horowitz piano series
Boris Berman, Artistic Director
Robert Blocker
with
Phil Setzer, violin · Tai Murray, violin
Abby Smith, viola · Paul Watkins, cello
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
José García-León, Dean
Program
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756–1791
Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, K. 414
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondeau. Allegretto
Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major, K. 415
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondeau. Allegretto
Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andantino
III. Allegro ma non troppo
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profiles
Robert Blocker, piano
Robert Blocker, the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Piano at Yale University and former dean of the Yale School of Music, has forged an inspired and multifaceted career as an internationally acclaimed pianist, impassioned educator, and renowned transformative leader. The Los Angeles Times described Blocker as an “artist of great skill and accomplishment” who performs with “a measurable virtuoso bent and considerable sensitivity,” while The Straits Times (Singapore) lauded the “beauty and sincerity” of his playing.
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Blocker began his study of piano at age five and presented his first public recital two years later. Today, Blocker performs throughout the world as a recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist. Later this season, he resumes his annual concert tours in China, where he has performed with Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Suzhou, and other symphonies in the major concert venues of that country. He is an Honorary Professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and curates an artist series at Yale Center Beijing.
His newest recording, eight contemporary character pieces by Yale composers, was recently released by Nimbus (UK), and Yale University Press will publish his second book in 2025, titled Music: The Currency of Hope.
Phil Setzer, violin
Violinist Philip Setzer is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet. He teaches as Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at SUNY Stony Brook and has given master classes at schools around the world. He serves as Director of the Shouse Institute, the teaching division of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Detroit. As a faculty member of the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center, Mr. Setzer wrote an article about those workshops that appeared in The New York Times on the occasion of Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday celebration in 2000. A versatile musician with innovative vision, Setzer is the mastermind behind the Emerson’s two highly praised collaborative theater productions: The Noise of Time, premiered at Lincoln Center in 2001; in 2016, Setzer teamed up with writer-director James Glossman and co-created the Emerson’s latest music/ theater project, Shostakovich and the Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy. Setzer also has been touring and recording the piano trios of Schubert and Mendelssohn with David Finckel and Wu Han.
Tai Murray, violin
Violinist Tai Murray has been described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a violinist with more than technique on her mind” and a musician of “exceptional assurance and style.” A winner of the 2004 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Murray has appeared in recital and with major ensembles around the world including the Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, BBC
Artist Profiles
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has been named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and has been a member of Chamber Music Society II at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A 2012 recipient of the Sphinx Organization’s Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Murray is dedicated to championing music by living composers. Her recordings include an album of Ysaÿe sonatas (harmonia mundi), 20th Century: The American Scene (eaSonus), and a recording of Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) on the Mirare label. Murray is an assistant professor (adjunct) of violin at the Yale School of Music, where she teaches applied violin and coaches chamber music. She earned artist diplomas from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and the Juilliard School.
Abby Smith, viola
Abby Smith is a graduate student at the Yale School of Music, where she studies with Ettore Causa. Previously, she attended the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles where she studied with Paul Coletti, Yura Lee, Teng Li, and Tatjana Masurenko. An accomplished and devoted orchestral and chamber musician, Abby attended the Festival Del Lago in Ajijic, Mexico in the summer of 2024. She was a Tanglewood Music Center orchestral fellow for the summers of 2022 and 2023 and performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed as a section substitute with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Abby has won major prizes in several national viola and chamber music competitions, including the Oneppo
Chamber Music Competition, Enkor International Competition, St. Paul String Quartet Competition, the WDAV Young Chamber Musicians Competition, the Pasadena Chamber Music Competition, received the 2019 Wendell Irish Viola Award and was a Quarter-finalist for the International Cecil Aronowitz Viola Competition.
Paul Watkins, cello
Acclaimed for his inspirational performances and eloquent musicianship, Paul Watkins enjoys a distinguished career as concerto soloist, chamber musician and conductor. Born in 1970, he studied with William Pleeth, Melissa Phelps and Johannes Goritzki, and at the age of 20 was appointed Principal Cellist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. During his solo career he has collaborated with world renowned conductors including Sakari Oramo, Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Mark Elder, Andris Nelsons, Sir Andrew Davis, and Sir Charles Mackerras. He performs regularly with all the major British orchestras and others further afield, including with the Norwegian Radio, Royal Flemish Philharmonic, Melbourne Symphony and Queensland Orchestras. He has also made eight concerto appearances at the BBC Proms, most recently with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in the world premiere of the cello concerto composed for him by his brother, Huw Watkins, and premiered (and was the dedicatee of) Mark-Anthony Turnage’s cello concerto. His first recording as a conductor, of the Berg and Britten violin concertos with Daniel Hope, received a Grammy® nomination.
Program Notes
written by Cliff Eisen
In the spring of 1781, Mozart was dismissed from Salzburg court service and took up permanent residence in Vienna, a city that offered more opportunities for advancement than his hometown. The best route to success was to make his name as a keyboard player: “my specialty is too popular here for me not to be able to support myself,” he wrote to his father on June 2, 1791, “This is without doubt the land of the piano.” Almost immediately, he set about collecting the local nobility as patrons, playing at their houses and giving them piano lessons. During the late spring and summer, he also determined to present himself to the public as a composer - an adult composer, not the child prodigy Vienna remembered him as. Thus, he set to work on a collection of sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment, K. 296 and K. 376-380, which he published in December.
Unlike Paris and London of this era, Vienna did not support regular public concerts, the concept of a standing orchestra outside the court theater was unthinkable to Mozart, which provided few opportunities for him to showcase the greatest vehicle for his virtuosity, the concerto. Concertos for keyboard, in fact, were relatively uncommon in Vienna until late in the 1780s. In an attempt to carve out a market for himself Mozart organized his first subscription concerts in the 1783–1784 season, with each concert an opportunity for him to showcase a new work for keyboard and orchestra. Mozart, in the winter of 1783–1784, thought to sell manuscript copies of his new concertos
to the public on a subscription basis. An advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung, on January 15, 1783, noted: “Herr Kapellmeister Mozart herewith apprizes the highly honoured public of the publication of three new, recently finished pianoforte concertos. These 3 concert0s… may be performed either with a large orchestra with wind instruments or merely a quattro, that is with 2 violins, 1 viola and [1] violoncello…”. These were K. 413, K. 414, and K. 415 composed that winter. However, Mozart’s scheme failed, and on February 15, 1783, he wrote to his patroness, Baroness von Waldstatten, that he was making “slow progress with the subscription of my concertos”. He later sold the works to the Viennese manuscript music dealer, Lorenz Lausch and an engraved edition was published by Artaria in March 1785. In the meantime, Mozart performed the works on several occasions, notably at concerts hosted by the singer Therese Teyber and possibly at a charity concert in December 1783. This concert was organized by a Viennese society that provided pensions for the widows and orphans of local musicians.
K. 449, dated February 9, 1784, was composed by Mozart for his pupil Barbara Ployer, the daughter of a local tax collector Franz Kajetan Ployer. She lived in Döbling, a suburb of Vienna, with her father’s cousin Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, who was a representative on the Education Commission and at the High Court of Justice as well as a Salzburg court agent in Vienna. Ployer’s first performance of K. 449 is unknown, although it is possible that she performed it at a concert on June 13, 1784. It is likely that this concert also
Program Notes cont.
included K. 453, another concerto written for her by Mozart. The June 13 concert is the first documented concert that Ployer played a Mozart concerto. It is likely that Mozart himself performed the work at one of his private concerts at the Trattnerhoff, a local concert hall, on March 17, 24 and 31, 1784.
The two other concertos played by Mozart at these concerts were the newly composed K. 450 and K. 451. Clearly K. 449 was a different sort of work, something the composer himself noted in a letter to his father on May 26, 1784: “the one in E-flat doesn’t belong in this group - this is a concerto of a very special kind and written more for a small orchestra than a large one…”. This ties it closely to the earlier set, K. 413–K. 415.
Mozart promoted these concertos as performable with a string quartet, although this was likely a marketing ploy. Regardless of Mozart’s advertisements, there are clear signs that point to Mozart thinking of these concertos as chamber-like works. Unique among his concerto autographs, the lowest part of the C-major concerto, K. 415, the most ‘heroic’ of the set, was originally assigned to a cello without double bass. What is more, the work’s trumpet and timpani parts were not part of the original conception but added later. All three concertos, and K. 449 as well, may therefore have originated as works performable in a variety of circumstances and scorings. The autograph of K. 499, although completed between 1783–1784 shows that it originated in the winter of
1782–1783, the same time as K. 413–K. 415, underscoring the connection between these concertos.
Certainly, the works are more intimate than Mozart’s later ‘grand’ concertos and none more so than K. 414. Not only is its original orchestration smaller than that of K. 413 or K. 415, consisting only of strings, oboes and horns, but its themes relate closely to other A-major themes by Mozart. Other works follow this trend as well, including the piano sonata K. 331, the clarinet quintet K. 581 and the piano concerto K. 488, all of which can be characterized as gentle, even nostalgic. Nostalgia is surely the operative gesture in the slow movement of K. 414, which is thought to be a tribute to his English mentor Johann Christian Bach. It includes a nearly exact quote from J. C. Bach’s 1763 overture to La calamitá de cuori. Mozart had probably learned of Johann Christian’s death (January 1, 1782) only shortly before the composition of K. 414. On April 10, 1782, he wrote to his father Leopold, “I supposed you already know that the English Bach has died? What a loss to the musical world!”.
K. 413 might be considered ‘galant’, discarding the overly asymmetrical and harmonically over-rich excesses of the late Salzburg works, instead displaying a leanness, precision and forward motion not found in pre-1782 concertos - a feature shared with the other concertos of this set. K. 449 adds another element to Mozart’s arsenal of new expressive gestures: overt counterpoint, which is especially prominent in the finale. The
first two movements also have their beauties: the opening Allegro vivace is remarkable for its exploitation of the ambiguity between major and minor, while the Andantino is the first of several luxurious, ornamental slow movements that are characteristic of his Viennese concertos overall.
It is no surprise that K. 413, K. 414, K. 415, and K. 449 were a success. In a letter on December 28, 1782, Mozart himself described his concertos, especially the 1782–1783 set, as “a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, [and] natural without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”
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