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presents…

NAREK HAKHNAZARYAN | Cello NOREEN POLERA | Piano

Friday, February 16, 2018 | 7:30pmSan Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall

SCHUMANN Adagio and Allegro in A-flat Major, Opus 70 Adagio. Langsam, mit innigem Ausdruck Allegro. Rasch und feurig - Etwas ruhigert - Tempo I

BRAHMS Sonata for Cello and Piano in F Major, Opus 99 Allegro vivace Adagio affettuoso Allegro passionato Allegro molto

INTERMISSION

TSINTSADZE Five Pieces on Folk Themes Arobnaya Chonguri Sachidao Nana Plyasovaya

ALBÉNIZ Asturias, from Suite Española, Opus 47

SHCHEDRIN In the Style of Albéniz

MASSENET Meditation from Thaïs

CASSADÓ Requiebros

This performance is supported in part by a generous gift from the Estate of Maxine D. Wallace.

Narek Hakhnazaryan is represented by Kirshbaum Associates711 West End Avenue, Suite 5KN, New York, NY 10025kirshbaumassociates.com

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ARTIST PROFILES

San Francisco Performances presents the San Francisco debut of Narek Hakhnazaryan. Nor-een Polera returns for a third time; she first ap-peared in 2004 with cellist Clancy Newman.

Since winning the Cello First Prize and Gold Medal at the XIV International Tchai-kovsky Competition in 2011 at the age of 22, Narek Hakhnazaryan has performed with major orchestras across the globe and has established himself internationally as one of the finest cellists of his generation. Hakhnazaryan has earned critical acclaim worldwide, with The Strad describing him as “dazzlingly brilliant” and the San Fran-cisco Chronicle hailing his performing as “nothing short of magnificent.” In 2014 he was named a BBC New Generation Artist and in August 2016 he made his highly dis-tinguished and critically acclaimed BBC Proms debut.

The cellist’s impressive performance history includes debuts with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Utah Symphony, Berlin Konzerthaus, Nether-lands Philharmonic, Teatro Dell’Opera (Rome), Munich Chamber, and Essen Phil-harmonic orchestras, with returns to the Kansas City and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras, BBC Philharmonic, Orchestre della Toscana, and to the Warsaw Easter Festival. He has performed concertos with the Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, Toronto, London, Sydney, and NHK Sym-phony Orchestras, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival Orches-tra, the Rotterdam, Czech, and Seoul Phil-harmonics, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Paris, among others, and he has appeared with acclaimed con-

ductors such as Gergiev, Guerrero, Hrůša, Koopman, Neeme Järvi, Pletnev, Slatkin, Sokhiev, Robertson, and Bělohlávek.

An eager chamber musician and recital-ist, Hakhnazaryan has performed in New York’s Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory, Chicago’s Harris Theatre, the Concertgebouw Am-sterdam, Salle Pleyel Paris, Wigmore Hall, Berlin Konzerthaus, Vienna Konzerthaus, Oji Hall Tokyo, Shanghai Concert Hall, and esteemed festivals such as Ravinia, Aspen, Piatigorsky, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Kissinger Sommer, Robeco Summer con-certs, Beethovenfest Bonn, Mikkeli, Pau Casals, Lucerne, and Verbier, amongst many others. The cellist is Artist-in-Residence with the Malta Philharmonic, and he regu-larly tours with the Z.E.N. Piano Trio with colleagues Zhou Zhang and Esther Yoo.

Narek Hakhnazaryan was born in Yere-van, Armenia, into a family of musicians. He was mentored by the late Mstislav Rostropovich and plays the 1707 Joseph Guarneri cello and F.X. Tourte and Benoit Rolland bows.

The pianist Noreen Cassidy-Polera ranks among the most highly-regarded and di-verse chamber artists performing today, and maintains a career that has taken her to every major American music center and abroad to Europe, Russia, and Asian cen-ters of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul and Tokyo. Recent performances include those at Zankel Hall, Weill Recital Hall, 92nd Street Y, Jordan Hall, Gardener Museum, Kennedy Center, the Louvre and the Casals and Piatigorsky Festivals. She has been a guest at the Caramoor, Bard, Grand Teton and Cape Cod Chamber Mu-sic festivals, as well as engagements at the Chamber Music Societies of Philadelphia and La Jolla. She has recorded for Sony, EMI, Audiophon and Centaur Records.

In addition to being a regular recital partner with cellists Amit Peled and Narek Hakhnazaryan, Ms. Cassidy-Polera has ap-

peared with Matt Haimovitz, Carter Brey, Antonio Menesis, Aurora-Natalie Ginastera, Yo-Yo Ma and Leonard Rose. Winner of the Accompanying Prize at the Eighth Interna-tional Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, she regularly collaborates with laureates of the Queen Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky and Naumburg international competitions.

Ms. Cassidy-Polera’s mastery and affec-tion for the complete standard cello-piano repertory is well known, as is her attention and dedication to the works of living com-posers. In recent seasons she performed Elliott Carter’s venerable Sonata for Cello and Piano on tour in Paris, New York and Philadelphia, along with new works by Lowell Liebermann, Benjamin C.S. Boyle and Kenji Bunch to critical acclaim. Her CD recording Sound Vessels (with cellist Scott Kluksdahl) features the recording pre-miere of Richard Wernick’s Duo, and works of Robert Helps, Augusta Read Thomas, as well as Elliott Carter.

Noreen Cassidy-Polera holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Martin Canin.

PROGRAM NOTES

Adagio and Allegro in A-flat Major, Opus 70

ROBERT SCHUMANNBorn June 8, 1810, ZwickauDied July 29, 1856, Endenich

In the winter of 1849 Schumann became interested in the French horn. The recent invention of the valved horn gave the once awkward natural horn much greater range, flexibility, and expressive power, and—working at white heat—Schumann set out to exploit the possibilities he recog-nized in the new instrument. He composed the Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano in four days (February 14–17, 1849) and then over the next three days sketched out the Concert-Piece for Four Horns and Orchestra.

Schumann specified that the Adagio and Allegro could be performed by other instruments, specifically the cello or the violin. And more recently, it has been ar-ranged for oboe and for viola, and in addi-tion the piano part has been orchestrated, transforming the Adagio and Allegro into a miniature concerto.

The Adagio and Allegro has become one of Schumann’s most popular chamber works.

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The dark opening section (Schumann marks it “Slow, with inward expression” and stresses that it should be played very legato) is suffused with a melancholy cast, but this vanishes at the second section, marked “Fast and fiery.” The Allegro bursts to life here in a flurry of triplets, and this music demands athletic playing through a very wide range. A quiet interlude pro-vides some relief before the exciting rush to the close. Schumann’s wife Clara was de-lighted by this music, and—after playing it through with a horn player—she is said to have exclaimed: “A magnificent piece, fresh and passionate; just what I like.”

Sonata for Cello and Piano in F Major, Opus 99JOHANNES BRAHMSBorn May 7, 1833, HamburgDied April 3, 1897, Vienna

Brahms was frequently inspired to write for a particular instrument by a particu-lar virtuoso player. He wrote much of his violin music with Joseph Joachim in mind, and late in life he wrote a series of works for clarinet after being impressed with the playing of Richard Mühlfeld. It was his as-sociation with the Austrian cellist Robert Hausmann (1852–1909) that led to the com-position of Brahms’ second and final cello sonata. Brahms heard Hausmann perform his Cello Sonata in E minor in Vienna in March 1885 and was so taken with Haus-mann’s playing that he wanted to write a new work specifically for him. But Brahms, then in the process of composing his Fourth Symphony, could not begin such a work im-mediately. It was not until the summer of 1886, which Brahms spent at Hofstetten on Lake Thun in Switzerland, that he could fi-nally set to work on the sonata.

When he returned to Vienna in the fall, he brought the manuscript with him, and he and Hausmann gave the work several private hearings before it had its first pub-lic performance in Vienna on November 24, 1886. Brahms himself was a virtuoso pianist, but he had the unfortunate habit of grunting and snorting as he played. His friend Elizabeth von Herzogenberg re-ferred gently to this when she wrote of her enthusiasm for the sonata:

“So far I have been most thrilled by the first movement. It is so masterly in its com-pression, so torrent like in its progress, so terse in the development, while the exten-sion of the first subject on its return comes as the greatest surprise. I don’t need to tell

you how we enjoyed the soft, melodious Adagio, particularly the exquisite return to F sharp major, which sounds so beautiful. I should like to hear you play the essentially vigorous Scherzo. Indeed, I always hear you snorting and puffing away at it—for no one else will ever play it just to my mind. It must be agitated without being hurried, le-gato in spite of its unrest and impetus.”

Those who claim that Brahms never wrote true chamber music have some of their most convincing evidence in this cel-lo sonata, for this is music conceived on a grand scale—muscular, passionate, striv-ing. The first movement is marked Allegro vivace, and from its first moments one sens-es music straining to break through the limits imposed by just two instruments. If the tremolandi beginning suggests the scope of symphonic music, the rising-and-falling shape of the cello’s opening theme recalls the rising and falling shape of the opening movement of the composer’s just completed Fourth Symphony. The first movement is in sonata form, and the vig-orous opening theme is heard in various guises throughout the movement. Its quiet and stately reappearance in the piano just before the coda is a masterstroke.

Brahms specifies that the Adagio be played affettuoso—“with affection”—yet for all its melting songfulness, this is a se-rious movement, full of surprises. Brahms moves to the distant key of F-sharp Major for this movement and then to the equally unexpected F minor for the second subject. He uses pizzicato, a sound not typical of his string writing, for extended periods and sometimes has the piano mirror that sound with its accompaniment. And he builds his themes on something close to echo effects, with one instrument seeming to trail the other’s statement. It is imaginative writ-ing—and often very beautiful. With the third movement, Allegro passionato, the music returns to the mood of the first, for it begins and ends with a great rush of en-ergy. Between the scherzo sections comes a haunting trio featuring some of Brahms’ most sensitive writing for the cello. In the felicitous words of American composer Daniel Gregory Mason, “throughout this movement there are few of those places, unhappily frequent in most music for the cello, that sound so difficult that you wish, with Dr. Johnson, they were impossible.”

The Allegro molto is by far the shortest movement of the sonata, and after the driv-ing power of the first and third movements, the finale seems almost lightweight, an af-terthought to the sound and fury that have

preceded it. Its main theme, possibly of folk origin, rocks along happily throughout and—in another of Brahms’ many success-ful small touches in this sonata—is played pizzicato just before the final cadence.

Five Pieces on Folk Themes

SULKHAN TSINTSADZEBorn August 23, 1925, Gori, GeorgiaDied September 15, 1991, Tbilisi

Many Russian composers have been at-tracted to the folk music from different regions of that vast country and its sur-rounding areas. Tchaikovsky used tunes he heard sung near his family’s summer estate in the Ukraine in his own music, and Khachaturian made extensive use of the popular music of his native Armenia. Even so cosmopolitan a composer as Shostako-vich visited Kyrgyzstan and wrote an Over-ture on Russian and Kirghiz Folk Themes.

One of the Soviet-era composers most devoted to the folk music of his region was Sulkhan Tsintsadze, who spent most of his career in his native Georgia. Tsintsadze studied the cello as a boy, and at the end of World War II the 20-year-old moved to Moscow, where he studied cello and com-position at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1953 Tsintsadze returned to Georgia and embarked on a long career as performer, composer, and teacher. For 20 years he was rector of the Georgian State Conservatory, and he also served for a time as chairman of the Georgian Composers Union. Tsint-sadze was vastly prolific composer, writing operas, ballets, five symphonies, six concer-tos, film music, and numerous other large-scale works. But his heart really belonged to music for strings and for chamber en-sembles, and at the core of his work are his twelve string quartets, which span nearly half a century: he wrote the first when he was 22 and the last in the year of his death.

As might be expected, Tsintsadze wrote with unusual understanding for the cello, and one of his most popular and frequent-ly recorded works is his Five Pieces on Folk Themes for cello and piano, composed in Moscow in 1950, when he was 25. The folk themes are, of course, from Georgia, and in this suite of five brief movements Tsintsadze gives us not only these themes but also the sound of some of the Geor-gian instruments that played them. The movements require little description. The mournful Arobnaya is also known under the title “Villain’s Song in a Carriage,” while Chonguri—played pizzicato—imi-

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tates the sound of a plucked folk instru-ment from Georgia. Sachidao, sometimes used as an encore piece, alternates drone effects with spiccato passages, while the haunting Nana is a lullaby. The suite con-cludes with a vigorous dance movement.

Asturias, from Suite Española, Opus 47ISAAC ALBÉNIZBorn May 29, 1860, Camprodón, LéridaDied May 18, 1909, Campô-les-Bains

Isaac Albéniz found himself as a com-poser when he moved away from writing “conventional” virtuoso pieces and began to make use of Spanish material in his own music. He composed four of the eight move-ments that make up the Suite Española in 1886, then completed the others over the following several years. Seven of the eight movements depict or were inspired by a par-ticular place in Spain (the final movement, a nocturne titled Cuba, is the one geographi-cal exception). Though Albéniz published these eight movements as a set, individual movements have become famous on their own and are often played separately.

Asturias is a province on the northern coast of Spain. Albéniz’s Asturias, which he subtitled Leyenda (“legend”), is in its outer sections a perpetual motion, with the theme pivoting around repeating D’s, all of this set off by great chords that make slashing attacks across the busy progress of the piece. This energy gives way to a slow interlude, the opening material re-turns, and the music fades into silence.

At this concert,  Asturias  is heard in an arrangement for cello and piano.

In the Style of Albeniz

RODION SHCHEDRINBorn December 16, 1932, Moscow

Rodion Shchedrin graduated with dis-tinction from the Moscow Conservatory in 1955 when he was only 23, and very early in his career he acquired a reputation for a sense of humor: his satiric cantata Bureau-cratiada was composed on an impenetrable text taken from the rules of a Soviet nurs-ing home. By far Shchedrin’s most popular work is his Carmen Suite, a re-imagining of the music of Bizet’s great opera for an or-chestra of strings and percussion, which Shchedrin wrote as a one-act ballet for his wife, the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. In this frequently performed score, Shchedrin

revisits Bizet’s music, recomposing it and decking it out in new colors and rhythms, and it is a measure of Shchedrin’s sense of humor (and Soviet officialdom’s lack of one) that the Russian government tried to block the premiere of the Carmen Suite, fearing the Shchedrin had desecrated a masterpiece.

Shchedrin originally composed In the Style of Albeniz as a piece for solo piano in 1959, basing it on a tango from Isaac Al-beniz’s Seven Studies, Opus 65 (it is worth noting that while Shchedrin is very much a Russian composer, he also holds Spanish citizenship). Shchedrin dedicated In the Style of Albeniz to Maya Plisetskaya, whom he had married the year before he wrote it, and it was first performed in Moscow on February 10, 1963. This music has proven popular, and it has been arranged for vio-lin and for trumpet, as well as the present arrangement for cello and piano by Walter Despalj. In the Style of Albeniz is an affec-tionate re-composition of music by a com-poser Shchedrin very much admired, and he very effectively captures Albeniz’s style, with its languid shifts of tempo, chromatic harmonies, and sudden eruptions of en-ergy. Those interested in this music should know that—as pianist—the composer re-corded this version of In the Style of Albeniz with cellist Raphael Wallfisch.

Meditation from Thaïs

JULES MASSENETBorn May 12, 1842, Montand, Saint-ÉtienneDied August 13, 1912, Paris

Massenet composed a number of operas about women, and one of the most famous is Thaïs, which he wrote for a soprano from California: Sibyl Sanderson, born in Sacra-mento in 1865, sang the opera’s premiere in Paris in 1894 (a scandalous feature of that premiere was a “wardrobe malfunc-tion” very similar to the one at a recent Super Bowl). Thaïs is based on a novel by Anatole France, which in turn had been derived from a story that goes back to the tenth century: the account of a courtesan who becomes a saint. That transformation takes on a subtle edge in Massenet’s opera: the fierce young monk Athanaël struggles to save Thaïs’ soul and drives her relent-lessly to that salvation. Only when she is dead does the young man realize that his love for her was not spiritual at all but had been driven by intense sexual desire.

The opera remained in the repertory for about sixty years, though it is seldom staged today. The one part of Thaïs that sur-

vives in the active repertory is not for voice but for violin, the Meditation. Athanaël has intruded violently into Thaïs’ sinful life, warned her of its dangers, and begun to steer her toward spiritual salvation. Assaulted by the fury of his words, Thais collapses at the end of Scene 1 of Act II. The Meditation, which forms the interlude be-tween the two scenes of Act II, is the music that accompanies her gradual turn toward redemption. Based on the continuous evo-lution of its gentle opening melody, this is almost perfect violin music. Moving from that chaste beginning, the melody grows more complex as it proceeds but never becomes conflicted: tender but never sen-timentalized, it accompanies Thaïs’ grow-ing awareness of her future course. In the opera, Massenet accompanies the melody with an important part for harp, and that part transfers easily to the arrangement for piano.

Requiebros

GASPAR CASSADÓBorn September 30, 1897, BarcelonaDied December 24, 1966, Madrid

Of Catalonian heritage, Gaspar Cassadó was one of the leading cello virtuosi of the first half of the twentieth century. He had his early training in his native Barcelona, and then went on to Paris, where he contin-ued his studies with Casals at age 13. He be-gan an international career as a performer after World War I, touring the United States in 1936 and 1949 and making a num-ber of recordings in the 1950s that are now available on compact disc; late in his life, Cassadó made a series of chamber record-ings with Yehudi Menuhin. As a composer, Cassadó is most noted for his Catalonian Rhapsody (premiered by Mengelberg and the New York Philharmonic in 1928) and his many works for cello; the latter include a concerto, several sonatas, a number of short works, and arrangements of a Mo-zart horn concerto and a Weber clarinet concerto for the cello.

Requiebros (that title translates as “Compliments”) remains one of Cassadó’s best-known compositions. Requiebros is brief and high-spirited: the piano’s firm introduction leads to the cello’s opening declaration. The style may be relaxed and rhapsodic, but Requiebros takes on a con-certo-like brilliance as it proceeds and fi-nally drives to an extroverted close.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger