PRELUDE !#$%#&'SEASON - shriverconcerts.org · Prelude in C-sharp minor for solo piano that soon became his signature piece on recitals. In the tightly knit musical world of late

PRELUDE 2017-18 SEASON

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CHAMBER MUSIC BYCANDLELIGHTFeaturing members of theBaltimore Symphony Orchestra

For more information call 443.759.3309 or visit

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SEPT 17, 2017

OCT 15, 2017

NOV 5, 2017

JAN 28, 2018

MAR 11, 2018

APR 15, 2018

MAY 6, 2018

JUN 3, 2018 *WORLD PREMIERE

FREE TO ALL

SEPT 24, 2017Felix Hell, Organ

OCT 8, 2017 Amadi Azikiwe, Viola

NOV 12, 2017 Robert Cantrell, Bass-Baritone

JAN 14, 2018 Philadelphia Brass

FEB 11, 2018 Alon Goldstein, Piano

MAR 18, 2018 Irina Muresanu

APR 22, 2018 Wonderlic Concert

MAY 20, 2018 Todd Marcus, Jazz Bass Clarinet

Welcome to our 31st season of Music for All! Please join

fellow music lovers from the Baltimore area for 16 FREE CONCERTS in the

beautiful sanctuary of Second Presbyterian Church

4200 St. Paul StreetBaltimore, MD 21218

RACHEL BARTON PINEViolinSeptember 17, 2017

301.348.3779 | 6125 Montrose Road | Rockville, MD 20852Tickets available at

TEMPEST TRIO & DANIEL GETZPiano Trio + ViolaDecember 3, 2017

LISE DE LA SALLEPianoNovember 12, 2017

GRYPHON TRIOPiano TrioMarch 11, 2018

ESCHER QUARTETString QuartetApril 15, 2018

SHANGHAI QUARTET &ALEXANDER FITERSTEINString Quartet + ClarinetMay 6, 2018

CONCERT SERIES 2017-2018 POLINGER ARTISTS OF EXCELLENCE

| 46TH SEASON | SUNDAYS AT 7:30 PM

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TUESDAYS ARE

DINNER WITH GERTIE,$15 SPECIALS!

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OUR ADVERTISERS MAKE PRELUDE POSSIBLE!HELP SUPPORT SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES BY PATRONIZING OUR ADVERTISERS. AND BE SURE TO TELL THEM YOU SAW THEIR ADS IN PRELUDE!

SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES’ BOARD OF DIRECTORS DEDICATES THE 2017-18 SEASON TO

JEPHTA DRACHMAN IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION FOR HER THIRTY YEARS OF INSPIRED LEADERSHIP, FROM 1987 TO 2017

“This series was created and nurtured by people whose only motive was the love of music and the desire to share it in order to enrich and broaden lives.” —Jephta Drachman

SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES’ BOARD OF DIRECTORS EXPRESSES ITS DEEP GRATITUDE TO

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY AND PRESIDENT RONALD J. DANIELS

FOR THEIR LEADERSHIP AND INVESTMENT IN RENOVATING SHRIVER HALL AUDITORIUM AND THEIR 52 YEARS OF SUPPORT FOR SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES.

7 Board Chair’s Welcome Dr. Edward F. McCarthy

9 Director’s Welcome Catherine Cochran

10 2017–18 Season Calendar

13 Board of Directors & News

15 Spring 2018 Lecture Series

17 SHCS Talks

20 SHCS Discovery Series

23 Programs and Notes 23 Jeremy Denk | Oct 29

29 Tetzlaff Quartet | Nov 19

37 Janine Jansen | Dec 10 Alexander Gavrylyuk Torleif Thedéen

45 Borromeo String Quartet | Jan 28 Benjamin Hochman

51 Pierre-Laurent Aimard | Mar 11

57 Eric Owens | Mar 25 Myra Huang

65 Truls Mørk | May 6 Behzod Abduraimov

71 Freiburg Baroque Orch. | May 20 Kristian Bezuidenhout

79 Annual Fund Campaign

80 Recognizing our Generous Donors

84 Planned Giving

85 SHCS Thanks!

PATRON INFORMATIONPlease turn off all cell phones, watches, beepers, and other electronic devices.

The use of cameras, recording devices, cell phones, tablets, and other electronic devices during the performance is strictly prohibited.

Latecomers will be seated at appropriate intervals in the program at the discretion of management. Please do not exit the hall during the concert except in an emergency.

Refreshments are available for purchase in the lobby before the concert and at intermission.

Prelude is published annually by Shriver Hall Concert Series, Inc.Use of program notes and articles or other reproduction without prior written permission is prohibited.

EDITORS Catherine Cochran, Sarah Dinin, and Julie Schwait

DESIGN B. Creative Group, Inc.

PUBLISHER Shriver Hall Concert Series, Inc.

PHONE 410.516.7164

FAX 410.516.7165

EMAIL [email protected]

ONLINE shriverconcerts.org

Shriver Hall Concert Series Shriver Hall, Suite 105 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2698

GROUPS OF 10+ Receive a 15% discount on advance ticket purchases.

JOIN OUR ONLINE COMMUNITIES

DONATE YOUR TICKETS If you are unable to use your tickets, we will gratefully accept them as a tax-deductible contribution up to two hours before the event.

HEALTHY HEART HEALTHY AGING

Interested in a healthier heart? Learn how to

eat smart, move more, understand your risks and

stay healthy.

Discover how you and your loved ones can keep a healthy body, mind and social life.

Learn more at hopkinsmedicine.org/health.

Want the latest health and wellness news from Johns Hopkins experts? Sign up for our complimentary monthly e-news.

Your Health: hopkinsmedicine.org/yourhealth

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CONNECT to Better Health

Get the information you need to improve your health from Johns Hopkins Medicine.

HEALTHY SLEEP

Sleepless nights? Learn about sleep apnea symptoms, the

science of sleep, stress relief techniques, and important

connections between health and sleep.

HEALTH SEMINARS

Receive the latest information on a variety of health topics through

interactive webinars with Johns Hopkins Medicine experts.

SIGN UP FOR ENEWS AT SHRIVERCONCERTS.ORG/ENEWS | 7

WELCOME TO THE 52ND SEASON OF SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES. AS A MUSIC LOVER AND AMATEUR CELLIST, I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING SHRIVER HALL CONCERTS FOR 40 YEARS. THIS YEAR I’M HONORED TO BEGIN SERVING AS CHAIR OF THE BOARD, FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ERNEST BUEDING, ALBERT MENDELOFF, JEPHTA DRACHMAN, AND GEOFF GREIF.

This season is a special one. As always, we will be hearing beautiful concerts performed by the world’s most esteemed artists. But, in addition, Shriver Hall will get a much-needed renovation. When our beloved hall re-opens in 2018, there will be new, more comfortable seating and better lighting, creating a significantly enhanced concert experience for you and all our audiences. We are grateful to Johns Hopkins University for leading this work and to our Executive Director, Catherine Cochran, for finding a wonderful alternate venue for our marvelous concerts.

As you know, Shriver Hall is one of the most reputable chamber music series in the world. In our first 50 years, we have hosted many of the world’s greatest soloists and chamber groups, with cellists alone including historic legends such as Jacqueline du Pré, Mstislav Rostropovich, and János Starker. In May we will add to this elite list with a recital by the renowned Norwegian cellist, Truls Mørk. Not only do we love hearing such amazing artists, they tell us that they love playing for us. This is because Shriver Hall audiences are welcoming, congenial, and well informed. Artists often remark that they can tell we have a special knowledge and love of music.

As you plan to attend these outstanding concerts this season, please consider helping Shriver Hall Concert Series financially. Our ticket sales cover only one- third of the cost of bringing these artists to our treasured series. You can find various ways of supporting Shriver Hall Concert Series by consulting our website, shriverconcerts.org.

I am very excited about this historically important season, and I hope you are too. I look forward to seeing you all and listening to music together.

Dr. Edward F. McCarthy, Board Chair

“As a music lover and amateur cellist, I have been enjoying Shriver Hall concerts for 40 years. I am very excited about this historically important season, and I hope you are too. I look forward to seeing you all and listening to music together.”

BOARD CHAIR'S

WELCOME

HEALTHY HEART HEALTHY AGING

Interested in a healthier heart? Learn how to

eat smart, move more, understand your risks and

stay healthy.

Discover how you and your loved ones can keep a healthy body, mind and social life.

Learn more at hopkinsmedicine.org/health.

Want the latest health and wellness news from Johns Hopkins experts? Sign up for our complimentary monthly e-news.

Your Health: hopkinsmedicine.org/yourhealth

MA

C16

0606

6

CONNECT to Better Health

Get the information you need to improve your health from Johns Hopkins Medicine.

HEALTHY SLEEP

Sleepless nights? Learn about sleep apnea symptoms, the

science of sleep, stress relief techniques, and important

connections between health and sleep.

HEALTH SEMINARS

Receive the latest information on a variety of health topics through

interactive webinars with Johns Hopkins Medicine experts.

w y p r . o r g

WYPR is Proud to Sponsor the

2017-2018 Shriver Hall Concert Series


WELCOME TO OUR 52ND SEASON!

This is tremendously exciting time for Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) as we welcome our dynamic incoming Board Chair, Ed McCarthy, while relocating to Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (BHC) during the highly-anticipated renovation of Shriver Hall Auditorium. On behalf of the Board of Directors and the staff here at SHCS, we thank the wonderful teams at The Johns Hopkins University and BHC for their collaborative efforts, and we thank you for embarking on this season of multiple venues with us.

In 2017-18, we enjoy a unique selection of soloists and ensembles that simply cannot be experienced in any other city or at any other series. We welcome the returns of such luminaries as pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Behzod Abduraimov (a recent alumnus of the Discovery Series), and the Borromeo String Quartet. And, we’ll enjoy debuts by eminent artists new to our series, including pianists Jeremy Denk and Benjamin Hochman, and bass-baritone Eric Owens; and new to the region, such as violinist Janine Jansen, cellist Truls Mørk, the Tetzlaff Quartet, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. The season is capped by Baltimore debuts on the Discovery Series by the Ariel Quartet, violinist Benjamin Beilman, and pianist Xiaohui Yang, winner of the 2017 Yale Gordon Competition. Hailing from four continents, it’s a delight and privilege to welcome this season’s artists to Baltimore.

These marvelous musicians bring repertoire that is both beloved and sure to pique your curiosity. The Tetzlaff Quartet shares Schubert’s profound final quartet, the Borromeo String Quartet joins with pianist Benjamin Hochman for Dvořák’s lyrical quintet for piano and strings, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra perform 18th-century treasures on period instruments. Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, one of the foremost interpreters of the music of György Ligeti, performs his late friend’s exhilarating Musica ricercata from the early 1950s. And, we’re thrilled to present the Baltimore premiere of a pair of new string quartets by Sebastian Currier, co-commissioned with Carnegie Hall, and the world premiere of a new work for violin and piano by the American maverick Frederic Rzewski.

SHCS has thrived for over five decades because of the time, energy, and enthusiasm of engaged patrons like you. In bringing friends to concerts, renewing your subscription, making an annual gift, and including SHCS in your will, you are investing in our future. We thank you for this continued support.

All of us at SHCS wish you a happy season full of musical exploration!

Catherine Cochran, Executive Director

“In 2017-18, we enjoy a unique selection of soloists and ensembles that simply cannot be experienced in any other city or at any other series. [...] it’s a delight and privilege to welcome this season’s artists to Baltimore.”

DIRECTOR'S

WELCOME

10 | SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES

OCT 2017SAT, OCT 14 | 3 PM Ariel QuartetDiscovery Series, p. 20 Towson University

SUN, OCT 29 | 5:30 PMJeremy Denk, pianoSubscription Series, p. 23

NOV SUN, NOV 19 | 5:30 PMTetzlaff QuartetSubscription Series, p. 29

DECSUN, DEC 10 | 5:30 PMJanine Jansen, violinAlexander Gavrylyuk, pianoTorleif Thedéen, celloSubscription Series, p. 37

JAN 2018SUN, JAN 28 | 5:30 PMBorromeo String QuartetBenjamin Hochman, pianoSubscription Series, p. 45

2017-18

SEASON CALENDAR

CALENDAR


MARSAT, MAR 3 | 3 PM Benjamin Beilman, violinOrion Weiss, pianoDiscovery Series, p. 21 UMBC

SUN, MAR 11 | 5:30 PMPierre-Laurent Aimard, pianoSubscription Series, p. 51

SUN, MAR 25 | 5:30 PMEric Owens, bass-baritoneMyra Huang, pianoSubscription Series, p. 57

APRTUE, APR 10 | 5:30 PMShakespeare & Music ISpring 2018 Lecture Series, p. 15 JHU Mason Hall Auditorium

SAT, APR 14 | 3 PMXiaohui Yang, pianoDiscovery Series, p. 21 The Baltimore Museum of Art

TUE, APR 17 | 5:30 PMShakespeare & Music IISpring 2018 Lecture Series, p. 15 JHU Mason Hall Auditorium

TUE, APR 24 | 5:30 PMShakespeare & Music IIISpring 2018 Lecture Series, p. 15 JHU Mason Hall Auditorium

MAYSUN, MAY 6 | 5:30 PMTruls Mørk, celloBehzod Abduraimov, pianoSubscription Series, p. 65

SUN, MAY 20 | 5:30 PMFreiburg Baroque OrchestraKristian Bezuidenhout, director / fortepianoSubscription Series, p. 71

MAESTRO SERIES: New works and beloved masterpieces performed by Maestro Edward Polochick, the CAB Orchestra and Chorus, and renowned soloists. Visit cabmusic.org for additional series and performances!

MAKING MUSIC MAGIC

Order tickets at www.cabmusic.org or by calling 410-625-3525, ext. 101

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The Citizens of Baltimore County

Concert Artists of Baltimore is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive.

These programs are also made possible by a grant from The Citizens of Baltimore County.

These programs have been funded by Mayor Catherine Pugh and the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.

MAESTRO #1 THE MUSICAL LIFE OF THE GERSHWINS Saturday, October 7, 2017, 7:30pmFriends School, Forbush Auditorium 5114 N. Charles St., Baltimore

Edward Polochick, conductor | John Nauman, piano | CAB Chamber Orchestra and Chorus

The season begins with the music and legacy of America’s beloved George and Ira Gershwin. WBJC’s Jonathan Palevsky will guide you through an evening of the music and the songs that became the very definition of Broadway and the Jazz Age. A magical evening set in Friends School’s beautiful new

concert hall, with performances by the prize-winning American pianist John Nauman.

Overture to Girl Crazy; I Got RhythmVariations for piano and orchestra; Selections from Porgy and Bess; Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra, Promenade; and songs including Embraceable You, Fascinatin’ Rhythm, Love is Here to Stay, Slap that Bass, and Someone to Watch Over Me

Sponsored by the Henry and Ruth Blaustein-Rosenberg Foundation and the Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust

MAESTRO #2

THE MAGIC OF THE BAROQUESaturday, March 10, 2018, 7:30pmFriends School, Forbush Auditorium 5114 N. Charles St., Baltimore

Edward Polochick, conductor | José Cueto, violin and Fatma Daglar, oboe | CAB Chamber Orchestra and Chorus

The rich acoustics of Forbush Auditiorium inspired a program filled with the kaleidoscopic colors and contrasts of the Baroque.

Sit back and surround yourself with the crystalline textures of Vivaldi, the tune-ful flourishes of Handel, and the exquisite counterpoint

of Bach. With two of CAB’s superb soloists: concertmaster José Cueto and principal oboist Fatmar Daglar.

HANDEL “Entrance of the Queen of Sheba” from Solomon; BACH Concerto for Violin and Oboe; BACH Motet No. 3, Jesu meine Freude; BACH Brandenburg Concerto No. 3; ALBINONI Adagio; VIVALDI Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Sponsored by Mr. Robert Mazaika

MAESTRO #3

ANNIVERSARY GALA CONCERT Saturday, May 12, 2018, 7:30pmGordon Center for Performing Arts3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills Edward Polochick, conductor | Simone Dinnerstein, piano | CAB Chamber Orchestra and Chorus

For our long-awaited Anniversary concert, Maestro Polochick has devised a program highlighting all of the facets that make CAB a singular force: soloist with

chorus and chamber orchestra, chorus alone, and chamber orchestra alone. Superstar pianist Simone Dinnerstein returns to CAB for very special performances of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and a world premiere by the celebrated composer Robert Sirota. Meet our soloist, composer, the Maestro, and all of our musicians at a free post-concert reception as a special thanks to you, our audience, for three magical decades of loyalty and support.

SIROTA A Call for the Battle to Cease (World premiere of a CAB-commissioned work); BEETHOVEN Choral Fantasy, op. 80; BRITTEN Hymn to St. Cecilia; HAYDN Symphony No. 94 in G Major “Surprise”

Sponsored by the Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust and by The Herbert Bearman Foundation


ANNOUNCEMENTSShriver Hall Concert Series’ Board of Directors and Administration welcome new officers Edward F. McCarthy, Chair; Julie A. Schwait, Vice Chair; Ian Heavers, Treasurer; and Ellen Blaustein, Secretary. They also announce the appointment of new Directors Irene Kuo and Marguerite Mugge, and note the retirement from the Board of Directors of Janice Chandler-Eteme, Jephta Drachman, Roswell Encina, Helmut Jenkner, and Sander Wise.

IN LOVING MEMORYThe Shriver Hall Concert Series Board of Directors and Staff are saddened by the passing of subscribers and good friends Lisa Basarab, David Drachman, Nydia Finch, Nelson Fishman, Ann Greif, Rob Higgins, Sandra Hittman, J. Woodford Howard Jr., David Kornblatt, Mark Krasselt, Edith Levine, Lois Love, Herman Meyer, Thomas Milch, Sally Miller, Nancy Norris-Kniffin, Joe Riley, Miriam Shulman, Janet Steinberg, and Philip Zieve.

Did you know that ticket sales support only one-third of the cost of presenting the world-renowned artists featured on the Series?

For the remaining two-thirds, Shriver Hall Concert Series relies on

the generosity of individual, corporate, and foundation giving.

SHCS’ Annual Fund Campaign provides essential support for

artist fees and day-to-day operations expenses.

Your gift will support one of Maryland’s cultural jewels and

bring the best in classical music to SHCS.

PLEASE CONTRIBUTE GENEROUSLY

YOUR GENEROSITYHELPS US BRING THE BEST IN CLASSICAL CHAMBER MUSIC AND SOLO RECITALS TO BALTIMORE

BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND STAFFCHAIREdward F. McCarthy

VICE-CHAIRJulie A. Schwait

TREASURERIan Heavers

SECRETARYEllen Blaustein

DIRECTORSRegina Anderson Robin BreiteneckerAlan S. EdelmanElaine FreemanGeoffrey L. GreifTamera GundersenMargot HellerLi-Wen KangBarbara KornblattIrene KuoSayra W. MeyerhoffMellasenah Y. MorrisMarguerite MuggeHarriet L. PanitzAsher RubinSolomon SnyderWinston TabbNanny WarrenJames Weiss

CHAIR EMERITA*Jephta Drachman

DIRECTORS EMERITI*Douglas FambroughHelmut JenknerSander Wise

* Chairs and Directors Emeriti are former members of the Board of Directors who are elected for life, having provided service to SHCS that is recognized as exceptional and distinctive, and who went above and beyond the expectations of the duties of being a Board member.

JUNIOR BOARDJulia DoverAlec KipnesJamie LeidwingerChristopher MooreDuy PhanTomasz RobakShon Stelman

EXECUTIVE DIRECTORCatherine Cochran

OPERATIONS MANAGERSarah Dinin

INTERNLauren Tokunaga

For more than 25 years, Odyssey, JHU’s

non-credit liberal arts program, has been

the region’s lifelong learning partner. Our

Fall and Spring semesters offer over 60

courses in humanities, music and theater,

current events, science and nature,

writing, photography, and languages.

Most of our classes are held on the JHU

Homewood Campus, within walking

distance of Shriver Hall!

ODYSSEY PROGRAMPersonal Enrichment Courses, Lectures, Workshops

To request our Odyssey Fall catalog , please call 410.516.4842 or visit our website to view our catalog .

Start here: odyssey.jhu.edu

Hailed as one of the most gifted conductors of his generation, Peabody alumnus Joseph Young has been named the Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Ensembles at Peabody.

HAVE A NIGHT OUT.

IT’S ON US.All concerts at Peabody are now FREE, from classical to contemporary to jazz.

Find your favorites at peabody.jhu.edu or by calling 667-208-6620.

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SPRING 2018 LECTURE SERIESDR. RICHARD GIARUSSO | JHU MASON HALL AUDITORIUM

SHAKESPEARE & MUSICFrom Shakespeare’s time to our own, his works have inspired countless musical adaptations that span genres and centuries. Historian, musician, and professor of musicology at The Peabody Conservatory, Richard Giarusso leads a series of talks considering a select number of musical works inspired by Shakespeare, including Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Verdi’s Falstaff, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Thomas Adès’ The Tempest, among others.

TUESDAYS AT 5:30 PMAPRIL 10: The touches of sweet harmony: IntroductionAPRIL 17: Soft stillness and the night: Shakespeare and the RomanticsAPRIL 24: In sweet music is such art: Shakespeare and Opera

RICHARD GIARUSSORichard Giarusso is Chair of the Musicology Department at The Peabody Conservatory, where he teaches classes in 19th- and 20th-century music. He holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Harvard University and a B.A. in Music and English from Williams College. Giarusso’s research focuses on the music of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams. A frequent lecturer for arts organizations in the mid-Atlantic, he has presented talks for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association, the Baltimore Symphony, the Washington Bach Consort, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In addition to his academic work, Giarusso maintains an active career as a singer and conductor throughout the Northeast. He currently serves as music director of the Georgetown Chorale in Washington, D.C., and as artistic director of the Voce Chamber Singers in northern Virginia.

FREE, GENERAL SEATINGSUGGESTED DONATION: $10 RESERVATIONS REQUIRED: CALL 410.516.7164

Lectures are in the auditorium of Mason Hall, facing Wyman Park Drive, on the JHU Homewood campus. Parking is available in the South Garage, which is entered from Wyman Park Drive opposite the Wyman Park Building. The south-end elevator inside the glass-enclosed Parking Office brings passengers to the Mason Hall lobby.

A warm and supportive learning community for Jews of all ages

Sandra R. Berman Jewish Education Centerat Beth El Congregation

The Pauline Mash School for Early Childhood Education Beth El @ Federal Hill Preschool (ages 2 and up) & Hebrew School NEW state-of-the-art and spacious classrooms at Pikesville location The first Jewish Early Childhood Education Program in Baltimore to be MSDE

Accredited and EXCELS Level 5 Infant/Toddler, Preschool, Early and After-School care Ongoing enrollment

Summer camp at both locations from June through August

Contact Mandy Barish at [email protected] or 410-602-2245 for more information.

Berman-Lipavsky Religious School & Hebrew School in Your Neighborhood Kindergarten through High School Achshav high school mission to Israel Multi-sensory classes & inclusive environment for students with learning

differences Hebrew language, music, art, prayer, holidays, history & Israel! Informal youth group experiences Neighborhood Schools in Hunt Valley, Roland Park, Towson, Howard County &

Federal Hill

Variety of Family Shabbat experiences for children of all ages

Contact Fran Davis at [email protected] or 410-484-4543 for more information.

The Rabbi Mark G. Loeb Center for Lifelong Learning Diverse learning opportunities will engage, inspire & enrich your life

through history, conversational Hebrew, entertainer in residence to celebrate Israel’s 70th year, music, Mah Jongg, Bridge,and more! 1st Wednesdays @ Beth El programming are entertaining and enjoyable

every month at 7:30 p.m. For a complete list of classes, programs, and events, visit www.bethelbalto.com

Contact Ellen Marks at [email protected] or 410-580-5166 for more information.

Beth El Congregation 8101 Park Heights Avenue Pikesville, MD 21208 410-484-0411 www.bethelbalto.com


SHCSTALKSTHE ALBERT I. MENDELOFF PRE-CONCERT TALKS

OCT 29Jeremy Denk, pianoAnicia Timberlake

NOV 19Tetzlaff QuartetRichard Giarusso

DEC 10Janine Jansen, violinAlexander Gavrylyuk, pianoTorleif Thedéen, celloJonathan Palevsky

JAN 28Borromeo String QuartetBenjamin Hochman, pianoMichael Kannen

MAR 11Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianoDavid Gutkin

MAR 25Eric Owens, bass-baritoneMyra Huang, pianoLaura Protano-Biggs

MAY 6Truls MørkBehzod Abduraimov, pianoCarl Schmidt

MAY 20Freiburg Baroque OrchestraKristian Bezuidenhout, director, fortepianoSusan Forscher Weiss

Join us one hour before each Subscription Series concert for a Pre-Concert Talk with a leading scholar. FREE to all ticket holders, Pre-Concert Talks are designed to provide you an entertaining look at the evening’s repertoire and composers, enhancing the performance for aficionados and first-time concert-goers alike.

For the concerts on October 29, November 19, and December 10, these talks will take place in Baltimore Hebrew Congregation’s Goodwin Center. For the concerts in Shriver Hall Auditorium, the talks will take place in Shriver Hall’s Clipper Room.

OCTOBER 29 JEREMY DENK

ANICIA TIMBERLAKEAnicia Timberlake is a faculty member at The Peabody Conservatory, where she teaches courses on 20th-century music. Her research focuses on the idea of German music over the last two centuries. She is currently writing a book about children’s music education in socialist East Germany. Her work has been supported with grants from the Council for European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the American Musicological Society. Timberlake earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2015.

NOVEMBER 19 TETZLAFF QUARTET

RICHARD GIARUSSO Richard Giarusso is Chair of the Musicology Department at The Peabody Conservatory, where he teaches classes in 19th- and 20th- century music. Giarusso’s research focuses on the music of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams. He holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Harvard University and a B.A. in Music and English from Williams College. In addition to his academic work, he maintains an active career as a singer and conductor. He serves currently as music director of the Georgetown Chrale in Washington, D.C. and as artistic director of the Voce Chamber Singers in northern Virginia.

DECEMBER 10 JANINE JANSEN, ALEXANDER GAVRYLYUK, & TORLEIF THEDÉEN

JONATHAN PALEVSKY Jonathan Palevsky has been an on -air host at WBJC -FM since 1986 and Program Director since 1990. He can regularly be heard hosting the WBJC’s Operafest, Face the Music (a music review program), and Past Masters (a CD reissue program). Originally from Montreal, he came to Baltimore in 1982 to study classical guitar at The Peabody Conservatory. He is also a widely popular lecturer and music travel leader.

JANUARY 28 BORROMEO STRING QUARTET & BENJAMIN HOCHMAN

MICHAEL KANNENCellist Michael Kannen is a musician and educator who is comfortable in widely diverse musical situations and venues. He was a founding member of the Brentano String Quartet, with which he performed throughout the world and on radio, television, and recordings. He has appeared at music festivals across the country and with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also been a member of the Meliora Quartet and the Apollo Trio. He is currently a member of the Cooperstown Quartet and is the Director of Chamber Music at The Peabody Conservatory, where he holds the Sidney Friedberg Chair in Chamber Music.

MARCH 11 PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD

DAVID GUTKINDavid Gutkin is a scholar of contemporary American and European music. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University in 2015 and joins the Department of Musicology faculty at The Peabody Conservatory in 2018. His research focuses on technologies of mediating music, theories of race and modernity, the history of globalization, and relationships between musical experience and historical memory. He is currently writing a book titled, Meanwhile, Let’s Go Back in Time: New York Avant-Garde Opera and the Historical Imagination. Before pursuing musicology, he studied classical guitar at The Peabody Conservatory and New England Conservatory.

MARCH 25 ERIC OWENS & MYRA HUANG

LAURA PROTANO- BIGGS Laura Protano -Biggs joined the musicology faculty of The Peabody Conservatory in Fall 2015. Prior to her arrival she was awarded a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of California, Berkeley (2014) and held an appointment as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (2014- 15). She is currently at work on a book about the material dimension of operatic experience, entitled Operatic Technologies in Late Nineteenth -Century Italy.

MAY 6 TRULS MØRK & BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV

CARL SCHMIDTCarl B. Schmidt is Professor Emeritus of Music History and Culture at Towson University. He has written extensively on French and Italian opera and ballet, members of Les Six, and Randall Thompson. His most recent books include The Music of Randall Thompson (1899-1984): A Documented Catalogue, co-authored with his wife Betsey, and A History of the Handel Choir of Baltimore (1935-2013): “Music Spread Thy Voice Around,” both published in 2015. The Schmidts are now completing Thompson’s documented biography. Schmidt has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard University, among others.

MAY 20 FREIBURG BAROQUE ORCHESTRA& KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT

SUSAN FORSCHER WEISS Susan Forscher Weiss is Professor of Musicology at The Peabody Conservatory, and holds a joint appointment in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literature, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, at The Johns Hopkins University. Her research involves images and memory as well as the Arabic contribution to music theory, and she is the recipient of numerous awards from the ACLS, NEH, Harvard University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2014, she was the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti.


SHCSTALKS CONTINUED

MUSICEVERGREENAT

2017–2018 Season | Evergreen Museum & Library

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3pm Concerts Amid Historic Surroundingsfollowed by Meet-the-Artist receptions

SUNDAY, NOV. 12 ANDREW TYSON, PIANO Carriage House

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Music in the ValleyMusic in the ValleyMusic in the ValleyMusic in the ValleyMusic in the Valley2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season2017 2018 Season

SAT, OCT 14 | 3 PM

ARIEL QUARTET “…a blazing larger-than-life performance that seemed to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit.” —The Washington Post

The Ariel Quartet, originally from Israel, has rapidly earned a sterling reputation for its bold versatility and soulful interpretations. Following its 2016 Carnegie Hall debut, the youthful group comes to Baltimore with a program of works by Schumann, Kurtág, and Beethoven.

Schumann: String Quartet in F major, Op. 41, No. 2Kurtág: Twelve Microludes, Op. 13Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131

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2017-18

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SAT, MAR 3 | 3 PM

BENJAMIN BEILMAN VIOLIN

ORION WEISS PIANO

“This young American is nothing less than a great artist.” —Le Monde

Violinist Benjamin Beilman is quickly rising to the top of the ranks. The New York Times praised his rich and powerful tone, noting his "handsome technique, burnished sound, and quiet confidence showed why he has come so far so fast.”

Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in D major, Op. 12Bartók: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2Frederic Rzewski: Demons for Violin and Piano (world premiere)Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 10 in G major, Op. 96

UMBC’S EARL AND DARIELLE LINEHAN CONCERT HALL1000 HILLTOP CIRCLE, BALTIMORE

SAT, APR 14 | 3 PM

XIAOHUI YANG PIANO

2017 YALE GORDON COMPETITION WINNER

Enjoy an afternoon of world-class art and music-making! Xiaohui Yang, one of The Peabody Conservatory’s top talents, is a graduate of The Curtis Institute and The Juilliard School. Her recent engagements include the New Jersey and Milwaukee symphonies, and she will astonish with a vibrant display of artistry and virtuosity.

Works by Schubert, Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Liszt

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART’S MEYERHOFF AUDITORIUM10 ART MUSEUM DRIVE, BALTIMORE

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Markand Thakarmusic director and conductor

triumphal delightsSunday, Oct 1, 2017

Daniel Hass celloROSSINI Overture From the Italian Girl in Algiers

LESHNOFF Cello Concerto BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

love from afar

Sunday, Nov 26, 2017Markand Thakar conductor

SKALKOTTAS Five Greek DancesBARTÓK Divertimento

WIRÉN Serenade for Strings, Op. 11 GINASTERA Variaciones Concertantes

3 serenades

Sunday, Feb 11, 2018Madeline Adkins violin

ELGAR Serenade for Strings in E Minor, Op. 20 BERNSTEIN Serenade After Plato’s Symposium

TCHAIKOVSKY Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48

jazz by any other nameSunday, Mar 18, 2018

Jonathan Palevsky narratorRob Patterson clarinet

JOPLIN Maple Leaf Rag and The EntertainerSTRAVINSKY Ragtime From L’histoire du soldat

MILHAUD The Creation of the WorldCOPLAND Concerto for Clarinet

madly mozart

Sunday, May 13, 2018Steven Masi piano

MOZART Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525 MOZART Divertimento in D Major, K. 131

MOZART Piano Concerto No. 19 in F Major, K. 459

BALTIMORE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA 11 West Mount Vernon Place Baltimore, Maryland 21201 | [email protected]

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Rondo in A minor, K. 511

SERGEY PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)Visions fugitives, Op. 22

1. Lentamente2. Andante3. Allegretto4. Animato5. Molto giocoso6. Con eleganza7. Pittoresco8. Commodo9. Allegretto tranquillo10. Ridicolosamente11. Con vivacità12. Assai moderato13. Allegretto14. Feroce15. Inquieto16. Dolente17. Poetico18. Con una dolce lentezza19. Presto agitatissimo e

molto accentuato20. Lento

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109

Vivace ma non troppo— Adagio espressivoPrestissimoGesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung—Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo

—INTERMISSION—

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856)Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13

Thema: AndanteEtude I: Un poco più vivoEtude IIEtude III: VivaceEtude IVEtude V: VivacissimoEtude VI: AgitatoEtude VII: Allegro moltoEtude VIII: AndanteEtude IX: Presto possibileEtude X: AllegroEtude XI: Con espressioneEtude XII: Finale: Allegro brillante

THE ZARELDA FAMBROUGH MEMORIAL CONCERTZarelda Fambrough, known as “Zee” to all, is remembered as a quietly enthusiastic and caring person, known for her support of the arts, for her love of nature (for many years she chaired the Science Department at St. Paul’s School for Girls), and for her work with adult literacy. She and her husband, Dr. Douglas Fambrough, a retired Professor of Biology at The Johns Hopkins University and an amateur pianist, supported Shriver Hall Concert Series for decades, with Doug serving on the Board of Directors from 1986 to 2010. Doug and Zee endowed this annual concert in 2000 with the hope of inspiring others to support SHCS through major donations and planned gifts. Doug dedicated this concert to Zee’s memory in 2017.

OCT 29, 2017

JEREMY DENK PIANO


Jeremy Denk appears by arrangement with Opus 3 ArtistsThis concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.


JEREMY DENK PIANO

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and Musical America’s

Instrumentalist of the Year award, Denk was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Denk returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has performed in recent seasons with the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra, as well as on tour with Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and at Royal Albert Hall this summer in his return to the BBC Proms.

In the 2017-18 season, Denk returns to the San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall with Orchestra St. Luke’s, and continues as artistic partner of The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with multiple performances throughout the season and a new piano concerto written for him by Hannah Lash. Denk is featured with the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican, where he is artist-in-residence at Milton Court. Denk makes his debut tour in Asia, including recitals in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul and reunites with Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and Joshua Bell this season for a tour of the U.S.

Denk’s upcoming releases from Nonesuch Records include The Classical Style, with music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and Charles Ives’ complete violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw. He also joins his long-time musical partners, Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis in a recording of Brahms’ Trio in B major. His previous disc of the Goldberg Variations reached number one on Billboard’s Classical Chart.

In the 2016-17 season, Denk performed extensively throughout the U.S., including a return to the National Symphony and appearances with the St. Louis, Vancouver, and Milwaukee symphonies. His recital tour featured performances at Wigmore Hall and Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, in a

special program that included a journey through seven centuries of Western music. He also recently debuted at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Philharmonie in Cologne, and continues to appear extensively on tour in recital throughout the U.S., including, recently, in Chicago, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

Denk served as music director of the 2014 Ojai Music Festival, for which, in addition to performing and curating, he wrote the libretto for a comic opera. The opera was later presented by Carnegie Hall and the Aspen Festival. Denk is known for his original and insightful writing on music, which Alex Ross praised for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New Republic, The Guardian, and on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. One of his New Yorker articles, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” forms the basis of a book to be published by Random House in the U.S., and Macmillan in the U.K. Recounting his experiences of touring, performing, and practicing, his blog, Think Denk, was recently selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress web archives.

In 2012, Denk made his Nonesuch Records debut with a pairing of masterpieces old and new: Beethoven’s final Piano Sonata, Op. 111, and Ligeti’s Études. The album was named one of the best of 2012 by The New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post, and Denk’s account of the Beethoven Sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano. Denk has a long-standing attachment to the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and his recording of Ives’ two piano sonatas featured in many “best of the year” lists.

Jeremy Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and The Juilliard School. He lives in New York City, and his website and blog can be found at jeremydenk.net.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Rondo in A minor, K. 511Composed in 1787

In the late 1780s, Mozart was the toast of Vienna, equally celebrated as a virtuoso pianist and as a composer. Having discovered that the Viennese were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of attending his popular subscription concerts, he worked day and night to keep the programs stocked with a fresh supply of concertos, sonatas, fugues, and various other stand-alone pieces. Wolfgang’s boundless energy and nonstop activity made a deep impression on his father when the latter visited the Austrian capital in 1785. “It is impossible to describe the trouble and the commotion,” Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter in Salzburg. “Since my arrival your brother’s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theater or to some other house.” For his part, the composer half-jokingly complained that “the whole morning is taken up with pupils and almost every evening I have to play. Well, haven’t I enough to do?”

Composed in 1787, Mozart’s K. 511 illustrates his determination to expand the range of piano technique and expression even while breathing new life into forms and genres associated with his Baroque predecessors—in this case, the rondo, in which a recurring theme alternates with music of a contrasting character. Soon after moving to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781, Mozart had begun attending concerts of “early music” at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, head of the Imperial Library and a pioneering music antiquarian. According to one of Mozart’s pupils, he became an avid student of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the score of which “was always lying open on his pianoforte.” Mozart told his father that he was collecting “the fugues of Bach—not only of Sebastian, but also of Emanuel and Friedemann.” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most famous of Johann Sebastian’s

musical sons, blended his father’s contrapuntal skill with the finely nuanced introspection and expressive range of the newer empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style). The author of an influential treatise on “the true art of playing keyboard instruments,” the younger Bach was renowned for the delicacy and precision of his touch.

The intense passions that C.P.E. Bach unleashed in many of his works are echoed in Mozart’s A-minor Rondo, one of his most profoundly emotional creations. Like C.P.E. Bach’s Rondo in C minor, Mozart’s K. 511 starts out in the minor mode and ranges freely over a broad expanse of harmonic and expressive terrain. The mournful A-minor theme is in lilting 6/8 meter, with a steady eighth-note pulse. Billowing sixteenth notes in the right hand introduce the first of two contrasting episodes, this one in F major. A series of chromatic scales, first descending, then rising, brings back the main rondo theme. It is interrupted in turn by the second episode, in A major, characterized by running sixteenth-note triplets. Mozart masterfully weaves these various elements together in the concluding statement of the theme.

SERGEY PROKOFIEV Visions fugitives, Op. 22 Composed in 1915-17

Known for his steely-fingered precision and refinement at the keyboard, Prokofiev wrote some of the 20th century’s most brilliant and percussive keyboard music. As both composer and pianist, he cultivated a sharply etched, ironic, and occasionally acerbic style that propelled him to the forefront of the modernist movement in the years before and during World War I. The composer Vladimir Dukelsky (the future Vernon Duke of popular-song fame) described Prokofiev’s pianism as “nothing but unrelenting energy and athletic joy of living.” Yet, in his lyrical moments, Prokofiev was equally capable of childlike directness and simplicity. The combination of brashness and restraint, of traditional and avant-

garde elements—as displayed in the suite of charmingly epigrammatic miniatures known as Visions fugitives—helps explain the wide appeal of Prokofiev’s music.

Composed between 1915 and 1917, the twenty Visions fugitives owe their title to the Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, who attended a private performance of the work that Prokofiev gave in the summer of 1917. “I do not know wisdom,” Balmont wrote, “leave that to others—I only turn fugitive visions into verse.” Something of a political naïf, Prokofiev mostly stayed aloof from the revolutionary fervor that played itself out daily in the streets of Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed at the outset of World War I). In his diary he expressed irritation at the proletarian masses who milled about “in such a monstrously aimless manner” while the tsar’s troops fired on them from rooftops. Holed up in his apartment, the composer devoted himself to recording his musical “visions,” which are by turns playful and poetic, wistful and sarcastic.

Unlike Prokofiev’s nine ferociously difficult piano sonatas, most of these exquisitely crafted pieces are delicate,


SERGEY PROKOFIEV

OCT 29, 2017ABOUT THE PROGRAM


almost impressionistic creations that demand more finesse than virtuosity of the performer. Not surprisingly, the Visions fugitives proved so popular with audiences in the West that he often played them as encore pieces on his recitals. The simple, repetitive melodic and rhythmic patterns that serve as Prokofiev’s basic building blocks are laced with pungent dissonances, chromaticisms, and “wrong-note” harmonies. Yet, even at its most bombastic, Prokofiev’s music never loses its essential lyricism. Each piece revolves around one or two basic ideas, and the set as a whole abounds in contrasts. The “fugitive visions” range in mood from the mysterious, ethereal textures of the Andante (no. 2) to the antic struts and swoops of Ridicolosamente (no. 10). The Debussyan reverie of Pittoresco (no. 7), with its delicate, harp-like rolled chords, contrasts with the clangorous, pounding accents of Inquieto (no. 15) and the muted, hypnotically oscillating eighth notes of Poetico (no. 17). In the last piece, the work circles back to its beginning, with a languid, almost otherworldly essay in triple time.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109 Composed in 1820

In 1817 Beethoven received a six-octave Broadwood piano as a gift from the English manufacturer. Although he was probably too deaf to appreciate the instrument’s expanded tonal and dynamic range, his keyboard music of the period—beginning with the mighty Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106 (to be performed on March 11th, see p. 51), of 1817-18—reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries. Like many of Beethoven’s other late works, these sonatas juxtapose passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How, and how much, the composer’s deafness affected his music and outlook on life is, to some degree, a matter of conjecture, but there is no mistaking the “inwardness” of these extraordinary works, with their

radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical time and space.

Commissioned by the Berlin publisher Adolph Martin Schlesinger, the last three of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas were composed between 1820 and late 1822, the period in which he was struggling to bring the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony to fruition. In these path-breaking sonatas, one often has the sense that the composer is not hearing but feeling his way from one idea to the next, the notes forming themselves soundlessly under his fingers, detached from their auditory moorings. Improvising had always been a vital element in Beethoven’s creative process, but it became even more so as deafness forced him to rely increasingly on his inner voice. “Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play,” he said, “so—if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.”

At the beginning of the E-major Sonata, Op. 109, the staggering of the two hands creates a delicately pointillist effect, betraying the Vivace’s origins as a stand-

alone teaching piece. Vast expanses of the piano’s register soon open up in the first of the movement’s two Adagio interludes. A hushed, coda-like reprise of the main theme flows directly into an explosive triple-time Prestissimo in E minor, which veers between extremes of motion and affect. Storm and fury give way, in the Sonata’s third movement, to incandescent lyricism. “Songlike, with the greatest inwardness of feeling” is Beethoven’s marking for the tender E -major theme, which unfolds in two eight-bar strains, each stated twice. This is followed by six contrasting variations: a slow, achingly poignant waltz; a vivacious scherzo; a short, Czerny-like exercise, full of spitfire runs; a lilting andante, to be played “a little slower than the theme”; a briskly contrapuntal version of the theme; and an extended tailpiece that plunges into a dense thicket of passagework and trills before emerging into the calm, clear air of the opening melody.

ROBERT SCHUMANN Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13Composed in 1834

Schumann epitomized the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms, his reliance on extramusical sources of inspiration, and the paramount value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. Although he wrote four symphonies, several concertos, and even a lone opera, his impulsive genius found its most characteristic expression in solo piano music and art songs. Schumann was an inveterate improviser at the keyboard, as one might suppose from the rhapsodic fluidity that characterizes his piano writing. In fact, only a chronic hand injury prevented him from realizing his youthful ambition to be a concert pianist. Instead, he dedicated himself to creating a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy.

In the seven years before his marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his most beloved piano works, including Carnaval, Kreisleriana,

JEREMY DENK

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN


Kinderszenen, the C-Major Fantasy, and the first version of the Symphonic Etudes. Although Clara was the muse behind most of these masterpieces, the composer was secretly engaged to another woman when he began work on the Symphonic Etudes in 1834. Schumann met and fell in love with 18-year-old Ernestine von Fricken in Leipzig, where they were both piano students of Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck. Ernestine, the adopted daughter of an Austrian nobleman, had already put in an appearance in Carnaval, masquerading as the passionate, darkly alluring “Estrella.” Moreover, the 21 vignettes that comprise Schumann’s musical masked ball are linked by different versions of the four-note motto A-S-C-H (A, E-flat, C, and B in German notation), a cryptic allusion to Ernestine’s hometown in Bohemia.

In 1834, Baron Ignaz Ferdinand von Fricken, an amateur flutist and composer, asked his prospective son-in-law to critique a set of variations he had written on an original theme. No doubt choosing his words with care, Schumann responded that the melody possessed “character and good feeling.” But that was as far as he was willing to go in the interest of ingratiating himself with his fiancée’s family. “As to the variations themselves,” he went on, “I must bring a charge against you, which the modern school is rather fond of making, namely, that they are too much alike in character. No doubt the theme ought always to be kept well in view, but it ought to be shown through different colored glasses, just as there are windows of various colors which make the country look rosy like the setting sun, or as golden as a summer morning, etc.”

As if to demonstrate how to do the job properly, Schumann proceeded to borrow the Baron’s theme for his own set of

variations, which he proposed to call Fantasies et Finale sur un Thême de M. le Baron de Fricken (Fantasies and Finale on a Theme by Baron von Fricken) and dedicate to Ernestine’s mother. Shortly thereafter, he discovered that Ernestine had been born out of wedlock and was therefore unlikely to inherit her father’s fortune. Whether for that or some other reason, Schumann broke off their engagement in the summer of 1835. When the Études symphoniques (Symphonic Etudes) was published two years later, Fricken’s theme had been reattributed to an anonymous “amateur” and several of the original variations had been jettisoned. (Published separately in 1873, the five “posthumous variations” are sometimes incorporated in modern performances.) Schumann was in the concert hall that August when his new sweetheart, Clara, performed three of the etudes in Leipzig. “The way you played my Etudes—I won’t ever forget that,” he wrote ecstatically; “they were absolute masterpieces the way you presented them—the public can’t appreciate such playing—but one person was sitting there, no matter how much his heart was pounding with other feelings, my entire being at that instant bowed down before you as an artist.”

The long, complicated gestation of the Symphonic Etudes lasted another 15 years, as the dissatisfied composer continued to tinker with his creation. At one point Schumann became so frustrated by the work’s lackluster reception that he exclaimed to Clara: “That sort of thing is not suited for the general public, and it would be very weak to make a moan afterwards, and say that they had not understood a thing which was not written to suit their taste, but merely for its own sake.” It was the critical and commercial

success of Schumann’s Album for the Young in 1848 that prompted his publisher to propose a new edition of the Symphonic Etudes. Schumann seized the opportunity to prune and simplify the score, without changing its fundamentally virtuosic character. The revised edition was published in 1852, this time titled Études en forme de variations (Etudes in the Form of Variations). Not until 1861—five years after Schumann’s death—did Brahms’ friend Adolf Schubring compile the variorum edition that is the basis for most performances today.

In all of its sundry permutations, the Symphonic Etudes mirrors the characters of Schumann’s fictitious literary alter egos—the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, reflective Eusebius. The latter’s spirit prevails in the opening Thema; Schumann said he tried to transform the wistful C-sharp-minor theme from a funeral march into a triumphal march, but in the end he couldn’t “escape the minor mode.” In the first etude, a crisp, martial-sounding melody wells up from the depths of the keyboard and flowers in a profusion of imitative entries. The intensity of the second etude, with its passionately throbbing triplets, gives way to quicksilver brilliance in the arpeggiated staccato figures of the third, and to contrapuntal ingenuity in the canonic textures of the fourth. Thereafter Schumann keeps the two sides of his artistic persona in balance, alternating displays of strenuous virtuosity with gauzy textures and dreamlike moods. Florestan has the last word in the massive orchestral sonorities of the Finale, which returns “home” to D-flat major, the enharmonic equivalent of C-sharp.

NOTES BY HARRY HASKELL, © 2017

OCT 29, 2017

THE CHRISTIANSBY LUCAS HNATHDIRECTED BY HANA S. SHARIFSEP 7–OCT 8, 2017

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVEBASED ON THE SCREENPLAY BY MARC NORMAN & TOM STOPPARDADAPTED FOR THE STAGE BY LEE HALLDIRECTED BY BLAKE ROBISONOCT 19–NOV 26, 2017

LOOKINGGLASS ALICEADAPTED BY DAVID CATLIN FROM THE WORKS OF LEWIS CARROLLDIRECTED BY JEREMY B. COHENNOV 30–DEC 31, 2017

SKELETON CREWBY DOMINIQUE MORISSEAUDIRECTED BY NICOLE A. WATSONJAN 25–MAR 4, 2018

GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM

ADAPTED BY IAN WOOLDRIDGEDIRECTED BY MAY ADRALESMAR 1–APR 1, 2018

A WORLD PREMIERE MUSICAL

TBADIRECTED BY KWAME KWEI-ARMAHMAY 3–JUN 10, 2018

Details are being finalized on a major new project that will be an extraordinary finale to the 2017/18 Season.

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SEASONDISCOVER

2017/2018 SEASON

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)String Quartet in E-flat major, K. 428

Allegro ma non troppoAndante con motoMenuetto: AllegrettoAllegro vivace

ALBAN BERG (1885–1935)String Quartet, Op. 3

LangsamMäßige Viertel

—INTERMISSION—

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)String Quartet in G major, D. 887

Allegro molto moderatoAndante un poco mossoScherzo: Allegro vivaceAllegro assai

THE HOWARD FAMILY CONCERTA member of Shriver Hall Concert Series’ Board of Directors from 1987 to 2012, Dr. J. Woodford Howard, Jr. was the Thomas P. Stran Professor Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University where he taught in and chaired the Department of Political Science. At SHCS, Dr. Howard, or “Woody,” was for many years Chair of the Music Committee. In his capacity as Chair, Woody used his encyclopedic knowledge of chamber music to help select artists and repertoire. Mrs. Howard also assumed an active role in volunteering for many SHCS projects. The Howard Family concert, established in 2001 by Woody and Jane, with their daughter and son-in-law, Elaine and Jeffrey Christ, is designated for performances by string quartets.

NOV 19, 2017

TETZLAFF QUARTET


The Tetzlaff Quartet appears by arrangement with CM Artists.This concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.

TETZLAFF QUARTETChristian Tetzlaff, violinElisabeth Kufferath, violinHanna Weinmeister, violaTanja Tetzlaff, cello

Praised by The New York Times for its “dramatic, energetic playing of clean intensity”, the Tetzlaff Quartet is one of today’s leading string quartets. Formed in 1994, Christian

Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Elisabeth Kufferath, and Hanna Weinmeister take time off from their successful individual careers to tour several times each season, performing concerts that regularly receive great critical acclaim.

Highlights of the Quartet’s 2017-18 season include its fourth North American tour, with performances on the West Coast, including the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Cal Performances at U.C. Berkeley, and The Green Music Center in Sonoma; in the Midwest, including the chamber music societies of Cleveland and Cincinnati; and on the East Coast, including Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Shriver Hall Concert Series in Baltimore, and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in New York. In Europe, the Quartet is featured on 2017-18 programs in London, Cologne, Hamburg, and Hanover, among a number of other cities.

Among the Quartet’s recent European engagements are performances at Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Paris’ Auditorium du Louvre, Brussels’ BOZAR, Vienna’s Musikverein, Munich’s Herkulessaal, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The Quartet’s latest recording was released in 2017 by the Ondine label and features works by Schubert and Haydn. Other recordings include a 2014 release of Berg and Mendelssohn, also by Ondine, and a 2010 debut with works by Schoenberg and Sibelius on the CAvi label.

Christian Tetzlaff, violin Described as “one of the most brilliant and inquisitive artists of the new generation” (The New York Times), Christian Tetzlaff is a regular guest with the world’s leading orchestras and festivals. He also enjoys collaborations with the most distinguished chamber musicians, including

recital partners Leif Ove Andsnes and Lars Vogt. Awards for his numerous recordings include the Diapason d’Or and several ECHO Klassik awards, including the 2017 award for violin. He plays a violin crafted by Peter Greiner. His website is christian-tetzlaff.de.

Elisabeth Kufferath, violin Elisabeth Kufferath is a frequent guest at international music festivals including those in Lucerne, Schleswig-Holstein, Rheingau, Ravinia, and Aspen. She has appeared as both soloist and chamber musician at venues such as the Berlin and Cologne philharmonies, Vienna’s Musikverein, and Paris’ Auditorium du Louvre. Her regular chamber music partners include Lars Vogt, Antje Weithaas, Isabelle Faust, and Jens Peter Maintz. Kufferath is currently professor of violin at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover and plays a Peter Greiner violin. Her website is elisabethkufferath.de.

Hanna Weinmeister, viola Currently first concertmaster at Opera Zurich, Hanna Weinmeister is the winner of numerous international competitions, including the International Mozart Competition, the Concours International Jacques Thibaud, and the International Parkhouse Award. She has performed as soloist with the Berlin and Munich philharmonics, SWR Baden-Baden & Freiburg Symphony Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. She has collaborated with esteemed artists including Leonidas Kavakos, Heinz Holliger, Gidon Kremer, and Benjamin Schmid, among others. She plays a Peter Greiner viola.

Tanja Tetzlaff, cello Tanja Tetzlaff has appeared with many of Europe’s major international orchestras under conductors such as Daniel Harding, Lorin Maazel, Sir Roger Norrington, and Paavo Järvi. She is especially dedicated to chamber music and regularly plays with Lars Vogt, Martin Fröst, and Carolin Widmann. Tetzlaff is a regular guest in international festivals including Risør, Bergen, Schwetzingen, Heimbach, Berliner Festwochen, Beethoven-Fest Bonn, and Bremer Musikfest. She plays a violoncello crafted by Giovanni Baptista Guadagnini in 1776. Her website is tanjatetzlaff.com.


WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART String Quartet in E-flat major, K. 428Composed in 1783

Mozart’s legendary virtuosity on the piano is amply attested. Less well known is his additional talent as a child prodigy on the violin, the instrument on which his father built his reputation. (The author of a famous textbook on violin playing, Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the orchestra of Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg.) Young Wolfgang seems to have learned his way around the violin by a kind of osmosis. A family friend told of playing string trios with the untutored seven-year-old wunderkind. They started out doubling the second-violin part, but the older man “soon noticed with astonishment that [he] was quite superfluous” and bowed out. Relishing his moment in the sun, Wolfgang decided to try his hand at the first-violin part. “For a joke we made the experiment,” the friend recalled, “and we almost died for laughter when he played this too, though with nothing but wrong and irregular positioning, in such a way that he never actually broke down.”

Leopold, ambitious and domineering, frequently berated his son for neglecting the violin. Yet by age 13 Wolfgang was playing alongside his father in the court orchestra; three years later he was promoted to concertmaster. As a young man, he often performed on the violin in public. But despite his brash self-confidence—in one of his cockier moments he boasted that he was equal to “the finest fiddler in all Europe”—Mozart never felt as comfortable playing string instruments as he did the keyboard. Over time he seems to have given up practicing altogether and took his violin out only in the privacy of domestic chamber music sessions. The Irish tenor Michael Kelly attended a memorable quartet party in Vienna at which Mozart played viola to Joseph Haydn’s first violin. He judged that “the players were tolerable,” although “not one of them excelled on the instrument he played.” Even so, Kelly added, “a greater

treat, or a more remarkable one, cannot be imagined.”

Mozart wrote the first of his 27 string quartets in 1770, at the tender age of 14. By the early 1780s, he had completed his informal apprenticeship in quartet writing under Haydn. If the elder composer had brought the Classical quartet genre to full maturity, the younger one invested it with unprecedented emotional depth and musical complexity. Nowhere are these qualities more apparent than in the six quartets composed between late 1782 and early 1785, known collectively as the “Haydn” Quartets. In dedicating the set to his esteemed mentor, Mozart reciprocated the magnanimous gesture Haydn had made several months earlier when he famously proclaimed to Leopold Mozart that his son was “the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”

Completed in 1783, K. 428 is the third of the “Haydn” Quartets. In presenting the published set to Haydn two years later, Mozart called it “the fruit of long and laborious study,” a statement borne out by the unusually large number of preparatory sketches he made for the works. Needless to say, however, these highly polished masterpieces betray no traces of these labors. One contemporary chided Mozart for seeking novelty at the expense of conventional feeling; the six quartets, this reviewer complained, were “too highly seasoned—and whose palate can endure this for long?” Evidently, the public’s taste was more adventurous: The “Haydn” Quartets were so enthusiastically received in Austria and elsewhere that they had to be reprinted several times to meet the demand. Mozart’s music looks both backward and forward, paying homage to Haydn’s Classical poise and wit even as it anticipates the more overtly dramatic quartets of Beethoven and Schubert.

The opening Allegro ma non troppo sets the tone for the entire work in its cheeky chromaticism: after an octave leap, the unison melody falls to A natural instead of the expected A-flat—a

dissonance that would have been considerably more shocking to 18th-century ears than it is to ours—then slithers up by half-steps before falling and rising again. This pleasurably unsettling frisson is reinforced by the shifting tonalities and staggered phrases at the beginning of the first movement’s development section. The Andante con moto starts out more conventionally, with sustained chords in the upper voices set against the cello’s “walking” triplets; but the mood is soon darkened by stabbing accents and further unprepared dissonances. The playful Menuetto is characterized by emphatic upbeats and hurdy-gurdy-like drones, an effect echoed in the minor-key Trio section. Mozart has more tricks up his sleeve in the zesty finale, whose stuttering theme keeps popping to the surface, in rondo fashion, amid the swirling freshets of invention.


ABOUT THE PROGRAM

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

NOV 19, 2017


ALBAN BERG String Quartet, Op. 3 Composed in 1910

A disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg was the most Romantic of the Viennese modernists—“the Puccini of twelve-note music,” as he was dubbed (not altogether flatteringly) by some of his contemporaries. Schoenberg saw a reflection of himself in his prize pupil. “Alban,” he wrote, “had a burning desire to express himself no longer in the classical forms, harmonies, and melodic forms and their proper schemata of accompaniment, but in a manner in accordance with the times, and with his own personality.” Berg’s music, both freely atonal and twelve-tone, stands out for its warm-blooded sensuality and rhapsodic lyricism. The rich vein of expression that he mined in such works as the Lyric Suite and the operas Wozzeck and Lulu have made them popular even with listeners who shy away from “modern” music.

Berg’s first string quartet dates from 1910, the year that marked his “graduation” from Schoenberg’s composition class. (His second quartet, the Lyric Suite, followed in the mid-1920s.) Op. 3 is at once an affectionate homage to his revered “master and friend” and a declaration of artistic independence. As with Schoenberg’s own music, much of the Quartet’s concentrated intensity is due to Berg’s economical method of construction: the entire work is based on a few short rhythmic and melodic motives that are stated and restated, varied, elaborated, and combined in a wonderful example of what Schoenberg would later call “developing variation.” Indeed, the musical structure is so clearly delineated, with ear-catching melodies and periodic resting points, that the listener almost doesn’t notice the absence of traditional key relationships and other familiar tonal landmarks. Although the Quartet’s two movements contrast sharply in form and character—the first is lyrical and contemplative, the second extroverted and excitable—recurrent gestures and

patterns provide a sense of organic unity and shapeliness that place it among Berg’s most accessible compositions.

Schoenberg praised his pupil’s work effusively, writing that it “surprised me in the most unbelievable way by the fullness and unconstraint of its musical language, the strength and sureness of its presentation, its careful working and significant originality.” Berg, while freely acknowledging his debt to Schoenberg, credited his wife Helene with being the primary inspiration for the Quartet. Their courtship coincided with the work’s gestation, and its Vienna premiere took place a few days before their wedding in 1911. Unfortunately, the first performance of the challenging score, by a poorly prepared amateur ensemble, was something of a disaster. This may explain why the Quartet was not published until 1920, and then only at Berg’s own expense. Belated satisfaction came three years later, when the distinguished Havemann Quartet played it at a major contemporary music

festival in Salzburg on a program with works by Schoenberg and Bartók. “When I saw they knew my Quartet by heart, felt it themselves as genuine music, and performed it with all that feeling—my heart opened to them,” Berg enthused.

This time the performance was exemplary. In a euphoric letter to Helene written the following day, Berg declared that “it was, artistically, the most wonderful evening of my life, and I am full of sorrow that you couldn’t experience it, you who have spent at my side so many sad decades artistically, you who are just as concerned in the Quartet as I am myself, you to whom it completely belongs.” The performers, he reported, “played with indescribable beauty, and I can tell you, though only you, that despite my great excitement . . . I reveled in the lovely sounds, the solemn sweetness and ecstasy of the music. You can’t imagine it by what you’ve heard so far. The ‘wildest’ and ‘most daring’ passages were sheer harmony in the classical sense. The first movement ended in an elevated atmosphere; complete stillness in the audience, a short breath for the players, and it went on. At the end there was almost frantic general applause. The quartet themselves came back twice, and kept looking for me in the audience. The third time I was called for, stepped onto the platform quite by myself, and was received with terrific enthusiasm by the whole audience—not one sound of booing. The applause continued, and once more the five of us went up onto the platform.

“Quite an important success for Salzburg and for such a small work of chamber music,” Berg crowed. “The rest of the program, surprisingly, rather fell off in comparison. General opinion was that I carried off the prize that night.” Indeed, the Salzburg concert was an important turning point in the composer’s career, leading to performances of his music all over Europe.

ALBAN BERG

TETZLAFF QUARTET


FRANZ SCHUBERT String Quartet in G major, D. 887Composed in 1826

Schubert’s youthful appetite for chamber music was whetted by the happy circumstance of having a family string quartet under his own roof in Vienna. His brother Ferdinand recalled the “uncommon pleasure” of playing first violin to young Franz’s viola during school holidays, with their brother Ignaz and their father rounding out the foursome. There was, it seems, no standing on seniority in the Schubert household. According to Ferdinand, “Whenever a mistake was made, were it never so small, [Franz] would look the guilty one in the face, either seriously or sometimes with a smile; if Papa, who played the cello, was in the wrong, he would say nothing at first, but if the mistake was repeated, he would say quite shyly and smilingly: ‘Sir, there must be a mistake somewhere!,’ and our good father would gladly be taught by him.”

The comparatively modest demands made by the dozen or so string quartets that Schubert wrote in his teenage years presumably strained neither his father’s instrumental technique nor domestic harmony. But when Schubert returned to the quartet medium in December 1820, after a hiatus of roughly four years, his musical language had evolved far beyond the capacities of the average amateur musician. Indeed, he himself seems to have been somewhat overwhelmed by his newfound range and dramatic power. After completing the first movement of a quartet in C minor and drafting some 40 bars of a slow movement, he either set the score aside or abandoned it. Unpublished for more than four decades after the composer’s death, the so-called Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) has remained a tantalizing torso.

In any case, by the time he reached his late 20s, Schubert had moved far beyond the prodigious facility of his teenage years. Toward the end of his short life, he became fixated on the idea of writing a “grand

symphony” on the scale of Beethoven’s Ninth. Although that project never got off the drawing board, Schubert hinted at its epic nature in the three great string quartets that he produced between 1824 and 1826. The G-major Quartet, like its two predecessors—D. 804 in A minor (“Rosamunde”) and D. 810 in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) —is a work of majestic proportions, elaborate thematic development, and great emotional complexity. Schubert’s capacity for work and concentrated inspiration remained undiminished in spite of the deteriorating health, debilitating bouts of depression, and financial worries that had plagued him since he contracted syphilis in late 1822.

The last of Schubert’s 15 string quartets, D. 887 is also arguably the greatest. In its grandiose scale and intensity of expression, the G-major Quartet stands in the rarefied company of Beethoven’s late-period quartets. Regrettably, most of Schubert’s contemporaries found the work too challenging—or perhaps simply too exhausting—for their taste. The composer had no success in finding a publisher, and only the first of the four movements was performed in public during his lifetime. Not until 1850, nearly a quarter-century after it was composed, did this late masterpiece receive its long-overdue premiere. Clocking in at nearly 45 minutes (closer to an hour, if the conventional repeat of the first-movement exposition section is observed), the G-major Quartet demands considerable stamina on the part of both listeners and players. To modern ears, however, the music is hardly “difficult” in the same sense as, say, Beethoven’s knotty Op. 131, also written in 1826. Schubert’s seemingly bottomless fund of melody and the supple piquancy of his harmonies never fail to leave one hankering for more.

It is true that a tendency to latch onto a musical idea and repeat it at “heavenly length,” with only subtle variations, was one of Schubert’s shortcomings as a composer of large-scale works. Yet his ideas are so inspired that they rarely

become stale with repetition. In the Allegro molto moderato, for example, the jaunty dotted rhythms of the opening bars are seamlessly absorbed into the first violin’s gently insistent tune, wafted above the shimmering tremolos in the lower voices. Fluid oscillation between major and minor modes—one of Schubert’s stylistic trademarks—enhances the sense of drama and tension within a fundamentally lyrical framework. The slow movement, with its plangent E-minor theme introduced by the cello, is even more intensely dramatic. After a helter-skelter Scherzo, with a waltz-like Trio section inserted by way of contrast, the Quartet culminates in a brilliant finale characterized by nervously propulsive triplet rhythms.


NOV 19, 2017

FRANZ SCHUBERT

BALTIMORE CHOR AL ARTS PRESENTS THE 2017-2018 SEASON

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Handel’s Dixit DominusSaturday, October 28, 2017 at 8pm Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher CollegeBlake Clark conducts the Chorus and Orchestra in Handel’s virtuosic work as well as music of Bach, Haydn, and Randall Thompson.

Christmas with Choral ArtsTuesday, December 5, 2017 at 7:30pm The Baltimore Basilica, 409 Cathedral StreetBlake Clark leads the Chorus and Orchestra in this popular annual holiday program.

Sing-Along MessiahFriday, December 15, 2017 at 7:30pm Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher CollegeJoin in singing the great choruses of Handel’s Messiah. Bring your own score or buy one at the concert.

Christmas for KidsSaturday, December 16, 2017 at 11am Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher CollegeHoliday fun for the entire family, featuring Pepito the Clown and a visit from Santa!

Duruflé RequiemSunday, May 6, 2018 at 3pm St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 233 N. Charles StreetWorld-renowned organist Jeremy Filsell showcases the magnificent organ in the historic St. Paul’s Church, as Blake Clark conducts the Duruflé Requiem, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and other works.

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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–75)Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8

SERGEY PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D major, Op. 94bis

ModeratoScherzo: PrestoAndanteAllegro con brio

—INTERMISSION—

SERGEY RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)Trio élégiaque No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9

Moderato—Allegro vivaceQuasi variazioneAllegro risoluto

THE HELEN COPLAN HARRISON CONCERTThis concert endowment was established in 2002 in honor of longtime Shriver Hall Concert Series Board member Dr. Helen Harrison, a gift by her sons Dr. Stephen Harrison and Dr. Richard Harrison and their families. Helen Harrison joined the Shriver Hall Concert Series Board of Directors in November 1973 at the invitation of founding president Ernest Bueding. Dr. Harrison served as an active and influential member of the Board until 2001, and she was responsible for bringing many new members to the Board, including chair emerita Jephta Drachman. As a scientist, Dr. Harrison shared the prestigious Howland Prize with her husband, Dr. Harold Harrison, for research done at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

continued on page 40

DEC 10, 2017

JANINE JANSEN VIOLIN

ALEXANDER GAVRYLYUK PIANO

TORLEIF THEDÉEN CELLO


Janine Jansen appears by arrangement with Alexandra Schulz.Alexander Gavrylyuk appears by arrangement with Askonas Holt.Torleif Thedéen appears by arrangement with Nordic Artists Management.This concert will end at approximately 7:20pm.



JANINE JANSEN VIOLIN

With an enviable international reputation, violinist Janine Jansen works regularly with the world’s most eminent orchestras and conductors. This season she

is a Perspectives Artist at Carnegie Hall, performing a variety of concerto and chamber music programs, and she tours with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie.

Other highlights this season include engagements with the Berlin, Munich, Czech, Rotterdam, Royal Stockholm, and Oslo philharmonics, Vienna and Iceland symphonies, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Jansen also travels to the Far East and Australia performing with the Singapore, Sydney, and New Zealand symphony orchestras.

A devoted chamber musician, Jansen joins Mischa Maisky, Martha Argerich, Itamar Golan, and Lily Maisky for a major European tour, in addition to performing recitals throughout Europe. As part of her Perspectives Series at Carnegie Hall, she performs Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and the U.S. premiere of Michel van der Aa’s Violin Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Further concerts at Carnegie Hall include chamber programs with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Dover Quartet, cellist Torleif Thedéen, and pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk.

Jansen records exclusively for Decca Classics and has been extraordinarily successful in the digital music charts since releasing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in 2003. Her latest release, conducted by Antonio Pappano, features Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with the London Symphony Orchestra and Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Jansen has also released a number of chamber music discs, including Schubert’s String Quintet, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and sonatas by Debussy, Ravel, and Prokofiev with pianist Itamar Golan.

The recipient of numerous prizes, Jansen’s accolades include several Edison Klassiek awards, ECHO Klassik awards, the NDR

Musikpreis for outstanding artistic achievement, the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award for performances in the U.K., the Bremen MusikFest Award, and the Concertgebouw Prize. Jansen studied with Coosje Wijzenbeek, Philipp Hirshhorn, and Boris Belkin.

In 2003 Jansen founded the hugely successful International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht and served as its artistic director through 2016.

Janine Jansen plays the 1707 Stradivarius “Rivaz - Baron Gutmann” violin, which is kindly on loan from Dextra Musica. Her website is janinejansen.com.

ALEXANDER GAVRYLYUK PIANO

A stunningly virtuosic pianist, Alexander Gavrylyuk has received international acclaim for his electrifying and poetic performances. Born in Ukraine, Gavrylyuk

began his piano studies at age seven, giving his first concerto performance when he was just nine years old. He went on to win First Prize and the Gold Medal at the 1999 Horowitz International Piano Competition and First Prize at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in 2000, where the Japanese press lauded him as the “most talented 16-year-old pianist of the second half of the 20th century.” In 2005, he was awarded both the coveted Gold Medal and the award for Best Performance of a Classical Concerto at the internationally renowned Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition.

Following his debut in 2010 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Gavrylyuk has been in demand by orchestras and conductors worldwide. He has appeared with, among others, the Hallé Orchestra; the New York, Los Angeles, Israel, Stuttgart, Warsaw, Moscow and Rotterdam philharmonics; and the Royal Scottish National, Bournemouth, Cincinnati symphony orchestras. He has also collaborated with renowned conductors


including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Andrey Boreyko, Valery Gergiev, Neeme Järvi, Louis Langrée, Gianandrea Noseda, Vassily Petrenko, Markus Stenz, and Osmo Vänska. Gavrylyuk regularly visits the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, and Russia, returning frequently to major halls for concerts and recitals.

Among Gavrylyuk’s discography is an acclaimed 2009 live recording of the complete Prokofiev violin concertos with Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony. His most recent release, a recital disc featuring Brahms’ Paganini Variations and works by Liszt, has been widely praised.

Orchestral highlights of the 2017-18 season include Gavrylyuk’s BBC Proms debut performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the BBC Scottish Symphony under Thomas Dausgaard, as well as debuts with orchestras including the Czech, Luxembourg, and Mainz philharmonics and Orchestre National de Lille. Recent and upcoming performances include his debut on London’s International Piano Series and the Concertgebouw Master Pianists Series, and concerts at Wigmore Hall, the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, Cologne Philharmonie, Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, and Tokyo City Concert Hall. He will tour Europe, Asia, and North America in duo and trio recitals with violinist Janine Jansen.

Gavrylyuk’s website is alexandergavrylyuk.com.

TORLEIF THEDÉEN CELLO

Torleif Thedéen is a highly regarded cellist who regularly performs with many of the world’s major orchestras, including the Berlin and Czech philharmonics, Vienna

Symphony, and Netherlands philharmonic orchestra, as well as the philharmonic orchestras of Moscow, Helsinki, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Rotterdam, London, and the BBC. He has collaborated with numerous esteemed conductors, including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paavo Berglund, Neeme Järvi, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Leif Segerstam, Franz Welser-Möst, and Eri Klas.

Hailing from Sweden, he first gained international recognition in 1985 with a series of important competition wins. Thedéen is active as a chamber musician, appearing in such prestigious concert venues as London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. He often participates in music festivals throughout Europe, including Verbier, Prague Spring, and Schleswig-Holstein, as well as festivals in Bordeaux, Oslo, Salzburg, and Stavanger (Norway). His chamber partners have included artists such as violinist Julian Rachlin, clarinetist Martin Fröst, the Danish String Quartet, and pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes.

He recently performed Dutilleux’s Cello Concerto with the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, Saint-Saëns’ Concerto with the Hamburg Symphony, and Brahms’ Double Concerto with Janine Jansen and the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. Among his engagements last season were several chamber music and orchestral performances in New Zealand and Australia.

Thedéen has recorded numerous CDs for BIS Records, including Dvořák’s Cello Concerto as well as contemporary works. His CD of Shostakovich’s Cello Concertos won the Cannes Classical Award, and his recording of Bach’s solo Cello Suites was named Editor’s Choice in BBC Music Magazine.

Since 1996, Thedéen has served as a professor at Edsberg Manor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He previously taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. Thedéen performs on a cello crafted by David Tecchler in 1711, which was formerly played by Lynn Harrell.


DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8Composed in 1923

Shostakovich has a special place in the annals of 20th-century Russian music. Unlike Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky, he didn’t come of age before the Bolshevik Revolution and immerse himself in Western culture. And unlike younger composers such as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, he didn’t live to see the fall of the regime that had muzzled artistic experimentation in the name of sterile “socialist realism.” Out-wardly, Shostakovich remained a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, alternately lionized and demonized by the Communist Party’s cultural apparatchiks. Yet throughout his life, the highly strung composer played an elaborate game of feint and attack with the Soviet establishment, cannily balancing his more abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly patriotic and artistically conservative works. As a result, his output veers wildly between mordent satire (for instance, the opera The Nose and the ballet The Age of Gold), patriotic bombast (the Second Symphony and the symphonic poem October, both eulogizing the 1917 Revolution), and bleak alienation (almost any of his 15 string quartets).

Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. But his incorrigible political cynicism, and his contempt for the proletarian pap encouraged by the authorities in the Kremlin, repeatedly landed him in hot water. The international success of the Leningrad Symphony—composed during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II and widely hailed as a symbol of Russian resistance—finally brought him a measure of security. In the “thaw” that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich reached a precarious entente with his political masters, who needed his support almost as much as he needed theirs. He traveled abroad, established contact with Benjamin Britten and other Western

composers, and achieved performances of his works that had long been suppressed. With acute misgivings, he even accepted a number of official posts, becoming secretary of the state-run composers’ union and belatedly joining the Communist Party.

Fundamentally tonal, but laced with dissonant harmonies and kinetic energy, Shostakovich’s music epitomizes the turbulent, existentialist spirit of the “Age of Anxiety.” He was a precocious 17-year-old pupil at the Leningrad Conservatory when he wrote his first piece of chamber music in 1923. As a student work, the Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 8, has neither the brooding intensity of its better-known sequel—the Piano Trio No. 2 of 1944, with its dark humor and savage dance of death—nor the symphonic richness of the composer’s masterful string quartets. Even so, the hallmarks of Shostakovich’s mature style are already apparent in the Trio’s insistent ostinato rhythms and slithering

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

continued from page 37

THE REIKO T. & YUAN C. LEE FUND FOR OUTSTANDING STRING PERFORMERSDrs. Reiko T. and Yuan C. (“Ed”) Lee, faculty in The Johns Hopkins University Department of Biology created this annual concert endowment in 2005. Biochemists and amateur string players, the Lees have been subscribers since SHCS’s first season. The Lee fund supports concerts by the world’s greatest string players. The first concert supported by this gift was the 2005-06 appearance by Pinchas Zukerman and was dedicated to Reiko’s father, Tomotake Takasaka, Professor of Agricultural Engineering at National Taiwan University and an avid self-taught amateur string player. He was also one of the first musicians to bring western music to Taiwan. Reiko’s father initially enticed her into playing violin and put the same energy into promoting student activities and amateur musicianship. He held weekly gatherings of chamber music lovers at his home, and it was at one of these that Reiko and Ed, who played viola, met. They came to the U.S. in 1958, earning their Ph.D.s in biochemistry at the University of Iowa. After three years at U.C. Berkeley, they arrived in Baltimore in 1965 to start their Hopkins—and Shriver Hall Concert Series—careers.


chromatic motives, its spare textures and wayward harmonies.

Teachers and critics were unanimous in their praise of Shostakovich’s piano playing at the conservatory. (Not surprisingly, the piano part of the Trio is a good deal more demanding, technically, than the violin and cello parts.) As a composer, however, he received mixed reviews from the more conservative members of the faculty, whom he privately dismissed as “stupid formalists,” much as he himself would be officially censured for bourgeois “formalism” in 1948. Shostakovich’s composition teacher, Maximilian Steinberg, grumbled about his persistent “enthusiasm for the grotesque” and called for revisions in the Trio that the budding genius stubbornly refused Perhaps as a result of his inflexibility, the work would remain unpublished until after Shostakovich’s death.

The grotesque element becomes prominent in Shostakovich’s later music, where it often has a dark, sardonic edge. Not so in the Op. 8 Trio, or Poème, as it was billed for its first performance at the conservatory by Shostakovich and two fellow students in December 1923. The short single movement is notable not for its biting introspection but for its extroverted buoyancy. Commentators have variously attributed the work’s high-spirited lyricism to the uplifting environment of Petrograd (in fact, it was largely written in the Crimea, where Shostakovich was convalescing from tuberculosis) or to the composer’s youthful romance with Tatyana Glivenko, the daughter of a prominent Moscow philologist, to whom the Trio is dedicated. Whatever the explanation, the music is suffused with warmth, self-confidence, and ebullient energy.

SERGEY PROKOFIEVSonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D major, Op. 94bisComposed in 1943, 1944

Prokofiev spent much of his life perched precariously between two chairs, his music

being regarded as too stylistically ad-vanced by some, and by others as too conservative. He rose to fame before World War I as a leader of the Russian avant-garde on the strength of such driving, acerbically dissonant works as the Scythian Suite—Prokofiev’s answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—and his Second Piano Concerto, both written in his early 20s. During the war, he tapped a more poetic vein in smaller-scale works like the delicately impressionistic Visions fugitives for solo piano. At the same time, he anticipated the clear-textured neoclassicism of the 1920s in his effervescent Classical Symphony, which he described as the kind of music Haydn would have written if he had lived in the early 20th century.

Something of a political naïf, Prokofiev took no part in the uprisings that swept across Russia in 1917-18, which he tended to regard as a bothersome distraction from his creative work. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, he received per-mission to emigrate from the Soviet Union and flung himself in the competitive, cosmopolitan culture of the West. In the musical capitals of Europe he soon found himself eclipsed by his fellow émigré Stravinsky, while in the U.S. he shared the limelight with Rachmaninoff, another Russian pianist powerhouse. Many of his best-loved works date from this period of self-imposed exile, including the fairy-tale opera The Love for Three Oranges, the Third Piano Concerto, and the Lieutenant Kijé Suite. But the pull of Mother Russia remained strong and in 1936, discounting the warnings of friends, Prokofiev returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow.

Both the sunny Violin Sonata No. 2 in D major and its dark-minded predecessor in F minor reflect Prokofiev’s attempt to stake out a middle ground between his edgy, distinctively modernist style and the music for the masses that Soviet artists were expected to produce under the banner of socialist realism. The brilliance of the violin parts reflects the influence of the great Ukrainian virtuoso David Oistrakh, to whom the Sonata No. 1 in F minor is dedicated. Like other privileged

Soviet artists, Prokofiev spent much of World War II at a safe distance from the fields of battle. In June 1943 he was evacuated to the industrial city of Perm in the Ural Mountains. It was during his brief stay there that he composed his incongruously light-hearted Sonata in D major for Flute and Piano, Op. 94, destined to become one of his most popular works. A few months later, at Oistrakh’s behest, he arranged the music for violin and piano (the suffix bis in the opus number indicates that it is a transcription). Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin premiered the violin version in Moscow on June 17, 1944, five days before the Red Army launched its last major offensive against Germany in Eastern Europe.

The Sonata’s four movements strike an attractive balance between bravura display and poetic lyricism. The opening Moderato

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SERGEY PROKOFIEV

pairs a languorous melody of silken elegance with a simple, hymn-like tune in flowing dotted rhythms, both set off against music of a crisp, martial character. In the spitfire Scherzo, two sharply rhythmicized moto perpetuo panels, with the violin and piano dancing nimbly in fast triple time, frame a rhapsodic, Slavic-flavored midsection. The short, richly melodious Andante cadences on a soft F-major chord, setting the stage for a swaggering Allegro con brio in brilliant D major that showcases the violinist’s virtuosity in a profusion of grace notes, doublestops, and trills.

In 1946, Oistrakh and Oborin also gave the belated premiere of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 in Moscow. The work was well received and won the composer a coveted Stalin Prize the following year. Shortly thereafter, however, the political winds changed and Prokofiev found himself subjected to withering ideological criticism by the Soviet Union’s cultural thought police. In a formal condemnation issued in 1948, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and several other prominent composers were charged with trafficking in “formalist distortions and antidemocratic tendencies.” Although Prokofiev desperately tried to rehabilitate himself by issuing a public mea culpa, he and his music remained shrouded for the remaining five years of his life. In a final irony that he would have appreciated, he died on the same day in 1953 as Stalin, his chief patron and persecutor.

SERGEY RACHMANINOFF Trio élégiaque No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9Composed in 1893

Although Rachmaninoff’s formidable reputation as a pianist has tended to compete with his compositional achievements, he occupies a prominent niche in the pantheon of Russian composers. As a 16-year-old wunderkind, he was singled out for greatness by no less an authority than Tchaikovsky, and shortly after graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, he composed the Prelude in C-sharp minor for solo piano

that soon became his signature piece on recitals. In the tightly knit musical world of late 19th-century Russia, it’s not surprising that a neophyte found himself rubbing shoulders with Tchaikovsky, one of the country’s greatest living composers. But the affinity between them ran much deeper than casual professional acquaintance: despite the generation-wide gap in their ages, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky were artistic soulmates. Both associated with the Moscow Conservatory, they distanced themselves from the assertive nationalism of the St. Petersburg-based composers known as the “Mighty Five” (Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Cui, and Balakirev).

Like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff wrote comparatively few pieces for chamber ensemble, all of these works clustered in the early years of his career. The String Quartet No. 1, which he apparently composed in 1889 and set aside after completing only two movements, is among the first works he produced after he began studying composition in earnest with

Sergey Taneyev (counterpoint) and Anton Arensky (harmony). This was followed by an assortment of short chamber pieces, another unfinished string quartet, two piano trios, and, finally, the masterful Cello Sonata in G minor of 1901. Thereafter, for reasons we can only surmise, Rach-maninoff abandoned instrumental chamber music altogether in favor of works for piano, orchestra, and voice.

Rachmaninoff wrote not one but two piano trios to which he affixed the programmatic subtitle Trio élégiaque (Elegiac Trio). The first, in G minor, dates from January 1892, only a few months before his conservatory graduation. By his own account, Rachmaninoff was “completely under the spell of Tchai-kovsky” at the time, and his first Trio élégiaque bears a marked resemblance to the two-movement Piano Trio in A minor that Tchaikovsky had written in 1881 in memory of the pianist Nikolay Rubinstein. Rachmaninoff compressed his elegy into a single sonata-form structure lasting some 15 minutes. The virtuoso keyboard part, with its lapidary chords and intricate filigree, was clearly molded for his famously large hands.

Prompted by Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893, the Trio élégiaque No. 2 is equally steeped in elegiac introspection. Rachmaninoff looked upon the older composer as both a mentor and an ally: it was largely thanks to Tchaikovsky’s influence that the prestigious Bolshoi Opera premiered his one-act gypsy melodrama Aleko in the spring of 1893. As Rachmaninoff recalled later:

“Tchaikovsky was already renowned then, he was recognized all over the world and revered by everyone, but fame had not spoiled him. Of all the people and artists whom I have had occasion to meet, Tchaikovsky was the most enchanting. His delicacy of spirit was unique. He was modest like all truly great men and simple as only very few are. Of all those I have known, only Chekhov was like him.”


JANSEN, GAVRYLYUK, & THEDÉEN

SERGEY RACHMANINOFF

That September, Rachmaninoff attended a musical soirée at Taneyev’s apartment in Moscow at which he auditioned his new symphonic poem The Crag at the piano for a small group that included a warmly appreciative Tchai-kovksy. According to Rachmaninoff, the great composer was unstinting in his praise, saying “with that nice grin of his: ‘It’s amazing how many things Serezha has managed to write this summer! A symphonic poem, a concerto, a suite, etc., etc.! All I’ve managed to write is just this one symphony!’” The work to which Tchaikovsky alluded so slightingly was his Symphony No. 6, the Pathétique. Rach-maninoff’s plans to attend the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s valedictory masterpiece in St. Petersburg in October were thwarted when he was summoned to Kiev to conduct the second production of Aleko.

Rachmaninoff dated the score of the D-minor Trio October 25–December 15, 1893, which suggests that he sat down to compose it on the very day Tchaikovsky died of cholera in St. Petersburg. The task

left him exhausted, both emotionally and physically. On December 17 of that year, he wrote to a friend:

“I’ve been working hard, regularly, persistently. This work is a composition on the death of a great artist. It’s now finished, so I can speak with you. While working on it, all my thoughts, feelings, powers belonged to it, to this song. . . . I trembled for every phrase, sometimes crossed out everything and started over again to think, think. Now that’s over, and I can speak calmly.”

Like the earlier Trio élégiaque, Rachmaninoff’s Op. 9 is closely and deliberately modeled on Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor. A slow funeral march in D minor opens the first movement, with the piano churning out a short ostinato theme consisting of two chords followed by a descending four-note chromatic figure. Above this grimly insistent motif, the violin and cello sing a

sad, soulful melody that builds steadily in intensity until the Moderato explodes in a tempestuous Allegro vivace featuring a variant of the descending chromatic pattern. The ensuing outpouring of emotion is by turns anguished and tender, delicate and fiery. This kind of robust—and occasionally over-the-top—romanticism would remain Rachmaninoff’s stock in trade for the next half-century. The Trio’s magisterial second movement, like Tchaikovsky’s, is a set of variations. Fittingly, Rachmaninoff took the broad, serene theme in F major from his tone poem The Crag, which Tchaikovsky had admired and proposed to conduct. Here Rachmaninoff shows himself a master of coloristic effects, especially in the highly virtuosic piano part. The work ends with a comparatively brief, energetic Allegro risoluto in D minor, stamped with inexorable doom and culminating in a moving reminiscence of the opening elegiac procession.



DEC 10, 2017

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847)String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13

Adagio—Allegro vivaceAdagio non lentoIntermezzo: Allegretto con moto—Allegro di moltoPresto—Adagio non lento

SEBASTIAN CURRIER (b. 1959)Etude 6, “Velocities” from Etudes and Lullabies for String Quartet* Lullaby 2, “Dreaming” from Etudes and Lullabies for String Quartet*

*Baltimore premieres—These works are co-commissioned by Shriver Hall Concert Series and Carnegie Hall.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841–1904)Quintet for Piano and Strings in A major, Op. 81

Allegro ma non tantoDumka: Andante con motoScherzo (Furiant): Molto vivaceFinale: Allegro

THE YALE GORDON YOUNG ARTISTS CONCERTYale Gordon first sponsored a concert featuring an accomplished young artist in 1978. The following year, his Yale Gordon Foundation made its initial contribution to Shriver Hall Concert Series. The Foundation eventually evolved into The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust, which has been sponsoring annual Series concerts since 1986. The Yale Gordon Young Artist Concert features soloists or ensembles with great promise in the formative stages of their careers. Many of the artists who debuted at Shriver Hall through this concert have developed or already have international careers. The Board of Directors of the Series is deeply grateful to the Trust and its officials, Phyllis and Louis Friedman, and the late Sidney Sherr and Loraine Bernstein, for their warmly welcomed support and encouragement in making the Yale Gordon programs so successful over the years.

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BORROMEO STRING QUARTETBENJAMIN HOCHMAN PIANO


The Borromeo String Quartet appears by arrangement with Dworkin & Company. Benjamin Hochman appears by arrangement with Kirshbaum Associates Inc.This concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.

BORROMEO STRING QUARTETNicholas Kitchen, violinKristopher Tong, violinMai Motobuchi, violaYeesun Kim, cello

Recently celebrating its 25th anniversary, each visionary performance of the award-winning Borromeo String Quartet strengthens its reputation as one of the most

important ensembles of our time, “simply the best” (Boston Globe).The BSQ strives to redefine the classical music landscape

through innovation, including its pioneering use of technology as the first string quartet to utilize laptop computers in concert. This allows the artists to perform solely from four-part scores and composers’ manuscripts, better revealing the creative process of the composer—an experience which the ensemble brings to students and audiences around the world. In 2003, the BSQ became the first classical ensemble to make its own live concert recordings and videos, distributing them for many years to audiences through its Living Archive, a music learning web portal for which a new version will soon be released.

The BSQ has presented more than ten string-quartet cycles by beloved masters, and enjoyed collaborations with major composers of the last two centuries. It has been ensemble-in-residence at the New England Conservatory, Isabella Stewart

Gardner Museum, and Taos School of Music in New Mexico for twenty-five years; and has worked extensively with the Library of Congress and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Recent and upcoming seasons include the premiere of a new work by Aaron Jay Kernis; a new multi-media collaboration with visual artist, puppeteer, and director Doug Fitch celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth; performances in Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and China; and the cycle of Bartók quartets in Boston, San Francisco, and at the Library of Congress. Upcoming highlights also include appearances at Carnegie Hall and Shriver Hall Concert Series, which have co-commissioned a new work by Sebastian Currier for the BSQ, the Schubert Club in Minneapolis, and the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival.

The BSQ has received numerous awards throughout its illustrious career, including Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant and Martin E. Segal Award, as well as Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award. It also received top prizes at the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France.

The Borromeo String Quartet’s website is borromeoquartet.org.



BENJAMIN HOCHMAN PIANO

T he New York Times says of Benjamin Hochman “classical music doesn’t get better than this.” Pianist Benjamin Hochman’s eloquent and virtuosic performances blend

exciting technique with poetic interpretation, exciting audiences and critics alike. He performs in major cities around the world as a respected orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, working with a celebrated array of renowned conductors and artist colleagues. An impassioned and intelligent exponent of diverse composers, he frequently juxtaposes familiar works with the unfamiliar in his concert programs to help illuminate each work for the listener, a talent further illustrated by his thoughtful recorded repertoire.

Highlights of the 2017-18 season include serving as soloist and conductor for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 with the Orlando Philharmonic; and reprising this work with Santa Fe Pro Musica Orchestra under the baton of David Felberg. Chamber music performances in 2017-18 include collaborations with the Borromeo String Quartet at Shriver Hall Concert Series, members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, and at Santa Fe and Norfolk chamber music festivals, among others.

Winner of the 2011 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Hochman has performed with the New York, Los Angeles, and Israel philharmonics; the Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, Seattle, Vancouver, New Jersey, American, and Portland symphonies; the New York String Orchestra; IRIS Orchestra in Memphis; Prague Philharmonia; Istanbul State Orchestra; and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada. He has worked with these orchestras under eminent conductors such as David Robertson, Gianandrea Noseda, John Storgårds, Pinchas Zukerman, Jun Märkl, Bramwell Tovey, Jahja Ling, Michael Stern, Jaime Laredo and Joshua Weilerstein.

Under the early influence of Otto Werner Mueller at The Curtis Institute of Music and with a deep admiration for the rich orchestral repertoire, Hochman has recently pursued serious conducting studies. He was appointed musical assistant to Louis Langrée and guest conductors at the 2016 Mostly Mozart Festival. He has served as assistant conductor at the Orlando Philharmonic and led the Roosevelt Island Symphony, a specialized ensemble consisting of New York’s top musicians. This season, he conducts members of The Orchestra Now and Orlando Philharmonic and serves as assistant conductor to Leon Botstein for American Symphony Orchestra’s concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Hochman’s latest album on Avie Records, Variations, was based on his 2014 recital at 92nd Street Y which was recognized by The New York Times as one of the top ten classical music events of the year. Earlier releases include Hochman’s 2009 debut solo recording of works by Bach, Berg, and Webern for Artek, followed by his 2013 solo album release titled Homage to Schubert for Avie Records. He has also recorded chamber music by Lawrence Dillon and by Lisa Bielawa.

Born in Jerusalem, Hochman began his studies at the Conservatory of the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. He is a graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music and the Mannes College of Music, where his principal teachers were Claude Frank and Richard Goode. His studies were supported by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He is currently on the piano faculty of Bard College. Hochman lives in New York City and his website is benjaminhochman.com.


FELIX MENDELSSOHNString Quartet in A minor, Op. 13Composed in 1827

Among the many testimonials to Mendelssohn’s early-blooming genius is a diary entry by the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, who taught piano to Felix and his older sister Fanny. “This is a family the like of which I have never known,” Moscheles observed. “Felix, a boy of 15, is a phenomenon. What are all prodigies as compared with him? Gifted children, but nothing else. This Felix Mendelssohn is already a mature artist, and yet but 15 years old! We at once settled down together for several hours, for I was obliged to play a great deal when really I wanted to hear him and see his compositions, for Felix had to show me a concerto in C minor, a double concerto, and several motets; and all so full of genius, and at the same time so correct and thorough!”

One excellent illustration of Mendelssohn’s prodigious precocity is the A-minor String Quartet. Both its technical assurance and its depth of feeling belie the fact that its composer was an 18-year-old student at the University of Berlin. To be sure, by late 1827 Mendelssohn already had an impressive collection of masterpieces to his credit, including the first version of the great String Octet and the ever-popular overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet none of his previous works quite prepares one for the boldly iconoclastic

language of his second quartet. It was at once a tribute to his artistic progenitors and a declaration of independence.

Mendelssohn freely acknowledged his debts to other composers, in particular the Viennese masters who had brought the string quartet genre to maturity in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Late in life, he advised his own students at the Leipzig Conservatory to “take a quartet of Haydn and model the form” of their compositions on it. Whether Haydn’s influence on Mendelssohn extended very far beyond the “amiable innocence” that one 19th-century critic detected in both men’s music is debatable. A more obvious source of inspiration, at least for the profusion of counterpoint in the A-minor Quartet, is J.S. Bach. A keen admirer of the Baroque master, Mendelssohn would soon go into rehearsals for his epoch-making revival of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie. Although his immersion in Bach’s music turned him into a lifelong student of counterpoint, Mendelssohn’s studious devotion did not meet with universal approval. Henry Chorley, the famously crotchety British critic, accused the young tyro of “parading his science, his knowledge of the ancients, his mastery over all the learning of his Art” in an effort to “prove himself a man among the double refined intelligences of those by whom he was surrounded.”

The strongest influence on Mendelssohn’s string quartet writing, however, was undoubtedly Beethoven, who died in 1827, the year the Quartet in A minor was written. Despite their marked differences in style and temperament, Mendelssohn knew and played much of the older man’s music, and contemporary critics often bracketed the two composers together. Indeed, so characteristically “Beethovenian” are the A-minor Quartet’s quasi-cyclical structure and generally high level of dissonance that a Parisian listener mistook it for one of Beethoven’s late quartets and praised it as such to Mendelssohn’s face, much to the younger composer’s chagrin. The French predilection for Beethoven helps explain FELIX MENDELSSOHN

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

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THE DAVID AND BARBARA RODBELL KORNBLATT COMMISSIONING FUNDBarbara and the late David Kornblatt always had a passion for contemporary art and the creative process. From 1975 to 1992, Barbara owned an art gallery that specialized in contemporary American painting, sculpture, and works on paper, and she helped numerous artists create and sustain lasting careers by promoting their work. Over 50 years ago, David and a partner founded what would later become the Kornblatt Company—a real estate development, brokerage, and management firm culminating in the building and management of Saint Paul Plaza. Passionate concert-goers, Barbara joined the Series Board of Directors in 1998. Barbara and David’s generous contribution establishing The David and Barbara Rodbell Kornblatt Commissioning Fund in 2014 enables Shriver Hall Concert Series to realize its goal of commissioning and premiering new chamber and solo instrumental works on a regular basis with the hope of broadening the repertoire and making a significant contribution to the oeuvre. This contribution was made in honor of their parents Harry & Rebecca Kornblatt and Isidore & Sarah Rodbell.


why Op. 13 became a popular set piece at the Paris Conservatoire. “The pupils there,” Mendelssohn proudly reported to his family, “are practicing their fingers off to play ‘Ist es wahr (Is it true)?’”

In calling the piece by its unofficial nickname, Mendelssohn underscored the importance he placed on the quotation from his own lied “Frage” (Question), a luminous, triple-time melody in A major that serves as the Quartet’s germinal idea. A questioning three-note motif, first falling, then rising, not only opens and closes the Quartet, but generates much of the music that comes between. “Is it true,” the poet asks his beloved in Mendelssohn’s lied, “that you are always waiting for me in the arbored walk?” For all its stylistic unconventionality, the Op. l3 Quartet, from its emotionally agitated first movement to its serene ending, can be heard as an extended rumination on romantic love. The rather severe fugue that constitutes the midsection of the quartet’s slow second movement recalls Bach’s Musical Offering and Beethoven’s late string quartets. Yet there is no mistaking Mendelssohn’s touch in the third movement, with its trademark gossamer scherzo. Nor is there anything remotely derivative in the masterly way the finale recapitulates and elaborates on the themes of the preceding movements. A spacious coda, in radiant A major, harks back to the question posed at the beginning of the Quartet, wordlessly affirming the poet’s devotion to the beloved woman “who feels with me and stays ever true to me.”

SEBASTIAN CURRIEREtude 6, “Velocities” from Etudes and Lullabies for String Quartet

Lullaby 2, “Dreaming” from Etudes and Lullabies for String Quartet Composed in 2017, co-commissioned by Shriver Hall Concert Series and Carnegie Hall

Sebastian Currier once said that the composer with whom he identifies most closely is Bartók, whose music he describes as “very thoughtful, honest, amazingly well put-together, and very human.” These same

qualities characterize Currier’s diverse catalogue of solo, orchestral, chamber, and multimedia works. Born into a musical family in Providence, RI—his father was a violinist, his mother and brother both composers—Currier studied with the serialist composers Milton Babbitt and George Perle. Although their influence can be felt in his meticulously plotted musical structures and attention to detail, Currier’s own works embrace a wider stylistic and conceptual range. For example, the richly coloristic chamber piece Static, which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2007, plays on the dual meaning of “static” as unchanging and “white noise.” The violin concerto Time Machines explores the idea that music takes place simultaneously in multiple temporal dimensions, with past, present, and future coexisting, intersecting, and colliding in front of the listener’s ears.

Put that way, Currier’s approach to composition sounds highly intellectual, recalling Babbitt’s view of the academic composer as a skilled specialist in the same league as researchers in other branches of the arts and sciences. Currier did in fact serve as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, from 2013 to 2016. But he has long since parted ways with many of the dogmas and procedures that captured the allegiance of many avant-garde composers in the late 20th century. Despite his penchant for high-level organization, he has shown little interest in serialism, post-modernism, or any other overarching compositional

philosophy. Many of his works follow a distinctly nonlinear and non-goal-oriented trajectory, unfolding simultaneously on multiple levels. The structures he devises for his music are often equally open-ended, as illustrated by the ongoing string quartet project that he calls Etudes and Lullabies.

The two pieces tonight represent the latest installment in this anthology. To date it comprises a dozen etudes and lullabies, which are intended to be played either individually or, cafeteria style, in any combination the performers choose. “The piano repertoire has many collections of short pieces: études, preludes, nocturnes, preludes and fugues, and so forth,” Currier explains. “The string quartet, strangely, does not. I wrote this collection with that in mind.” The Borromeo String Quartet is one of several ensembles that Currier has entrusted with introducing various pairings of etudes and lullabies. Etude 6, “Velocities” and Lullaby 2, “Dreaming", co-commissioned by Shriver Hall Concert Series and Carnegie Hall, had their world premieres in New York on October 20, 2017.

As the title suggests, “Velocities” has the energetic character of a musical relay race, with the four instruments passing the baton—in the form of a blistering barrage of sixteenth notes—from one to the other, while the other three players urge the designated sprinter on from the sidelines with goading pizzicatos, tremolos, glissandos, and other effects. The texture suddenly changes from detached notes to smooth slurrings and insistent repetitions, then just as abruptly switches back, ultimately dissolving in a mad rush of swooping slides and thudding accents. Currier employs some of the same instrumental techniques in “Dreaming”, but in a very different context and sound world. Slowly changing harmonies, microtonal intervals, ghostly harmonics, and grating ponticello sounds (produced by placing the bow near the bridge) conspire with wispy fragments of melody to create a dream-like, almost hallucinatory atmosphere.

The pairing of etude and lullaby, two genres with long histories and rich

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SEBASTIAN CURRIER

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associations, feels natural to the 58-year-old composer. “For me,” Currier explains in a note to the score, “these two forms perfectly complement each other, representing two fundamental and opposing aspects of music: the ability to energize and to soothe. An etude projects struggle, intensity, energy, and triumph over difficulty. A lullaby represents the polar opposite: It projects calm, quiet, intimacy, and letting go. The etude embodies defiance, the lullaby surrender.” The genesis of Etudes and Lullabies dates back to Currier’s Quartetset of 1995, which began as a collection of short pieces, “the equivalent of Chopin etudes, or preludes, or mazurkas,” but ended up as a more conventional seven-movement string quartet. The new work’s flexible design reflects Currier’s belief that stylistic parameters in music are constantly shifting, upending established traditions and hierarchies, and that the journey is generally more interesting and important than the destination. “We live in a multi-farious world,” he says. “I don’t like and don’t respect . . . the sort of closed feeling that . . . it’s this way or the highway. It just doesn’t make sense to me as a conceptual framework for the way the world is.”

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁKQuintet for Piano and Strings in A major, Op. 81 Composed in 1887

A comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his musical mark in his native Bohemia. Until

then, the composer’s reputation had hardly penetrated beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his Slavic-flavored comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech opera house. (There was also one for German opera.) But Dvořák’s career finally took off when the imperial Austrian government awarded him a prestigious stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security, the prize brought him to the attention of Johannes Brahms, a member of the award jury.

In introducing the obscure Czech composer to his own publisher in Berlin two years later, Brahms noted that Dvořák “has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces. In any case, he is a very talented man. Moreover, he is poor!” From 1877 to the end of Brahms’ life 20 years later, the two men remained on terms of mutual esteem and affection. Brahms, who found composing laborious, envied Dvořák’s facility and melodic invention, observing that “he is never at a loss for an idea like the rest of us.” For his part, Dvořák looked upon the older composer as a mentor and regularly dispatched his scores to Vienna for Brahms to criticize, correct, and even proofread.

Brahms’ endorsement worked like magic: with his works issued under the respected Simrock imprint, Dvořák became an international celebrity virtually overnight. Invitations to perform and commissions for new works began streaming in from all over Europe. Dvořák’s early popularity, both at home and abroad, rested largely on works steeped in Czech folk music and lore, such as the Slavonic Dances, Moravian Duets, and Gypsy Melodies. His opera Dimitrij, a grand historical epic in the vein of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, was successfully produced in Dresden in 1882. But Brahms and other friends urged him to adopt a more cosmopolitan (that is, Germanic) stance in order to get his music performed in Vienna,

the cultural capital of central Europe, where anti-Czech sentiments ran strong.

A proud nationalist, Dvořák ultimately remained true to his Slavic roots, but not without undergoing a period of intense soul searching. As he gradually reasserted his identity as a Czech composer, melody came to play an ever more prominent role in his music. In acknowledging his affinity to Schubert, Dvořák wrote that the Viennese master “does not try to give his chamber music an orchestral character, yet he attains a marvelous variety of beautiful tonal effects. Here, as elsewhere, his flow of melody is spontaneous, incessant and irrepressible.” Dvořák found a fertile source of melody close at home in the dumka, a traditional folk lament popular throughout the Slavic world and adopted by many Romantic composers, including Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Janáček. He had already incorporated dumky in such works as the Op. 48 String Sextet of 1878 and would do so again in the Dumky Piano Trio of 1890-91, which is almost nothing but dumky—and variations on dumky—from start to finish.

A dumka is the centerpiece of Dvořák’s Op. 81 Piano Quintet, a work that is by turns brilliantly exuberant and poignantly melancholy. Composed in 1887, the A-major Quintet has long been one of his most beloved works. In the opening Allegro, the cello spins out a languorous melody that pivots adroitly from major to minor, provoking a vivacious riposte from the other three players. The second theme is introduced by the viola, Dvořák’s own instrument, and has a more restless and urgent character. The violist does the honors again in the warmly lyrical slow movement. The dumka’s measured Slavic strains give way to a fast and furious Scherzo (the subtitle “Furiant” refers to a Bohemian folk dance), whose boisterous energy is tempered by a flowing countermelody and a tranquil middle section. The finale is built around a rollicking, high-spirited tune that gets bandied from one instrument to another.


ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

BORROMEO & HOCHMAN

NIKOLAI OBUKHOV (1892–1954) Révelation

Le glas d’au-delà (The Tolling from Beyond)La mort (Death)Néant (The Void)Immortel (Immortal)La détresse de Satan (The Distress of Satan)Vérité (Truth)

GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006)Musica ricercata

1. Sostenuto—Misurato—Prestissimo2. Mesto, rigido et ceremonial3. Allegro con spirit4. Tempo di valse (poco vivace, “a l’orgue de Barbarie”)5. Rubato. Lamentoso6. Allegro molto cappricioso7. Cantabile, molto legato8. Vivace. Energico9. (Béla Bartók in memoriam) Adagio. Mesto—Allegro maestoso10. Vivace. Cappricioso11. (Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi) Andante misurato e tranquillo

—INTERMISSION—

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”

AllegroScherzo: Assai vivaceAdagio sostenuto, appassionato e con molto sentimentoIntroduzione: Largo, Allegro—Fuga: Allegro risoluto

THE SIDNEY & CHARLTON FRIEDBERG CONCERTA young girl with dreams of being a singer, Charlton Friedberg began singing at Peabody at age 14 but gave up her pursuit by the time she reached the age of 20. Music was a part of her life from then on. “I can’t do without it,” she says. “It rounds off the tensions and the vicissitudes of life.” Introduced to chamber music by husband Sidney, Mrs. Friedberg spent many summers at Marlboro, VT, where she “really came to love it.” Charlton’s gift in 2002 endows an annual concert named for her and her late husband, music lovers and supporters for many years. Mrs. Friedberg served as a member of the Board of the Directors of the Chamber Music Society of Baltimore for more than ten years. She now divides time among her homes in Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

MAR 11, 2018

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD, PIANO


Pierre-Laurent Aimard appears by arrangement with HarrisonParrottThis concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD PIANO

Widely acclaimed as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated

career. In recognition of a life devoted to the service of music, he was awarded the prestigious International Ernest von Siemens Music Prize in 2017.

Each season Aimard performs throughout the world with major orchestras led by conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Eötvös, Sir Simon Rattle, and Vladimir Jurowski. He has been invited to curate, direct, and perform in a number of residencies, with projects at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Tanglewood Music Festival, and London’s Southbank Centre. Aimard was the artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival in England from 2009 to 2016; his final season featured a performance of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, with concerts programmed from dawn to midnight.

The 2017-18 season marks the start of Aimard’s three-year tenure as artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre. During this first year he performs works by Messiaen with the Aurora Orchestra, Mozart with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Ravel with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and is the curator of a weekend dedicated to the music of György Ligeti with whom he has a long association. Other season highlights include recitals in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, New York, and at the new Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. Orchestral performances include appearances with the Boston Symphony and Berlin Philharmonic, a European tour with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, and a special Stockhausen project in Hamburg.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Aimard studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Yvonne Loriod and in London with Maria Curcio. Early career landmarks included winning first

prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition, at the age of 16, and being appointed, three years later, by Pierre Boulez as the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s first solo pianist.

Aimard has had close collaborations with many leading composers including György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and George Benjamin. In recent seasons, he has performed the world premieres of Harrison Birtwistle’s piano concerto Responses: Sweet disorder and the carefully careless, as well as Carter’s last piece, Epigrams for piano, cello, and violin, which was written for Aimard. Through his professorship at the Hochschule Köln, as well as numerous series of concert-lectures and workshops worldwide, he sheds an inspiring and very personal light on music from all periods.

A member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Aimard is the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award and was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2015 he launched a major online resource in collaboration with Klavier-Festival Ruhr, explorethescore.org, centered on the performance and teaching of Ligeti’s piano music with filmed masterclasses and performances of the Études and other works.

Aimard has made many highly successful recordings. His first Deutsche Grammophon release, Bach’s Art of Fugue, received both the Diapason d’Or and Choc du Monde de la Musique awards, debuted at No.1 on Billboard’s classical chart and topped iTunes’ classical album downloads. In recent years Aimard was honored with ECHO Klassik awards, a Grammy award in 2005 for his recording Concord Sonata and Songs, and Germany’s Schallplattenkritik Honorary Prize in 2009. DG also released Aimard performing works by Liszt in 2011, Debussy in 2012, and Bach in 2014. He recently signed an exclusive contract with Pentatone records, his first recording being the complete Catalogue d’oiseaux for release in Spring 2018.

Aimard’s website is pierrelaurentaimard.com.


NIKOLAI OBUKHOVRévelationComposed in 1915

A contemporary of Prokofiev, the Russian composer Nikolai Obukhov studied composition at both the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories between 1911 and 1916. With many of his colleagues (including Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky), Obukhov left Russia in the wake of the 1917 Revolution and the end of World War I. Still being young at the time, he never worked under the Soviet system. He eventually settled in Paris and, with Ravel’s help, secured a job there as a copyist at a music publisher. But even though his music continued to make an impression in the Paris cultural milieu, Obukhov was never successful enough to earn a living from composing, and his work as a bricklayer provided his principal source of income.

Obukhov’s music follows a path laid out by the “Mighty Five” group of composers, especially Borodin and Mussorgsky, in its commitment to overt “Russianness,” but combined with the modernist innovation and mysticism of Scriabin. His music draws inspiration from faith, spirituality, and liturgy, much like Messiaen’s music would a decade later. In fact, Obukhov represents a crucial link between Scriabin’s apocalyptic spirituality and Messiaen’s open religiosity, a link that Messiaen (who knew and respected Obukhov’s work in Paris) openly admitted. Two of Messiaen’s most famous students, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen, also spoke highly of Obukhov’s music.

Obukhov’s mysticism was expressed tangibly as well as aesthetically. While still a student, he developed a new system of music notation—used for a short time by the composer Arthur Honneger—that replaces chromatic accidentals with a cross as the note-head. This notational device was symbolic, as Obukhov also used crosses (symbols of the crucifixion) to mark off measures and phrases. In some of his manuscripts, Obukhov wrote tempo

markings and score indications in his own blood as a reference to Christ’s sacrifice. He also invented an electronic instrument, the croix sonoré (essentially a cross-shaped theremin) that figures in many of his later compositions. He preferred this instrument to be played by females only, the performer acting as a high-priestess within the musical composition. Obukhov was also one of the first composers to direct vocalists to make noises other than singing—shouts, whistles, whispers, screams, and so on—as he sought for new ways to express spiritual ecstasy through music. Obukhov’s magnum opus is a massive liturgical cantata, The Book of Life, which remained unfinished at his death, though the manuscript runs nearly 2,000 pages.

Obukhov’s Révelation is a suite of six piano miniatures from 1915, composed while he was still a student. The movement titles manifest the influence of Scriabin’s theosophy, though the two composers never met in person. The musical and harmonic language is completely chromatic (Obukhov called it “total harmony”) and structured using techniques and systems that predate

Schoenberg’s serialism by nearly a decade. The six works form a symmetrical pattern, the shorter movements on the outside framing the two central, longer works. Within each movement, discreet phrases and immediate repetition of ideas show a logical formal plan at work.

“The Tolling from Beyond” is a gentle atonal chiming of bells from a distance, with repeated changes separated by silent pauses. The dramatic, shuddering “Death” leads into “The Void,” which sparkles in the piano’s upper registers over deep chords in the bass, representing the vast emptiness of the cosmos. But this is not a true void; there is clear organization and order. The sustained quality of “Immortal” is somewhat programmatic, and “The Distress of Satan” returns to the dramatic repeated notes of “Death,” occupying a parallel position in the suite’s overall arch-form structure. Filled with appoggiaturas and grace notes, the concluding “Truth” ends the suite rather abruptly.

PROGRAM NOTE BY LUKE HOWARD, © 2017

GYÖRGY LIGETIMusica ricercataComposed in 1951-1953

Like his countryman Béla Bartók, György Ligeti was born in a part of Hungary that is now in Romania; that sense of a displaced homeland may be a key to understanding Ligeti, for his life and career were shaped by many of the forces that erupted so violently in his native land across the 20th century. Ligeti was born in 1923 into a Hungarian Jewish family, and it was a very musical family indeed—his great-uncle was the esteemed violinist Leopold Auer. Ligeti spent most of his childhood in Romania and began his formal musical studies at the conservatory in Cluj, but this was during World War II, and catastrophe soon struck the Ligeti family: the 21-year-old György was sent to a labor camp, the rest of the family to concentration camps. His brother and father died in these camps, and only his mother survived Auschwitz.


MAR 11, 2018ABOUT THE PROGRAM

NIKOLAI OBUKHOV

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD


Ligeti resumed his musical studies in Budapest after the war and eventually joined the faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy. But this was a miserable time to be a young composer in a country under Soviet domination. Socialist Realism demanded music accessible to the masses and based on the correct political sentiments—with this backdrop, Ligeti found himself limited to composing choruses, children’s music, and pieces based on folk melodies. Even the music of Bartók, Hungary’s greatest 20th-century composer, was banned in Hungary because of its difficulties, and Ligeti realized that he would never have the freedom to develop as a composer if he remained there. In December 1956, two months after the Russians crushed the Hungarian Revolution, Ligeti escaped across the border with his wife.

Once in the West, the young composer discovered a musical world that had been denied him in his homeland, including the European avant-garde, electronic music, and composers like Stockhausen. After early experimentation with electronic music, Ligeti sought and created new sound-worlds of his own. These included his famous (or infamous) Poème symphonique, scored for a hundred metronomes: the metronomes, each set at a different tempo, are wound up and released at precisely the same instant–gradually their beats go in and out of phase and the metronomes wind down, leaving only one ticking into silence (one German radio station was so outraged by this piece that it refused to broadcast it, much to Ligeti’s delight). A more daring work was his Atmosphères of 1961 in which Ligeti destroys any notion of the traditional language of music—there are no themes, no form, no harmony, and virtually no rhythm. He replaces these with huge blocks of sound that remain unchanged for long periods; beneath these static sound masses, many smaller voices develop and interweave, a technique Ligeti called micropolyphony. And then came an unexpected breakthrough. Without the composer’s permission, director Stanley

Kubrick used excerpts from Ligeti’s Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, and other works in his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and suddenly Ligeti’s music and name were familiar to audiences around the world.

Ligeti went on to compose a large body of impressive works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voice, and the opera Le grand macabre (whose overture is performed by an ensemble of automobile horns). But if Ligeti sought new sonorities and means of expression, he remained profoundly aware and respectful of the past—for example, he described his Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano as an act of homage to Brahms, who had written a similar trio. Ligeti’s music is the product of a profoundly original mind—it can be densely textured, glittering in its sonorities, and seething with rhythmic energy, yet all of this is carefully controlled; his scores are prefaced with exact instructions as to how they should be performed. Ligeti’s music creates an utterly original sound-world, and for those willing to enter that world, it has a magic all its own.

Musica Ricercata is one of Ligeti’s earliest works to remain in the repertory: he wrote it in 1951-53, when he was in his late 20s and still under the artistic

strictures of the communist government. Yet even here we can see signs of Ligeti’s incredible musical imagination. Musica Ricercata means “music to seek out,” and the title ricercar has come to denote music that tries to demonstrate a particular compositional approach (Bach gave the title Ricercar to several of the movements in his Musical Offering). In his Musica Ricerata, Ligeti sets himself a formidable musical challenge: the first piece is built on just two pitches (A and D), the second on three pitches, and so on—each subsequent movement adds one more pitch until the 11th and final piece is built on all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. One of the most impressive things about these 11 pieces is that Ligeti is able to do so much with so little. He sets the pieces in different forms, creates a different sound for each, and arranges them in a sequence of contrasting moods, tempos, and complexity. With each successive piece he has one more pitch to work with, and the sequence becomes increasingly complex as it proceeds.

The first movement is built entirely on the note A, in different rhythms and octaves, and D makes its appearance only in the final measures.

The second movement—Mesto [sad], rigido—is darker in character: the grieving main theme rocks back and forth between pitches, and the movement fades into silence on tremolos played with two fingers.

The next two movements are a little lighter. The Allegro con spirito, built on four pitches, is indeed spirited music, featuring rapid exchanges between the hands. In the Tempo di valse, Ligeti asks the pianist to play the waltz in a way that suggests the sound of a cranked barrel-organ; an occasional measure of 2/4 upsets the waltz-rhythm 3/4.

The title of the fifth movement, Rubato. Lamentoso, suggests its dark character; it is built on parlando rhythms, meant to mimic speech patterns, and fades away to the sound of tolling bells.

The sixth movement, Allegro molto capriccioso, is the shortest in Musica Ricercata, whipping past in about thirty

GYÖRGY LIGETI


seconds. It often sounds like a children’s song, with quick exchanges between hands.

In the seventh movement, Cantabile, molto legato, Ligeti creates a whirring seven-note ostinato in the left hand that is independent of the right, which plays a gentle tune above it. Ligeti writes out only the right-hand part, leaving pianists to perform the ostinato on their own; at the end of the movement, that ostinato dissolves into a quiet trill.

The eighth movement—Vivace. Energico—is a sturdy chordal dance in 7/8 that appears to have its roots in folk music.

Ligeti titled the ninth movement Béla Bartók: In Memoriam, and it should be understood as a gesture of homage to his countryman and fellow composer. Ligeti specifies that the beginning should sound “Like deep bells,” and this slow movement rises to a tolling peak before fading into silence.

Ligeti titles the tenth movement Vivace. Capriccioso, and this brief movement requires equal measures of energy, humor, and virtuosity. It drives to a climax that Ligeti stresses that he wants played Wie verrückt (“As if insane”) before trailing off to an understated conclusion (a revealing aside: when Ligeti arranged this movement as the finale of his Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet, the Hungarian government blocked its performance at the premiere in September 1956, claiming that it was “too dangerous”).

In the final movement, Ligeti finally has all twelve tones at his disposal. He builds this piece on all twelve of those tones, but he also conceives the movement as an act of homage to the 17th-century Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi, famed for his contrapuntal imagination. This movement takes the form of a fugue, and at moments sounds very much like the opening movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Sometimes written on as many as four staves, Ligeti’s fugue gradually thins out its textures and concludes on a solitary A, the note on which the opening piece of Musica Ricercata was built. PROGRAM NOTE BY ERIC BROMBERGER, © 2017

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVENSonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”Composed in 1817-1818

In 1817, Beethoven’s health was poor, his income was dwindling, and legal battles over the custody of his nephew Karl were taking their toll on him—all while his deafness had virtually isolated him from the rest of society. If life was a struggle for the composer at this time, so was composition. His sketchbooks show that the Piano Sonata in B-flat, Op. 106, which was composed during this period, required of Beethoven a level of intensity that was unusual even for him. Yet he considered this immense effort worthwhile, mentioning to a friend, “I am now writing a sonata that will be my greatest.”

Some critics have suggested that by the time Beethoven wrote the Op. 106 sonata, known informally as the “Hammerklavier,” the composer’s deafness had caused him to forget “the realities” of writing for the piano, and that he conceived this music in “absolute” terms. Certainly there are passages that are almost unplayable and require a super-human effort, but calling

upon that determination and involving oneself in the physical and emotional struggle of performance is precisely the substance of Beethoven’s late style.

The source of the nickname “Hammerklavier” is not particularly instructive. During a period when strong patriotic fervor burned within him, Beethoven sought a German word to replace the Italian name of the instrument (“pianoforte”) for which he was composing. He had included the term “Hammerklavier” on the title page of his Op. 101 sonata, and in January 1817 instructed his publishers (with mock seriousness) that “henceforth all our works that have German titles are to have Hammerklavier instead of pianoforte.” The Op. 106 sonata was merely the first to bear the designation, “Sonata fur das Hammerklavier,” hence the nickname. It’s a common misconception that Beethoven gave this title to indicate he intended the sonata to be played exclusively on the piano

This sonata begins with a dramatic first-movement Allegro, where hard, driving energy goes hand-in-hand with a lyrical melody. As in much of Beethoven’s music, it is the rhythmic quality of the theme, rather than its pitch content, that dictates its subsequent development and transformation. The lengthy development section blends into a recapitulation that also develops thematic material while diverting through numerous key areas, some of them only distantly related to the tonic (including a section in far-flung B-major). The recapitulation includes fugato passages that give a hint of the contrapuntal procedures used in the work’s finale, capped by an extended coda that nearly amounts to another development section entirely.

The brief Scherzo and Trio that follow present a fine example of the composer’s grim humor. As Beethoven scholar Eric Blom observed, “It would be difficult to think of any movement that represents him more strikingly in his capricious playful mood, in which he is never far from sudden accesses of anger and rudeness.”

MAR 11, 2018

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

MAR 11, 2018


PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD

Jim Rouse Theatre in Columbia www.columbiaorchestra.org 410-465-8777

THE COLUMBIA O R C H E S T R A

SIBELIUS & CHAPLIN: 10/7Smetana: The Moldau

Simpson: Charlie Chaplin’s silent film The Immigrant

Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE: 12/2 Adams: The Chairman Dances

Rodrigo: Concierto de AranjuezBerlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

FAMILY HOLIDAY: 12/16 (10:30am) BEETHOVEN & BRAHMS: 1/27

Fulton: DeadlockBeethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3

Brahms: Symphony No. 2

YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONCERTS: 3/17Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals

SYMPHONIC POPS: 4/14 & 4/15 (3pm)Blockbuster hits from Broadway, the

silver screen, popular song, and more!

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: 5/19Ravel: Bolero

Dukas: Sorcerer’s ApprenticeRavel: Daphnis & Chloe

The outer sections are dominated by the incessant repetitions of a single short motif. Despite the odd phrase lengths, there is a sense of regularity and balance that almost recalls the Classical minuet style. The contrasting Trio expresses the melody in octaves, shifting between hands. But just when it seems that Beethoven’s procedures are becoming a little too straightforward, he inserts a cheeky Presto tune of an entirely different character, which swells violently until it tumbles through five octaves and rushes back up a cadenza-like scale. The return of the scherzo only partially restores the temperamental balance.

The slow movement of the sonata is the longest Beethoven ever wrote for piano, but the listener’s patience is amply rewarded with arguably the most profound and elevated music in the entire piano repertoire. The first two notes of the movement, an upbeat to the theme proper, were added by Beethoven at the last minute, as the publisher was preparing to print, and is one of the composer’s most famous afterthoughts. The expansive theme of nearly 25 measures, in a slow 6/8, gives the illusion of music unfolding on a cosmic scale. Again, the vastness of the material hides the architecture of the movement, which follows a conventional sonata form. The central section, though formally a development section, is more of a cadenza-like bridge to the reprise, which embroiders new figurations around the re-statement of themes.

In order to pass convincingly from the contemplative slow movement into a Finale (and to smooth over the retransition from F-sharp minor to B-flat major), Beethoven inserts a slow introduction in the style of a free fantasy, with sudden changes of tempo and thematic material. It isn’t surprising that this improvisatory passage recalls Bach, as Beethoven then proceeds to a fugal finale comparable in scope to his Große Fuge, Op. 133. Here Beethoven adheres for the most part to the rules of Baroque fugue composition, but this is no mere academic exercise, as it reaches levels of profundity and grandeur that many Baroque masters would have envied. He employs many of the stock devices of contrapuntal writing: inversions, augmentations, crab canons, and a fugue within a fugue. The trill figure of the fugue’s subject and the wide melodic leap within help the listener keep track of the theme amid these various treatments. This movement in particular presents a challenge to the performer, requiring a monumental technical effort to keep the texture clear without detracting from the necessary fullness of tone. But as Beethoven himself remarked, “what is difficult is also beautiful.”

PROGRAM NOTE BY LUKE HOWARD, © 2017

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Mentre ti lascio, o figlia, K. 513

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)Prometheus, D. 674 Fahrt zum Hades, D. 526 Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, D. 583

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)Liebe und Frühling I, Op. 3, No. 2 Liebe und Frühling II, Op. 3, No. 3 Alte Liebe, Op. 72, No. 1 Meine Liebe ist grün, Op. 63, No. 5 Von ewiger Liebe, Op. 43, No. 1

—INTERMISSION—

MOZART Così dunque tradisci, K. 432/421a

HENRI DUPARC (1848–1933)L’invitation au voyageLe manoir de RosemondeLa vague et la cloche

MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)Don Quichotte à Dulcinée

Chanson romanesque Chanson épiqueChanson á boire

THE MITY CLARKE GANN MEMORIAL CONCERTFlorence Clarke Gann (1909-1995) was known as “Mity” because she was as small as a “mite.” The moniker never fit. She had irrepressible energy and an extraordinary love for life. She had a quest for knowledge and enjoyed lively intellectual debate. She loved music, art, good books, and, at age 85, she was still working on her tennis game. Mity’s love for music and her piano were important aspects of her life. She played chamber music and was still playing a few weeks before her death. She used to say, “Music is one of the things that always makes me feel good.” Mity’s legacy is surely one of love for life and for all the beautiful and interesting things in it. She is remembered by this gift of a concert in her memory made in 1996 by her family and friends.

MAR 25, 2018

ERIC OWENS BASS-BARITONE

MYRA HUANG PIANO


Eric Owns & Myra Huang appear by arrangement with IMG Artists.This concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.

ERIC OWENS BASS-BARITONE

Bass-baritone Eric Owens has a unique reputation as an esteemed interpreter of classic works and a champion of new music. Equally at home in performing orchestral,

recital, and operatic repertoire, Owens brings his powerful poise, expansive voice, and instinctive acting faculties to stages around the world.

In 2017-18, Owens returns to Lyric Opera of Chicago to make his role debut as Wotan in its new production of Wagner’s Die Walküre following his role debut as Wotan in the Lyric’s new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold last season. He sings Filippo II in Verdi’s Don Carlo at Washington National Opera, Don Basilio in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia at Houston Grand Opera, Enrico in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at Canadian Opera Company, and the Forester in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at Glimmerglass Festival, where he serves as artist-in-residence and artistic advisor. Concert appearances include Rossini’s Stabat Mater with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Verdi’s Requiem with the National and Nashville symphony orchestras, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah with Music of the Baroque. He gives recitals in Baltimore, St. Paul, and Boston.

In 2016-17, Owens sang a trio of operas at The Metropolitan Opera: the Met premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin, a new production of Rusalka, and a revival of Idomeneo, all of which were broadcast through the Met’s Live in HD series. Concert highlights included joining the New York Philharmonic for performances of Das Rheingold and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, which he also performed at the Cincinnati May Festival as artist-in-residence; a gala celebrating The Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary at Lincoln Center; and performances of Strauss’ Elektra at the Verbier Festival and Berlioz’s La

Damnation de Faust with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He gave recitals in Cleveland, Washington D.C., and Chicago, and appeared with the Chicago Symphony’s Negaunee Music Institute to present an interactive recital for incarcerated youth alongside Riccardo Muti and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato.

Owens collaborates regularly with such conductors as Muti, Simon Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas, Alan Gilbert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Franz Welser-Möst, Andrew Davis, Osmo Vänskä, and Donald Runnicles. In addition to performing with leading opera companies in Europe and North America, he has appeared with orchestras including the New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras; Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Bavarian Radio, Atlanta, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Swedish Radio symphony orchestras; and the Cleveland and Minnesota orchestras. Owens is featured on several recordings including excerpts from Richard Strauss operas (Telarc) and John Adams’ A Flowering Tree (Nonesuch Records) and Doctor Atomic (Sony).

Recognized with multiple honors, including Musical America’s 2017 “Vocalist of the Year” and Marian Anderson awards, he received honors in the Plácido Domingo Operalia Competition, Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition.

A native of Philadelphia, Owens began his musical training as a pianist at age six, followed by formal oboe study with members of the Delaware Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra. He studied voice at Temple University and Curtis Institute of Music. Currently, he serves on the Board of Trustees of National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and Astral Artistic Services.


MYRA HUANG PIANO

Acclaimed by Opera News as “among the top accompanists of her generation,” and “a colouristic tour de force,” pianist Myra Huang regularly performs in recitals and

chamber music concerts around the world. The New York Times recently noted, “Ms. Huang proved an exemplary collaborator; her gorgeous playing was notable throughout the program for its wealth of color, character and detail.”

Huang has performed at notable venues and concert series around the world, including Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Washington Performing Arts, U.S. Supreme Court, Library of Congress, Eastman School of Music, Celebrity Series of Boston, Chicago’s Symphony Center Presents, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Seoul National Arts Center. The 2017-18 season brings tours with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and bass-baritone Eric Owens at venues including the Park Avenue Armory, Herbst Theatre, Gilmore Keyboard Festival, and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, among others.

Huang has served on the music staffs of the Washington National Opera, New York City Opera, and Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain, where she worked closely with Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta. She has worked with conductors including Riccardo Frizza, Richard Hickox, Philippe Jordan, Christopher Hogwood, Daniel Oren, Robert Spano, Patrick Summers, and Marco Armiliato. She is a staff pianist for the Operalia Competition, directed by Plácido Domingo, performing in

opera houses around the world, such as London’s Royal Opera House, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Beijing’s Opera House of the National Grand Theater, and Madrid’s Teatro Real. The Mariinksy Theater recently featured her in recital with bass Dmitry Grigoriev in its festival tour of Mexico City and Chile.

In addition to an avid performing schedule, Huang frequently serves as a guest artist coach at Houston Grand Opera Young Artists Studio, Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, Butler Opera Center at University of Texas at Austin, and the YoungArts Foundation, among others, providing guidance and support to young artists across the country. She recently joined the music staff of the Music Academy of the West, where she coaches opera singers and collaborative pianists who are at the beginnings of their careers.

Huang is a prolific recording artist, and The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and Time Out New York, among others, named her album, Winter Words with tenor Nicholas Phan, among the best classical recordings of 2011. Their second release, Still Falls The Rain, achieved the same status in 2012. Her album Paysages with soprano Susanna Phillips won The Classical Recording Foundation Young Artist of the Year award. In 2017, Huang and Phan released the album Gods and Monsters on the Avie label to critical acclaim, with a program they debuted at Wigmore Hall that same season.



MOZART ARIAS FOR BASS

Mozart wrote Mentre ti lascio, o figlia in 1787 as a gift for his friend Gottfried von Jacquin, who reportedly had a good amateur bass voice and whose sister studied piano with him. The text comes from an opera libretto written by Duca Sant’Angioli-Morbilli that had been previously set to music by Giovanni Paisiello and Tommaso Traètta for a Venetian audience. The text, from Sant’Angioli-Morbilli’s work La disfatta di Dario, recounts the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. In the libretto, Darius is disarmed on the battlefield and afterwards encounters his daughter Statira, who is torn between love for Alexander and love for her father. Darius then sings this eloquent farewell to her and to life.

A long, eloquent introduction seems to mimic the progression from a sudden, brief welling-up of stronger emotion to a return to intimacy, marked by the distinctively Mozartian decoration of a simpler harmonic progression with melodic chromaticism. Several minutes into the aria, the sudden, hushed shift into greater tonal darkness at the words “Provo nel mio dolore,” emphasizing the protagonist’s sorrow and terror, is one of many arresting details in the Larghetto first section. When Dario sees Statira weeping, the sight ushers in the Allegro and Più allegro sections as the bitterness of parting overwhelms him, and sadness becomes fiery torment.

The recitative-aria pair Così dunque tradisci was, according to a contemporary of Mozart’s, written in 1783 for the eminent bass Ludwig Fischer, for whom Mozart tailor-made the role of Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). The text was taken from a revised opera libretto by the famous 18th-century opera reformer Pietro Metastasio entitled Temistocle, an opera about the battles and subsequent exile of the Athenian politician and general, Themistocles. In the libretto, this selection is sung by Sebaste, a prince and confidante

of King Serse, upon learning that Princess Rossane has betrayed his designs to overthrow the monarch. Rage, despair, and self-reproach animate both the recitative and the aria; we hear the harshness of remorse in the stabbing repeated-note triplet figures in the accompaniment, the dramatic leaps in the vocal part, and the quiet ending when all that emotion has run its course.

SCHUBERT AND ANCIENT GREECEIn Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give to mortals—in punishment he was bound to a rock and an eagle daily plucked out his liver. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was drawn to this myth in 1773 by Prometheus’ championship of humanity against the gods; not for nothing was Goethe called “the great pagan” (a title he liked), celebrating human self-sufficiency in many of his masterpieces.

Schubert set Goethe’s poem in 1819, when the composer was himself chal-lenging patriarchal authorities, and the song’s formal novelties and harmonic boldness match the great German writer’s audacity. The mighty, striding piano intro-duction is a proclamation of rule-breaking boldness, and quasi-orchestral tremolos and operatic recitative join forces with Goethe’s blank verse damnation of all gods to proclaim a power that is entirely human.

1817 is a year in which songs on classical subjects proliferate in Schubert’s output, due in part to his collaboration with his older friend, Johann Baptist Mayrhofer. A poeta dolorosus, martyred by his pathologically depressive nature, Mayrhofer may not have been the equal of Dante or Goethe, but he wrote a number of powerful, bleak poems in a unique voice. Schubert set 47 of his poems to music, including Fahrt zum Hades, in which the poet imagines his journey to a hellish Underworld where the nectar of poetry and the ambrosia of knowledge will be forever taken away from him. When he asks at the end, “When will these torments cease?”, we understand that the “torments” belong both to life and the afterlife.

At the start of Schubert’s music, we hear a march downwards in exorable tones on a traditional lamentation figure; his tormented soul tries to be a true Stoic (Mayrhofer admired the philosophy of the Stoics), but almost succumbs to a thickening fear. Terror transgresses the bounds of song and the lied briefly transforms into an operatic recitativo accompagnato (the most dramatic sort of recitative)—but Schubert brings back the opening lines and the farewell to “the fair earth” in the final measures. In this way, unlike in the poem, he allows his friend to end ascendant over his fears,

“Fahrt zum Hades” is one man’s journey; Gruppe aus dem Tartarus imagines a nameless, faceless horde of souls forced on the final journey through the lowest realm of the Underworld to Eternity. At the beginning, we are bidden, “Listen!”; the poem’s author, Friedrich BRAHMS

ABOUT THE PROGRAM


Schiller, then delays the revelation of what we hear by means of analogy (like the mur-muring of an angry ocean, like a brook weeping through holes in a crag). First, we hear; then we see the souls as they look back in despair at the bridge over the River Cocytus (the “river of wailing,” which flows into the river Acheron, with the under-world across from it). The souls ask each other anxiously whether the end has not yet come—and then Eternity sweeps over them, breaking Saturn’s scythe in two (Saturn being both a god of agriculture and a god of time.)

Schubert, in the marvelous piano figuration at the start, is perhaps “channeling” Mozart’s Don Giovanni, whose damnation scene features rising and falling chromatic scales. We hear Saturn’s scythe swinging in the piano as sorrow distorts the souls’ countenances, we hear the rising drumbeats of doom, and finally, massive, wheeling chords herald the arrival of eternity. The harmonic audacity of this final section is heart-stopping. But it all ends with a diminuendo and descent in which we can almost see the souls vanishing, with a final chill chord high in the treble, like a last sigh.

BRAHMS AND FIVE FACES OF LOVEBrahms’ published songs represent only a portion of his lieder output, and by the time his Op. 3 set was published in 1853, Brahmsian signature traits were already in evidence. With text by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the speaker in Liebe und Frühling I compares thoughts of his beloved by day and night to vine tendrils trembling in the breeze and to bindweed curling around a rose. Brahms begins with a theme we first hear unharmonized, the voice and singer bound together on the same pitches like the rose and the bindweed. The same theme then sounds in two-part counterpoint, beginning in imitation, followed by ever fuller and richer textures that emphasize the contrary motion between the top and bottom voices so characteristic of this

Bach-obsessed Romantic composer. With the final invocation of the beloved, we hear the omnipresent musical idea in rhythmic augmentation, while the piano sinks chromatically into the lowest depths of the piano. Somehow we doubt a happy outcome for this love, at least in Brahms’ reading.

Liebe und Frühling II presents us with the same lover in manic mode. Having sunk into depression at the end of I, he is now animated by a frenzy of trilling, thrumming need, and desire; the descending chromaticism from the postlude of the previous song now becomes something emphatic and dissonance-laden. The tonality becomes truly clear only at the end of the first section—but not for long. As the singer rejects Nature’s beauties one by one in the second sweeter, more lyrical section, Brahms shifts from one harmonic location to another, with shape-shifting enharmony in play; this exemplifies his characteristic tonal richness. In the final section, he brings back the furious energy of the

beginning, but the eloquent piano postlude dies away in an unusual cadence. Yet again, we are given cause to doubt the chances for felicity in love.

In Alte Liebe, the little-known poet Karl Candidus evokes the returning swallows and storks in spring as the sad speaker remembers past sorrow in love; in the final three stanzas, the “old dream” of love envelopes him. Brahms, in love for much of his life with the great pianist-composer Clara Schumann, incorporates a six-note melodic segment into the song from a solo piano work that he had presented to her five years earlier. He then asked his friend, the great baritone Julius Stockhausen, to sing it to Clara, along with his setting of “Unüberwindlich,” Goethe’s poem about a man who tries—and fails— to drown love’s sorrow in the bottle.

Looking at the poet’s name and dates for Brahms’ Junge Lieder I (Meine Liebe ist grün), one opens the door to this composer’s yearning to be part of the Schumann family and his extraordinary empathy with those in his circle of beloved friends. The poet was Felix Schumann, Brahms’ godson and the youngest child of Robert and Clara Schumann, conceived not long before Schumann had to be committed to a mental institution. Felix, who would die of tuberculosis at 25, turned to poetry when bad health made a musical career impossible; in this poem, an ardent swain proclaims that his love is as green as the lilac bush and as fair as the sun shining upon it. In the letter accompanying his Christmas Eve gift of this song, Brahms told Clara that he had recalled her husband’s “Schöne Fremde” (the 6th song of the Liederkreis, Op. 39) when he read Felix’s verses, and he quotes it at the beginning of his own masterpiece, in which youthful ardor comes to sounding life.

Even the great lieder composer Hugo Wolf—no fan of Brahms—liked Von ewiger Liebe, a dialogue between a village lad, who tells his girlfriend that he fears for her reputation and will therefore leave her, and the young woman, who swears that their love is stronger, more enduring, than

MAR 25, 2018

HENRI DUPARC

OWENS & HUANG


iron or steel. Brahms borrowed much of the woman’s melody and important aspects of the harmonic structure in this song from his own unpublished Brautgesang (Bridal Song) for women’s voices and orchestra, composed in 1858; only the vocal parts survive. The choral work was conceived during the height of the 25-year-old composer’s infatuation with Agathe von Siebold; when he set “Von ewiger Liebe” eight years later, his friend Joseph Joachim had recently married and fathered a child, while Brahms’ intent to propose to another woman at Christmas 1863 was destroyed by her engagement to someone else. Furthermore, Brahms’ own parents parted in 1864, and all of these events might well have inspired him to ponder love, fidelity, and separation. When Brahms sets the word “fester” (stronger) to a highly dramatic chord from outside the key, he tells both of the maiden’s great resolve and of the dangers threatening her love—dangers he knew well.

HENRI DUPARC: CONSUMMATE ACHIEVEMENT AND TRAGEDYThe long-lived Henri Duparc composed only 17 mélodies before falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenic disease that prevented him from composing in the final 48 years of his life. As if in compensation for such a hideous fate, his songs are among the greatest in the French language, their subtlety and gravitas beyond the reach of most of his contemporaries. Under the aegis of those German composers he revered (Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Beethoven, and Bach), he fashioned songs that are inimitably French, endowing the mélodie with an emotional intensity and a close relationship of poetry and music that would not be equaled until Fauré’s mature songs.

Duparc would be immortal if he had composed nothing other than L’invitation au voyage, using the text of one of Charles Baudelaire’s most beautiful poems in the famous anthology Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). Here, the

poet seduces the beloved with his vision of a realm of perfect beauty, steeped in calm and bathed in a Watteau-like amber glow of sensuality. The pair will journey to this exotic realm by boat; Duparc floats this exquisite song on a harmonic waterway infused with “luxe, calme, et volupté” (luxury, calm and sensuous pleasure—the refrain) from the start. Over an elemental-hollow low bass (the ocean bed of this song), watery harmonies shift and change, their colors entrancing.

In Robert de Bonnière’s proto-Symbolist poem Le manoir de Rosemonde, love is the “rose of the world,” and its manor house is celestial blue. The progenitors of the music were Schubert’s “Erlkönig”—the steed that charges upwards in Duparc’s bass was sired by the galloping ride through Schubert’s ballad—and “Die Post” from Winterreise, its dotted rhythms a pre-cursor for Duparc’s mad ride.

François Coppée, “the poet of the poor,” affiliated himself at the turn-of-century with the anti-semitic, anti-Dreyfus Ligue de la patrie française, incurring posterity’s opprobrium, but his plays and poems were popular in their day. In La vague et la cloche, his poetic persona quaffs a potion, then has a despairing Romantic dream featuring shipwreck and a frenzied ride atop a giant bell (Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo is clearly his literary ancestor), symbols for the clamorous anguish of the human condition. The song is Duparc on his darkest, stormiest night, conceiving a big work for a big voice that must ride the Wagnerian waves of sound in the piano. But it was Schubert’s “Der Atlas,” I would guess, that inspired the passage in which the vocal line is doubled by the low bass in octaves (“Je voguais sans fanal dans la nuit”).

RAVEL AND SPAINBorn to a mother from the Basque Country north of Spain, Ravel always felt close to his Basque heritage, Spain, and all things Spanish. He acknowledged that the primary influences on his craftsmanship

as a composer were his teacher, Gabriel Fauré and the 1889 Paris Exhibition, which exposed him to Javanese gamelan and Russian music. At odds with authority (he repeatedly failed to win the Prix de Rome), Ravel was a member of Les Apaches, an avant-garde literary, artistic, and musical group, in his youth. After Debussy’s death in 1918, he was widely regarded as France’s leading composer.

Ravel did not produce many songs, but he wrote them throughout his active life as a composer. The three songs collectively entitled Don Quichotte à Dulcinée come from his final period, just before he began to be affected by Pick’s disease, a rare and dreadful neurodegenerative disease. The songs—inspired by the Spanish novel and conveying further evidence of his attraction to Spanish sources—are the result of a commission from the Austrian filmmaker Georg Pabst for a film about Miguel de Cervantes’ immortal knight,

MAURICE RAVEL

MAR 25, 2018

with the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin cast in the title role. (Since Ravel was late in delivering the score, Jacques Ibert was brought in to compose the songs actually used in the movie.)

In this trio of songs, Don Quixote appears in three guises: lover, warrior, and drinker. Each of the three songs exemplifies a different type of Spanish or Basque dance, reflecting Ravel’s lasting

preoccupation with the form, which he prized as an important source of rhythmic invention. The lover’s song, “Chanson romanesque,” is a Spanish guajira, a Cuban-derived dance evoking rusticity, alternating measures of 6/8 and 3/4 meter, appropriate for the gaunt knight’s peasant sweetheart Dulcinea. The warrior’s song, “Chanson épique,” is a nod to the Basque zortzico, with modal inflections that

appear to be Ravel’s final homage to Fauré. And the drinking song, “Chanson à boire,” calls on the cross-rhythms of the jota, in triple meter, marked by complex rhythms for the castanets and the dancers’ heels.

NOTES BY SUSAN YOUENS, © 2017

Join us for our 30th ANNIVERSARY Season!OCTOBER 1, 2017 at 4 p.m. Part of FreeFall BaltimoreBach’s Cantata 16: Herr Gott, dich loben wirHandel’s Concerto Grosso in F Major, Op. 3, No. 4

NOVEMBER 5, 2017 at 4 p.m. World Premiere of Hollis Thoms’s one-act opera: And did the world with devils swarm… and other Bach favorites!

DECEMBER 3, 2017 at 4 p.m.Handel’s Messiah

JANUARY 1, 2018 at 4 p.m. A New Year’s Day Baroque Celebration!

JANUARY 7, 2018 at 4 p.m.Bach’s Cantata 9: Es ist das Heil uns kommen herBach’s Cantata 54: Widerstehe doch der Sünde Handel’s Organ Concerto Op. 4, No. 5 in F Major

FEBRUARY 4, 2018 at 4 p.m.A Bach Instrumental Extravaganza featuring:Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G MajorDouble Violin Concerto in D minorOrchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor

MARCH 4, 2018 at 4 p.m.Bach’s Cantata 149: Man singet mit Freuden vom SiegBach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major

APRIL 15, 2018 at 4 p.m.30th ANNIVERSARY CONCERT!Verdi’s Requiem

MAY 6, 2018 at 4 p.m.Bach’s Motet 225: Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

For tickets and concert information, visit BachinBaltimore.org or call 410.941.9262

Bach In Baltimore is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. Bach in Baltimore acknowledges the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artists Awards, www.BakerArtistsAwards.org.


BALTIMORE’S PREMIER EARLY MUSIC ENSEMBLE

A Baroque Halloween October 29Grace United Methodist Church

SuperBach Sunday:Bach Goes Italian February 4

Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall, UMBC

Mozart’s Magic Clarinet April 15 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Auditorium, Baltimore Museum of Art

Viennese Matinee for Mother’s Day May 13 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Auditorium, Baltimore Museum of Art

Tickets $30 | $10 for studentsSUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE 410.728.2820

WWW.PROMUSICARARA.ORG

43rd SEASON 2017-2018

Commanding the PassionsCONCERTS: Sundays at 3:30 • pre-concert talks at 2:30

Brooklyn RiderFebruary 17

Benjamin Grosvenor, pianoMay 5

Chamber Music Series17-18

Simone Dinnerstein, piano with Telegraph QuartetNoveMber 12

(Linehan Concert Hall at UMBC)

october 8

Stefan Jackiw, violin with Anna Polonsky, piano

Horowitz Center | Howard Community College

410-997-2324 | www.candlelightconcerts.org

CalefaxMarch 10

Parker Quartetoctober 28

So PercussionJaNuary 20

Tempest Trioapril 15

SERGEY RACHMANINOFF (1873–1943)Two Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op. 2

Prélude Danse orientale

EDVARD GRIEG (1843–1907)Sonata for Cello and Piano in A minor, Op. 36

Allegro agitatoAndante molto tranquilloAllegro—Allegro molto e marcato

—INTERMISSION—

GRIEGIntermezzo for Cello and Piano in A minor

RACHMANINOFF Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 19

Lento—Allegro moderatoAllegro scherzandoAndanteAllegro mosso

THE PIATIGORSKY MEMORIAL CONCERTThe Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Concert was established in 1978 by Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Drachman and Dr. and Mrs. Joram Piatigorsky. The concerts present a mix of internationally renowned cellists as well as those with promising solo careers. Gregor Piatigorsky dedicated a large part of his life to teaching and encouraging talented young musicians. His heart’s desire was to open the way to successful careers for them. Piatigorsky exemplified extraordinary virtuosity as well as high musical and personal ideals. It is the endowers’ intention that cellists who possess likeminded goals and accomplishments will be given an opportunity to perform through these concerts.

MAY 6, 2018

TRULS MØRK CELLO

BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV PIANO


Truls Mørk and Behzod Abduraimov appear by arrangement with HarrisonParrott.This concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.


TRULS MØRK CELLO

Truls Mørk’s compelling performances—combining fierce intensity, integrity and grace—have confirmed him as one of the preeminent cellists of our time.

Mørk is a celebrated artist who regularly performs with the most distinguished orchestras in the world, including the Berlin, London, Munich, and Vienna philharmonics; Leipzig Gewandhaus, Philharmonia, and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras, and Orchestre de Paris. In North America he has appeared with the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Conductor collaborations include Mariss Jansons, David Zinman, Manfred Honeck, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Christoph Eschenbach, among others.

Highlights of the 2017-18 season include a return to Orchestre National de France; performances with the Czech Philharmonic at the Grafenegg Festival and on tour in Switzerland; an appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; and three concerts in Salzburg as part of the Helsinki Philharmonic’s residency under Susanna Mälkki.

He gives regular recitals at major venues and festivals throughout the world, appearing as a featured artist at the 2016 Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles and returning to the Verbier Festival in 2017. He has recently developed a collaboration with pianist Behzod Abduraimov, with whom he performs on a 2017-18 tour of the U.S. and Europe.

A great champion of contemporary music, Mørk has premiered over 30 new works. These include Rautavaara’s Towards the Horizon with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under John Storgårds, Pavel Haas’ Cello Concerto with Vienna Philharmonic under Jonathan Nott, Krzysztof Penderecki's Concerto for Three Cellos with the NHK Symphony Orchestra

under Charles Dutoit, and Hafliði Hallgrímsson's Cello Concerto, co-commissioned by the Oslo Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony and Scottish Chamber orchestras.

With an impressive recording output, Mørk has recorded many of the great cello concertos for labels such as Virgin Classics, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Ondine, Arte Nova, and Chandos. Many of these releases have received international acclaim including Gramophone, Grammy, Midem and ECHO Klassik awards. These include recordings of Dvořák’s Concerto (Mariss Jansons/Oslo Philharmonic), Britten’s Cello Symphony and Elgar’s Concerto (Sir Simon Rattle/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra), Dutilleux's Concerto and Trois Strophes Sur Le Nom De Sacher (Myung-Whun Chung/Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France), CPE Bach's concertos (Bernard Labadie/Les Violons du Roy), Haydn’s Concertos (Iona Brown/Norwegian Chamber Orchestra), Rautavaara’s Towards the Horizon (John Storgårds/Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra) as well as the complete Bach Cello Suites and Britten Cello Suites. His most recent recordings include Shostakovich’s cello concerti with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko, works for cello and orchestra by Massenet with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Neeme Järvi and the Saint-Saens concerti together with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Neeme Järvi.

Initially taught by his father, Mørk continued his studies with Frans Helmerson, Heinrich Schiff, and Natalia Schakowskaya. In his early career, he won a number of competitions such as the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition (1982), Cassado Cello Competition in Florence (1983), the UNESCO Prize at the European Radio-Union competition in Bratislava (1983), and the Naumberg Competition in New York (1986).


BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV PIANO

Behzod Abduraimov’s captivating performances are rapidly establishing him as one of the forerunners of his generation. He has been hailed by The Times (UK) as the

“master of all he surveys.”Following his spectacular debut at the BBC Proms with the

Munich Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev in July 2016, Abduraimov immediately returned in July 2017. Similarly, after his debut success at Carnegie Hall with the Mariinsky Orchestra in January 2015, he returned in November 2016 to make his Stern Auditorium recital debut.

He has worked with leading orchestras worldwide, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, NHK Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras, with prestigious conductors such as Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Manfred Honeck, Vasily Petrenko, James Gaffigan, Jakub Hrůša, and Vladimir Jurowski.

Upcoming European highlights include the Lucerne Festival, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Philharmonia, Czech Philharmonic, and BBC Symphony orchestras. Recent notable dates include NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra as part of the Elbphilharmonie opening, the London Symphony Orchestra, and debuts at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden and Rheingau Musik festivals. In recital, he is one of the featured artists for the Junge Wilde series

at the Konzerthaus Dortmund and is being presented in recital at the main halls of the Barbican, London, and Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Abduraimov also collaborates with the cellist Truls Mørk, and they tour Europe and the U.S in 2017-18.

In North America, Abduraimov appeared this past summer at the Hollywood Bowl, Blossom and Ravinia Festivals. In the 2017-18 season, he makes his debut with the San Francisco Symphony and returns to Dallas and Atlanta symphony orchestras. Last season, appeared with the Houston Symphony and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and Minnesota Orchestra.

An award-winning recording artist—his debut recital CD won both the Choc de Classica and the Diapason découverte—Abduraimov released his first concerto disc in 2014 on Decca Classics which features Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai.

Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1990, Abduraimov began to play the piano at the age of five. He is an alumnus of Park University’s International Center for Music in Parkville, MO, where he studied with Stanislav Ioudenitch, and now serves as the ICM’s artist-in-residence.

Abduraimov’s website is behzodabudraimov.com.


SERGEY RACHMANINOFFTwo Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op. 2Composed in 1892

So many of Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Russian contemporaries only pursued music after abandoning plans to study law, medicine, or some other profession. But Rachmaninoff was always going to be a musician—his background and connections virtually demanded it. Rachmaninoff’s grandfather had studied with the legendary Irish pianist John Field, and his cousin, Alexander Siloti, was a pupil of Liszt and one of the most important musical figures in Russia at the time. As for Rachmaninoff himself, he became a protégé of Tchaikovsky while just a teenager, and the established composer didn’t hesitate to proclaim him as an equal.

Rachmaninoff left Russia after the October 1917 Revolution and never returned, shuttling for the next two decades between New York and Switzerland. In 1935 he settled in Beverly Hills, CA, and became a U.S. citizen just before his death in 1943. It was during this post-Russia period that Rachmaninoff focused on performance and cemented his reputation as an esteemed pianist; he actually composed relatively little during this time. But, Rachmaninoff always considered himself a composer first. And as a composer, he was completely unmoved by the modernist musical experiments of the early 20th century, clinging steadfastly to the opulent and lyrical Romanticism of the 19th century. While this pleased his audiences, it failed to impress the music historians and modernist critics who at first regarded his works as little more than stale, uninter-esting echoes of a past era. It was only after his death that Rachmaninoff’s reputation as a composer rose to match his standing as one of the preeminent pianists of his day.

The Two Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op. 2, were among the first of Rachmaninoff’s compositions to be published. Conceived independently of each other, both pieces were written for famed Russian cellist Anatoli Brandukov. A close personal friend, Brandukov was the primary inspiration

behind Rachmaninoff’s small but significant group of works for solo cello.

The first of these pieces actually began as a piano prelude in F major, written in 1891 while a teenaged Rachmaninoff was wrapping up his final piano studies at the Moscow Conservatory. He turned this prelude into a duet for cello and piano early the following year, when he performed it with Brandukov at the composer’s first independent concert. The solo piano version was eventually published in 1948, after Rachmaninoff’s death.

The prelude is cast as a song without words, the cello dominating the rich melodic material as the piano adds simple chordal accompaniment. In the middle section, the amiable dialogue between the instruments is more active and fluid. Then, upon the return of the main theme, the piano retains the active 16th-note accompaniment over a pedal F in the left hand, leading into the gentle conclusion.

The Danse orientale in A minor is decidedly more exotic, announced by modal parallelisms in the harmonies of the piano introduction. The melody is based on a gapped scale, which is often used to evoke

Middle Eastern or gypsy music. Here, however, the melody seems to more closely resemble the flavors of Central and Eastern Russian folk music, with its more regular accompaniment patterns. An agitated middle section in the more familiar key of F major provides a contrast. When the main theme has its reprise, it gradually fades into the distance as little more than a memory.

EDVARD GRIEGSonata for Cello and Piano in A minor, Op. 36Composed in 1882-83

The career of Norway’s most famous composer, Edvard Grieg, was marked by a struggle between nationalistic pride and the desire to be respected as a serious composer. Grieg’s early formal training in Germany—“that damned Leipzig Con-servatory,” he called it, “where I learned absolutely nothing”—left him embittered and cynical. In his own words, “I longed to find a way to express something good in me that was a thousand miles away from Leipzig and its spirit.” Yet he was dis-satisfied with his compositions that were closely associated with Norwegian culture, in particular his incidental music for the plays Sigurd Jorsalfar and Peer Gynt, labelling them “trashy occasional pieces.”

Grieg continually felt the need to write a substantial, “respectable” work that would prove (if only to himself) his musical maturity, self-discipline, and mastery of materials: the hallmarks of a conservatory education. But by the end of his career he had completed only a handful of full-length compositions: three violin sonatas, a string quartet, an early piano sonata, an unpublished symphony, the famous Piano Concerto, and the Sonata for Cello and Piano, his longest chamber work.

Grieg worked on his cello sonata in the winter of 1882-83, and dedicated it to his brother John, a gifted amateur cellist. At the 1883 premiere the cello part was played by noted German soloist Friedrich Grütz-macher, with the composer at the piano.

Strong recollections of Grieg’s piano concerto and direct references to some of

EDVARD GRIEG

ABOUT THE PROGRAM


his earlier works deeply infuse this sonata, leading many (including the composer himself) to regard it as a derivative work. But with these melodies and references retaining such freshness and energy, the familiar melodic ground Grieg treads in this work remains unfailingly engaging. Grieg himself programmed this piece on concerts through the end of his career, and it has been a favorite among cellists, including the likes of Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich, ever since.

The impassioned first movement recalls harmonic procedures reminiscent of Peer Gynt, the unmistakable figurations of the Piano Concerto, and the lyricism of Grieg’s vocal works. A dramatic A-minor opening in which the piano plays the role of surrogate orchestra quickly gives way to a gentle C-major second theme derived from the opening musical ideas. After the development section, a mini-cadenza for solo cello leads directly into the recapitulation and a flamboyant prestissimo coda.

The second movement opens with a melodic reference to the “Homage March” from the incidental music Grieg composed for the play Sigurd Jorsalfar. The triplet rhythm becomes a driving force in the central section before easing into the lyrical melody of the opening, then fading into a pizzicato close.

After a short cello solo, the sonata-form finale features leaping dance rhythms and arpeggiated folk-like melodies. In the development section, Grieg creates more variety through changes of dynamic, texture and tonality than through the development of musical ideas. The cello solo that introduced the movement returns once more to introduce the recapitulation, which rounds out the sonata.

GRIEGIntermezzo for Cello and Piano in A minorComposed in 1866

Grieg was not a prolific composer for the cello. Apart from the Sonata, his only other surviving piece for cello and piano is the

Intermezzo in A minor, a salon piece he completed in 1866. (An earlier mazurka for cello and piano, performed in 1864, is now lost.) At the time, however, he apparently had plans to write more works for this instrumentation. In the manuscript for this Intermezzo, it is clearly marked as the first movement of an intended suite for cello and piano, and Grieg actually wrote 20 measures of another movement, a humoresque, before abandoning the effort and transferring some of its ideas to his Violin Sonata No. 2.

It’s unclear why Grieg wrote this diverting little work. It could have been simply a piece (or part of a suite) for his brother John to play, a composition exercise, or a way of working out musical ideas that might have found a place in his contemporaneous Lyric Pieces for piano. Regardless, the manuscript remained unpublished and largely forgotten for over a century, until it was rediscovered and published in 1979.

Though the title of Intermezzo suggests an “in between” movement, the music itself has the congenial, lyrical character of a Romantic-period intermezzo. As a stand-alone work (even if intended as a suite movement), this Intermezzo predates by over a decade Brahms’ solo piano

Intermezzi, which are usually regarded as the first examples of an independent intermezzo as a character piece.

In the same key as his later Cello Sonata, A minor, this work opens with a tuneful melody that soon turns to (and cadences in) C major. At only 39 measures in length, this miniature is actually a highly-compressed sonata-allegro form, and the repetition of the opening 11 measures functions as a traditional exposition repetition. A short development section displays some of Grieg’s familiar dramatic touches, and moving briefly to C major before a recapitulation, which stays in tonic minor and closes out this touching, youthful work.

RACHMANINOFFSonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 19Composed in 1901

Like his earlier Op. 2 pieces for cello and piano, Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 19, was composed for his friend Anatoli Brandukov. The work was completed in November 1901 and premiered in Moscow the next month, with Brandukov playing cello and the composer tackling the fiendishly difficult piano part. Rachmaninoff made some small tweaks to the score soon after the first performance, and the work was published the following year in 1902. Close friends as well as musical collaborators, Brandukov served as “best man” at Rachmaninoff’s wedding only a few months later.

Tchaikovsky’s preferred cellist, Brandukov had premiered many of the older composer’s works and was renowned for his refined playing and expressive tone. It was these qualities that Rachmaninoff hoped to exploit in his Sonata. He was composing to Brandukov’s strengths.

Though Rachmaninoff may not have known it at the time, this Sonata was the last chamber piece he would ever write. After its completion, he concentrated almost exclusively on solo piano works and large-scale symphonic and choral compositions.

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RACHMANINOFF

MAY 6, 2018


The Sonata was considered a success at the time of its premiere, though its reputation was overshadowed by the debut of Rachmaninoff’s monumental Piano Concerto No. 2 only a few weeks earlier. Indeed, the Sonata and the Concerto are musically related, coming from the same period in Rachmaninoff’s career. Echoes of the Concerto resonate throughout the Sonata’s four movements, and, although there are no direct quotations of Russian folk tunes or Orthodox hymns in the sonata, the flavor of Russian culture suffuses the work’s melodies.

Rachmaninoff preferred not to call this piece a Cello Sonata as such. He thought of it as being more equally balanced between the two instruments—a true partnership—rather than a work for cello with piano accompaniment, and so he referred to the work repeatedly as a Sonata for Cello and Piano. Throughout the work, the piano presents most of the main themes, which are then embellished and developed by the cello.

Some have identified in this work a kind of programmatic parallel with the previous five years of Rachmaninoff’s career: the breakdown and crisis of confidence in 1897 after the failure of his

First Symphony, the dark period that followed, the struggle to regain his compositional footing, and the success of his Second Piano Concerto. Though there is no documentary evidence to support this interpretation, the Sonata does clearly traverse a journey from trouble to triumph.

The first movement opens with a slow, hesitating introduction. When the Allegro proper begins, the cello presents a beau-tiful, impassioned theme that develops some of the seemingly-incidental motifs heard in the introduction. The piano introduces a more reflective, second theme in D major, very much in the Rachmaninoff family of melodies, before the cello embellishes it further. Clearly related to corresponding passages in the Piano Concerto, these ideas bear the hallmark both of the composer’s pianism and his ear for contrapuntal interplay. The triplet-infused development section leads into a kind of short cadenza for solo piano before moving into the recapitulation and a short coda.

A Scherzo follows, in the form of a devilish tarantella in C minor. Lyrical episodes led by the piano (and again, referencing the composer’s piano-concerto style) intervene periodically in this rondo-

like formal structure, but it is the downward-leaping motif that leads the scherzo to its final perdendo finish.

The slow movement is regarded by many as the Sonata’s strongest. The piano leads with a bittersweet theme that plays on major/minor harmonies while remaining peacefully in E-flat major. The solo piano also presents the second theme, marked by two-against-three cross-rhythms, developing an internal anxiety that is only relieved by the return of the main theme, ornamented and varied, before the closing cadence brings complete repose.

As dark and despairing as the Scherzo was, the finale is equally triumphant, and with triplets throughout the common meter helping to create a parallel metric and rhythmically sound world. Descending scales are turned around into fanfare figures and, even in the more restrained second theme, there is a palpably energized confidence. In the development section, reminiscences of the first movement and scherzo act as reminders of the darker past, but the recapitulation and coda return to confirm the victory over past trials.

NOTES BY LUKE HOWARD, © 2017

MØRK & ABDURAIMOV

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)Symphony No. 74 in E-flat major

Vivace assaiAdagio cantabileMenuetto et Trio: AllegrettoFinale: Allegro assai

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453

AllegroAndanteAllegro—Presto

—INTERMISSION—

JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH (1735–1782)Symphony in G Minor, Op. 6, No. 6

Allegro Andante più tosto adagioAllegro molto

MOZARTPiano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major, K. 271, “Jeunehomme”

AllegroAndantinoRondo: Presto—Menuetto: Cantabile—Presto

THE PAUL & BARBARA KRIEGER EARLY MUSIC CONCERTPaul and Barbara Krieger, great lovers and players of early music, endowed this concert in 2003. Paul, a retired pathologist, has turned to another great love: the study of music theory. Barbara was the executive director of the Vineyard Theater, an off-Broadway theater that she founded in 1981 that garnered two Pulitzer Prizes among many other honors. Currently, she is the artistic director of New York City’s Children’s Theater, a family theater and education company that she founded in 2001. The Kriegers have a collection of historical keyboard, wind, and string instruments, all of which they enjoy playing with their many musical friends.

MAY 20, 2018

FREIBURG BAROQUE ORCHESTRAKRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT DIRECTOR & FORTEPIANO


The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra appears by arrangement with Intermusica.Kristian Bezuidenhout appears by arrangement with Askonas Holt.This concert will end at approximately 7:30pm.

FREIBURG BAROQUE ORCHESTRA

The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (FBO) is a popular guest at the most important international concert halls and opera houses. With a history of 30 successful years, the

en-semble’s current concert calendar displays breadth and diversity, with repertoire from the Baroque to the musical present and venues ranging from the Americas to Asia.

The FBO’s artistic credo remains unchanged from its found-ing: to sustain the individual ensemble members’ creative curiosity in order for the ensemble to perform each composition in as lively and as expressive a manner as possible. The en-semble’s refined yet rousing performances have become an international trademark:

“The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra is a diamond of particular brilliance. In the technical and mental ‘mastery’ of the in-struments and the individual parts one sees what ‘historical’ music-making is currently capable of. Vivid and pure, trans-parent and lucid, delicate in phrasing and articulation and without excessive pathetic pressure, one hears all the details and experiences the whole as a musical cosmos of overpowering richness. Open your ears, this is how music sounds!” —Salzburger Nachrichten

The FBO collaborates regularly with important artists such as Christian Gerhaher, Philippe Jaroussky, Isabelle Faust, René Jacobs, Pablo Heras-Casado, and Andreas Staier, and has a close alliance with the Harmonia Mundi record label. The artistic success of this partnership is expressed in numerous recordings and the receipt of prominent awards, such as the Gramophone Award, several ECHO Klassik German Music Prize awards, the Edison Classical Music Award, and the Classical Brit Award.

With its two artistic directors, Gottfried von der Goltz and Kristian Bezuidenhout, and under the baton of select conductors, the FBO presents approximately 100 performances per year in a variety of orchestral formations from chamber to opera orchestra. A self-administrated ensemble, the FBO presents its own subscription concerts at Freiburg’s Concert Hall, Stuttgart’s Liederhalle, and Berlin’s Philharmonie in addition to touring all over the world.

Recent notable performances include FBO’s first complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies on period instruments (Mexico City), two of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas (China), a U.S. tour with baritone Christian Gerhaher, and a tour of the chamber ensemble Freiburg Baroque Consort throughout the U.K. and Europe performing Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers for the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth with the Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis.

2017-18 marks the FBO’s 30th anniversary season, with highlights including semi-staged performances of Beethoven’s Leonore under René Jacobs, the performance and recording of Beethoven’s five piano concertos with Kristian Bezuidenhout under the baton of Pablo Heras-Casado, performances of Handel’s Saul in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, and an anniversary concert featuring works by Telemann, C.P.E. Bach, and Beethoven under three artistic leaders.

The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra’s website is barockorchester.de.



KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT DIRECTOR & FORTEPIANO

Kristian Bezuidenhout is one of today’s most notable and exciting keyboard artists, equally at home on the fortepiano, harpsichord, and modern piano. Born in

South Africa in 1979, he began his studies in Australia, completed them at the Eastman School of Music, and now lives in London. After initial training as a pianist with Rebecca Penneys, he explored early keyboards, studying harpsichord with Arthur Haas, fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson, and continuo playing and performance practice with Paul O’Dette. Bezuidenhout first gained international recognition at the age of 21 after winning the prestigious first prize and audience prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition.

Bezuidenhout is a regular guest with the world’s leading ensembles, including the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Les Arts Florissants, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Orchestre des Champs Elysées, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. From the keyboard, he has guest-directed the English Concert, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Tafelmusik, Collegium Vocale, Juilliard 415, Kammerakademie Potsdam, and Dunedin Consort, the latter in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He has performed with celebrated artists including John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Frans Brüggen, Trevor Pinnock, Giovanni Antonini, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Isabelle Faust, Alina Ibragimova, Rachel Podger, Carolyn Sampson, Anne Sofie von Otter, Mark Padmore, and Matthias Goerne.

Bezuidenhout’s rich and award-winning discography on the Harmonia Mundi label includes the complete keyboard music of Mozart (Diapason d’Or de L’année, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Caecilia Prize); Mozart violin sonatas with Petra Müllejans; Mendelssohn and Mozart piano concertos with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (ECHO Klassik Award); and German lieder and Schumann’s Dichterliebe with Mark Padmore (Edison Award). In 2013 Bezuidenhout was nominated as Gramophone Magazine’s artist of the year. Recent releases include Volume 2 of Mozart piano concertos with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.

In the 2017-18 season, Bezuidenhout serves as an artistic director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and principal guest director of the English Concert. He play-directs programs with both orchestras this season and with Camerata Salzburg, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. As a soloist, he is featured in the 2017-18 season in performances with Orchestre des Champs Elysées, Les Violons du Roy, and Le Concert Olympique. Solo recitals and chamber music performances in 2017-18 take him to London, Rome, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne, Berlin, the U.S., and Japan.


FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)Symphony No. 74 in E-flat majorComposed in 1781

With his long-standing position as court composer to the Esterházy family, Franz Joseph Haydn rarely traveled far from their estate in Vienna. Yet Haydn still earned great renown across Europe through his music—especially the symphonies and string quartets—during the last quarter of the 18th century. His quartets and symphonies became, by sheer force of quantity alone, the Classical models for younger composers including Mozart and Beethoven. Hadyn wrote nearly 70 quartets and over 100 symphonies in his lifetime, standardizing the four-movement format in both of these relatively new genres and establishing the foundation for their further development in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When a composer writes over 100 works in the same genre, it is not surprising that there might be a degree of similarity within the collection. This holds true all the more so due to the stylistic expectations of the Classical era. Although Haydn was only a little more than a generation older than Beethoven, he worked during a period when the assumptions of generic conformity— a legacy of the Baroque era—still held sway. One anticipated that a concerto or symphony, for example, would follow a traditional formal pattern, use traditional contrapuntal devices, and explore traditionally-related key areas. The variety came in the details, not in innovations to the overall plan. It was only after Haydn’s era that composers such as Beethoven began to think every new work should be an innovative masterpiece that broke new ground.

So it is that Haydn’s Symphony No. 74 in E-flat major shares traits found in many of his other symphonies: a standard four-movement format, concise proportions, largely monothematic expositions, galante clarity, and a touch of his renowned musical wit. The work dates from around

1780, after Haydn had experimented with the darker Sturm und Drang style, but before his visits to London in the 1790s, which inspired the expansion of the proportions and scoring of his last symphonies. This Symphony No. 74, like the vast majority of Haydn’s symphonies, was conceived for the court orchestra at Esterháza, a small-ish but evidently talented band.

Three loud chords open the first movement as an attention-grabber, showing Haydn’s familiarity with the techniques developed by the incomparable Mannheim orchestra and the symphonies of Johann Stamitz. These effects are followed by a gentle main theme that is embellished upon the repeat. (Haydn was not a natural melodist like Mozart, and tended to work with motivic ideas rather than melodic themes in his symphonies.) The second theme is a modified inversion of the first, showing Haydn’s predilection for gaining maximum use from simple musical ideas. After the requisite development of the principal three-note theme, which includes some minor-key

seriousness, the abbreviated recapitulation leaves room for a brief coda.

The slow movement is a muted set of variations on a cantabile violin melody that sits in a warm, low register, accompanied by the cellos. After three variations, a woodwind trio breaks the pattern with a brief, imitative interlude, followed by a short fugato on the main theme to conclude the movement.

In the minuet, a Lombard rhythm (also known as a “Scotch snap”) enlivens the theme. Haydn’s minuets typically tend toward the rustic, distinct from the urbane and elegant minuets of Mozart. Here it is neither peasant stomping nor aristocratic courtly dancing, though the occasional phrase extensions and the insistence on ending every section in tonic harmony betray Haydn’s general reluctance to fully embrace the learned style of a “city” composer.

The string-dominated finale uses a gigue meter, and—somewhat unusually—is also in sonata form. Haydn liked his finales to be light and frothy. But by casting this finale in sonata form, he adds formal and emotional weight to the symphony’s conclusion, a trend that Mozart and Beethoven would also later adopt in earnest. The recapitulation and development are, like the exposition, marked with a repeat—a stylistic hold-over of the sonata-form’s origins in Baroque binary forms—though this second repeat is not frequently utilized in performances today.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453Composed in 1784

Throughout Mozart’s career, the piano concerto was his principal vehicle for public performance. A majority of the 27 concertos he composed were for his own use, and the genre itself was intended to please a wide audience. It was this prospect of popular performance and the income it could secure that motivated

FRANZ JOSEPH HADYN

ABOUT THE PROGRAM


Mozart to write no fewer than 17 piano concertos following his move to Vienna in 1781. In spite of his unrivaled facility as a pianist, however, he never let the temptation to dazzle the audience override the musical integrity of his concertos.

The formal model for Mozart’s piano concertos was provided by Johann Christian Bach, whose friendship with the Mozarts flourished during the young prodigy’s first concert tour to London in 1764. The format that J.C. Bach employed typically consisted of three movements, beginning with an Allegro that combined elements of sonata form with an orch-estral refrain or ritornello. A lyrical slow movement followed, and the work usually concluded with a light-hearted finale. It was a basic outline that also served Mozart well.

In an especially intense burst of activity, Mozart produced 12 piano concertos between February 1784 and December 1786, a period that coincided with the peak of his popular and financial success in Vienna. One of the earliest of these mature Vienna concerti is K. 453, in G major, completed on April 12, 1784 and premiered soon after (though scholars are unclear about exactly when it was premiered, and by whom).

This is one of only a handful of concerti that Mozart wrote for another musician to play—in this case, his pupil Barbara Ployer, an unusually gifted student who paid him handsomely for the commission. Perhaps in an effort to ensure his student’s popular success, Mozart wrote this concerto (as he noted) “in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”

The concerto opens with a graceful march whose orchestral exposition presents all the major themes of the movement, with the wind instruments adding more independently-conceived material than was typical for the time. Even within this exposition, though, which remains in the tonic key throughout, there are surprising harmonic turns that give a hint of future chromatic drama that occurs throughout the work, especially in the

ensuing development section. When the solo piano finally enters on the repeat of the exposition, it plays what is essentially a reduction of the string materials, with the winds embellishing, before the interplay becomes more integrated and the dialogue more equally balanced between the full ensemble. After the development and recapitulation, an opportunity for a cadenza leads into an orchestral coda that completes the movement.

The C-major slow movement opens with a simple string theme that suddenly ceases after a few measures, then is taken over by the winds. Unexpected pauses, surprise modulations and chromaticisms, spicy dissonances, exaggerated melodic leaps, and unprepared surges in dynamics suggest that this movement was influenced by the musical language of the North German Empfindsamer Stil or “style of sensitivity.” This style was heard more frequently in C.P.E. Bach’s solo keyboard works, but here is adapted to a larger ensemble. Another solo cadenza sparkles before the movement’s closing paragraph.

The finale is a set of variations based on a theme that would continue to dwell in Mozart’s home beyond his manuscript. Mozart’s pet bird, which he purchased soon after completing the concerto, learned the theme quickly and sang it repeatedly (though it was reported that the bird sang one note sharp and held another for too long.) Some versions of the story mistakenly claim that Mozart got the theme from the bird, but the chronology makes it clear that the bird got the theme from Mozart. An especially chromatic fourth variation recalls the drama of the second movement. Then, a tempo change for the coda reintroduces textures and scorings from previous movements in a bustling, cheerful exchange that has all the lighthearted elements of an opera buffa ensemble finale.

JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH (1735–1782)Symphony in G Minor, Op. 6, No. 6Published in 1770

As the youngest son of the famed J.S. Bach, Johann Christian Bach inherited a large number of elder brothers and half-brothers, several of whom were already well-established as musicians by the time he was born. Largely—and impressively—avoiding sibling rivalry, he became the most cosmopolitan of the Bach sons, with a musical style that turned away from the North German Lutheranism of his father and brothers and towards the more vibrant and modern sensibilities of Italy.

J.C. Bach learned keyboard and the rudiments of music from his father in Leipzig. But after his father’s death in 1750, he went to live in Berlin with his half-brother, C.P.E. Bach, 21 years his senior. It was while in Berlin that J.C. Bach came into contact with Italian opera, igniting a passion that he would explore further. He was the only Bach son to compose Italian opera.

Bach left Berlin for Italy when he was 20, converted to Catholicism, and was appointed the organist at Milan Cathedral where he was known as “Giovanni Bach.”

MAY 20, 2018

JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH


Then in 1762 he moved to London and became a leading figure in London’s music scene. He was consequently dubbed the “London Bach,” and was known in the city simply as “John Bach.”

In 1764, J.C. Bach met the young Mozart, and their friendship blossomed almost immediately. Some scholars have suggested he was a more powerful influence on the young Mozart’s compositional style than was the boy’s overbearing father, Leopold. When J.C. Bach died in 1782, the news was hardly noted at all outside London, but when Mozart heard of it, he remarked to his father that the death of his friend and mentor was “a loss to music.”

Not only did J.C. Bach instill in the young Mozart a love of J.S. Bach’s “old-style” music, but also demonstrated for Mozart the emerging new genres of symphony, classical concerto, and quartet. In that regard, J.C. Bach’s 60 or so sym-phonies are not only monuments to their time, but also crucial ancestors to the later development of the Classical symphony.

Composed in the 1760s, J.C. Bach’s Symphony in G minor, Op. 6 No. 6, is exactly the kind of work that was performed at the fashionable and influential London concerts he organized with Carl Friedrich Abel, and the kind of new music the young Mozart soaked up enthusiastically. It is, in effect, a Sturm und Drang symphony, with each of the three movements in a minor key. It might not be a coincidence that the only two symphonies (out of 41) that Mozart composed in a minor key were also in the key of G minor. Their pedigree is clear.

The opening movement demonstrates J.C. Bach’s remarkable expressivity and dramatic compass—features that are not always so evident in his lighter galante symphonies. The liberation of the winds from merely doubling the string lines is yet another feature J.C. Bach passed on to Mozart.

The C-minor slow movement is the longest symphonic movement J.C. Bach ever composed. It reveals a composer who

foresaw the future expansion of the symphony’s proportions, and adjusted the musical language and formal elements to accommodate it. In an adaptation of sonata form, its long-breathed phrases and leisurely harmonic rhythm are the structural background against which the contrapuntal dialogue plays out.

The brevity of the finale intensifies the drama, with sudden modulations, driving motifs, and impassioned string tremolos returning the movement fully to Sturm und Drang expressivity. But rather than resolve the tensions at the movement’s end, the composer exaggerates them with a sudden decrescendo, concluding the work with ellipsis points instead of an exclamation point.

W.A. MOZART (1756-1791)Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major, K. 271, “Jeunehomme”Composed in 1777

Mozart had just turned 21 years old and was working in Salzburg when he wrote his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major. It was

his first significant composition in nearly a year, an unusually lean period for such a prolific composer.

The concerto has historically been known by the nickname “Jeunehomme,” a French term that translates simply as “young man.” In 1912, two Mozart scholars attributed the concerto’s unofficial but widely-accepted moniker to a French pianist surnamed “Jeunehomme” who they claimed was visiting Salzburg at the time of this work’s composition. But recent scholarship suggests this was a misappropriation, or at least a mis-interpretation. Mozart actually composed this concerto for an aspiring young pianist named Victoire Jenamy, the daughter of the famous ballet-master Jean-George Noverre, who had spent some time in Vienna during the preceding years. The concerto’s actual nickname, then, should be “Jenamy,” but thanks to some misguided scholars, it has been transformed into “Jeunehomme.”

Though it is a relatively early work in Mozart’s oeuvre, this concerto has been consistently praised, even revered, by critics. In his authoritative volume, The Classical Style, Charles Rosen cites it as “perhaps the first unequivocal masterpiece” of Classical composition. Famed pianist Alfred Brendel calls it “one of the greatest wonders of the world,” and included the work on the program for his farewell concert in 2008. Alfred Einstein regarded it as “Mozart’s Eroica, which he would later match but never surpass.”

This is a concerto of exuberance and innovation. Instead of beginning with a purely orchestral exposition, which was the expectation at the time, Mozart allows the soloist to enter in the second measure before the orchestra continues with its presentation of the main themes. The intensity of dialogue between piano and orchestra throughout the movement’s development and recapitulation also breaks with convention. Mozart’s un-surpassed melodic gifts are very much on display in this movement, and he delights in crafting vocally-conceived tunes for both soloist and orchestra

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

FREIBURG & BEZUIDENHOUT

throughout. A sparkling cadenza pre-cipitates the orchestra’s final statements.

The second movement is a moving and dramatic lament in a minor key, an abrupt shift in the concerto’s emotional range and another break with convention. But the drama is mitigated somewhat by extended passages of major-key tranquility in its inner sections. The movement’s tension and temperature fluctuates with each change in texture, mode, and dynamics,

leading to a pained cadenza near the end of the movement that emphasizes a feeling of isolation.

Then, in another complete turnabout, the piano introduces a completely jovial and untroubled rondo theme for the third movement. Midway through the rondo, after another short cadenza, Mozart interpolates a tender minuet that offers a brief respite from the relentless cheer while highlighting the upbeat nature of

this finale. Mozart would use this ingenious device again later in his Piano Concerto No. 22, also in E-flat. After the minuet, the original rondo tempo and theme resume, bringing this remarkable concerto to a thoroughly satisfying close.

NOTES BY LUKE HOWARD, © 2017

MAY 20, 2018

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2017–18ANNUAL FUNDCAMPAIGN

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT ADDITIONAL WAYS TO SUPPORT SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES, PLEASE CALL 410.516.7164

FOR!"#!YEARS$!Shriver Hall Concert Series

has brought the greatest solo recitalists, chamber

ensembles, and singers to Baltimore, always

maintaining affordable ticket prices.

WE!NEED!YOUR!SUPPORT!to maintain

and advance our tradition of artistic excellence,

accessibility, and educational programming

that led The Sun to call Shriver Hall Concert

Series “Baltimore’s finest importer of classical

music talent” and Baltimore magazine to name

SHCS “Best Concert Series” and “Best Classical

Music” five times.

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less than one-third of the costs of presenting

these world-famous performers who inspire

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We thank those who help to make this and every season possible through gifts to the Annual Fund. This list reflects those who have given to the Annual Fund from July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017.

Jeffrey and Elaine Christ

Jane W. Cohen

George and Eileen Cox

Ms. Gwen Davidson

Frank and Mary Emerson

Thomas and Susan Fillion

David Gomberg

Judith A. Gottlieb

Michael and Susan Guarnieri

Jim and Heather Hahn

Ellen and Bob Hartley

Gail and Lenny Kaplan

Susan Katzenberg

Shirley A. Kaufman

Julian Krolik and Elaine Weiss

Dosia and Hyko Laeyendecker

Richard and Susan Lehmann

Sara W. Levi

Dr. Martin and Mrs. Rhona Levin

Henry and Sarah Lord

Ellen Mack

Bill and Dotty Nerenberg, In Memory of Nelson Fishman

Bill and Dotty Nerenberg, In Memory of David Kornblatt

Bill and Dotty Nerenberg, In Memory of Woody Howard

Cathy Neuman, In Honor of Geoff Greif

Dr. Jean M. C. O’Connor

Harriet L. Panitz

Patsy Perlman

Charles W. Phelps

Marlyn Robinson

Jennie Rothschild and Jon Lederer

Lucy Rouse

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Saucier

Oliver Schein and Nadine Fontan

Mr. Daniel Schlozman

Erica Schoenberger

James C. Schultz

Scott and Julia Smith

Dr. Allan Spradling and Ms. Edith B. Stern

Ms. Natalie Starr

Damie and Diane Stillman

Peter E. Threadgill

Robert F. Ward, MD

ENTHUSIAST$100 – $249Ron and Jan Allen

Julia Barker

Douglas Blackstone and Judith Krummeck

Mrs. Sonia D. Blumenthal

Janet L. Bradley

Dr. Helene Breazeale

Gilbert and Virginia Burnham

Lee Chambers

Elizabeth and David Champney

Mary and John Cogar

Henry Cohen

Helen Coplan

Dr. and Mrs. Christopher Corbett

Helen Davis

Dr. Mary Delbanco

Margot W. M. Heller

Helmut Jenkner and Rhea I. Arnot

Roz and Al Kronthal

Juliette Lecomte

Lois and Philip Macht Family Philanthropic Fund

Mellasenah Morris

Marguerite Mugge and Michael Gill

Andrew Pappas and Richard Kitson

Paul and Mary Roberts

Rona and Arthur Rosenbaum

Seymour S. Rubak

Allison and Asher Rubin

Julie and Allen Schwait

Dean and Mrs. Winston Tabb

Drs. Susan and James Weiss

Sander L. Wise

Wolman Family Foundation

PATRON$500 – $999Dr. and Mrs. Theodore M. Bayless

Ms. Gayle Blakeslee

Donald and Linda Brown

Suzanne F. Cohen

Mr. Eric Drachman

Jonathan and Paula Lozano Drachman, In Honor of Jephta

Drachman

The Eliasberg Family Foundation, Inc.

Dr. and Mrs. Jack Fruchtman

Donald S. and Gail R. Gann

Richard A. Goldthwaite

Barbara and Sam Himmelrich

Mr. and Mrs. Sanford Jacobson

Mr. and Mrs. Herschel L. Langenthal

Mr. Peter Leffman

Beng and Dale Light

Mr. Michael Monheit

Charles and Mary Jane Morse

Dr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Nichols

Asta Ottey

Dr. and Mrs. Lawrence C. Pakula

Ms. Linda Hambleton Panitz

Sherrill J. Pantle

Judy Witt Phares

Barbara Scherlis

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Spence

Dean and Mrs. Winston Tabb, In Memory of Woody Howard

Anne M. Wyatt-Brown

FRIEND$250 – $499Joanne Althoff and Ray Depaulo

Amelia Andres

Mary Andrew

Anonymous

George R. Barth, In Memory of Dr. George R. Stanley

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai P. Blaustein, In Memory of Ann Greif

David and Margot Blum

Louis C. Bothwell

Penny Catzen

Mr. Arthur Chomas

SUSTAINER$25,000 +Paul M. Angell Family Foundation

Maryland State Arts Council

BENEFACTOR$10,000 – $24,999The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust

Drs. Geoffrey L. Greif and Maureen Lefton-Greif

Jane Howard, In Memory of Her Beloved Husband,

Woody Howard

Drs. Reiko T. and Yuan C. Lee

Mr. Robert E. Meyerhoff and Ms. Rheda Becker

The Estate of Jacob Radin

SPONSOR$5,000 – $9,999Dr. Daniel and Mrs. Jephta Drachman

Doug Fambrough and Savitri Gauthier

Charlton Friedberg

Edward and Lucille McCarthy

Neil A. and Sayra Wells Meyerhoff

Dr. Solomon H. Snyder

Nanny and Jack Warren

ANGEL$2,500 – $4,999Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai P. Blaustein

Susan Chouinard

Jeffrey and Elaine Christ, In Loving Memory of Woody Howard

Samuel Dell

Arthur and Isadora Dellheim

Alan and Carol Edelman

Elaine Freeman

Stephen C. Harrison

Ian and Rachel Heavers

Hecht-Levi Foundation, Inc.

Jane and Woody* Howard

Li-Wen Kang and Dr. Sharon Solomon

Barbara and David* Kornblatt

AFICIONADO$1,000 – $2,499George and Frances Alderson

Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts

Dr. Barbara F. Bass and Ms. Barbra L. Levin

Marlene Brager

Dr. Rudy and Robin Breitenecker

Ed and Barbara Brody

Drs. James N. and Regina Anderson Campbell

Constance R. Caplan

Dr. and Mrs. Arno Drucker

Mr. and Mrs. John G. Ford

Kathe Fox and Michael Collins

Stephen Gerke

Ms. Tamera S. Gundersen

Drs. Robert and Ruby Hearn, In Honor of Jephta Drachman

Ellen M. Heller and Shale D. Stiller

RECOGNIZING OURGENEROUS DONORS

Mr. and Mrs. William T. Durkin

Thomas L. Edmondson

Sibylle Ehrlich

George and Elaine Farrant

Paul and Joan Feldman

David and Rosemary Fetter

Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson

Stanley and Marilyn Gabor

Sandra Levi Gerstung

Mr. Stephen Goodman

Michael R. Gordy

Warren and Sharon Green

Drs. Geoffrey L. Greif and Maureen Lefton-Greif,

In Memory of David Kornblatt

Dr. Diane Griffin

Douglas Guiles

Carl Haller

Mr. and Mrs. Henry L. Hammond

Marianne Hanyi

Sue L. Hess

Drs. Georges Hoché and Joan Bielefeld

Dr. Marcel Horowitz

Dr. Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena

Michael Kannen

Barbara and David* Kornblatt, In Memory of William

Polonowski

Charles Keenan

Dorothy B. Krug

Alice Kurs

Jim and Ann Lano

Qing Li

Doris Lin

Joan R. Lucco

Laidily MacBride

Sylvia Marcus

Diane Markman

Mr. Richard P. Martin

P. Kyle and Susan McCarter

Marian Michel

Mr. Clare L. Milton and Ms. Elizabeth P. Townsend

Susan and Stanley I. Morstein

Mr. Edward Mortimore

Ann Moser

Dr. Patrick Murphy

Jacques Neefs

Hon. and Mrs. Paul V. Niemeyer

Dr. Nancy Norris-Kniffin*

Elizabeth M. Nuss

John R. Oleson

Dr. and Mrs. Takashi Ono

Michael O’Pecko and Dyer Bilgrave

Art and Judy Pittenger

Scott D. Ponemone

David Pozorski and Anna Romansky

Deborah and Bernard Rabin

Gretchen Redden

Paul Romney

George Rose

Wendy Rosen and Richard Weisman

David and Alice Schlessinger

Dr. and Mrs. Carl B. Schmidt

Mrs. Sue Schuster

Mr. Sanford Shapiro

Nancy Sherman and Marshall Presser

Ernest Silversmith

Marion and Raymond Sjodin

Robert C. Snyder, MD

Dr. and Mrs. Michael Stang

Mrs. Janet Steinberg*

Katie Stevens

Ann Stiller

Leon Strauss, MD Ph.D.

Lynne and Bruce Stuart

Mr. Peter Szanton

Doris Tippens

Joanne and Edward Wallach

Murray West and Theresa O’Malley

David Williams

Sander L. Wise, In Memory of Ann Greif

Miryam Yardumian

CONTRIBUTORto $99Ann Hersey Allison

Peter Babcox and Hillary Barry

Charlotte Benton

Geoffrey Berman

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai P. Blaustein, In Memory of Tony Perlman

Richard and Suzanne Brafman

Gustav Buchdahl

Barbara Burroughs

Pat Campbell

Joe Chmura

Julien Davis

James Fackler

Christopher B. Fowler

Mrs. Elizabeth Frank, In Honor of Rena Kelly’s Birthday

William Fritz

Harold and Ruth Gainer

Martin Gellert

Linda Graham

Anne B. Gray

Herman and Heide Grundmann

Calvin Hein

Jutta Heiner

Janet Albert Heller

Mrs. Margot Heller, In Memory of David Drachman

Mrs. Margot Heller, In Memory of Ann Greif

Sandra Hittman*

Phyllis S. Hoyer

Dr. Takeru Igusa

Kathleen Isaacs

Stephen Jacobsohn, In Memory of Woody Howard

Susan Jakab, In Honor of Edie Stern and Allan Spradling

Ivo Jamrosz & Rosalie McCabe

Mrs. Ellen Jandorf

Johns Hopkins University Department of Political Science,

In Memory of J. Woodford (Woody) Howard, Jr.

John Kattler

Robert Kessel

Veronica Kestenberg

Ildar Khannonoz

Barbara Kornblatt, in Memory of Barbara B. Hirschhorn

Barbara Kornblatt, In Memory of Thomas Milch

Rosa Korobkov

Jennifer Kraus

Sidney Levin

Margaret Lord

Tatjana Lowe-Jurek

Lawrence Lubetsky

Margit E. Lucskay

Brian Malsberger

Susan F. Marbury

Arna Margolis

Roberta McKay

Frederick Miles

Ms. Margaret Mitchell

Barbara Lindsay Olsh

Philip Perkins

Audrey and Leslie J. Polt

Jeff Radowich and Sandra Mason

Michael Reisch and Lily Jarman-Reisch

Dan Richman

Barbara Bender Rosenberger

Winstead Rouse

Ursula A. Scheffel

Mr. and Mrs. Daniel B. Schneider

Hanne Schulten

Colette Shen

Scott and Janet Shindell

J. Simmons

Barbara Styrt, In Memory of David Kornblatt and

In Honor of Barbara Kornblatt

Alan and Kelly Sweatman

Dr. and Mrs. John A. Talbott

Suzanna Thieblot

Evan Tucker

Sandy Waters

Mr. and Mrs. Gunther Wertheimer

Deborah Wheeler

Franceska Wilde

Sander L. Wise, In Memory of Zarelda Fambrough

Sander L. Wise, In Memory of Woody Howard

Mollie K. Witow

Dr. and Mrs. Irving Wolfe, In Memory of David Drachman

Cary and Peggy Woodward

Christian Zickert

SHCS DISCOVERY SERIESGeorge and Frances Alderson

Paul M. Angell Family Foundation

John Boushka

Barbara Burroughs

David A. Clark

Ernesto Escola

Ms. Heidi Fancher

The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust

Jim and Heather Hahn

Ellen and Bob Hartley

Mr. Kari Hemdal

Alexandra Jaskula-Ranga

Hillary Kruh

George Lambert

David Lefkowitz

Lawrence Lubetsky

Margit E. Lucskay

Nino Panagia

Diane Pressley

Mr. and Mrs. James F. Ridenour

Jessica Robinson

Paul Romney

Adam Scherr

Dinglei Su

Lei Zhang

MATCHING GIFT COMPANIESAetna Foundation

Becton Dickinson

The Boeing Company

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

T. Rowe Price Foundation

*deceased

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT


The following friends of SHCS have contributed to the Drachman Endowment from its establishment in 2006 through June 2017 to support SHCS’s continuing educational and outreach activities:

THE JEPHTA DRACHMAN ENDOWMENT FOR EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

Ms. Roberta Pehr

Ms. Roberta Pehr,

In Memory of Jacqueline Piatigorsky

Dr. and Mrs. Anthony Perlman

Dr. and Mrs. Joram Piatigorsky

Arthur and Judith Pittenger

Mary Elizabeth Porth

Mr. Jacob Radin

Mr. and Mrs. James Ridenour

Drs. Paul and Mary Roberts

Rona and Arthur Rosenbaum,


Dr. and Mrs. Jesse Roth

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Saucier

Dr. and Mrs. Frank F. Schuster

Daniel Schwait

Julie and Allen Schwait

Julie, Allen, and Daniel Schwait,


Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Silversmith

Dr. and Mrs. Solomon Snyder

Mr. Shale D. Stiller, Esq. and Hon. Ellen M. Heller

Judith Storey

Dean and Mrs. Winston Tabb

Mr. Peter Threadgill

Mrs. Barbara Trimble

Dr. and Mrs. George Udvarhelyi

Dr. and Mrs. John Warren

Dr. and Mrs. Edward Wallach

Dr. and Mrs. Edward Wallach,

In Honor of Jacqueline Piatigorsky’s

100th Birthday

Dr. and Mrs. Edward Wallach,


Ms. Barbara M. Weinstock

Drs. James and Susan Weiss

Mr. and Mrs. Werner-Jacobsohn

Norrie Epstein and Stephen Wigler

Mrs. Gladys W. Winter

Mr. Sander L. Wise

Mr. Sander L. Wise,

In Honor of Jacqueline Piatigorsky’s

100th Birthday

Mollie Witow

The Wolman Family Foundation

Ms. Miryam Yardumian

Edith Furstenberg

Ms. Kathe Fox and Mr. Michael Collins

The Harry Gladding Foundation

Ms. Louise Goldberg

Dr. Geoffrey Greif and Dr. Maureen Lefton-Greif

The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust

Drs. Diane and John Griffin

Drs. Susan and Michael Guarnieri

Mr. and Mrs. John Heller

Mr. and Mrs. John Heller,


Mr. and Mrs. John Heller,

In Honor of Ellen and Mordecai

Blaustein’s Special Anniversary

Ms. Sue Hess

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Himmelrich

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Himmelrich,


Drs. Georges Hoché and Joan Bielefeld

Dr. and Mrs. J. Woodford Howard, Jr.

Dr. Heidi Hutton

Stephen Jacobsohn and Dr. Maura Reinblatt

Dr. Helmut Jenkner and Ms. Rhea Arnot

Mr. Richard Johnson

Dr. and Mrs. Nagi Khouri

Mr. and Mrs. David Kornblatt

Rev. Richard T. Lawrence

Drs. Reiko T. and Yuan C. Lee

Charlotte Z. Lister

Dr. and Mrs. Paul McHugh

Phyllis McIntosh

Drs. Edward and Lucille McCarthy

Toby Mendeloff

Neil A. and Sayra W. Meyerhoff

Mr. Robert E. Meyerhoff and Ms. Rheda Becker

Mr. and Mrs. Edward Meyers

Mr. and Mrs. Edward Meyers, In Honor of Jacqueline

Piatigorsky’s 100th Birthday

Mr. and Mrs. Edward Meyers, In Memory of Jacqueline

Piatigorsky

Mrs. Ann Moser

Ms. Elizbeth Moser

Mr. and Mrs. Naylor

Dr. and Mrs. Ernst Niedermeyer

Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Nichols

Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Nudelman

Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Nudelman, In Memory

of Jacqueline Piatigorsky

Dr. and Mrs. Lawrence C. Pakula

Ms. Harriet L. Panitz

Amelia Andres

Dr. and Mrs. Reubin Andres

Dr. and Mrs. Fred Askin

Mr. David Baldwin and Mr. Tim Graham

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai Blaustein

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai Blaustein,


Mr. Robert Bogomolny

Ms. Janice Toran and Mr. Robert Bogomolny

Dr. and Mrs. Stuart H. Brager

Dr. and Mrs. Stuart H. Brager,

In Honor of Jacqueline Piatigorsky’s 100th Birthday

Dr. and Mrs. Stuart H. Brager,


Dr. and Mrs. William R. Brody

Dr. and Mrs. Donald Brown

Ms. Constance Caplan

Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Carson

Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Carson, In Honor of Jacqueline

Piatigorsky’s 100th Birthday

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Catzen

Bette Cohen and Sander L. Wise,


Ms. Suzanne F. Cohen

Ms. Gwen Davidson

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Dell III

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dellheim

Ms. Adele Derby

Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Drachman

Dr. Daniel Drachman

Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Drachman

Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Drachman,


Dr. and Mrs. David Drachman

Mr. Eric Drachman

Mr. Eric Drachman – The Bosco Foundation,


Dr. and Mrs. Jonathan Drachman

Dr. and Mrs. Richard Drachman

Mr. and Mrs. Alan S. Edelman

Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson

The France-Merrick Foundation

Liza Frank

Dr. and Mrs. John Freeman

Dr. and Mrs. John Freeman,


Dr. and Mrs. John Freeman,


Leslie and Tom Freudenheim

Mrs. Charlton Friedberg


THE DR. ERNEST BUEDING LEGACY SOCIETYThe following are members of the Dr. Ernest Bueding Legacy Society, established in honor of Shriver Hall Concert Series’s founder. SHCS gratefully acknowledges these people who have so generously expressed their commitment to preserving the legacy for future audiences by naming SHCS as recipient of planned or deferred gifts. For more information, please call 410.516.7164

Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai Blaustein

Mrs. Robin Breitenecker

Estate of Dr. Nathan Carliner

Dr. Daniel and Mrs. Jephta Drachman

Doug Fambrough and Savitri Gauthier

Mrs. Elaine Freeman

Estate of Ms. Dailina Gorn

Dr. Geoffrey L. Greif

Mrs. Jane Howard and

The Estate of Dr. J. Woodford Howard, Jr.

Margot W. M. Heller

Mrs. Barbara Rodbell Kornblatt

Drs. Edward & Lucille McCarthy

Ms. Harriet L. Panitz

The Paula Pitha-Rowe Trust

Estate of Jacob Radin

Mrs. Mary Ellen Robinson

Ms. Rebecca Rothey

Julie & Allen Schwait

Dr. Solomon Snyder and

The Estate of Mrs. Elaine Snyder

Dr. Robert Trattner

Jean Tullius

Mr. Sander Wise

THE HARTMAN PIANO FUNDProvides funding for the purchase of a new instrument.

THE ALBERT I. MENDELOFF MEMORIAL FUNDSupports the free pre-concert talks.

Anonymous

Ms. Susan Chouinard

Helen Cohen

Isadora and Arthur Dellheim

Dr. and Mrs. J. Woodford Howard, Jr.

David and Barbara Kornblatt

Jayne M. Love

Mr. Michael Monheit

Mr. William Nerenberg and Dr. Dorothy Rosenthal

Andrew Pappas and Richard Kitson

Dr. and Mrs. Harry Stevens

Dr. Margaret R. Pennybacker

and Mr. William Sunda

Anthony and Patsy Perlman

Ms. Marjorie Tolins

Helaine G. Trosch

THE DIANE SUE MONHEIT MEMORIAL FUNDPerpetuates the memory of a longtime subscriber and her love of music. The following friends of SHCS and Mrs. Monheit have contributed to the Fund:

TO MAKE A CHARITABLE BEQUEST:You’ll need a current will or revocable living trust. Your gift can be made as a

percentage of your estate. Or you can make a specific bequest by giving a certain

amount of cash, securities, or property. After your lifetime, SHCS receives your gift.

PLANNED!GIVINGOPPORTUNITIES


SIMPLICITY A simple sentence in your will is all that is needed to help secure a promising future for SHCS: “I, (Name), of (City, State, Zip), give, devise, and bequeath to the Shriver Hall Concert Series (written amount or percentage of the estate or description of property) for its unrestricted use and purpose.”

VERSATILITY You can identify a specific item, amount of money, make the gift contingent on certain events, or leave a percentage of your estate by structuring the bequest according to your desires.

FLEXIBILITYYou can change your mind at any time since your gift is not actually made until after your lifetime.

TAX RELIEF If your estate is subject to tax, a bequest can defray tax burdens on your heirs.

EXPRESS YOUR COMMITMENT TO ENSURING SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES’S LEGACY FOR FUTURE AUDIENCES THROUGH A PLANNED GIFT.

We hope you’ll consider including a gift to Shriver Hall Concert Series in your will or living

trust. A planned gift may enable you to make a more significant contribution than you

previously thought possible, while allowing you to meet other financial and philanthropic

goals. Called charitable bequest, this type of gift offers these notable benefits:

OTHER!PLANNEDGIVING!OPTIONS

GIFTS OF STOCKare a powerful way to contribute to the future of SHCS while avoiding capital gains taxes on the shares you donate. Through a gift of stock, you may qualify for an income tax deduction for the full appraised value of the stock.

RETIREMENT PLAN GIFTScan be made under the extended charitable IRA legislation. If you are 70½ or older at the time of the gift, you may transfer up to $100,000 directly from your IRA without undesirable tax effects.

LIFE INSURANCE GIFTScan provide you with the satisfaction of making a very generous donation. After it serves its original objective, you might consider giving your Life Insurance policy new life with a charitable purpose. Naming SHCS as a beneficiary, while retaining ownership, is a powerful way to make a future gift. You can make SHCS the sole, partial, or contingent beneficiary of your policy.

TO GIVE OR FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT US:Catherine Cochran Executive Director 410.516.7164 shriverconcerts.org

Shriver Hall Concert Series Shriver Hall, Suite 105 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2698

SPECIAL APPRECIATION is due to the many concert staff, volunteers, vendors, advertisers, and organizations for their considerable skills, talents, resources, and support that make SHCS a success.

Especially, the leadership and staffs of The Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.

SHRIVER! HALL!CONCERT! SERIES! THANKS! YOU!

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TO VOLUNTEER:

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FLEXIBLE VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIESBASED ON YOUR SCHEDULE

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GREAT UNIVERSITIES HAVE GREAT MUSEUMS

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F I N D U S O N L I N E A T W W W . M U S E U M S . J H U . E D U Guided tours: Tuesday–Sunday; Members are always FREE. Memberships start at only $70!

TICKETS FROM $33JOSEPH MEYERHOFF SYMPHONY HALL410.783.8000 | BSOMUSIC.ORG

PINCHAS ZUKERMANPERFORMS BACH

NOV 10 & 11

ANDRÉ WATTS RETURNS FOR RACH 2

NOV 17 & 19

STEPHEN HOUGHPERFORMS MENDELSSOHN

FEB 2 & 3

MAHLER’S TITANAPR 20 & 21

TO BERNSTEIN WITH LOVEFEATURING NICOLA BENEDETTI

MAY 4 & 6

GERSHWIN’S PIANO CONCERTOJUN 1 & 2

VISIT US ONLINE AT SHRIVERCONCERTS.ORG

Documents

PRELUDE !#$%#&'SEASON - shriverconcerts.org · Prelude in C-sharp minor for solo piano that soon became his signature piece on recitals. In the tightly knit musical world of late