NOVA Chamber Music Series
Fry Street Quartet, music directors
Libby Gardner Concert Hall
concert program
with notes by Jeff Counts
Piano Trio No. 39 in G minor, Hob. XV/25
Franz Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809)
William Hagen violin | Anne Francis Bayless cello | Cahill Smith piano
Symphonies? 104. String Quartets? 68. Keyboard Sonatas? At least 52. It is certainly not news to declare Franz Joseph Haydn prolific. We all know this, but it is necessary to occasionally confront ourselves with the actual numbers, the staggering totalities that comprise his contributions to culture and history. For example... Piano Trios? No fewer than 45! Though present before, the trio became a fixture of chamber music composition in the Classical era, with the “piano trio” owing its ascendance almost entirely to that time, thanks to Papa Haydn and others. No. 39 on Haydn’s personal list was composed in 1795 as part of a set of three he dedicated to Rebecca Schroeter, a wealthy younger widow with whom the composer shared a mild May-December infatuation. Haydn’s English publishers described the trio of Trios as “sonatas for pianoforte with violin and cello accompaniment”, which says much about the genre during Haydn’s association with it. Some scholars suggest the poor quality of late 18th-century pianos required the support of string instruments, but there is no doubt that the distinct keyboard focus here represents the prevailing tastes of the time.
Hommage à Robert Schumann, op. 15d
György Kurtág
(b. 1926)
Erin Svoboda-Scott clarinet | Yuan Qi viola | Cahill Smith piano
When György Kurtág left Budapest for Paris in 1956, his intention was to study with Messiaen and Milhaud. It was not easy to be a Hungarian artist in the years following the war, when Communist Party efforts to control abstraction and individuality frustrated composers who were interested in exactly that kind of freedom in their music. Kurtág’s year in France did help clear the path for his highly unique, nearly unclassifiable style, but not for the most obvious reasons. Kurtág, depressed and adrift after so many years of repression, sought the advice of psychologist Marianne Stein, who encouraged him to narrow the scope of his compositional ambition by stripping away all unnecessary flourishes in favor of the most basic elements. Hommage à Robert Schumann was composed much later (1975-1990), but it synthesizes the guidance of Stein and Kurtág’s contemporaneous close study of Webern. The instrumentation and structure were inspired by Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tale Stories), with movements that playfully invoke the literary alter egos of Schumann and E.T.A. Hoffmann, alongside 14th-century poets and a fictional musical curmudgeon. It’s the kind of menagerie only György Kurtág would ever attempt to manage.
Six Bagatelles
György Ligeti
(1923-2006)
Caitlyn Valovick Moore flute | Zachary Hammond oboe
Erin Svoboda-Scott clarinet | Leon Chodos bassoon
Jessica Danz horn
I. Allegro con spirito
II. Rubato. Lamentoso
III. Allegro grazioso
IV. Presto ruvido
V. Adagio. Mesto
VI. Molto vivace. Capriccioso
Like Kurtág, György Ligeti left Budapest in 1956 after the unsuccessful uprising against the Hungarian People’s Republic. Non-Soviet Europe provided opportunities for Ligeti to interact with many leading lights of the avant-garde and to expose himself to revolutionary scores by Boulez, Stockhausen, and others. He would also use the extra breathing space to hone the iconoclastic, micropolyphonic style he was furtively developing under the eye of the Party. Before any of that, though, Ligeti wrote a series of 11 bagatelles (a word which translates to “a thing of little importance”) for piano between 1951 and 1953. The work was entitled Musica ricercata and it employed the novel structural conceit of starting with only two pitches in the first movement and adding one note per movement until the entirety of the chromatic scale was in use for the finale. It was a feisty little masterclass on musical economy, one made necessary by the scrutiny and censorship that forced Ligeti to “build up a new music from nothing” before leaving his homeland. He immediately transcribed a handful (plus one) of the movements of Musica ricercata for wind quintet under the title Six Bagatelles.
- Brief Intermission -
Violin Sonata No. 1, Sz. 75
Béla Bartók
(1881-1945)
Robert Waters violin | Jason Hardink piano
I. Allegro appassionato
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Bartók’s dalliance with expressionist serialism was both brief and serious. It was the 1920s, the perfect time for such a consideration of the contemporary musical mood, but no matter how brazenly he stared into the avant garde sun, Bartók remained himself. In the words of one record reviewer (Michael Schell), the two violin sonatas the composer wrote in 1921 and 1922 are “unapologetic dissonant modernism filtered through a prism of Eastern European folklore.” He was right. The music of this fleeting period in Bartók’s career was atonal, yes, but also recognizably harmonic. It was abstract, often frighteningly so, but never neglected to reference the traditional influences that made his personal sound so unique. Both pieces were written for Hungarian virtuoso Jelly d’Arányi during a break from his efforts on The Miraculous Mandarin. D’Arányi was the eldest daughter of a family Bartók had known since 1902 and the great-niece of Joseph Joachim (Ravel would dedicate his Tzigane to her in 1924). Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 1 was probably a big challenge for the listeners at its modest 1922 London premiere but, according to d’Arányi’s own astonished recollection, the newspapers rightly treated it as a major event. They were right, too.
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