those who feel safe in insecurity, who are led in uncertainty, in guidelessness, who let them selves be drawn by the target and do not define the target themselves.

—Pablo Picasso

On the other hand, as Archibald MacLeish wrote in his poem, “Rape of the Swan”: 230

To love love and not love’s meaning Hardens the heart in monstrous ways. No one is ours who has this leaning. Those whose loyalty is love’s betray us.

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BATEAU L’étoile du berger tremblote The planet Venus gleams Dans l’eau plus noire et le pilote In the dark water and our hero Cherche un briquet dans sa culotte. Looks for his lighter in his jeans. C’est l’instant, Messieurs, ou jamais, It’s time, gentlemen, D’être audacieux, et je mets To be bold, and from now on I throw Mes deux mains partout désormais ! Discretion to the winds! Le chevalier Atys, qui grate The noble Atys plays a chorus Sa guitare, à Chloris l’ingrate And shoots a quick look Lance une œillade scélérate. At the lowlife Chloris. L’abbé confesse bas Eglé, The priest pardons bad Aglé, Et ce vicomte déréglé And then the crazy beast Des champs donne à son cœur la clé. Leads him to his bed. Cependant la lune se lève But moonbeams swallow my head: Et l’esquif en sa course brève Through the brief night merrily we row File gaîment sur l’eau qui rêve. Our boat along a sea that dreams.

—English translation by Peter Halstead

IDYLL Setting out in the moonlight For Cythère, or any island at all, As Venus brightens the night, Atys lusts for a highly musical Nymph, Sangarite, who loves of course Someone else; the knight Has a goddess for a wife, But he himself could care less.

Eglé is in love with his boss, Theseus, who suggests holding Him captive at the office As his sage advice. Thus merrily we row Along through deadly seas That seem to us a paradise.

—Peter Halstead

The poem “En bateau” is based on a painting in the Louvre by Watteau, L’embarquement pour Cythère (Cythère being the island of Aphrodite). Such conflicted islands exist everywhere, in writers’ colonies, in the cloakrooms of museums, in supposed utopias. Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance was about such a colony, where the protagonist was expelled for falling in love (or so he claimed). Verlaine felt, as did Proust, that love was finally about captivity and power, not affection. For Verlaine, a dream, a mirage, was an escape, an exodus, a refuge from pain. His lifelong struggle was with the gap between the gritty reality which he had experienced and what he felt was the illusion of an artificial paradise which awaits us. The poetic circle he frequented in his youth was called the Parnassians. A fête galante was a metaphor for death, love being a danse macabre leading to a fatal destination, similar to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.

Verlaine, using their somber cachet for his own credibility, while turning it to his own uses. Robert Frost’s benign poems about trees, flowers, and meadows weren’t respected until critics decided that he was secretly writing about death. Death is the key to immortality. Verlaine was the ideal poet to translate into music, as Verlaine himself in 1873 had published Romances sans paroles (Songs without Words), inspired by Mendelssohn’s miniature musical pieces. Cortège: This gorgeous march was inspired by another Verlaine poem about an aristocrat who travels with a pet monkey and a dwarf, both of whom desire her. However,

She coyly ascends the stair, To the chibbering appeals Of her familiar animals Immune, or maybe unaware.

The nonchalance of the music echoes the charming insouciance of Madame. Verlaine may be subtly critical of his ménage, but Debussy is totally taken up with the elegance of its surreal parade.

As Gretchen Schultz states (in La Petite musique de Verlaine: Romances sans paroles, 1982, “Lyric Itineraries”), “Verlaine abandoned the search for meaning in words and gave himself free rein to explore the most musical aspects of poetry, sound and rhythm.”

Menuet: People criticize the Petite suite for being Debussy before he became Debussy, and possibly imitative of other French composers, such as Massenet’s Manon (1884) or in this piece, Rameau. The Spanish influence of Bizet’s Carmen (1875) is evident in the muted lilting flamenco seguidilla rhythm, mixed in with the more rigid Bach template of the minuet. But the fact is that never has a minuet been so unique, brilliant, humorous, coy, or beguiling.

Debussy was attracted to Verlaine because of the music of his poetry; Debussy’s own idyllic music turns its dark inspiration upside down, a theme which Harold Bloom describes in A Map of Misreading, where literature (and thus society) advances through misreadings of each preceding age. Debussy used only the titles of the poems, not their sense, for his own happier myths, but he was aware (who in France wasn’t?) of the darkness of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and

Ballet: The finale is a syncopated grand march where the two pianists split the cakewalk rhythm. The midsection becomes a waltz, before the Creole two-step returns. Debussy later used this syncopation in the “Serenade for the Doll” in his Children’s Corner Suite of 1908, contradicting the critics who would say it is derivative. The New Orleans strut was later introduced (in 1910) to the Champs-Élysées by the American clown Edward Lavine. Debussy used it in his 2018 Summer Season

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Prelude No. 12, “Minstrels,” and, of course, in Prelude No. 6, “Général Lavine, eccentric.” But Debussy had used the rhythm here in 1889, also disproving claims that Debussy was copying anyone. Minstrel songs and pantomimes were popular in Paris at the time. Picasso was painting masks from Papua New Guinea, Gauguin was painting Tahiti, France was colonizing Africa, and music derived from foreign places “gave safe access to native cultures that were seen as primitive, forbidden, and therefore infinitely enticing,” according to Catherine Kautsky in Debussy’s Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913–1976) Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 65 This was the first of five works Britten wrote for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, with whom David Finckel studied. The sonata was tailored to Rostropovich’s particular strengths. The first performance of this piece played by the composer and Rostropovich took place at Britten’s festival at Snape Maltings, whose roof angles and floating acoustics are incidentally incorporated into the Olivier Music Barn. The Olivier barn is smaller and thus more powerful, but you can hear a similar lucidity to the music at its premiere. Like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Eliot: “In my end is my beginning”: the first few notes present the theme on which the entire sonata is based. This is a conversation between friends: a pianist and a cellist, Britten and Slava. It is also a test of perseverance, maybe hinting at the longevity of an ideal friendship which, although neither artist knew it, was to last for the rest of their lives and result in many collaborations. 232

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The second movement references the Balinese gamelan tradition found in Debussy and Satie, later to become prevalent in the music of Philip Glass, John Cage, Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Edgard Varèse, Steve Reich, Lou Harrison, and Pierre Boulez. Gamelan orchestras use the untempered scale which comes from the natural harmonies found in bells and gongs, unlike the Western “well-tempered” scale which attempts to organize the discordances and microtones of natural metallic or wooden frequencies into a more pleasing, if artificial, system. The Scherzo-Pizzicato is entirely plucked, rather than bowed. The fifth movement is based on the notes DSCH (for Dmitri Shostakovich), which in musical notation becomes D, E-flat, C, and B. Britten had met Rostropovich for the first time when Slava played Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Slava’s fame allowed him to travel away from Stalin’s Russia, and also to champion Shostakovich, which was one of the alliances that saved the composer’s life. Mozart used this anagram in his String Quartet No. 19, Britten used it several other times, and Shostakovich himself used it in at least ten pieces. The finale uses saltando, or bouncing bowing. The resultant momentum can seem like the bow is magically playing itself. This is a virtuoso romp, ending in the final C of redemption and reincarnation, as C is the key of childhood, the first key we learn.

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CONVERSATION WITH

C A L I D O R E QUA R T E T

Founded in the heart of Los Angeles and currently based in New York, the Calidore String Quartet comes out west to make their Montana debut this summer at Tippet Rise. Cellist Estelle Choi represents the quartet in this interview, and tells us about the quartet’s group dynamic, origins, and history.

DH: Can you identify what it is about you four that is integral to the cohesion of the ensemble?

Devanney Haruta: How did the quartet start?

We all strive for excellence. We’re never satisfied, we always want something to be improved. There has to be this passion for bringing the music alive. I think when four people agree on this concept, you can go very far. The other thing is that we all get along really well. It’s not to say we don’t ever argue, but I think we also have a great sense of humor. We’re able to laugh it off, and we don’t get hung up on things. We’re able to let go of issues and come back to them later with a cooler head. As a string quartet, we travel all the time together, and we’re around each other for sometimes 12 hours a day. The ease of being able to let things go, and even to reconsider and try new ideas has been really important for our physical and mental health.

Estelle Choi: The Colburn School [in Los Angeles]

is very much at the root of our foundation. We all went to school there. They were incredibly supportive in the early years, making sure that we had the teaching and the mentorship that we needed. Right off the bat, we started doing competitions. We ended up doing quite well, and for us, that seemed like a sign, that maybe the universe was telling us something. So, very early on we all took our blood oaths and said we’re going to give one hundred percent to playing string quartets. From that point on, it’s been pretty much complete devotion to the quartet.

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EC: I think a lot of it has to do with combined work ethic.

DH: As an established quartet, it’s not often that you perform with other musicians. What is it like to switch gears and play in the context of a larger ensemble? EC: It’s really important and healthy for us to work with

other people because it gives us a chance to open up our horizons and to take in different perspectives. As a quartet that has been together for about seven years, we get used to the rhythm of how we work together. It’s good to reinvigorate the energy of the group by collaborating with other musicians.

DH: Over the course of the seven years that you’ve been playing together, how has the ensemble changed? EC: When we first started out, we were doing really well.

But one thing we struggled with was that we weren’t being considered as a professional string quartet. I think people saw that we were still students, and they would say, “are you guys going to stay together?” And all along we were thinking, “of course, this is what we all put our eggs in the basket for.” Over the years, working professionally and shedding that student image has also changed our outlook on ourselves. Sometimes when you’re a student, it’s easy to rely on that label and say, “Somebody will fix this for us.” I think having made that giant leap of being self-sufficient also changed the audience perspective of us. They realize that we are in it for the long run. Being able to come into that professional limelight has been a really great change for us.

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CONVERSATION WITH

TA R A HELEN O'CONNOR A N D DA N I E L P H I L L I P S

Husband-and-wife violinist Daniel Phillips and flutist Tara Helen O’Connor are active chamber musicians who play in a wide variety of venues all around the world, from international festivals to their own living room.

Devanney Haruta: What do each of you enjoy about playing in chamber ensembles? Daniel Phillips: Chamber music is the perfect

balance between solo music and a large ensemble. Chamber music almost never has a conductor, so that means it’s played entirely in a committee way. Often in a group there’s someone who’s assigned to start the piece, but afterwards, whoever has the lead melody gets to lead. There’s nobody outside telling us what to do. One of the great challenges is to pick up on what everyone else is doing and

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make a unified way of playing. We talk about things in rehearsal and work things out. It’s an exciting, dynamic thing. Not dissimilar to what jazzers do when they get together, except we don’t improvise the notes, we just improvise the interpretation. Or work it out quickly, in any case.

Tara Helen O’Connor: Absolutely. I love the challenges in chamber music. Sometimes it’s just one on a part, so you’re really responsible for your voice. You have direct control of your artistic input and output. What you do can very much affect what your colleague does. That kind of spontaneous interplay is absolutely amazing to be a part of. It stimulates your imagination and your heart. It makes you express yourself in different ways, and that always changes. We can play the same piece with different people, and the experience of the piece changes. It’s always new.

DH: What is the relationship between your music and the environments in which you play? DP: I’ve played above the Arctic Circle in Norway; in Japan at a chamber music festival; in Portland, Oregon; in New England . . . Anyway, it’s always inspiring to see nature around you. It reminds you how the music fits into the grand scheme of the universe. Having said that, I’m not sure if I see a beautiful mountain, I’ll play a phrase differently just because I see the mountain. But definitely, playing great music in awesome spaces with nature around does make it seem like we’re participating in nature itself, when we create great music in those environments.

nature, you can’t help but be inspired by the landscape and the beauty and serenity of it. I think that music is inherent in nature and that they go really well together. I think that everything has a pulse and a hum and a beat and a rhythm and a tune, everywhere. And to have it in its most natural element is very profound.

DP: This is one of the great perks of being a musician—we get the opportunity to go to a place like this. It’s fun for us to do all these things, and in addition, play music that we love to play anyway. THO: With people that we love. What other job gives you that opportunity?

THO: What you said is so beautiful, I feel the same way. I’m very inspired by what’s around me. When you look at

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CONVERSATION WITH

X AV IER FOL E Y

Xavier Foley is an accomplished classical bassist, performing in solo and chamber concerts, and also a talented composer of inventive works that draw inspiration from any and all styles of music.

Devanney Haruta: How did you start playing the bass? Xavier Foley: I was 11 at the time, and I didn’t

really have any deep desire to play, I just liked the size of the instrument. I didn’t even think I was going to pursue it professionally, I just thought I was going to pick it up and put it back and that would be the end of that. And maybe I’d go to college for something like economics or business. But I went to college for something I wasn’t expecting. It was quite surprising.

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DH: Why did you decide to pursue bass performance professionally? XF: The fact that I spent so much time on it and not much

time with anything else . . . I really had no choice but to take it up professionally! I spent probably more time than I should have on the instrument, and it wouldn’t have made sense not to pursue it in college and then as a career.

DH: In the chamber pieces that you’ll play at Tippet Rise, how does your bass part contribute to the ensemble? XF: The bass plays the continuo. It’s meant to provide the foundation and the rhythm for all the other higher pitched

instruments. That’s pretty much the function for the double bass in pieces by Mozart and Bach. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, and a very important part. Without it, things just wouldn’t sound right.

DH: In addition to performing, you also compose. How did you get interested in writing music? XF: There isn’t much [solo] repertoire for the double bass.

The only way to play different pieces is to make those pieces; otherwise, there’s nothing to play. When I started, I didn’t have a teacher. I just wanted to write down what I heard. Typically, if I can make sense of what I hear, then the audience sees what I see. If it sounds good to me, it sounds good to them. I listen with very non-biased ears. If I hear

something and it makes sense, I’ll put it down on paper. It’s that simple, really.

DH: How do you experiment and discover new sounds with your instrument? XF: If I hear a sound, I have to find a solution, and most of

the time I do find a solution. Sometimes it takes weeks, but I keep trying and experimenting. [These sounds] are not the sort of sounds that I’ve been trained to do in college or was taught by teachers in high school. I don’t discriminate the sounds that I hear. If I hear it and it makes sense in my work, I’ll put it in. This is all about providing a storyline for the audience that’s engaging, easy to understand, highly accessible, and something different than all the other pieces have to offer.

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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 Aria Variation 16 Ouverture Variation 1 Variation 17 Variation 2a Variation 18 Canone all Sesta Variation 3 Canone all’Unisono Variation 19 Variation 4  Variation 20 Variation 5  Variation 21 Canone alla Settima Variation 6 Canone alla Seconda Variation 22 Alla breva Variation 7 Al tempo di Giga Variation 23 Variation 8 Variation 24 Canone all’Ottava Variation 9 Canone alla Terza Variation 25 Adagio Variation 10 Fughetta Variation 26 Variation 11 Variation 27 Canone alla Nona Variation 12 Canone alla Quarta Variation 28 Variation 13 Variation 29 Variation 14 Variation 30 Quodlibet Variation 15 Canone alla Quinta: Andante Aria da capo INTERMISSION JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (trans. BUSONI): Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750): Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 This is the ultimate achievement of music; it is where modern music began. To play this immense work is also the greatest achievement of virtuosity, mastering its hundreds of labyrinths, its thousands of touches and tempos, twisting so many strands into one rope. It is one thing to invent an equation; it is another thing to make it fun. Is Bach just the triumph of rote memorization, or is free will possible in the midst of all these crisscrossing patterns? Concerts can be so demanding and terrifying that many pianists don’t remember if they even played, let alone what or how they played. Rote memory sneaks in under the frozen hypothalamus of the brain. My teacher Russell Sherman always insisted that this was why you had to think as you played, that, even in the throes of the deepest surges of memory (needed for a piece this complex), flexibility and choice were necessary to let the piece breathe, expand, and contract the way the audience’s comprehension does during a concert. This is one reason the consummate Bach pianist Glenn Gould hated concerts: audience expectation interfered with the choices he wanted to make on his own. Many notes had been written before Bach’s great masterpieces, but no composer before had managed to unearth such a universe of meaning and beauty from intense explorations of structure. Notes are the Platonic shadows in our cave, the avatars, the surrogates, the keys which unlock a galaxy of coincidence, correspondence, harmony, and revelation, which provide a wormhole into parallel dimensions of the soul. 242

Music, the daughter of number and sound, on an equal basis with the fundamental laws of

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the human mind and of nature, is naturally the preferred way to express the universe in its fundamental abstraction. Modern science brings us to a more primeval knowledge of music, and by expanding the imagination of the musician it moves him towards unknown horizons.

— Iannis Xenakis

There are only nineteen copies of the original text of the Goldbergs, of which one is a printer’s proof, with corrections made by Bach. Very little printed matter stands between civilization and the loss of our greatest achievements. When William Shakespeare died in 1616, only half of his plays had ever been printed, as scripts for actors. Another 18 plays are known today only because they were printed in the first collected edition of his plays, the 1623 First Folio. When Vivaldi died, the 450 manuscripts found in his house went through eight owners; a complete edition was published only in 1947. One of his works wasn’t discovered until 2005. Bach himself was mostly lost to society until his reputation was revived by Mendelssohn in 1829 and then again by Pablo Casals, who was the first to record all six of Bach’s Cello Suites in 1939 (they had formerly been thought only for study, not performance). Casals changed the way Bach was heard with his lilting versions of the Brandenburg Concertos at the Prades Festival in 1950 and again at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1965, with Rudolf Serkin playing the stunning piano cadenza in the Fifth Concerto. The score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos was sold for the equivalent of 24 dollars after the death of its owner, King Frederick William I of Prussia, in 1734, and lost until 1849. The Goldbergs were intended for a two-manual harpsichord, like the “William Hyman 1980” owned by Tippet Rise. The way you play the Goldbergs makes an almost Buddhist statement about your stage in life. When Glenn Gould made his first recording, it was of the Goldbergs, fast and brash.

When he made his last recording, it was also the Goldbergs, slow and meditative, listening to every note. It is a great mistake to assume that because you know every note of a piece, your audience will have spent the years with the piece that you have. You have to allow people time to absorb the beauty of the notes, the cleverness of the ornamentation. Ornaments in music are called trills, turns, ascending and descending appoggiaturas, mordents, inverted mordents, grace notes, cadences, and so on. They are particular to a piece, to an era, and to a performer. Rosalyn Tureck, Ruth Laredo, Glenn Gould, Dinu Lipatti, Angela Hewitt, Konstantin Lifschitz, and Sviatoslav Richter on piano, or Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, William Christie, and Wanda Landowska on harpsichord, each one favors different timings, different notes where an ornament should begin or end. Each of us has a favorite. As Russell Sherman used to say, you need the right edition to play a piece as the composer intended. Errors creep into texts over the years, and only the urtext editions, the purest and most scholarly versions, are acceptable at the highest levels of performance, in the great conservatories. Try to hear how Bach takes a simple melody, the song or aria which begins the Goldberg Variations, and then explores it in 30 different ways. By the end, he has deconstructed the original melody into varieties of spiritual and emotional experiences. Here is a very brief guide for each variation, not including the original aria: Variation 1: Rapid scales; an elegant dance or polonaise. Variation 2: A timeless, syncopated treble melody over a syncopated “walking” bass line. The left hand plays the bass, the right hand the treble.

Variation 3 Canone all’Unisono: The scales are in the left hand; the right hand plays triplets, groups of three notes which make a wonderful joyous dance. This is the pianistic equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. Variation 4: A passepied, where you pass your foot over your other foot, or your hand over your other hand. The brilliance here is that the left hand imitates or turns upside down the melody started by the right hand. Like a canon, the left hand starts a bit after the right hand, but the mirror images meet in unexpected places to make, not a pedantic repetitive form, but a fractal pattern of brilliant unexpected harmonies made up of predictable patterns. The universe is structured like this: the chaos of inspiration leaping out of the anchor of structure, both opposites tumbling over each other like bears playing. Variation 5: The right hand plays rapid scales, and the left hand crosses over to make comments with single notes and ornaments. The two hands mix perfectly, so it sounds more complex than Bach’s brilliant solution, which is to cheat and transfer the singing treble to the double-crossing left hand, which sneaks out of its basement to play on the swings. Variation 6: Canone alla Seconda: Note the groups of five notes, one for each finger. This is a canon, where the second group of five starts a bit late and overlaps and then the next group overlaps the second, et cetera. Despite the brilliant mathematics of the complex form, the effect is of a lush and comforting song. Variation 7: Al tempo di Giga: This is a jig from the Canary Islands, syncopated and slightly wistful. The ornaments are rapid scales leading to the end note, which is the “point” of the ornament, to decorate one note with many others. Rachmaninoff used this technique in a virtuosic kaleidoscope of intersecting melodies and digressions, derived from simpler melodies, as this Bach jig swirls around an easygoing core. 2018 Summer Season

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Variation 8: Rather than using groups of five notes, this piece uses groups of ten or eleven notes. It has hand crossings as well, but this time the hands cheat even more cleverly, duetting with the other hand’s scales. This is easy to do if you have two keyboards, as on a dual-manual harpsichord, but your fingers can get tripped up when you play it on a piano, because the fingers have to be so close to one another. Variation 9 Canone alla Terza: This is almost an interlude, when everyone is free to dream. One hand copies the other, but in a courtly, polite slow dance. Variation 10 Fughetta: This is a four-voice fugue. You can hear the original theme; then it’s repeated in the left hand. Glenn Gould felt that four voices were the most that the mind (or the hands) could keep track of all at once. The initial trill from the original theme is a good way to keep track of when the second voice comes in, because its long trill alerts you. Despite how busy it is, notice what beauty is created. This is always the challenge: to make the technical difficulties disappear in favor of simply having a good time with the harmonies. You have to reveal the structure, which is the point of all German music: “form’s what affirms,” as James Merrill has said. But at the same time you have to forget the structure, and enjoy the hedonism of the song. It is reason versus passion. The two must combine. T.S. Eliot felt that we lost our anchor to the earth when we separated the two hemispheres of the brain into warring entities, rather than cooperative teams. Variation 11: Here Bach expands the first note of the theme into seven notes, but keeps the trill at the end, the goal of the earlier notes. Bach uses reverse motion scales, pauses, and syncopations to keep it interesting. Variation 12 Canone alla Quarta: All the scales here shelter hidden patterns where each group’s first or last note becomes a melody of its own, so that the original theme’s harmonic 244

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structure, its chords, are used as a melody. Rock and roll and bebop use chord progressions as melodies as well. Variation 13: Here the ornaments themselves are the point, and the harmonies are used as modulations which lead to the next ornament, or appoggiatura. The complex ornamented figures gradually morph into the scales themselves, so you can tell, and even feel, how both the decoration and the underlying harmonies and the linking scales are all the same thing, each disguised as the other. This is an extraordinary revelation, where Bach shows how even a few seconds of a passage is composed of the same three basic elements, the way the earth is composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, rearranged in a hundred ways; the way the materials of stars have also shaped the earth. If you listen to this piece enough, suddenly it dawns on you: one part of it is derived from the part before, and so on. Variation 14: And this virtuoso amalgam of trills, syncopations, and silences is your reward. It may be the same formula as all the other variations so far, but it’s infectious. It shows how all of the elements that are so serious can also be fun. This is the most virtuosic and explosive variation. Variation 15 Canone alla Quinta: Andante: The pianist Glenn Gould called this “the perfect Good Friday spell.” It puts the previous variation, which was so effervescent, in its place. We realize here that serious ecclesiastic codes can be woven from the same DNA as pleasure. It is the ultimate merging of the two spheres of the brain: the music of the spheres. The physical and the metamorphic: things that exist and things that vaporize, both merging into the metaphysical, metaphors that start in the flesh and rapidly transmute into more ethereal airs, lead turning into gold. Prayer turning into heaven itself. It’s the opposite of what Claudius, the evil king, says in the play Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” But if physical words can somehow combine with incorporeal thoughts, the result is catharsis, magic, redemption,

ascension. This is the stuff of miracles. Notes become the wardrobe door in C.S. Lewis, the mirror in Lewis Carroll: notes become wormholes where ordinary dimensions are transmigrated into extraordinary dimensions. This is the halfway point in this long and demanding exegesis of spirit and charm. I feel there should be an intermission here. Too much genius is an exhausting thing. Note that there’s been the wild celebration of the 13th variation, followed by the compensatory transmigration of souls. The metamorphosis is complete: we have spoken to the angels, we have touched the heavens, we are restored. How can there be more to come? Variation 16 Ouverture: Like an entirely different piece, this overture opens with a cinematic chord and introductory scale, and a few separated trills before moving into a dance which expands the trills into scales. The challenge in the second half is to figure out how the variations are connected to the main theme. Bach makes many of the themes very simple, but keeps them farther away logically from the familiar chords of the melody, so it’s more of a job sleuthing out the connections. Today the urban myth is discredited, where Bach wrote the pieces for his friend Goldberg, who had to play them to help his boss, Count Kaiserling, conquer his insomnia. The concentration necessary in the second half of this enormous work does seem at times, however, like a descent into the depths of a drugged incantation, an exploration at the bottom of the cave of consciousness. Variation 17: This toccata is somewhat like Bach’s C-minor Prelude from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which has both hands doing the same thing but with one hand the inverted mirror image of the other, so they both start at the outside and meet in the middle. Here he’s opened that idea up into a broader universe, so the intense Rorschach pattern goes higher into the spring sky and down into the waking swamps. Two similar stories are inverted to make opposites which mostly live at their

extremes until their breezy, seemingly independent flightiness meets in the middle. Variation 18 Canone alla Sesta: A very calm afternoon walk through a beautiful meadow. Repeated patterns based on a “turn” (where notes revolve around a central anchoring note) gradually turn into a more melodic tune while the left hand plays the same harmony in scales. This repeats rather than develops, and gradually subsides. Variation 19: A variation on the previous variation. A calm melody floats over scales in the middle and low registers. Variation 20: The hands mirror each other, right descending as left ascends, syncopated so that they are cushioned on air as they seem to float together and drift apart. Sustained turns climb rapidly in the bass as the right hand comments in the margins, and uses arpeggios in the right hand to make the same points as the turns in the left hand, broadening the scope of this dialogue of opposites until the rapid end. This is one of Bach’s charming virtuosic dances, where technical prowess is necessary for the moto perpetuo, which, however, is really a simple dance in disguise. Variation 21 Canone alla Settima: The melody here climbs in single notes under the moving treble scales. The single notes are chromatic—that is, they move upwards by half notes; they seem to be sneaking up on some target which is never identified. Then the left hand takes the scales and the right hand the crablike crawling melody. Variation 22 Alla breva: The left hand modulates up and down simply, the way a rock song would, almost like a two-legged animal climbing slowly up and then back down. The treble melody is the exact same pattern, but upside down. So the effect is of two people crawling towards each other. Variation 23: This virtuosic scale variation is broken into eleven-note scales with a rest. The hands at the end unite to play thirds together (that is, the right hand plays three notes 2018 Summer Season

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higher than the left hand). By doubling the tempo, Bach retains interest. Variation 24 Canone all’Ottava: A lovely lyrical theme is repeated in the bass and then an octave above the original theme. This is the pattern the piece follows back and forth, ending as it began. Variation 25 Adagio: Rachmaninoff stated that a piece, no matter how long, should only have one ultimate point. If so, this is the point of the Goldbergs. A droning and inching depressed chromatic bass is offset by a treble melody that climbs and jumps slowly to ecstatic high notes. It is like a conversation between two people who speak different languages. The bass and the treble don’t agree. You have the feeling that the treble might be joyous if the bass didn’t drag it down with its underwater, ungrateful tonalities. This is the duality between reason and passion expressed as an impossible barrier, the dissociation about which T. S. Eliot warned, the fragmentation of a modern world where there is no inner correspondence between the spirit and the flesh. It is what the modern world has become, without the unifying force of 17th-century belief. Variation 26: Bach realizes that we need some excitement after the profundity of the last variation. You can hear the familiar chord structure of the original melody, now covered over with the filigree of endless turns. It’s like a trellis covered with vines blowing in the wind. Variation 27 Canone alla Nona: Using the by now familiar scales to begin each phrase, Bach breaks open the ends of phrases into ornaments that jump very far apart, rather than staying close to a central anchoring note. He wants to see what this will sound like in a few different positions. There is a kind of joy in the way the end of each phrase dances: a happy hop. Variation 28: Both hands play trills and one note of melody at a time. This technique, where one hand plays the 246

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inversion, the mirror-image, of the other, is also employed in the C-minor Prelude in the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. It can be played either as a dance or meaningfully slowly. The melody is the bass of the initial aria, played upside down, so it’s inverted both as a theme and inverted also by being in the right hand rather than the left. The trills are a diversion, because what Bach wants to do is very simple, but he needs to make it entertaining. Even Bach has a sense that he has asked a lot of Count Kaiserling in the 25th Variation, and there must be a contrasting playfulness in the variations that follow. He uses such fast-slow, profound-diverting contrasts throughout, acknowledging the dual purpose of music. As Rachmaninoff said, he really wanted to communicate single-note messages, but was forced to play scales and octaves to keep people entertained while he went about his simple revelations. To mirror the treble melody, Bach often repeats it in the bass by crossing the right hand over the left while the left hand continues the trills. This virtuosic trick is attributed to the French, especially to Couperin. Gould pointed out that this and the following variation have the same motivic structure. Everywhere else, Bach varies his attention to add to the complex skein of the harmonics. So here you can hear directly two ways of improvising on the same notes. Variation 29: The descending bass notes of the original theme introduce every measure (as they did in the last variation), motivating giant trills in the treble. The trills are actually huge chords moving back and forth, which is a brilliant way of varying a two-note figuration. The effect is very celebratory. The massive chords give way to rapid passagework, where the bass melody of the original aria becomes a virtuoso aria, coming into its own at last, as important as the treble melody, which Bach focused on first. In the second section you can hear even more clearly the descending theme. Schumann and Brahms both used descending themes of four notes to signify their love for Clara Wieck, but here Bach links four descending groups

of four descending notes, a vaster classical endoskeleton than even the Romantic giants inspired by his complex example devised. Then he reverses the descent, and the same notes ascend. Bach puts in clever chromatic aberrations on the path upwards, in the way that, much later, Haydn would put in wrong notes and add clever comments on the melody into the melody itself, a kind of kibbitzing (scribbling in the margins of one’s own manuscript), as Balzac would do (Balzac made so many additions to his first drafts that all his profits were eaten up by proofreading). And of course Bach ends these wildly fragmented descending episodes with a witty ascending group of four notes, and rounds out the symmetry of the piece by finishing with a final chordal trill in the original key in which the variation (and the entire piece) begins. Variation 30 Quodlibet: “As soon as they were assembled, a chorale was first struck up,” Bach’s first biographer, Johann Forkel, wrote. “From this devout beginning they proceeded to jokes which were frequently in strong contrast. That is, they then sang popular songs partly of comic and also partly of indecent content, all mixed together on the spur of the moment. . . . This kind of improvised harmonizing they called a Quodlibet, and not only could laugh over it quite whole-heartedly themselves, but also aroused just as hearty and irresistible laughter in all who heard them.”

how half the melody is composed of grace notes, of ornaments meant to be added or varied at the discretion of the performer. After centuries of tradition, most of these parenthetical comments on the melody have become an expected part of the piece, but there is room still for individual contribution. This is a very regulated form of aleatory music, where the composer and the performer collaborate on the choices made at the last second. It was adopted by avant-garde composers such as Varèse, Berio, and Xenakis in Paris and Rome, in an attempt to seek “harmony within mankind” in the 1970s, but this is where it started. The ear remembers the shape of the last variations, all of which have focused on the descending bass of the Aria itself, so the root of the entire piece is embedded in our unconscious memory. It is as if Bach is saying, look around, see how many wonders of the world are hidden in the small details of daily life. And how many wonders of the instrument and of the performer, how many voices and gifts must be combined to produce this, one of the great achievements of musical history?

Forkel (whose library forms the core of the Berlin State Library) thus believes this last variation is meant as a joke. It contains humorous folk songs about food, such as Kraut und Rüben (cabbage and turnips), which was used earlier in a 32-part Partita by the composer Dieterich Buxtehude. If you count the themes at both ends of Bach’s variations, there are also 32 parts. The return of the initial theme, the Aria, suddenly reveals how many works there are in any one melody. You can hear 2018 Summer Season

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JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH trans. FERRUCCIO BUSONI (1866–1924) Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 Ferruccio Busoni was one of the great pianists of history, because he was also a composer and conductor and brought not only diversity but also an enormous maturity to his virtuosity. Samuel Beckett said of Proust’s characters that they were like giants buried in the ages, touching the past and the future at the same time. Busoni was like that. He transcribed for piano some of Bach’s choral preludes, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and a vast arrangement of Bach’s incomplete final fugue from The Art of the Fugue, called the Fantasia Contrappuntistica. But he also transcribed Liszt, Mozart, and even Schoenberg. He was friends on one hand with Schnabel and Sorabji, and on the other with Varèse and Schoenberg. He wrote atonal music, and taught composition to the witty and underappreciated cabaret composer Kurt Weill. So what he brought to Bach’s monumental Chaconne was more than just Bach, and more than bravura. He gets the orchestral splendor of this cathedral of a piece, from its meditative recitative to its organlike summits. His use of octaves and scales is only what Bach would have done, had Bach had a modern piano. Busoni understands the concept of organ stops—that is, the ability to play on pipes that sound like flutes, violins, reeds, a celeste, the oboe, the bombarde, a clarinet, the diapason, and the giant bass bourdon. Bach’s own organ at the Thomaskirche was a typical Baroque organ with only around 63 stops (knobs that you pull out to unblock or unstop the attached pipe to create a specific sound). Busoni certainly pulls out all the stops and finds at the end of the D-minor storm a simple, clear day. The great miracle is that Bach originally assembled an entire orchestra, an organ, the entire spectrum of a concert piano, on the four strings of a violin. 248

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 11:00 AM The Olivier Music Barn Emma Resmini, flute Calidore String Quartet

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285 Allegro Adagio Rondo: Allegretto IAN CLARKE: Zoom Tube for Solo Flute LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 9 in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3 Andante con moto â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Allegro vivace Andante con moto quasi allegretto Menuetto (Grazioso) Allegro molto

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285 Mozart was 21. In August of 1777, desperate to get out of Salzburg, he requested a leave of absence from the Archbishop Colloredo, who was so annoyed by Mozart’s constantly looking for other work that he fired both Mozart and his father. So the trip to Augsburg, Mannheim, Paris, and Munich wasn’t entirely voluntary, and became a frantic search for a new position, as Mozart was depleting his savings rapidly. He and his mother, Anna Maria, stayed five months in Mannheim, where the Dutch East India Company surgeon and amateur flutist Ferdinand de Jean asked him to write three easy, short flute concertos and two quartets. Mozart wrote this quartet in a week, finishing on Christmas Day of 1777. He made it easy for himself by changing the lead violin part of an existing quartet to the flute part. While he was in Mannheim, Mozart met members of its well-known orchestra, and also fell in love with Aloysia, the sister of the woman he would later marry. The sisters’ brother Franz’s second wife gave birth to Carl Maria von Weber, so the Weber sisters had music in their blood. Mozart was unenthusiastic about the quartets, which he wrote to get enough money to leave Mannheim, but Aloysia obviously gave him a reason to linger over the music. So this is the music of love. The Adagio is both a cantilena and a nocturne for the flute floating over pizzicato strings in the time-honored fashion of Vivaldi and Giuliani. Alfred Einstein wrote that this movement is “perhaps the most beautiful accompanied solo ever written for the flute.” The Adagio’s 35 bars contain the roots of the future slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488. 252

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IAN CLARKE (b.1964) Zoom Tube for Solo Flute Ian Clarke has studied both music and mathematics in London, and is professor of flute at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama there. This étude is an amusing and virtuosic paraphrase of the Zoom, Zoom, Zooma-Zoom theme from the popular children’s show, Zoom, from the 1970s. Clarke has mentioned using a variety of techniques to make this charming piece a cleverly fiendish étude: note bending to imitate the whirr of snare drums; rhythm and blues; Bobby McFerrin’s vocalizations; ideas from Stockhausen, Robert Dick, and Ian Anderson; and South American flute playing. The voice whispers, shouts, and scoops, apart from playing the flute, using these multiphonic displays to end the piece. Don’t be fooled by the pauses halfway through: the piece is four minutes long.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) String Quartet No. 9 in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3 This work is the last of three quartets commissioned by Prince Andrey Razumovsky, then the Russian ambassador to Vienna, and one of Beethoven’s great patrons until a fire destroyed much of his wealth. Razumovsky kept a permanent string quartet from 1808 to 1816, led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who premiered many works by Beethoven, including the quartets. Critics have suggested that all three of these quartets merge together to form a unique symphony. But we’ll only look briefly into the workings of the last one. As Mia Chung of the Curtis Institute of Music says, the first movement starts “in complete abstraction, pulselessness, dissonance, and tremendous uncertainty.” This rootless anxiety will become triumphant in the fourth movement,

using the same theme. The opening ominous, hornlike tone descending to the note a half step below it is in the fourth movement freed from that scary chromatic half step, and interval becomes a whole step (instead of a half step). This liberated two-note motif then becomes a cascade of linked three-note figures for the rest of the six-minute movement, joy sprung from distrust. Although the piece finds its identity in the fourth movement, it remains until then exuberantly rootless, which is somewhat unique, as the enormous structures necessary for quartets generally have to have harmonic underpinnings. But Beethoven is determined to face a world of chaos with optimism at the end. But this happy ending must be wrung from depressing reality. Redemption can’t be a false hope, but must be wrung out of despair. This isn’t so much Beethoven as Haydn, but, as The Beethoven Quartet Companion points out, not the Haydn who gave Beethoven indifferent lessons, but the Haydn who composed “The Representation of Chaos” in The Creation (written five years before this quartet). This quartet is called the “Dissonant” because of its Schoenberg-like beginning, which even today is disturbing to the ear. Like fractals, these initial chaotic patterns can be seen as intentional structures from an enormous distance, and with enough time. But initially, this world of diminished chords does not resolve pleasantly but instead leads to diminished worlds in other galaxies. Beethoven moves through every note for an octave and a half, through fifteen modulations, and each one is unexpected and shocking. There is no solace, no escape from this new world of despair. Its pain never arrives at comfort. As the cello descends, the violin climbs. The quartet arrives at a very unconvincing resolution in the key of C (supposedly its home key), but it isn’t until more instability is endured that the key of C becomes prevalent. But the destination of this search for meaning must wait for the fourth movement.

The second movement begins in A minor with a very Schubertian theme which critics associate with the Russian steppes. Many sforzandos disrupt the otherwise constant run of notes, like footsteps in the snow. Suddenly the procession breaks into a more Mozartean A major in the midsection before reverting to the minor mode, which in the development flirts with many keys, some joyous, some dubious, before reverting to the original minor dirge and finishing with a short bass cadenza. The Trio in the third movement has the jabbing triplets of the well-known Fifth Symphony theme. The movement continues until it ends in mid-phrase to segue immediately into the fourth movement. The fourth movement is a false fugue, more of an exuberant rondo. The entrance of each instrument must be split-second, or chaos will result. Arnold Steinhardt (the first violin of the legendary Guarneri String Quartet) says in Coursera, an online course from the Curtis Institute of Music:

The last movement has an almost impossible metronome marking. The intonation must be flawless, the speed enormous, and the tempo sustained. But at the same time the movement has to sound easy. Accompanied by fireworks. You can hear the good cheer in the opening of each instrument. This is a playground where the music can frolic. Themes are tossed around like hot potatoes . . . This is a razzle-dazzle movement. And then comes something completely unexpected: the second violin provides a deliciously soaring melody, one that no longer requires circus-like technique, but the touch of an artist.

Simply by turning the minor “neighbor-note” dissonance into a major note, the darkling plain of uncertainty is liberated 2018 Summer Season

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to form cascading spirals of triplets in C, very easy to play in that key, which spill up and down the entire range of the strings for the whole movement. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m reminded of the death of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who killed himself while awaiting deportation from Spain back across the French border into Nazi hands. If he had been one day earlier, he would have missed the deportation order, and just one day later, the Spanish officials became more lenient. So it was just one dark day on which Benjamin chose to judge his world. We base our lives often on split-second decisions, when it might be more realistic to look at larger patterns. And possibly this is Beethovenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s message. He had thought of killing himself at the time of the Testament he wrote at Heiligenstadt, about an hour outside Vienna, in October of 1802, depressed by his deafness and the idea that people might realize it:

O men, when some day you read these words, reflect that you did me wrong and let the unfor- tunate one comfort himself and find one of his kind who despite all obstacles of nature yet did all that was in his power to be accepted among worthy artists and men.

But he had fifteen sonatas yet to write; he had written only one symphony, and fortunately he was to live for another 25 years.

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WEEK EIGHT

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30 PM

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Aaron Boyd, violin Daniel Phillips, violin Xavier Foley, double bass Emma Resmini, flute Calidore String Quartet

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Harpsichord Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1056 Allegro moderato Largo Presto JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Harpsichord Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052 Allegro Adagio Allegro INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (arr. CZERNY): Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466 Allegro Romanze Rondo: Allegro assai

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) Harpsichord Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1056 Bach published his absolutely gorgeous keyboard concertos the same year as Handel did his organ concertos. Before this, no one had included a keyboard soloist in such purely orchestral music. The weak early harpsichord played along with the string group and could only be heard when everyone else stopped playing. When everyone played together, the harpsichord became just another voice, but not the dominant one. Today, although the piano plays the same theme as Bach’s orchestra much of the time, it is hard to imagine not having this transcendent and joyous continuo in the forefront of the assembled forces. This evening each musician will be equal in our small Baroque hall, and each instrument will be a soloist. We expect the resulting dance will be an even-voiced trellis of modern teamwork combined with the equality produced by ancient acoustics. (The dimensions of the Olivier Hall are the same as those of the Parthenon and the halls Bach used.) The basso continuo or figured bass of the harpsichord is often used as harmonic fill and rhythmic support for more impressive orchestral sonorities. But here the keyboard clearly initiates and motivates the other instruments, using the “sprung rhythm” of the turn, or ornament, to displace and thus distinguish itself from the metronomic moto perpetuo of the strings. Despite its clear individuality, Bach cobbled together the rich keyboard part from the violins and the original harpsichord continuo (the simple chordal accompaniment) of the original violin concerto, upon which this piece is based. Risen from the ashes of its Baroque background comes the modern world of the bravura piano concerto, waistcoats flying. 258

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The second movement has the same suspended, breathless summer night timelessness as the “Air on the G String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3. It also closely resembles the opening Andante of the Telemann Flute Concerto in G Major. Trills are used to sustain a note which could simply be held by a string instrument, a woodwind, or an organ. Piano notes are evanescent and disappear as soon as they are registered on the keys, a transience which has en passant led to its poignant immortality.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Harpsichord Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052 Bach had lost this concerto in Köthen or Weimar, but had written it down again by 1728. It was originally a violin concerto. He had also used it as the organ obbligato for Cantatas in 1726 and 1728. Repurposing (or musical regifting), in which Telemann and Mozart also specialized, is the key to being prolific. Welcome to D Minor Week at Tippet Rise. D minor is the key of the Phantom of the Opera (Bach’s Toccata in D Minor being the score to Lon Chaney’s movie of that name). It is the key of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. It is the key of Bach’s monumental Harpsichord Concerto No. 1, and the key of Mozart’s great Piano Concerto No. 20. The Bach piece was obviously the inspiration for the Mozart, and this is possibly why Anne-Marie has chosen to perform it out of order just before the Mozart concerto. Bach had been in turn inspired to write the D-minor Concerto by Vivaldi’s highly virtuosic Grosso Mogul violin concerto, RV 208.

Both Bach and Vivaldi use bariolage, or the alternation of notes on adjacent strings, one of which is usually “open”— that is, played without any fingers on it. A static repeating note (usually on an open string) is surrounded by notes above and below it which create the melody. The 18th-century French bowing technique used is called ondulé in French or ondeggiando in Italian. This same technique is used by Bach (and Busoni) in the Chaconne (which is also in D minor). Another technique used is perfidia (a pattern of fast notes repeated for long periods of time). These frenzied undulations of the bow or of the fingers build up to out-of-the-body crescendos in both the Bach concerto and in the Chaconne. We are thrilled to have so many wonderful string players to support Anne-Marie McDermott in our resonant hall, similar in size and sound to many of the palaces where Bach performed. Bach often played his concertos in his living room with his two elder sons. C.P.E. Bach was during his lifetime more renowned than his father, and seems to have been wittier. W.F. Bach became the organist at the great church in Dresden.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) arr. CARL CZERNY (1791–1857) Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466

the printed page, the sharps have simply been replaced with one lone mellow, melancholy flat, whose D minor despair is enough to cancel out those bouncing Bobbsey twins, the two sharps of D major. Mozart and Rachmaninoff’s great concerti, Chopin’s final Prelude, Bach’s phantasmic Toccata and Fugue, all dig deep into the dank D minor well of death for their immense structure, as if that lone flat demands darkness, desolation, and who among us dare fly in the face of such a depressing tradition. Happiness is simply not ton- ally possible in a minor key, and definitely not in D minor. The resonance of history cries out for blood.

Although the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor is not the last (the popular No. 23 and the great C-minor No. 24 were also written in 1786), Mozart’s last four concertos were written almost all at once, and represent the height of the classical piano repertoire. From here there was nowhere for Mozart’s genius to go but into the greatest operas in musical history: Le nozze di Figaro was written the next year (1786), Così fan tutte in 1790, and The Magic Flute in 1791, the year Mozart died. After this, the rest is silence. The God of structure, the immortal trellis of perfect interconnections, died in that year with Mozart.

As I wrote in Pianist Lost: Excesses and Excuses:

(Until the rise of the Romantic era changed entirely the way music was written: the rules were now meant to be broken. In 1792, the year after The Magic Flute, the 22-year-old Beethoven traveled to Vienna to study with Haydn. Know your enemy. Beethoven also wanted to study with Mozart, but it is not certain whether they ever met, and Mozart died before Beethoven could move to Vienna.)

In our time, we believe that the above “immortal trellis of perfect interconnections” is hidden under the surface of universes, and it is electromagnetic. This grid explains why atomic reactions (the quantum energy exchange) can travel across time instantaneously, vastly beyond the speed of light. But back to earthly immortality.

D minor . . . introduces the tense scale of D major to its two mysterious minor cousins, sloe-eyed nymphs out for trouble, and suddenly the high- collar, button-down formal dress of D is flirting with the disaster of D minor. Speaking like a graphic designer, the change is a visual one. On

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The last four Mozart concertos are not only the high achievement of the classical form, they are also infectious, popular, seamless, and fun. You don’t want to think about them. You just want to hear them. First among firsts, the 20th is also very different from the other three. It has the aura of death hanging over it, like the chromatic scale in Don Giovanni (1787), where you hear him going to hell from the first page of the opera. The ultimate dramatic foreshadowing. (Mozart wrote the Overture to Don Giovanni in three hours, starting at midnight the day the opera was to open. He just pulled the important themes out of the opera itself.) Much of Don Giovanni is also in D minor, as is the Piano Concerto No. 20. George Bernard Shaw said he wanted Mozart played at his funeral, because Mozart, more than Liszt, Beethoven, or Wagner, understood death.

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You’d think that Mozart’s absolute and omnipresent joy would indicate a kind of Forrest Gump, immune to any seriousness, but in fact Shaw was prescient in seeing the skull lurking at the edge of the canvas. My own teacher said you had to know Schoenberg to understand Mozart, because you had to know the void lurking just over the horizon of Mozart’s forced gaiety, the atonality that Mozart approaches at times but pulls back before he goes too far. A tragedy is just a comedy gone bad, as in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, where the play is about to turn into a complete tragedy when the Duke gets home and all ends happily, if unconvincingly. The brutal role-playing in Così fan tutte (Much Ado About Nothing has essentially the same plot) ends in a very unconvincing about-face at the end, where the happy ending leaves the singers eyeing one nother warily in most modern productions. There has been too much “blood under the bridge” (in Edward Albee’s words) for happiness to be accepted without severe reservations (the point of The Fantasticks). Happiness, like goodness, is only a moral triumph when it is wrenched from the tragedy which is the human condition. Goodness isn’t a default setting: it has to be willed. It is a conscious choice. And so the beauty of Mozart isn’t just the knee-jerk reaction of a simpleton, a Lord Fauntleroy, a Pollyanna, an Emma. The Music at Tippet Rise

The beauty of Mozart is wrested deliberately from darkness and death, two values which swirl like vampire bats around the great scaffolding of the 20th concerto. (Only the 20th and the 24th concertos are written in minor keys.) The despair of the first movement is repeated in the mid-section inferno of the second movement, but in the final movement all is forgiven, and the concerto ends with absolute jubilance, a Viennese dance (Mozart spent his last decade in Vienna and in its suburb Alsergrund). The abyss is averted. But is insouciance, indifference, a happy dance in D major enough to blot out the maw of hell itself which has been revealed to us? This is the eschatological question always introduced by D minor. Did he who made the Lamb make thee? How can the lord of the dance tolerate the devil? How can absolute evil (D minor) exist in a world where the purity of D major coexists with it? (That it can is the revelation of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet.) It is psychologically interesting that Mozart doesn’t think the relative major of D minor (F major, the key of the second movement Romanze) is the solution to the horror of D minor. Somehow F major would be too pat, too traditional, too expectable. What is needed is a one-on-one, a face in the mirror which isn’t yours, a chilling last-minute swap to make the redemption equal to the damnation. D minor must convert to D major. To paraphrase a quote attributed to St. Augustine (by way of Samuel Beckett, Noam Chomsky, and Leonard Bernstein): “Do not fear that one of the thieves (crucified next to Christ at Golgotha) is damned. But do not presume that one of the thieves is saved.” We are left on edge, finally. Too much has happened to accept the happy lovers as the ultimate resolution of any story. Don Giovanni himself now dominates the narrative. It is time for high opera.

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Desert Island Albums We all have records that have reached our souls and changed our lives, which we would take to a desert island. Here are a few classical albums that have done that for us: Glenn Gould: Brahms Intermezzi Jessye Norman: The Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss Kiri Te Kanawa: Nozze di Figaro Pavarotti, Sutherland: Norma Magdalena Kožená: Ah! mio Cor: Handel Arias Magdalena Kožená: Vivaldi Beverly Sills: The Barber of Seville Cecilia Bartoli: Viva Vivaldi Joyce DiDonato: In War & Peace Anna Netrebko: La Cenerentola (also a DVD) Anna Netrebko: L’Elisir d’Amore (also a DVD) Anna Netrebko: The Berlin Concert (also a DVD) Anna Netrebko: Don Pasquale (also a DVD) Elīna Garanča: Carmen (also a DVD) Bryn Terfel, Alison Hagley: Le Nozze di Figaro (also a DVD) György Cziffra: Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies

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Stephen Hough: My Favorite Things Stephen Hough: Saint-Saëns: The Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra Krystian Zimerman: Chopin Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 Arcadi Volodos: Piano Transcriptions Arcadi Volodos: Volodos Plays Liszt Christopher O’Riley: O’Riley’s Liszt Martha Argerich: Chopin: The Legendary 1965 Recording Martha Argerich: Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 (also includes an amazing performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1) Van Cliburn: Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (also includes Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2) Vladimir Horowitz: Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 (also a DVD) Ruggiero Ricci: Paganini: 24 Caprices Itzhak Perlman: Beethoven: Violin Concerto (Giulini) Hélène Grimaud: Brahms Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 Beaux Arts Trio: Schubert: Piano Trios Emerson String Quartet and Leon Fleisher: Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor (Note that YouTube features other performances and videos by these artists, often of lesser quality than what is on the disks.)

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Works To Live By by Peter Halstead

here are many works we refer to in our brochures and programs. They are the books, plays, poems which have stuck in Cathy’s and my minds over the years, and which we use to explain and enlarge the world in our minds. We thought it might be helpful to present a list of these works, in case anyone is curious. The biographies are the kind which tell you about the era in every sentence. Reading Proust was one of the great experiences of our lives. Painter’s book is very helpful, as are Shattuck’s two volumes, which discuss the era in witty and informative prose. After you read some of Trollope or Dickens, you’ll probably read a lot more. But music is just the start of it, as someone said of Schnabel. Music isn’t just a sound; it’s a philosophy. The more we understand its specific language, the deeper our insights into the miracles the world offers. Music teaches us how to live. It gives us moments of clarity, of insight. We can use it to illuminate our lives. To escape our sorrows. And, especially, to celebrate our joys. Stendhal said that no one would fall in love if he hadn’t read about it first. Reading is a dangerous sport. We become what we read.

NOVELS

Tom Stoppard Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon Italo Calvino If on a winter’s night a traveler 264

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Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory Pale Fire The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Saul Bellow Humboldt’s Gift Mervyn Peake Gormenghast Raymond Roussel Impressions of Africa Tibor Fischer Voyage to the End of the Room Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past (Random House, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff; vol. 7 translated by Terence Kilmartin) The first volume, Swann’s Way, is a tough start because the wonderful story of Swann himself doesn’t start for forty pages, because Proust decided to put his dream-metaphor of falling asleep first. Even though this essential reverie is crucial to the book, it’s slow going. I’d start with the witty stuff about Swann and his love life, and save the sleep metaphor until you’re halfway through the volumes, when it becomes obvious how Proust’s occasional prose poems deepen the novel and reveal its gears. Anthony Trollope The Way We Live Now Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend

Andrei Bely (translated by John Cournos) Petersburg This book is about linguistic tricks, Rudolf Steiner, and the strangification of what Nabokov described as the way a city whirls above you, completely unfamiliar, before it settles down into a known place.

BIOGRAPHIES, CRITICISM, ESSAYS George D. Painter Marcel Proust: A Biography

Lawrance Thompson Robert Frost: A Biography Like the great biographies of Proust by Painter or Robert Frost by Thompson, this book has revelations in every sentence: about the people, the stories, the atmosphere of the most creative time in history, populated with Liszt, George Sand, Chopin, Hugo, Marie d’Agoult. Stacy Schiff Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) Oscar Wilde Intentions Hugh Kenner The Pound Era Roger Shattuck The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time

eulogy to the Shiants in the Hebrides, to life on isolated islands. James Attlee Nocturne: A Journey In Search of Moonlight A journey to the last places of true darkness and a search for moonlight throughout history and literature. M.T. Anderson Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad The terror years of Stalin and a city surrounded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht, in which a composer writes a symphony that forever captures the horror and the beauty of Russia.

PLAYS

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest An Ideal Husband Alan Ayckbourn Henceforward House & Garden Relatively Speaking

POEMS

Douglas Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October,” “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “And death shall have no dominion,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art” Collected Poems

Adam Nicolson Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides The heir to the great British country house Sissinghurst, Nicolson has written many interesting books about his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Sir Harold Nicolson, who were members of the Bloomsbury crowd. This is a stunning poetic

W. H. Auden “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” “Song of the Master and Boatswain,” “Roman Wall Blues,” “Who’s Who,” “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” “Stop All the Clocks,” “At Last the Secret Is Out,” “If I Could Tell You,” “Musée des Beaux Arts” Collected Poems 2018 Summer Season

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POEMS (continued)

Archibald MacLeish “Bahamas,” “The Learned Men,” “Epitaph for John McCutcheon,” “Calypso’s Island,” “Thunderhead,” “What Any Lover Learns,” “The Old Man to the Lizard,” “They Come No More, Those Words, Those Finches,” “The Two Priests,” “Captivity of the Fly,” “An Eternity,” “Poem in Prose,” “The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever,” “The Rape of the Swan,” “Speech to the Scholars” Collected Poems (especially New Poems 1951)

Richard Wilbur “A Courtyard Thaw,” “A Summer Morning,” “First Snow in Alsace,” “Parable,” “On the Marginal Way,” “Complaint,” “Seed Leaves,” “Walking To Sleep,” “Running” Collected Poems: 1943-2004 James Merrill Divine Comedies Nights and Days

Arthur Rubinstein My Young Years Incredible stories-this is like having dinner with one of the greatest raconteurs in history. What was it like to be a genius who knew everyone at the height of the classical and social worlds, with a perfect memory, and who was also a lot of fun? Arthur Rubinstein My Many Years This supremely assimilated virtuoso who spoke six languages and could play anything has astonishing stories about his attempted suicide, his decision to become a piano teacher, his slumming with the Rothschilds. You can’t put it down. Gary Graffman I Really Should be Practicing: Reflections on the Pleasures and Perils of Playing Piano in Public Graffman is very funny and has marvelous stories of his life in music, as well as serious reflections on compulsive practicing.

Katie Hafner A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano MUSIC There are many wonderful books about pianos, Russell Sherman but Hafner really makes it fascinating, and she understands what makes a piano great. Piano Pieces The first half of the book features brilliant Perri Knize biographies of each finger, and extraordinary, Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey contrarian flashes of genius. This is a sampling of You follow the writer from ignorance to gradual the philosophic brilliance which Sherman and his awakening to complete realization of what gives a wife, Wha-Kyung Byun, have brought to polishing piano character. Much more fascinating and some of the greatest virtuosi of the concert world, somehow more “edge of the seat” than it sounds. such as Marc-André Hamelin, Livan, and George Li. Wolfgang Hildesheimer Mozart Intense and brilliant, this lyric and exhilarating plunge into the biography of creativity sets a new standard for how to think about music. 266

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Tim Page The Glenn Gould Reader Gould was witty, unique, brilliant, eccentric, tragic, and funny. He developed new ways of thinking about music, while being extremely entertaining.

Kevin Bazzana Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould The most balanced and probing of the many wonderful biographies of a great genius. Alan Rusbridger Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible As the former editor of the excellent paper The Guardian, Rusbridger can ask every classical master how they play Chopin’s “Governess” Ballade, as he learns it himself over a year, in between covering the major stories of the era. This witty book turns what mightseem a specialized and pedantic effort into an adventure that’s impossible to put down. David Dubal Evenings with Horowitz: A Personal Portrait Nikolai Grozni Wunderkind This is a Bulgarian Holden Caulfield (who in real life studied at Brown) loose in the Sofia Conservatory, getting in trouble with apparatchiks, girls, and pianos, interspersed with emotional and original descriptions of playing Chopin. Paul Roberts Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy From paulrobertspiano.com: “This book…relates the piano music of Debussy to the cultural background of Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century. It has become a seminal text on the subject, admired by scholars, teachers, and concert pianists all over the world.” Reflections: The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel Written by a master pianist, this book, like his Debussy volume, tells you about the stories and the era that inspired Ravel to write his challenging Impressionist études.

Harold C. Schonberg The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present Schonberg’s sense of wonder and his idolatry of speed might have turned concerts into spectacles, but his enthusiasm is a lot of fun, and he set the standard for virtuosity as a sport. Thad Carhart The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier I had a similar experience myself in a maison particulière near the Place des Vosges in Paris, run by Daniel Magne, the son of Messiaen’s technician, where I found a piano that was the twin of one of Horowitz’s. A wonderful book about not just pianos, but also Paris. Lang Lang Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story Lang Lang’s father suggested he throw himself off a balcony when he came in second at a competition. He wept when he realized that his apartment at Curtis was just for him, not for twenty students. China tried to replace him at his own concert at the last minute with another prodigy. This is an extraordinary and difficult journey through enormous sacrifices, told with compelling honesty. Oscar Levant The Memoirs of an Amnesiac Levant said of himself, “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” The inspiration for Peter Sellers’s character in The World of Henry Orient, Levant was an acid wit who made hypochondria into a profession; an excellent pianist, his name was synonymous with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but he also recorded music by Debussy, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian.

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Artist Profiles

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Timo Andres Borromeo String Quartet Aaron Boyd Julien Brocal Calidore String Quartet Jenny Chen Dover Quartet Anton Dressler Escher String Quartet Krista Bennion Feeney David Finckel and Wu Han Ingrid Fliter Xavier Foley Vadim Gluzman Caroline Goulding Gabriel Kahane Jeffrey Kahane Aaron Jay Kernis Myron Lutzke Anne-Marie McDermott Johannes Moser Pedja Muzijevic Tara Helen O’Connor Daniel Phillips Stewart Rose St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble Yevgeny Sudbin Orion Weiss

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Timo Andres grew up in Connecticut and lives in

TIMO A N DR E S

Brooklyn, New York. As a Nonesuch Records artist, his albums include Home Stretch and Shy and Mighty. Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Andris Nelsons; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia and premiered at the Barbican; and The Blind Banister, a piano concerto for Jonathan Biss. Co-commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts and Orchestra of St. Luke’s, The Blind Banister was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. As a soloist, recent performances include the world premiere of a piano concerto by Ingram Marshall with John Adams and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and an appearance at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where he received the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize; Philip Glass selected Andres as the recipient of this award. This season Andres writes new works for Music Academy of the West, for cellist Inbal Segev and Metropolis Ensemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and for Ravinia’s Steans Institute of Music.

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Andres studied composition and piano at the Yale School of Music. He is one sixth of the Sleeping Giant composers’ collective.

The Borromeo String Quartet recently celebrated

its 25th anniversary and continues to be a pioneer in its use of technology. The group has the trailblazing distinctions of being the first string quartet to use laptop computers on the concert stage and the first classical ensemble to make and distribute its own live recordings to audiences. As passionate educators, the Borromeo’s programs for young people include Mathemusica, a fun and uniquely effective learning environment combining music and science study.

BO R RO M EO S T R IN G QUA R T E T

With an expansive repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Gunther Schuller, its signature cycle of Bartók string quartets, and collaborations with some of the most important contemporary composers—including John Cage, György Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon, and John Harbison—the Borromeo has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, Tuscany’s Terra di Siena Chamber Music Festival, and at venues in Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and China. The Borromeo is quartet-in-residence at New England Conservatory, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Taos School of Music. Recent and upcoming engagements include appearances at the Library of Congress, Peabody Institute, San Francisco Conservatory, La Jolla Music Society, and Trinity Church Wall Street, among many others.

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aron Boyd enjoys a versatile career as soloist, chamber musician, orchestral leader, recording artist, lecturer, and teacher. Since making his New York recital debut in 1998, Boyd has concertized throughout the United States, Europe, Russia, and Asia. Formerly a member of the Escher String Quartet, Boyd was a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Martin E. Segal Prize from Lincoln Center, and was also awarded a proclamation by the city of Pittsburgh for his musical accomplishments. As a recording artist, Boyd can be heard on the BIS, Music@Menlo Live, Naxos, Tzadik, North/South, and Innova labels. Boyd has been broadcast in concert by NPR, WQXR, and WQED, and was profiled by Arizona Public Television. Born in Pittsburgh, Boyd began his studies with Samuel LaRocca and Eugene Phillips and graduated from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Sally Thomas and coached extensively with Paul Zukofsky and cellist Harvey Shapiro. Formerly on the violin faculties of Columbia University and University of Arizona, Boyd now serves as director of chamber music and professor of practice in violin at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas with his wife, Yuko, daughter, Ayu, and son, Yuki.

Julien Brocal began studying piano at the age

of five and first performed on stage at the Salle Cortot in Paris at the age of 7. He was taught by Erik Berchot at the Conservatoire National de Région de Marseille and Rena Shereshevskaya at the l’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. He was supported by the Zaleski Foundation, Assophie Association, and the Safran Foundation during his training. In January 2013 he came to the attention of Maria João Pires during a course at the Cité de la Musique in Paris and was subsequently invited by her to develop artistic projects at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. Since then, Brocal and Pires have performed together in numerous concerts across the world, including with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, at the Chopin Festival, and at Opera di Firenze in the Great Artists Series. Highlights of the 2017/18 season include recitals at the Festival Classique au Vert, Piano aux Jacobins, and the Philharmonie de Paris. Brocal’s debut album was released in 2017 by Rubicon Classics and features Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes and Sonata No. 2. The recording was received with critical acclaim by the international press; BBC Music Magazine gave the disk five stars, and in April 2018 awarded Julien their Newcomer Award.

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The Calidore String Quartet made international C A LI DO R E STRING QUA R T E T

headlines as the grand prize winner of the inaugural 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition, the largest prize for chamber music in the world. Also in 2016, the quartet became the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and was named BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, an honor that brings recordings, international radio broadcasts, and appearances in Britain’s most prominent venues and festivals. In 2017, the Calidore was honored with the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. The 2017/18 season continues their three-year residency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program. In March 2018, the quartet was named a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Calidore regularly performs in the most prestigious venues throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Hall, and at many significant festivals, including Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, Music@ Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk, and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

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Highlights of the 2017/18 season included debuts at the Kennedy Center and in Boston, Philadelphia, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, and Barcelona. In April 2018 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented the Calidore in their Alice Tully Hall recital debut. Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles.

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enny Chen is an enthusiastic pianist and innovative music educator. She debuted with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra at age 9 and was accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music the next year, studying with Gary Graffman and Eleanor Sokoloff. She then proceeded to complete amasterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree at Yale School of Music with Melvin Chen and Robert Blocker and is currently the youngest doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Eastman School of Music, studying with Douglas Humpherys. As a chamber musician, Chen has collaborated with esteemed artists Anne-Marie McDermott, Arnold Steinhardt, and Peter Wiley, as well as the Philadelphia Orchestra, National Repertory Orchestra, New York Downtown Sinfonietta, Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. She has been invited to many prestigious festivals, including Bravo! Vail, Mainly Mozart, Sejong International Music Festival, Ocean Reef Festival, and Lincoln Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chamber Music Encounters. She also has won top prizes at the New York International Piano Competition, Eastman Piano Competition, MTNA Competition, Young Concert Artist Award, and International Franz Liszt Piano Competition.

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The Dover Quartet catapulted to international

DOV ER QUA R T E T

stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Recently named winner of the Cleveland Quartet Award and earning the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Dover has become one of the most in demand ensembles in the world. The group serves as the quartet-in-residence for the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. In 2017/18, the Dover Quartet performs more than 100 concerts around North America and Europe. The quartet opened the season with performances for Texas Performing Arts, Chamber Music Houston, and Performance Santa Fe before appearing for the Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Library of Congress, Detroit Chamber Music Society, and La Jolla Music Society. The quartet performed together with the superstar violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, and continued its multi-year residencies for the Walton Arts Center’s Artosphere, Peoples’ Symphony, and the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival.

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Cedille Records released the quartet’s sophomore album, Voices of Defiance: 1943, 1944, 1945, in October 2017. Its members studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where they were mentored extensively by Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley. It was at Curtis that the quartet first formed, and its name pays tribute to Dover Beach by fellow Curtis alumnus Samuel Barber.

eeply committed to the chamber music repertoire, Anton Dressler is one of the founding members of the modular Kaleido Ensemble. His musical partners have included Ingrid Fliter, Mischa Maisky, Julian Rachlin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Itamar Golan, Alexander Kobrin, and Olga Kern, among others.

A N TO N DRE SSLER

Dressler has premiered numerous works dedicated to him. His passion for live electronics has led him to broaden his repertoire, composing new pieces and expanding the clarinet’s expressive possibilities. Dressler’s recordings include Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, an album of Russian music for clarinet and piano, and a CD with elements of improvisation called Duo al Opera. He is currently teaching at the conservatories of Trento and Riva del Garda in Italy.

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The Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for

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its expressive, nuanced performances that combine unusual textural clarity with a rich, blended sound. A former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, the quartet has performed at the BBC Proms and is a regular guest at Wigmore Hall. In its home town of New York, the ensemble serves as season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where it has presented the complete Zemlinsky string quartet cycle and been one of five quartets chosen to collaborate in a complete presentation of Beethoven’s string quartets. Last season, the Escher Quartet toured with CMS to China. Within months of its inception in 2005, the ensemble came to the attention of key musical figures worldwide. Championed by the Emerson Quartet, the Escher Quartet was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be quartet-inresidence at the Young Artists Program at Canada’s National Arts Centre and the Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, New York. The quartet has since collaborated with David Finckel, Leon Fleischer, Wu Han, Lynn Harrell, Cho-Liang Lin, Joshua Bell, Paul Watkins, and David Shifrin, as well as jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, vocalist Kurt Elling, legendary Latin artist Paquito D'Rivera, and Grammy Award-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux. In 2013, the quartet was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

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The Escher Quartet has made a distinctive impression throughout Europe, performing at venues such as Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Konzerthaus Berlin, London’s Kings Place, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Slovenian Philharmonic Hall, Auditorium du Louvre, and Les Grand Interprètes series in Geneva. Currently quartet-in-residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Tuesday Musical in Akron, Ohio, the quartet fervently supports the education of young musicians. In 2016, the quartet released the third and final volume of the complete Mendelssohn quartets on BIS.

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Krista Bennion Feeney has enjoyed an unusually

varied career as a soloist, chamber musician, music director, and concertmaster. She has been a member of the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s since 1983, where she performs frequently in the roles of concertmaster and violin soloist. She is currently involved in rediscovering and reviving a musical sound world from the past as the founding first violinist of the Serenade Orchestra and Quartet, playing music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries on historic instruments. From 1999 through 2006, she was the music director of the un-conducted New Century Chamber Orchestra based in San Francisco.

K R IS TA BEN NIO N FEEN E Y

Feeney has made solo appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra in the world premiere of Terry Riley’s SolTierraLuna, Mostly Mozart Festival, New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and at the Kennedy Center, and with several historic instrument ensembles. Recent highlights include performances of Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, Nardini’s Violin Concerto in E Minor,and Paganini’s La Campanella on historic violin with the American Classical Orchestra.

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David Finckel and Wu Han are among the most

esteemed and influential classical musicians in the world today. They are recipients of Musical America’s Musicians of the Year Award, one of the highest honors granted by the music industry. The talent, energy, imagination, and dedication they bring to their multifaceted endeavors as concert performers, recording artists, educators, artistic administrators, and cultural entrepreneurs has garnered superlatives from the press, public, and presenters alike. In high demand year after year among chamber music audiences worldwide, the duo has appeared each season at the most prestigious venues and concert series across the United States, Mexico, Canada, Asia, and Europe to unanimous critical acclaim.

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Their wide-ranging musical activities also include the launch of ArtistLed, classical music’s first musician-directed and internet-based recording company, whose 19-album catalogue has won widespread praise. Finckel and Han have also overseen the establishment and design of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s acclaimed CMS Studio and CMS Live labels, as well as CMS’s recording partnership with Deutsche Grammophon and the much-lauded Music@Menlo Live label. Now in their third term as artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Finckel and Han hold the longest tenure as directors since Charles Wadsworth, the founding artistic director. They are also the founding artistic directors of Music@Menlo, a chamber music festival and institute in Silicon Valley. In 2011 they were named artistic directors of Chamber Music Today, an annual festival held in Korea. Under the auspices of CMS, they also lead the LG Chamber Music School, which serves dozens of young musicians in Korea annually. In these capacities, as well as through a multitude of other education initiatives, including their chamber music studio at the Aspen Music Festival and School, they have achieved universal renown for their passionate commitment to nurturing the careers of countless young artists. Finckel serves as professor of cello at the Juilliard School, as well as artist-inresidence at Stony Brook University. Finckel and Han reside in New York.

ngrid Fliter has won the admiration and hearts of audiences around the world for her passionate, thoughtful, and sensitive music-making played with effortless technique. Winner of the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award, one of only a handful of pianists and the only woman to have received this honor, Fliter divides her time between North America and Europe. Fliter made her American orchestral debut with the Atlanta Symphony, just days after the announcement of her Gilmore Award. Since then she has appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit, Toronto, National, Cincinnati, Dallas, Vancouver, and New World symphonies, as well as at the Mostly Mozart, Grant Park, Aspen, Ravinia, Blossom, and Brevard summer festivals. Equally busy as a recitalist, Fliter has performed at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 92nd Street Y, and Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. She has also appeared in recital in Boston, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Detroit. Born in Buenos Aires, Fliter began her piano studies in Argentina with Elizabeth Westerkamp. In 1992 she moved to Europe, where she continued her studies in Freiburg and Italy. Fliter began playing public recitals at age 11 and made her professional orchestra debut at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires at age 16. Already the winner of several competitions in Argentina, she went on to win prizes at the Cantù International Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Italy and in 2000 was awarded the silver medal at the Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw. She has been teaching at the Imola International Academy “Incontri col Maestro” since the fall of 2015. As a recording artist, Fliter has recorded an all-Beethoven and two allChopin CDs for EMI, as well as the complete Chopin Preludes and Nocturnes, both Chopin concertos, and the Schumann and Mendelssohn concertos for Linn Records.

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In the 2017/18 season, Xavier Foley appeared as X AV IER FO LE Y

soloist with the Orchard Park Symphony Orchestra and in recital at the Perlman Music Program Alumni Recital Series, the Harriman-Jewell Series, and the Buffalo Chamber Music Society. An active chamber musician, he has also played at Wolf Trap, at the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, and with the Jupiter Chamber Players. As a winner of the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he gave his New York and Washington, DC recital debuts. Foley is only the second bassist in YCA’s 57-year history to win and join its roster. In March 2018, he was named a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Foley has appeared as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, Nashville Symphony, the Brevard Concert Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra, and with the Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie Hall. His numerous prizes include Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Society Award to perform on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society Series, and first prizes at Astral’s 2014 National Auditions and at the 2011 International Society of Bassists Competition. He has participated in the Marlboro Music and the Delaware Chamber Music Festivals.

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Also a composer, Foley graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2016, after working with Edgar Meyer and Hal Robinson. His bass was crafted by Rumano Solano.

Vadim Gluzman’s artistry brings to life the glorious violin tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries. His wide repertoire embraces adventurous new music, and his performances are heard around the world through live broadcasts and a striking series of award-winning recordings exclusively for BIS.

The Israeli violinist has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and many others, and has enjoyed collaborations with today’s leading conductors, including Riccardo Chailly, Christoph von Dohnányi, Tugan Sokhiev, Sir Andrew Davis, Neeme Järvi, Michael Tilson Thomas, Semyon Bychkov, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Paavo Järvi, and Hannu Lintu. His festival appearances have included Tanglewood, Ravinia, Lockenhaus, Verbier, and the North Shore Chamber Music Festival in Chicago, which he founded with pianist Angela Yoffe. Highlights this past season include Gluzman’s debut appearance with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and performances with the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He celebrates Leonard Bernstein’s centennial year with both the BBC and San Francisco Symphonies, and gives the European premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich. He plays the 1690 “ex-Leopold Auer” Stradivari on extended loan to him through the generosity of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

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For nearly a decade, Caroline Goulding has perC A RO LI N E GOU LDI N G

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formed with the world’s premiere orchestras, in recital, and on recordings, blossoming from a precociously gifted 13-year-old soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra into one of the world’s leading soloists. Emerging from a sabbatical focusing on meditative practices and the merging of meditation and music, Goulding will reopen the 2018 season with the release of her third album on Clives Records; this marks her first record since her Grammy Award—nominated and chart-topping debut recording on Telarc in 2009. A winner of the Sommets Musicaux De Gstadd’s Prix Thierry Scherz, this recording embodies Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Mozart’s A-Major Concerto with the Berner Symphonieorchester led by Kevin John Edesui. Widely recognized by the classical music world’s most distinguished artists and institutions, Goulding was a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2011, and in 2009 she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and was the recipient of the Helen Armstrong Violin Fellowship. She has also garnered significant attention from music and mainstream press, appearing on NBC’s Today, Martha, and Germany’s Stars von Morgen hosted by Rolando Villazón. Goulding has also been heard on NPR’s Performance Today, From the Top, and SiriusXM Satellite Radio. She plays a Giovanni Battista Rogeri violin from 1675, courtesy of Peter and Cathy Halstead.

Over the last decade, Gabriel Kahane has established

himself as one of the leading exponents of American song, grafting a deep interest in character and narrative to a keen sense of harmony and rhythm. Kahane now celebrates the release of his fifth LP, The Fiction Issue, an album comprising three chamber works performed by Brooklyn Rider with vocal appearances by Shara Worden, of My Brightest Diamond, and Kahane himself. Kahane has collaborated with a diverse array of artists, including Sufjan Stevens, Blake Mills, and Chris Thile, for whom Kahane opened 40 concerts in the United States last year. This season found Kahane returning to Carnegie Hall for a duo recital with pianist and composer Timo Andres. In March, he made his European debut with concerts at Kings Place in London, the Paris Philharmonie, and the Finnish National Theater in Helsinki. As a composer increasingly known for larger-scale works, Kahane has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with which he toured in the spring of 2013, performing Gabrielâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide to the 48 States, an hour-long cycle on texts from the WPA American Guide series. Additionally, he has written three works for the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial. An avid theater artist, Gabriel starred at Brooklyn Academy of Music in the critically lauded staged version of The Ambassador, directed by Tony winner John Tiffany. That production was also presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and by Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Kahane has been an artist-in-residence since 2014. He is also the composer-lyricist of the musical February House, which was premiered in 2012 at the Public Theater, for which Gabriel is currently writing a new evening-length musical theater work.

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A fellow of both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, Gabriel lives in Brooklyn. 2018 Summer Season

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Equally at home at the keyboard and on the podium, J EFFR E Y K AHANE

Jeffrey Kahane has an international reputation as a truly versatile artist, recognized by audiences around the world for his mastery of diverse repertoire ranging from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to Gershwin, Golijov, and John Adams. Kahane has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony, and is also a popular artist at all the major American summer festivals, including Aspen, Blossom, Caramoor, Mostly Mozart, and Ravinia. In April 2016, he was appointed artistic director of the Sarasota Music Festival. Since making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983, he has given recitals in many of the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s major music centers, including New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Equally at home as a chamber musician, Kahane collaborates with many of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most important chamber ensembles and was the artistic director of the Green Music Center Chamberfest during the summers of 2015 and 2016.

PIANO

Recent and upcoming engagements include playing and conducting for the fourth time with the New York Philharmonic as well as with the Houston, Indianapolis, Vancouver, Detroit, Milwaukee, Colorado, San Diego, and Phoenix symphonies; concerto appearances with the Toronto, Cincinnati, New World, Oregon, and Utah symphonies; and appearances at the Aspen, Britt, and Oregon Bach festivals. He also appeared with the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia and with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. In May 2017, Kahane completed his 20th and final season as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Kahane lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist in private practice. They have two children: Gabriel, a composer, pianist, and singer/songwriter, and Annie, a dancer and poet.

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Winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for

Music Composition, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and 2012 Nemmers Prize, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America’s most honored composers. His music appears prominently on concert programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by preeminent performing organizations and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Sharon Isbin.

A A RO N JAY K ER N IS

Kernis’s works have been recorded on Virgin, Dorian, Arabesque, Phoenix, Argo, Signum, Cedille, and many other labels. Recent recordings include his Goblin Market and Invisible Mosaic II on Signum; Three Flavors, featuring pianist Andrew Russo, violinist James Ehnes, and the Albany Symphony with conductor David Alan Miller on Albany; and a disc of his solo and chamber music, On Distant Shores on Phoenix. Kernis’s conducting engagements include appearances with the Pascal Rioult Dance Company, at major chamber music festivals in Chicago and Portland, and with members of the San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic. He is the workshop director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, and for 11 years served as new music adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, where he co-founded and for 15 years directed its Composer Institute. Kernis teaches composition at Yale School of Music and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Classical Music Hall of Fame. Leta Miller’s book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series.

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yron Lutzke is well known to audiences as a cellist on both modern and period instruments. He is currently a member of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Aulos Ensemble, Mozartean Players, Bach Ensemble, Loma Mar Quartet, the Theater of Early Music, and the Esterhazy Machine, and serves as principal cellist for Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Classical Orchestra, and for 14 years, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society with Christopher Hogwood. He has appeared as soloist at the Caramoor, Ravinia, and Mostly Mozart festivals, and is a regular participant at the SweetWater Music Festival, Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. Myron’s numerous recordings include the complete Mozart and Schubert piano trios with the Mozartean Players and the album Working Classical with the Loma Mar Quartet for Paul McCartney. He has recorded for Sony, DG, Dorian, Atma, Arabesque, EMI, and Oiseau-Lyre. He teaches regularly at the Indiana University Early Music Institute and is currently on the faculty of the Mannes School of Music, where he teaches period cello and Baroque performance practice. He has also served as director of the Amherst Early Music Baroque Academy.

Anne-Marie McDermott is a consummate

artist who balances a versatile career as a soloist and collaborator. With over 50 concertos in her repertoire, McDermott has performed with many leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico. She has collaborated with many esteemed conductors, including Jaap van Zweden, Gilbert Varga, Alan Gilbert, and Carlos Miguel Prieto. An artist-member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, McDermott performs and tours extensively with them each season. She records with Bridge Records and in the fall of 2017 released a Mozart concerto album, as well as recordings of Haydn and Wuorinen sonatas. In addition to her affiliation with the McKnight Chamber Music Festival, McDermott is also the artistic director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, and curator of the Mainly Mozart Spotlight Series.

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She recently completed the Beethoven concerto cycle with Santa Fe Pro Musica. She lives in New York with her husband and travels extensively with her Maltese, Lola.

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Johannes Moser has performed with the world’s JO H A N N E S M OSER

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leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic at the Proms, London Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Tokyo NHK Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra. He has worked with conductors including Riccardo Muti, Lorin Maazel, Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, Zubin Mehta, Vladimir Jurowski, Franz Welser-Möst, Christian Thielemann, Pierre Boulez, Paavo Järvi, Semyon Bychkov, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Gustavo Dudamel. Moser recently won his third Echo Klassik Award for his Russian recital disk on Pentatone, for which he records exclusively. A dedicated chamber musician, Moser has performed with Joshua Bell, Emanuel Ax, and Leonidas Kavakos, and is a regular at the Verbier, Schleswig-Holstein, Gstaad, Kissinger, Colorado, Seattle, and Brevard music festivals. Renowned for his efforts to expand the reach of the classical genre, he has recently been involved in commissioning works by Julia Wolfe, Ellen Reid, Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen, Johannes Kalitzke, Jelena Firsowa, and Andrew Norman. Throughout his career, Johannes has been committed to reaching out to all audiences, from kindergarten to college and beyond. He combines most of his concert engagements with masterclasses, school visits,and pre-concert lectures.

Pedja Muzijevic has performed with the Atlanta

Symphony Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfonica in Montevideo, Residentie Orkest in the Hague, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and Japan Shinsei Symphony Orchestra. He has played solo recitals at Alice Tully Hall, the Frick Collection, Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Gallery, Casals Hall, and Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo. His Carnegie Hall concerto debut playing Mozart's Concerto No. 25 with the Oberlin Symphony and Robert Spano was recorded live and has been released on the Oberlin Music label.

PEDJA M UZIJ E V IC

Highlights of the 2017/18 season include solo recitals at the Mostly Mozart Festival, the 92nd Street Y, Carolina Performing Arts, Mainly Mozart, and the Honens Festival in Calgary, as well as concerto engagements with Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra and Spoleto Festival Orchestra. Muzijevic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and came to the United States in 1984 to continue his education at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School. His mentors included pianists Joseph Kalichstein and Jerome Lowenthal, harpsichordist Albert Fuller, and violinists Robert Mann and Joel Smirnoff.

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DA NI EL PH I LLI PS

VIOLIN

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aniel Phillips enjoys a versatile career as an established chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher. He is a founding member of the 30-year-old Orion String Quartet, which is in residence at Mannes College of Music, and performs regularly at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Since winning the 1976 Young Concert Artists Competition, he has performed as a soloist with many orchestras, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, and Yakima Symphony Orchestra. He appears regularly at the Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Music Festival, and has participated in the International Musicians Seminar in Cornwall, England since its inception. He also serves on the summer faculty of the Heifetz Institute and the St. Lawrence String Quartet Seminar at Stanford. Phillips was a member of the renowned Bach Aria Group and has toured and recorded for Sony in a string quartet with Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, and Yo-Yo Ma. A judge in the 2018 Seoul International Violin Competition, he is a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the faculties of the Mannes College of Music, Bard College Conservatory, and the Juilliard School. He lives with his wife, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A graduate of the Juilliard School, his major teachers included his father, Eugene Phillips; Ivan Galamian; Sally Thomas; Nathan Milstein; Sándor Végh; and George Neikrug.

“An amazing musician... your artistry is astounding.”

(NPR’s Performance Today) Flutist Emma Resmini is a soloist, collaborative artist, and new music advocate. She has soloed numerous times with the National Symphony, as well as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival Orchestra. Emma was a 2016 NPR Performance Today Young Artist In Residence, with interviews and performances airing over three days, primarily focusing on American contemporary composers. Her performanes have also been aired on WHYY-TV. Other recent solo engagements include the National Flute Association Convention, Bowerbird, Music for Food, Penn Composers Guild, and Odeon Chamber Music Series. Beyond the classical canon, Emma is also an avid performer of new music. A review of her performance at the 2016 New Music Gathering raved, “Emma Resmini stunned the crowd.” (I Care If You Listen) At the Curtis Institute of Music she was a featured soloist in the tribute concert to composer Kaija Saariaho, performing NoaNoa for flute and electronics, and as a member of the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble’s performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in NYC, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. As an advocate of emerging composers, she has performed the world premiere of over twenty new works. She is also in her third season with the Arcana New Music Ensemble, where her music has been described as “masterfully performed” (DC Metro Theater Arts). In addition, her performance of Stockhausen’s cycle KLANG was praised for its “buoyant cognitive comprehension.” (David Patrick Stearns, Condemned to Music) Emma is currently pursuing her Master of Music degree at The Juilliard School, studying with Jeffrey Khaner, and is a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music. She was also the youngest member ever accepted to the National Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellowship, and was a long-time student of NSO flutist Alice Kogan Weinreb.

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Stewart Rose is principal horn of the Orchestra of St ST E WA RT ROSE

Luke’s, which he first joined in 1983. He has performed as soloist with OSL and the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble on numerous occasions and recently released his first solo CD, From the Forest, a collection of early Classical works for horn and orchestra by Haydn, Telemann, Leopold Mozart, and Christoph Förster with the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Rose is also principal horn with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the New York City Opera Orchestra. In recent seasons he has performed as guest principal horn with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and as a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Ensemble Wien-Berlin, and the Met Chamber Ensemble. Other recent performances include appearances at the Marlboro, Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Spoleto, Edinburgh, Eastern Shore, and Bravo! Vail festivals.

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Recent recordings include his appearance as first horn on the New York Philharmonic’s Deutsche Grammophon release of Harold in Italy with Lorin Maazel; Renée Fleming Bel Canto with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s; and in wind ensemble works by Beethoven, Mozart, Pleyel, and Rossini with Mozzafiato on Sony Classical. In the studio, Rose has recorded with Paul Simon, Pat Metheny, Lenny Kravitz, David Byrne, Grover Washington, Jon Faddis, Tony Bennett, Wayne Shorter, Branford Marsalis, Aerosmith, Metallica, Philip Glass, and Ennio Morricone. Rose is a native of New York.

Orchestra of St. Luke’s began in 1974 as a

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group of virtuoso musicians performing chamber music concerts at Greenwich Village’s Church of St. Luke in the Fields. Now in its 43rd season, the orchestra performs more than 80 concerts a year, at 19 different venues, in all five boroughs of New York City. Nearly half of OSL’s performances are presented for free through its education and community programs, reaching more than 10,000 New York City public school students annually. OSL built and operates the DiMenna Center for Classical Musicin Hell’s Kitchen, New York’s only rehearsal, recording, education, and performance space dedicated to classical music. It serves more than 500 ensembles and more than 30,000 musicians each year.

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Yevgeny Sudbin performs regularly in many of the world’s

Y E VGEN Y SU DBI N

finest venues and concert series, both in recital and with orchestras, including Tonhalle Zurich; Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Wigmore Hall in London; the Amsterdam Concertgebouw; David Geffen Hall in New York; and Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Orchestras he has worked with include the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest, Czech Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, as well as many others. Sudbin has collaborated with some of the world’s most influential conductors, including Neeme Järvi, Charles Dutoit, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Osmo Vänskä, Hannu Lintu, Tugan Sokhiev, Mark Wigglesworth, Andrew Litton, Dmitri Slobodeniouk, and Vassily Sinaisky. His love of chamber music has led him to collaborate with many other musicians, including Alexander Chaushian, Ilya Gringolts, Hilary Hahn, Julia Fischer, the Chilingirian Quartet, and many others. Appearances at festivals include Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Tivoli, Nohant, La Roque d’d'Anthéron, Menton, and Verbier.

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Recent and future engagements include concerts with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, and Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as recitals at the Wigmore Hall, Serate Musicali, and Muziekgebouw Amsterdam. In addition, he embarked on an extensive European tour with Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser in fall 2017. This new trio project kicked off its inaugural season with concerts at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Konzerthaus Berlin, Sociedad Filarmónica de Bilbao, and Wigmore Hall. As BIS Records’ only exclusive artist, all of Sudbin’s recordings have received critical acclaim and are regularly featured as CD of the month by BBC Music Magazine or editor’s choice by Gramophone.

Orion Weiss has performed with the major American or-

chestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic. His deeply felt and exceptionally crafted performances go far beyond his technical mastery and have won him worldwide acclaim.

ORION W E IS S

The 2017/18 season saw him opening the season for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and ending his season with the Colorado Symphony and Mozart’s Concerto in C Major, K. 467. In between, Weiss played with eleven orchestras, went on a recital tour with James Ehnes, and performed recitals around the country. In 2016/17 Weiss performed with the Knoxville, Wichita, and Santa Rosa Symphonies, and the Symphony Silicon Valley, among others, and in collaborative projects with Alessio Bax, the Pacifica Quartet, Cho-Liang Lin, and the New Orford String Quartet. In 2015 Naxos released Weiss’s recording of Christopher Rouse’s Seeing—a major commission Weiss debuted with the Albany Symphony—and in 2012 he released a recital album of Dvořák, Prokofiev, and Bartók. That same year he also spearheaded a recording project of the complete Gershwin works for piano and orchestra with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta. Named the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year in September 2010, Weiss made his debut with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood as a last-minute replacement for Leon Fleisher. Also known for his affinity and enthusiasm for chamber music, Weiss performs regularly with his wife, the pianist Anna Polonsky; the violinists James Ehnes and Arnaud Sussmann; and cellist Julie Albers.

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Education at Tippet Rise Art Center Montana State University Honors College Program

A Montana State University Honors College “Art Expedition” course brought approximately twenty Honors students to Tippet Rise in August of 2016 and again in 2017. Students attended concerts; discussions with the art center’s founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead; and lectures by architect Laura Viklund and Tippet Rise Artistic Advisor Charles Hamlen, and more. The visit gave students the opportunity to immerse themselves not only in art, music, and nature, but also architecture, environmental sciences, engineering, and land management, all in a way that links the human experience with the sights, sounds, and sensations of rural Montana. We look forward to continuing this program in August of 2018. Dean Ilse-Mari Lee, Professor of Music and Dean of the Honors College, and a professional cellist, leads the course each year, helping the students prepare as fully as possible for the weekend. With Dean Lee’s guidance, students study the artists, musicians, musical scores, composers, natural history, and artwork that they will experience at Tippet Rise. The MSU Honors College aims to enrich the state of Montana by offering exceptional opportunities to Montana students so that they may study, conduct research, and exchange ideas in challenging and supportive environments on and off campus. Honors College students routinely receive some of the most prestigious academic awards, including the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, the Truman Scholarship (Brown, Vanderbilt, Yale, and MSU all had two winners last year), and the Goldwater Scholarship (MSU ranks eighth in the nation, just ahead of Yale, for the total number of Goldwater Scholars).

Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is funding Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild International Sculpture Park, which celebrates the rich environmental, industrial, and cultural heritage of the Blackfoot Valley. Sculptors have been invited to create significant site-specific works of art using the materials—natural and industrial—that are associated with the community’s economic and cultural traditions. The Tippet Rise Fund supported the installation of a sculpture by Patrick

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Dougherty at Sculpture in the Wild in September 2017, and in 2018 is supporting outreach and educational programs.

Workshops at Tippet Rise (and Beyond)

Tippet Rise offers many workshops and other cultural opportunities at the art center throughout the seasons, including: • Three Summer Camp Workshops with the Boys & Girls Club of Carbon County in 2016, one led by internationally renowned sculptor Mark di Suvero. These workshops continued in 2017, and we look forward to more in 2018. • Montana Shakespeare in the Parks worked with Red Lodge High School students at Tippet Rise in the fall of 2016. In the spring of 2017 and 2018, Montana Shakes held workshops with local Fishtail and Nye Schools at Tippet Rise. • For adults, a summer nature workshop and a watercolor plein-air workshop took place at the art center in 2017 and will be offered again in 2018. • Tippet Rise has hosted group piano lessons for many of the region’s piano students. • FAM at the YAM: Tippet Rise was featured as the guest “artist” for open-studio night at the Yellowstone Art Museum, an opportunity for families of all ages and sizes to visit the museum and make art together. • Sunday concerts for children and their families featuring musical instrument “petting zoos” and lively interaction with world-class performers take place throughout the music season.

Art in Montana Women’s Prison

When Cierra Coppock was 14, she sold her iPad to finance her school project: paying her art teacher to teach the work of Van Gogh, whom she loves, and other artists to women in the Montana Women’s Prison in Billings. Several years later, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation continues Cierra’s initiative, and the only criticism the program has received is that it isn’t frequent enough.

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Tippet Rise and the Community by Lindsey Hinmon

CARBON COUNTY ARTS GUILD The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is pleased to support the Carbon County Arts Guild. With this collaboration, we support the common purpose of keeping art as a vital part of the education of today’s youth. The Tippet Rise Fund brings art into the classrooms of three local schools through a traveling art teacher program. Art teachers make regular visits to Nye, Fishtail, and Luther schools, where art classes may not have otherwise been an option. Through this partnership, students also come to Tippet Rise Art Center to meet artists during the installation of their sculptures, and to experience, hands on, art in nature. In 2015, the Fishtail and Nye Schools worked with renowned sculptor Stephen Talasnik during the installation of Satellite #5: Pioneer. Motivated by the visit, they returned to their classrooms to build their own sculptures using their interpretations of Satellite #5: Pioneer and the skills they learned from Talasnik. In 2016, Luther School students visited Tippet Rise with art teacher Willis Johnson. Back at the school, they cast their own Ensamble Studio–inspired pieces and reflected on their experience at the art center through watercolor, pencil, pen, and other media. The students’ artwork was on display for a month-long art show at Honey’s Café in Red Lodge in July of 2016. The relationship between Tippet Rise and Luther School continues to grow: during the winters of 2017 and 2018, Tippet Rise sent its Art Education coordinator, Beth Huhtala, to Luther School to teach printmaking over the course of two days. The students created linocuts, gelatin prints, monoprints, and collagraphs. Tippet Rise is thrilled that programs such as these will continue to grow alongside the art center.

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RED LODGE AREA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION In partnership with the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation and the Carbon County Arts Guild, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation brought more than twenty local grade school students to Tippet Rise to participate in a unique workshop with artist Patrick Dougherty during the installation of Daydreams. Students worked alongside Patrick, one of today’s most admired sculptors, learning and building their own sculptures using local willows. Students boarded the bus at the end of the day with arms full of willows for their own future creations. The Tippet Rise Fund also supports the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation’s activities in the community of Red Lodge. For example, with Tippet Rise Fund support, the Community Foundation supports youth programming and the management of the Nonprofit Shared Services Center. RED LODGE MUSIC FESTIVAL The Red Lodge Music Festival has celebrated summer music camp for more than 50 years, focusing on inspiring a love of classical and jazz music in youth. The Festival’s nine-day camp hosts professional faculty to teach student musicians and prepare them to perform in recitals. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation supports scholarships for the Festival’s Honor Ensemble and other students. NYE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION The Nye Community Foundation was founded in 1999 to build a permanent financial base to support and promote projects that will benefit the residents of Nye and the surrounding area. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation provides scholarship funding for the Foundation’s efforts to encourage the higher education dreams of local

students. Since its founding in 1999, the Nye Community Foundation has gifted over $90,000 to community efforts, including scholarships. NYE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is proud to support the Nye Volunteer Fire Department’s fire prevention and protection services. With the Fund’s support, the Department is now better equipped with a custom “wild lands fire truck” and a fire danger sign for the town. The Tippet Rise Fund also purchased equipment and tooling for an off-road tanker truck for the Department and helped to expand community outreach programs for fire-prevention education, such as fuel mitigation around homes and subdivisions and maintenance of fire extinguishers. Tippet Rise Art Center appreciates the hard work and time that volunteer firefighters dedicate to ensure the safety and security of the community and land near the art center and throughout the region. ABSAROKEE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION The Absarokee Community Foundation takes pride in organizing and building a stronger community within Absarokee and its surrounding communities for today and for the future. Through the ACF’s efforts, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation supports local community initiatives for educational, environmental, and social services. Local nonprofit organizations supported by ACF with the help of funders like Tippet Rise Fund include the Absarokee PTA, Husky Wilderness Adventures, Operation Second Chance, Emergency Medical Services, the Absarokee Senior Center, and the Stillwater Valley Watershed Council.

YELLOWSTONE BIGHORN RESEARCH ASSOCIATION A new program offered in partnership with the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association invites guests to explore the geologic wonders of Tippet Rise. Founded at the foot of the Beartooth Mountains by the Princeton Geological Association in 1936, YBRA is dedicated to research and teaching in the field. Over four Thursdays in the summer of 2018, the association’s distinguished faculty will lead tours of the art center’s geologic “hot spots.” ABSAROKEE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation has been proud to support the Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department’s mission to protect and preserve the lives and property of Absarokee area residents. Because the Fund cares about the safety and efficacy of the dedicated Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department volunteers, the Fund has provided support for updating uniforms as well as purchasing new helmets and a thermal imaging camera. The Tippet Rise Fund also purchased new dry suits for swift water rescue, and it supports the Department’s efforts to provide fire safety and prevention education in the local schools. ABSAROKEE PUBLIC SCHOOLS It is a joy to share a love for music with our region’s young people. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation helped support the Nye Elementary music program and also assisted in purchasing equipment for the Absarokee Public Schools’ music departments, including keyboards, MIDI controllers, and orchestral string instruments.

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Tippet Rise Partnerships

We are very fortunate to partner with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the modern art branch of the august Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian is our nation’s museum, and also the world’s largest museum complex, founded in 1846, with nineteen museums and nine research facilities. We are supporting ARTLAB+, their digital lab, which provides training for young people in technologies such as disc jockeying and virtual reality, offering certifications which students can then use for college admissions and later in the job market. Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn, believes in extending the nation’s museum to everyone in the country, not just urban residents. Fishtail is one of the first beneficiaries of that expanded outreach. We thank her, the staff, the Hirshhorn board, and David Skorton, the thirteenth secretary of the Smithsonian, for the loan of Two Discs and Stainless Stealer, both by Alexander Calder. Two Discs was given to the Hirshhorn by its founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, in 1966. This is its first appearance outside Washington, D.C. Joseph Hirshhorn presented Stainless Stealer to the Hirshhorn in 1972. We celebrate as well our friendship with the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, whose artistic director, Anne-Marie McDermott, returns to Tippet Rise to perform once again. Hailed as one of the Top 10 “Can’t Miss” Classical Musical Festivals in the U.S. by National Public Radio, Bravo! Vail is the only festival in North America to host four world-renowned orchestras in a single season: the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, playing in the gorgeous outdoor Ford Amphitheater. The Billings Symphony Orchestra has contributed both the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City Strings to Tippet Rise over the past few years. We support their Explore Music education and outreach program.

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The UK’s National Theatre broadcast its series of recorded plays in the Olivier Music Barn last summer and fall. We also broadcast select performances by Glyndebourne Opera. Tippet Rise’s partner, the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, has helped fund the filming and broadcast of many Glyndebourne, National Theatre, and Royal Shakespeare Company performances over the years. Montana State University Honors College will hold an “Art Expedition” course at Tippet Rise Art Center. The Honors College aims to expand learning beyond the traditional classroom boundaries. Twenty to twenty-five multidisciplinary, highly motivated students will have the opportunity to attend concerts, explore the beautiful natural surroundings, and contemplate the unique, large-scale art installations. Finally, we have been inspired for many years by our friendship with Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley. They generously agreed to part with Mark di Suvero’s iconic Beethoven’s Quartet, which was displayed at Storm King since 2003. Di Suvero’s sculptures have been displayed there since 1968. Widely celebrated as one of the world’s leading sculpture parks, Storm King has welcomed visitors from across the globe for 50 years. Its pristine 500-acre landscape of fields, hills, and woodlands provides the setting for a collection of more than 100 carefully sited sculptures created by some of the most acclaimed artists of our time. Storm King published the first definitive monograph of the works of Mark di Suvero, with 150 photographs.

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The Tippet Rise Team Lindsey Hinmon Director of Outreach and Logistics Lindsey assists in leading Tippet Rise, alongside her husband, Pete. She keeps the art center’s logistics humming smoothly, oversees public relations, and is instrumental to our planning and development. Lindsey coordinates with artists, architects, musicians, community members, and educators, from kindergarten teachers to university deans, as well as leaders from regional and national cultural institutions, welcoming everyone into the Tippet Rise family. In short, Lindsey helps to bring the Tippet Rise vision of nature, music, and art intertwined to full, blooming life—an experience she hopes to share with her Montana friends and people from all over the world. She and Pete live in Red Lodge with their baby girl. Pete Hinmon Director of Operations A lifelong pursuit of adventure in the mountains led Pete to Tippet Rise, where he draws on his experiences to make the organization’s vision a reality. Intrigued by the exploration of art and nature, Pete’s role at Tippet Rise is an adventure in itself. Often working in tandem with his wife, Lindsey, Pete provides team leadership; oversees the art center’s operations, planning, and development; and coordinates the installation of its 304

The Team at Tippet Rise

sculptures. When he isn’t orchestrating Tippet Rise’s many facets, Pete enjoys life with Lindsey and their baby girl, all the better if it’s outside beneath Montana’s big, beautiful sky. Ben Wynthein Ranch Manager Ben oversees ranching operations at Tippet Rise. From May to mid-November, this work includes grazing oversight of 200 to 300 calf-cow pairs, 100 to 120 heifers, and 2,000 to 2,600 head of sheep. He works year-round to improve the art center’s rangeland health as well as its water use and conservation practices. Through these efforts, Ben endeavors to make Tippet Rise an increasingly healthy and viable ranchland, wildlife habitat, and treasured piece of the Montana landscape. In the process, he hopes the art center’s guests can enjoy and experience Montana’s rich ranching heritage. For the past eleven years, Ben has lived with his family on or next to what is now Tippet Rise.

Melissa Moore Communications and Administration Manager From the moment a guest first learns of Tippet Rise to the time they exit the art center’s gates, Melissa helps facilitate their experience from beginning to end. With a background in theater and hospitality, she oversees communication and administration at the art center. From managing the Tippet Rise website and social media accounts to orchestrating event planning and ticketing, her contributions are indispensable to day-today operations and to her colleagues at the art center. Melissa lives in Red Lodge with her husband and two young daughters. Beth Huhtala Art Education Coordinator and Visitor Center Manager With a background in fine art and education, Beth has taught kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as at the college level, running art workshops, teaching classes, and giving tours. She earned a BFA from the University of Wyoming and an MFA from the University of Montana and is a professional artist herself. Beth began working at Tippet Rise as an intern during the inaugural season. Today she manages the visitor center and oversees our art education programs, which focus on art, music, architecture, and conservation through hands-on workshops for all ages.

Alexis Adams Publications Administrator Alexis helps to write and edit articles and other content for the Tippet Rise website, and she assists with our public relations efforts. Although she often works behind the scenes, her favorite days are spent at the art center working alongside her colleagues, helping guests, and marveling at the extraordinary acoustics of the Olivier Music Barn. She is also a freelance writer, contributing to Oxford University Press, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and other publications, often writing about Greece, where she has lived off and on since childhood. Today Alexis lives in Red Lodge with her children, a bird dog, and a couple of Greek cats. Monte Nickles Audio Engineer and Technical Systems Engineer Monte maintains the Olivier Music Barn’s state-of-the-art audio-video systems and supervises all audio recordings of performances at Tippet Rise, which he masters in ultra-high-fidelity formats and in 9.1 surround-sound. With a Bachelor’s degree in Audio Production from Webster University in St. Louis, his background also includes recording the St. Louis Symphony’s performances for several years. But Monte not only records performances; he also performs: on the trumpet, which he has played since childhood. 2018 Summer Season

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Dan Luttschwager Maintenance and Operations Assistant Dan helps to maintain the buildings, mechanical systems, vehicles, and equipment at Tippet Rise. Always willing to help with whatever is needed, he is not only indispensable to the art center’s operations, but also a friendly face to guests, artists, and staff alike. A lifelong Montanan, Dan loves the outdoors, especially the mountains, rivers, and streams, which he explores by raft as often as possible. He and his wife, Yvonne, live near Absarokee, Montana. They have three children and four wonderful grandchildren. Dan is proud to be on the Tippet Rise staff, believing it to be “one of the greatest places there is.” Carl Mayer Maintenance, Events, and Special Project Assistant Carl has served as interpretive ranger at Tippet Rise since the inaugural season, patrolling the art center’s 10,000-plus acres by mountain bike and providing insight and guidance to our guests as they explore our trail system on foot and by bike. He also serves as 306

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events crew, assisting with the setup and breakdown of concerts. When not working as a ranger or on the events crew, Carl helps to complete a wide variety of projects and assists with the coordination of new building endeavors. Originally from the great state of Maine, Carl has a degree in Biology from Saint Lawrence University in upstate New York. Emily Rund Assistant Editor and Production Coordinator Emily works with musicians, actors, and her fellow video crew members to film Tippet Rise performances and other productions, films that she later helps to edit. Her personal interests include hiking and skiing, all the better if it’s with a few dogs. She also enjoys filmmaking, stop-motion animation, and photography. Emily was born in Maryland, went to school in Richmond, Virginia, and moved to Montana in the summer of 2017 to work for Tippet Rise.

Craig M. White Creative Consultant and Graphic Designer While Craig has had many management positions with national marketing and advertising firms, he has never wandered far from what he likes doing the most. Since his very first position at D’Arcy MacManus and Masius, the creative process—writing, designing, and working in radio and television production— was where he felt most comfortable and productive. Tippet Rise is the perfect fit for Craig. Here his artistry and skills as a graphic designer have helped create beautiful advertising pieces, brochures, and the book you are holding in your hands. His participation doesn’t stop there either; he has contributed to our signage program, trail maps, even our ticketing programs. It’s difficult to find a project at Tippet Rise that Craig hasn’t had a hand in helping to create.

Jeanne Reid White Special Projects Advisor Jeanne draws on a background of management, strategic planning, marketing, finance, and institutional advancement for diverse organizations ranging from international sports events to classical orchestral, chamber music, and jazz concerts. She enjoys sharing the mission of the Tippet Rise Art Center and providing communities with live classical and contemporary music of the highest level while creating educational opportunities for audiences of all kinds. She finds it deeply fulfilling to work with artists from all genres, helping them to realize their creative visions and then sharing them with audiences in the Olivier Music Hall, on the land of Tippet Rise, and throughout the virtual world. Jeanne and her husband, Craig, enjoy skiing, hiking, traveling, and all kinds of live music performances.

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Thank you to the many others on the Tippet Rise team who help to keep the art center flourishing.

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Chris Clark Along with the team she brings to assist her, Chris works behind the scenes to keep the Cottonwood Campus and other Tippet Rise structures clean, warm, and welcoming. With her infectious smile and longtime roots in this region, Chris makes Tippet Rise feel like home.

Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed Chefs Nick and Wendi of Wild Flower Kitchen provide delicious sustenance to our guests, artists, and staff. Nick was born in London, the child of a Brit and a Montanan. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon. Wendi, who is from Los Angeles, studied at Johnson & Wales University in Denver. The two met in Colorado and moved to Montana to live at Nick’s family’s cabin in Fishtail and run his family’s B & B in Absarokee. After selling the B & B in 2015, they started Wild Flower Kitchen. Their mission—to use all-natural, organic, and local ingredients whenever possible—keeps us happy and well fed at Tippet Rise.

Laura Viklund Architect, Gunnstock Timber Frames Growing up outside of Boston then moving to rural Wyoming, Laura has her foot in two different worlds. Her introduction to timber framing nearly 15 years ago decidedly altered her life’s trajectory. Laura worked as a timber framer for several years before attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design to earn her Master’s in Architecture. She and her husband, Chris Gunn, founded Gunnstock Timber Frames in 2005. At Tippet Rise, Gunnstock’s contributions include Will’s Shed, the artists’ residences, the Tiara Acoustic Shell, and the extraordinary Olivier Music Barn. 2018 Summer Season

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The Romance of the Piano Why the piano? This is like asking mountaineers, “why mountains?” “Because they’re there” is the standard evasion, but Victorians climbed because the world was undiscovered, exotic, unnamed, and the darkest jungles, the highest peaks were a way of seeing strange lands through children’s eyes. (Only later would we begin seeing the world through the eyes of the people who had actually been there all along.) We love mountains because the sidewalk outside our apartment doesn’t have séracs, arrêtes, couloirs, nunataks, Brocken spectres. Houses don’t have hallucinations. The street where we live doesn’t have yetis. We crave places with no vocabularies. Where we have to make the names up. In a word, the Romantic. The Temple of Doom. The Mountains of the Moon. A mountain isn’t just a stairway to heaven. Rope bridges along the way lead to eroding trails cut into sheer cliffs: all the way to heaven is heaven. It’s the terror, the righteousness of self-deprivation, the complete freedom of adventure: no office, no calls, no family, no debts (no immediate debts, anyway). Man in his Element. (Usually women are

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sensibly distant.) Possibly bloodthirsty savages await. Possibly you are the bloodthirsty savage. Your country calls. Edmund Hillary summited Everest on the Queen’s Coronation. Germans climbed the Eiger for the Kaiser. This romance with abnormal topography, with inaccessible geography, is why H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines have proved so enduring—as have C. S. Forester’s African Queen or James Hilton’s Lost Horizon—anything with monkeys, temples, and questionable cults. In the same way, pianos aren’t just accordions on legs. Or organs without bellows. They are the death dance of Liszt and Saint-Saëns. They are Faustian deals with the devil, with strings attached. They are coffeehouses in Berlin and Vienna, the twilight of a lazy European afternoon. Beethoven’s widening gyres in Bonn and then Vienna, where he heard the future as he became deaf to the present. They are Schumann’s overtures and Brahms’s regrets to the same amazing woman, Clara Wieck. They are Chopin’s anthems to the idea of Polish freedom, even though he left Poland because of its limitations. They are Glenn Gould’s idea of North. Even though he never went farther north than an hour from where he lived in Toronto. But he understood the idea.

Pianos are what Hoagy Carmichael played at Rick’s in Casablanca. Or how Bobby Short summoned up Cole Porter at the Carlyle. Pianos are the jazz that Cziffra played in Paris clubs before he became famous as the world’s greatest virtuoso. Or the jazz that Aznavour played in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Or the Chopin that saved Szpielman’s life in the true story behind the film The Pianist. Or the salvation of the world in Anderson & Roe’s ominously entertaining Rite of Spring. I used to play Chopin preludes while my mother cooked, and I can still hear her calling out my mistakes from the kitchen. So pianos conjure up our parents. If you’re lucky enough to have children who play, you can hear their minds expanding as they turn into people at the piano before your own eyes and ears. So pianos are our children, too.

It isn’t just the music. Music is the tip of the iceberg. Pianos are mountains, symbols of lost dreams and horizons, tropic seas where the waves wash in between the palms, an escape where discipline gives you freedom. Pianos let you hear your own soul, growing like vines. They will give you, your children, your parents, and yourselves an extraordinary life, whether or not you ever make it to Carnegie Hall. And so we hope we leave you with the sound of something ringing in your ears that will make you think of us through the seemingly eternal snows of winter (at least last winter seemed like that), and bring you back to us next summer: hopeful, energized, and encouraged. —Cathy, Peter and the Team at Tippet Rise

When I was young, my friends had baseball. I had the Beethoven Sonatas, and summer music camp. The pieces I used to play are like Proust’s madeleines: with them, my childhood comes flooding back, as baseball brings it back for my friends. Pianos are the tip of centuries of accumulated romance. They are mountain climbs in the moonlight, songs of passionate love, entire decades of fading amber light in European drawing rooms, the promise of new lives in America (Rhapsody in Blue).

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If Design Govern

When I commit an essay to the abyss of publication, I usually abandon hope. But when I send text to Craig White, I know he will take its heavy blockish overcoat and turn it into a butterfly, interweaving it with fonts and photos and well-tuned borders until it floats enticingly above its heavy skeleton. The Vail Valley was fortunate to have his sense of taste and eye for beauty during its long gestation from a ski resort to a cultural center, and now Tippet Rise is the benficiary of his energy, focus, expertise, and modesty. Craig is the ultimate team player for our family; calm and unassuming, he can always be counted on to defuse the rigors of deadlines and overwhelming schedules with his humor, steadiness, and indefatigable good nature. His mark is on our maps, brochures, ads, art guides, summer programs, and books such as A Winter Ride, where his sense of texture, lightness, grain, paper, and the role of both design and photographs in the narration of a Montana winter have created an ideal balance between the intensity of the language and the elegance of the page itself. Coleridge felt that a poem should â&#x20AC;&#x153;surview" its contents, that its surface should be a portal into its less apparent depths: the cupboard into the kingdom of Narnia. Craig provides that window.

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â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Peter Halstead

The Team at Tippet Rise

Photography

Iwan Baan Andre Costantini Peter Halstead James Florio Paul Johnson Kathy Kasic Kevin Kinzley Erik Petersen Yevgeny Subdin Craig M. White Djuna Zupancic Cover Photo - Yevgeny Sudbin

Text

Peter Halstead and the Tippet Rise Team

Program Notes

Peter Halstead and Benjamin Pesetsky

Editor

Benjamin Pesetsky Additional Editing by Amy Holmes and RenĂŠ Saller

Creative Consulting and Design Craig M. White

Production

McKenzie Designs, LLC

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CONCERT PERFORMANCES FROM OUR 2017 MUSIC SEASON Ravel: Miroirs No. 1, Noctuelles (Moths): Performed by Julien Brocal, https://vimeo.com/348693174 Ravel: Miroirs No. 2, Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds): Performed by Julien Brocal, https://vimeo.com/348710115 Ravel: Miroirs No. 3, Une Barque sur l’Ocean (A Boat on the Ocean): Performed by Julien Brocal, https://vimeo.com/348667669 Ravel: Miroirs No. 4, Alborada del Gracioso (The Jesters Aubade): Performed by Julien Brocal,

https://vimeo.com/348673096

Ravel: Miroirs No. 5, La Vallée des Cloches (The Valley of the Bells): Performed by Julien Brocal,

https://vimeo.com/348899052

Gubaidulina: And He Returned to His Home: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser,

https://vimeo.com/351812798

Gubaidulina: Listen to the Small Voice Within: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser,

https://vimeo.com/351811237

Gubaidulina: Rejoice, Rabbi!: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser, https://vimeo.com/351805754 Gubaidulina: Your Joy No Man Can Taketh from You: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser,

https://vimeo.com/351466684

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Gubaidulina: Rejoice with Them That Do Rejoice: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Johannes Moser,

https://vimeo.com/351809931

Shostakovich: Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40, Allegro non troppo: Performed by Johannes Moser and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351800655 Shostakovich: Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40, Allegro: Performed by Johannes Moser and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351796083 Shostakovich: Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40, Allegro: Performed by Johannes Moser and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351794725 Schnittke: Tango from Life with an Idiot: Performed by Vadim Gluzman, Johannes Moser, and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351650601 Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, K. 301, Allegro: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351788006 Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, K. 301, Allegro con spirito: Performed by Vadim Gluzman and Yevgeny Sudbin, https://vimeo.com/351790638 John Luther Adams- Songbirdsongs, Movement V. Mourning Dove: https://vimeo.com/351494067 Bach: O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 1085 (trans. Kurtag): Performed by Jeffrey Kahane and Gabriel Kahane, https://vimeo.com/345999657

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Tippet Rise Staff and Credits Founders Cathy and Peter Halstead Artistic Advisor Charles Hamlen Director of Operations Pete Hinmon Director of Outreach and Logistics Lindsey Hinmon Ranch Manager Ben Wynthein Communication and Administration Manager Melissa Moore Art Education Coordinator and Visitor Center Manager Beth Huhtala Publications Administrator Alexis M. Adams Special Projects Advisor

Jeanne Reid White

Assistant Editor and Production Coordinator Emily Rund Audio Engineer and Technical Systems Engineer Monte Nickles Piano Technicians Mike Toia, Tali Mahanor, Drew Carter Maintenance and Operations Assistant Dan Luttschwager Maintenance, Events, and Special Project Assistant Carl Mayer Head of Housekeeping Chris Clark Food Services & Catering Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed / Wild Flower Kitchen

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Creative Consultant and Graphic Design Craig M. White Photography Iwan Baan, AndrĂŠ Costantini, Peter Halstead, James Florio, Paul Johnson, Kevin Kinzley, Erik Petersen, Yevgeny Sudbin, Craig M. White Website Design Crush & Lovely Public Relations Polskin Arts & Communications/A Division of Finn Partners, and Skinner/Benoit Public Relations Lead Design and Planning

Alban Bassuet

Architecture (Olivier Barn, Residences, Tiara, Willâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Shed) Laura Viklund and Chris Gunn, Gunnstock Timber Frames Architecture (Energy Building, Daydreams Schoolhouse, Solar Canopy) CTA Architects Engineers Acoustician Alban Bassuet Landscape Architect Lisa Delplace and Liz Stetson from Oehme, van Sweden Interior Design Cynthia Waters LEED Consulting High Plains Architects Design and Engineering Arup Local Civil Engineering DOWL Local Engineering MKK Engineering Construction Management Engel Construction, Inc., and On Site Management, Inc.

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ÂŠ 2018 Tippet Rise, LLC Two Discs and Stainless Stealer photos, by permission, ÂŠ 2018 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic or mechanical (including photo copy, film or video recording, internet posting, or any other information storage and retrieval system), without the prior, written consent of the publisher. Visit tippetrise.org for more information about the artists, tours, events, videos of performances, and interviews. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905935 ISBN 978-1-7323390-2-6 Printed by Thomas Printing, Billings, Montana

Printed on 100% Post-Consumer Recycled Fiber, FSC, SFI, Green-e, Processed Chlorine-Free, and Ancient-Forest Friendly. Cover printed on 10% Post-Consumer Recycled Fiber, FSC. 96 South Grove Creek Road, Fishtail, MT 59028 406-328-7820 tippetrise.org

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