PLEASE SILENCE ALL ELECTRONIC DEVICES

Sonata No. 8 in G major, Opus 30, No. 3 Ludwig van Beethoven Allego assai Tempo di minuetto, ma molto moderato e grazioso Allegro vivace

Berlin Music (2010) Brett Dean

Sonata in D Major, K. 306 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Allegro con spirito Andantino cantabile Allegretto—Allegro

Intermission

Divertimento after The Fairy’s Kiss Igor Stravinsky (Homage to Tchaikovsky) Sinfonia: Andante—Allegro sostenuto—Andante Danses suisses (No pause before this movement) Scherzo Pas de deux: Adagio—Variation—Coda

Valse-scherzo, Opus 34 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Schubert Club

presents

Augustin Hadelich, violinJoyce Yang, piano

Tuesday, November 29, 2016, 7:30 PM | Ordway Concert HallThursday, December 1, 2016, 10:30 AM | Ordway Concert Hall

Pre-concert conversation by David Evan Thomasone hour before the performance

These concerts are dedicated in memory of Charlotte P. Ordway, by her children

Please hold applause between movements

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Continuing to astonish audiences with his phenomenal technique, poetic sensitivity, and gorgeous tone, Augustin Hadelich has established himself as one of the great violinists of his generation. His remarkable consistency throughout the repertoire, from Paganini to Adès, is seldom encountered in a single artist.

Highlights of his 2015-2016 season include debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, and the Finnish Radio Orchestra, as well as return performances with the London Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphonies of Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Louisville, Milwaukee, New Jersey, Oregon, Seattle, Utah, and Vancouver. Other projects include a return to the Wigmore Hall in London, a recording with the London Philharmonic, a residency with the Bournemouth Symphony, and numerous recital appearances in Germany.

With the 2015-2016 season’s addition of the Chicago and Pittsburgh symphonies, Mr. Hadelich will have appeared with every major orchestra and chamber orchestra in the U.S., several on numerous occasions. Festival appearances include his 2015 debuts at Ravinia and the Grand Teton Music Festival, as well as return engagements at Aspen and Bravo! Vail Valley. He has also performed at Blossom, Britt, Chautauqua (where he made his American debut in 2001), Eastern Music Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, Marlboro, and Tanglewood.

Among Mr. Hadelich’s recent and upcoming worldwide appearances are the Badische Staatskapelle, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Danish National Symphony, Dresden Philharmonic, German Radio Philharmonic, Helsinki Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Malaysia Philharmonic, Mozarteum Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, NHK Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, RTE National Symphony Orchestra, São Paulo Symphony, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, and a highly acclaimed tour of China with theSan Diego Symphony.

Mr. Hadelich plays on the 1723 “Ex-Kiesewetter” Stradivari violin, on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Augustin Hadelich is represented by Schmidt Artists International.

Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Sanborn International Artist Series

Born in 1986 in Seoul, South Korea, Joyce Yang received her first piano lesson at the age of four. She quickly took to the instrument, which she received as a birthday present, and over the next few years won several national piano competitions in her native country. By the age of ten, she had entered the School of Music at the Korea National University of Arts, and went on to make a number of concerto and recital appearances in Seoul and Daejeon. In 1997, Yang moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of the Juilliard School with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky. During her first year at Juilliard, Yang won the pre-college division Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D with the Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra. After winning the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just twelve years old. She graduated from Juilliard with special honor as the recipient of the school’s 2010 Arthur Rubinstein Prize, and in 2011 she won its 30th Annual William A. Petschek Piano Recital Award.

Blessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), pianist Joyce Yang captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism, and interpretive prowess. As a Van Cliburn International Piano Competition silver medalist and Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, Yang showcases her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians.

These concerts are dedicated in memory of Charlotte P. Ordway, by her children

Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Sanborn International Artist Series November 29/December 1

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Sonata No. 8 in G major, Opus 30, No. 3 Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Bonn, 1770; d. Vienna, 1827)

Opus 30 is the third batch of Beethoven’s early violin sonatas (after Opus 12 and the composite Opus 23/24). Composed in 1802, this set was published in the spring of 1803 jointly by the Viennese Bureau d’Arts et d’Industrie and in London by Joseph Dale. 1802 was the year in which Beethoven wrote ruefully that he found himself “not always able to escape indolence.” If we look at the catalogue of his works, we in turn can find that it was also the year in which he composed, along with Opus 30, the three piano sonatas, Opus 31, the Second Symphony, and the Piano Concerto No. 3. To a friend he reported that “I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the next is already begun. The way I write now I often find myself working three, four things at the same time.”

Beethoven, c. 1804by Jos. Mähler

Yang came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at 19 years old, she took home two additional awards: the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for Best Performance of Chamber Music (with the Takàcs Quartet) and the Beverley Taylor Smith Award for Best Performance of a New Work.

Since her spectacular debut, she has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). She has performed as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Baltimore, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Sydney, and Toronto symphony orchestras, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and the BBC Philharmonic (among many others), working with such distinguished conductors as James Conlon, Edo de Waart, Lorin Maazel, Peter Oundjian, David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, Bramwell Tovey, and Jaap van Zweden. In recital, Yang has taken the stage at New York’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Chicago’s Symphony Hall; and Zurich’s Tonhalle.

In spring 2014, Yang “demonstrated impressive gifts” (New York Times) with a trio of album releases: her second solo disc for Avie Records, Wild Dreams, on which she plays Schumann, Bartók, Hindemith, Rachmaninoff, and arrangements by Earl Wild; a pairing of the Brahms and Schumann Piano Quintets with the Alexander Quartet; and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Denmark’s Odense Symphony Orchestra that International Record Review called “hugely enjoyable, beautifully shaped —a performance that marks her out as an enormous talent.” Of her 2011 debut album for Avie Records, Collage, featuring works by Scarlatti, Liebermann, Debussy, Currier, and Schumann, Gramophone praised her “imaginative programming” and “beautifully atmospheric playing.” On the Avie label, Yang joins Hadelich to record a duo disc (featuring a repertoire of Schumann, Kurtág, Franck, and Previn) slated for 2016 release.

Program Notes

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Berlin Music (2010) Brett Dean

Australian composer and violist Brett Dean (b. Brisbane, 1961) studied in Brisbane before moving to Germany in 1984 where he was a permanent member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for fourteen years. Now one of the most

The G-major Sonata begins in a whirlwind of spinning sixteenth-notes. This turns out to be the wind-up to an exuberant shot into the sky. Ideas are short, sharply contrasted, epigrammatic, and the second theme surprises us by being in D minor. The development is brief, but with its chains of trills—a device Beethoven would explore more and more deeply over time—and its descents into the deepest bass regions, the violin answering from very high up and far away, it is a most exciting episode.

The first movement’s keynote, G, is also the first note we hear in the second movement, but the harmony Beethoven slips under it, mellow E-flat major, gives it a meaning a world apart. The tender music is in the manner of a minuet, but, Beethoven adds, very moderate in tempo as well as grazioso. But we do have those sforzando accents to assure us this is really Beethoven. It comes to us like the most natural, spontaneous music in the world, but the sketches show that getting it to sound that way cost Beethoven immense trouble. Each time the lovely opening tune returns it is newly scored, and always with magical effect. The last movement, Beethoven’s take on a Haydn finale, is another whirlwind, a perpetual motion. It pays a deliciously surprising visit to the second movement’s E-flat major, although in a completely different mood, and it ends in a riot of offbeat accents and in unbuttoned exuberance.Program note © by Michael SteinbergUsed by kind permission of Jorja Fleezanis.

internationally performed composers of his generation, much of Dean’s work draws from literary, political, environmental or visual stimuli, including a number of compositions inspired by paintings by his wife Heather Betts. “I like voices to sing,” Dean has said. “I like long lines and melodic motivic materials, which have the capacity to include really important DNA information about a piece. It does help the understanding of a piece for an audience which is confronting it for the first time, without making it necessarily ‘easy.’” His music is championed by many of the leading conductors and orchestras worldwide, including Sir Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons and Marin Alsop. Dean received the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for his violin concerto, The Lost Art of Letter Writing.

Berlin Music was written for Midori, and was premiered by her in Stockholm with Charles Abramovic, piano in 2011. The composer offers this note:

Berlin Music, written in July–August 2010 during my first extended period back in the city in more than ten years, pays homage to the role Berlin’s rich musical life played in my development as musician and composer.

The first four, relatively short movements form a suite of character pieces that are followed by a lengthier final movement. In fact, work on the piece began with this final Hauptsatz—or “main movement”—and it serves therefore as both wellspring and summary of the ideas and harmonies found in all of the preceding movements. As my starting point in this particular instance, I noted several violin chords and sonorities that came about by playing around on a fiddle with the G string tuned down a whole tone to F. It is remarkable how significant a change such a seemingly small adjustment like this can make to the overall sound, color and resonance of the instrument. Furthermore, hitherto impossible passagework then becomes quite playable, such as the extended passage of running major sixths in the violin part early on in the final movement.

In addition, the violinist is required to play the third movement moto perpetuo using a practice mute, while the pianist changes instruments and plays an adjacent upright piano, similarly muted by a practice pedal. The nervous energy emitting from closed practice rooms, such as I remember so intensely from my student days at Berlin’s Hochschule in Bundesallee, momentarily takes center stage. –Brett Dean

Brett Dean

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Dushkin and Stravinsky

Divertimento, after The Fairy’s KissIgor Stravinsky(b. Lomonosov, Russia, 1882; d. New York City, 1971)

Stravinsky’s collaborator on most of his violin works was Samuel Dushkin, a Polish-American student of Auer and Kreisler who was some ten years younger than the composer. For several years they toured together in recital, even stopping in Minneapolis on a 1935 American tour. Beginning with the 1931 Violin Concerto, Dushkin crafted the composer’s violin writing in the Duo concertante, Suite italienne (an arrangement of material from Pulchinella) and this Divertimento. Stravinsky praised Dushkin’s “remarkable gifts as a violinist” and “delicate understanding.” Dushkin found Stravinsky’s music “so original and so personal that it constantly posed new problems of technique and sound for the violin,” adding: “these problems often touched the core of the composition itself.”

The Fairy’s Kiss (Le baiser de la fée), an orchestral ballet commissioned by Ida Rubinstein for her company, was composed in the summer of 1928 largely at Echarvines in the French Alps. Stravinsky wholeheartedly embraced the choreographer’s idea to use Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and songs to tell the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ice Maiden. Tchaikovsky’s music was a life-long passion for Stravinsky. The Stravinsky household boasted a photograph of Tchaikovsky inscribed to Igor’s father, a bass, commemorating the singer’s performance as the monk in Tchaikovsky’s opera The Sorceress.

Sonata in D Major, K. 306 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (b. Salzburg, 1756; d. Vienna, 1791)

The six so-called “Kurfürstin” sonatas, K. 301–306, were products of a journey Mozart undertook in 1777–78 to find a permanent position. Departing Salzburg in September 1777, Mozart’s itinerary took him to Mannheim, where he fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber; to Paris, where he stayed from March to September 1778; back to Mannheim, where Mozart presented his sonatas to the Palatine Electress (Kurfürstin); and home in January 1779. The set of six was published by Jean-Georges Sieber in Paris as Mozart’s Opus 1. All but this last Sonata in D Major are in two movements, and this is the only one with a true slow movement. Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein calls K. 306 “simply a great concert sonata in which Mozart tries to forget that he is writing for amateurs: brilliant, sonorous and rich in the first movement; concertante in the Andante cantabile and the Finale.”

As is natural in a sonata “for piano and violin,” piano states the opening theme, while violin reinforces the bass. The second theme, proposed by the violin, tends toward the minor mode. In developing this material, violin at first quaintly mimics the piano’s right hand, then collaborates in a series of rigorous sequences. Lest anyone think there is a single formula for a sonata movement, Mozart brings back the themes in reverse order. The main subject serves as a coda.

Emphasis in the Andantino is on song, as violin enters on a sustained tone—but discreetly, mezza voce—then adds a counterpoint to piano’s opening theme.

The closing Allegretto is a binary system: partners embrace for a gracious, French rondo theme, then cavort to a saucy Italianate tune. After several go-rounds, there is a cadenza for both partners, with the piano making the first move. One is reminded of Papageno’s song in The Magic Flute, “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” and it’s hard not to imagine Mozart in love.

Countess Palatine Elisabeth

Auguste of Sulzbach, dedicatee of

the “Kurfürstin” sonatas

Program Notes continued

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Yosif Kotek and Tchaikovsky

Nadezhda von Meck

In drawing on Tchaikovsky’s music, Stravinsky employed a process common in the Renaissance called parody (a term used here in a descriptive not derogatory sense). He had made just such a parody of “Pergolesi’s” music in Pulchinella.“ As an act of homage, The Fairy’s Kiss is surely one of the most curious ever conceived by one composer for another,” writes Lawrence Morton. “Stravinsky treats Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre “as a storehouse of raw material, not unlike a collection of folk music. Tchaikovsky’s faults—his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures—are composed out of the music. Everywhere, Stravinsky invoked Tchaikovsky; everywhere he composed his own music.”

To create a divertimento, a suite of movements of light-hearted character, Stravinsky cut the ballet by half. Two clearly-recognizable Tchaikovsky bits are found in the Sinfonia, which is largely based on the children’s song “Lullaby in a Storm,” and in the Danses suisses, which quotes the Humoresque, Opus 10, No. 2 for piano.

Valse-scherzo, Opus 34 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky(b. Kamsko-Votinsk, 1840; d. St. Petersburg, 1893)

In 1876 a wealthy widow asked Moscow Conservatory director Nikolay Rubinstein to recommend a violinist to accompany her in chamber music. Rubinstein suggested Yosif Kotek (1855–1885), a student in Tchaikovsky’s theory class at the Conservatory. The woman also asked Tchaikovsky to make piano arrangements of his violin works for her to play. “With your music I live more lightly and pleasantly,” she wrote in appreciation. That woman was Nadezhda von Meck and she would become Tchaikovsky’s faithful correspondent and patroness.

Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest about Kotek in January 1877. “I am in love, as I haven’t been in love for a long time. Can you guess with whom? I have known him for six years already. I always liked him, and on several occasions I have felt a little bit in love with him.” Tchaikovsky went so far as to confess his love, but there is no evidence that Kotek reciprocated. The violinist was one of the attendants at Tchaikovsky’s intimate and ultimately disastrous wedding to Antonina Milyukova later that July.

Composed right before the Violin Concerto, Opus 35, on which Kotek was a key consultant, the Valse-scherzo was ordered by Kotek for a Lenten concert. Its scherzo element comes from the stuttering quality of successive down-bows on the G string. Tchaikovsky dedicated the Concerto to Leopold Auer; Kotek received the dedication of the Valse-scherzo, a lesser, but still utterly charming work by one of the greatest waltz-composers.

Stravinsky, Mozart, Tchaikovsky notes © 2016 by David Evan Thomas