NOVA Chamber Music Series
Fry Street Quartet, music directors
Libby Gardner Concert Hall
concert program
with notes by Jeff Counts
Five Melodies,
op. 33b
Sergei Prokofiev
(1891-1953)
Rebecca McFaul violin | Kimi Kawashima piano
I. Andante
II. Lento, ma non troppo
III. Animato, ma non troppo
IV. Andantino, un poco scherzando
V. Andante non troppo
In 1918, with the Russian Revolution showing no signs of slowing, Sergei Prokofiev fled his homeland for the United States. The Five Melodies date from the happy time he spent in California (“I am smiling along with the California countryside,” he wrote) and were originally composed as Five Songs Without Words for Nina Koshetz, a Ukrainian soprano. Five years later, he reworked them for a performance with violinist Pawel Kochanski. In this form, Five Melodies has gone on to become one of the most popular violin works of the 20th century.
Four Imagist Songs
Igor Iachimciuc
(b. 1968)
Celena Shafer soprano | Lissa Stolz oboe
Alex Purdy tuba | Evgenia Zharzhavskaya violin
I. In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)
II. November Night (Adelaide Crapsey)
III. The Skaters (John Gould Fletcher)
IV. A Year Passes (Amy Lowell)
“Every composer grows a music tree,” writes Moldovian-born Igor Iachimciuc. “In the process of growing new branches it is important not to forget about the roots.” As Director of the New Music Ensemble at the University of Utah, Iachimciuc has regular opportunities to weigh this maxim against contemporary chamber works, his and others. Iachimciuc composed Four Imagist Songs for his student group in 2020 after determining that, given the rarity of the instrumental combination they offered, “it would be faster to write a piece for this unique group” than to find one. According to his own note on the music, it was “inspired by the poems of E. Pound, A. Crapsey, J. G. Fletcher and A. Lowell, who are associated to the Imagism, a radical poetic movement that extended the frontiers of English literature.” The movement was a reaction against early 20th-century Romanticism and, like all such intellectual experiments, it depended on the very past (the roots, perhaps?) it was responding to. The “precision of language” and “direct treatment of the subject” of Imagism are a perfect fit for Iachimciuc’s clear and highly concentrated style.
Prism Spectra
Dai Fujikura
(b. 1977)
Brant Bayless viola | Mike Cottle electronics
In his brief profile for Japanese composer Dai Fujikura, Paul Griffiths notes that Fujikura “always respond[s] with vim to the challenge of writing for soloists who match his energy.” The “energy” Griffiths references here is truly uncontainable and has resulted in a staggering 200 works (“many of them on a large scale”) before the age of 46. Fujikura’s enthusiasm is evident on the smaller scale, too, particularly in pieces like Prism Spectra (2009) for solo viola and electronics. “My initial idea was to create a virtual string orchestra which would be controlled by the solo violist,” Fujikura wrote in his program note. “I thought that would be every violist’s dream!!!” He goes on to describe himself as “a wizard who aims to make an instrumentalist’s dream come true” in Prism Spectra but admits that his “virtual string orchestra” often misbehaves by playing late, loud, and out of tune. By contrast, the electronic elements of the music are meant to “behave like fish in a tropical sea. Sometimes they swim through the piece in a shoal, sometimes they dart past like little rays of light.”
- Brief Intermission -
His House Is Not of This Land
Jonathan Bailey Holland
(b. 1974)
Caitlyn Valovick Moore alto flute | Chris Bosco bass clarinet
Karen Wyatt violin | Brant Bayless viola | Andrew Larson cello
Much like Igor Iachimciuc’s sonic response to poetry, Jonathan Bailey Holland has often reflected on the impact of visual art in his music. His House Is Not of This Land (2015) was inspired by a 2005 art piece by Cornelia Parker called Anti-Mass, in which the charred timbers of a Southern Baptist church are suspended by wires in a formation that defies gravity and challenges stillness.
Anti-Mass, by Cornelia Parker
Parker’s piece is no abstraction. The variously sized chunks of wood are real. They came from a church fire in Alabama that was also real, and the racist arsonist who made them is realer still.
To capture the haunting experience of Parker’s vision in sound, Holland told Benjamin Cassidy of the Berkshire Eagle in 2018 that he wanted to depict “the essence of a church and the idea that it’s made up of people.” Holland apparently listened to numerous recordings of church services to get a feel for the call-and-response rhythm of an engaged congregation, and the score for His House Is Not of This Land depends on a similar spontaneity from the players in the ensemble.
String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op. 135
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
The Fry Street Quartet
Robert Waters, Rebecca McFaul violin
Bradley Ottesen viola | Anne Francis Bayless cello
I. Allegretto
II. Vivace
III. Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo
IV. “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” (“The Difficult Decision”)
For those who seek (and almost always find) profundity in Beethoven’s late works, String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op. 135, is an outlier, at least at first glance. For one thing, it’s among the shortest of all his quartets. This feature would not be cause for confusion if the subject matter were somber enough, but even that aspect of Opus 135 stands apart from his typical output at the time. The music is open-hearted and genial, not fist-shaking and pensive, which is all the more intriguing given Beethoven’s own admission that No. 16 would be his last string quartet. Where is the sense of resignation? The reluctant acceptance of fate’s final knock? Wait, there it is…right there in the finale! Beethoven wrote “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” (“The Difficult Decision”) in the score for the last movement and notated the question “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?) beneath the slow three-note motif of the introduction. Under the ensuing answer in the violins, he penned “Es muss sein, Es muss sein” (It must be, it must be). Here, at last, is the doubt, the angst we expect. Except it isn’t. These insertions come from a story about a government official called Dembscher who missed the premiere of No. 16 but still expected a copy of the manuscript. “Must it be?” was his reply to the suggestion that he could certainly purchase one. “It must be!” assured Beethoven’s friend Carl Holz. Beethoven burst into laughter when he heard this and revised the finale to commemorate it immediately.
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