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VIRTUAL FESTIVAL CONCERT #9 - Released July 31, 2020 Richard / Arr. Franz Liszt “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde

Andreas Haefliger

Pierre Boulez Sonatine for Flute and Piano Marina Piccinini flute / Andreas Haefliger piano

Béla Bartók Duos for Two Violins, sz. 98 (selections) 36 Bagpipes 36a Változata (Variant of No. 36) 26 Teasing song 5 Slovakian song (1) 22 Mosquito dance 19 A fairy Tale 14 Pillow dance 33 Harvest song 27 Limping dance 42 Arabian song 35 Ruthenian Kolomejka 28 Sorrow 38 Romanian whirling dance

Stephen Rose violin / Tessa Lark violin

Franz Schubert Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano in B-flat Major, D. 898 Allegro moderato Andante un poco mosso Scherzo: Allegro Rondo: Allegro vivace Benjamin Beilman violin / Ani Aznavoorian cello / Orion Weiss piano

Concert was originally scheduled for July 24, 2020 / Arr. Franz Liszt Pierre Boulez (1813–1883) (1925–2016) “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde (1856-59) Sonatine for Flute and Piano (transcribed by Franz Liszt, 1867) (1946, rev. 1948) SCMS premiere SCMS premiere

Richard Wagner’s affair with Mathilde Wesendonck In an article appearing in The Atlantic magazine in bore two offspring, the richly expressive song 1995, composer David Schiff likened Pierre Boulez’s cycle, , and more famously, the career to that of many a mathematical genius, who emotionally wrenching drama, Tristan und “had his great ideas in his early twenties, when he Isolde, a tale of unrequited love whose literary burst onto the Parisian musical scene as a radical sources extend back to medieval lore. The opera’s composer and a scathing polemicist who intended final great apotheosis, often excerpted for stand- to rewrite musical history of the 20th-century to alone performance, is the so-called Liebestod (“Love justify his own innovations.” The implication was that Death”). The rising passion and aching beauty of as he aged, he became less of a vital compositional this glorious excerpt from the complete opera has force, though his continued presence as a leading assured itself a permanent place in the orchestral conductor and charismatic icon maintains his repertoire, performed without the Heldensoprano. A undiluted fame to this day. number of have transcribed various chunks of Wagner’s “music dramas” (as he called his operas) Even after death, Boulez remains a center-stage for the keyboard, including Franz Liszt. figure, stoutly defended by his admirers and strenuously assailed by those not enchanted by his Liszt’s piano transcription of the ravishing Liebestod music and audacious pronouncements about art, from conveys the orchestral and music, and culture in general. There is even a website vocal grandeur of the original in full voice. Liszt, that invites people to destroy all recordings and of course, was as familiar with Wagner’s music as books about the still-controversial French musician. virtually anyone else at the time, no great surprise Boulez has magnetically attracted both fame and given his relationship as father-in-law to the notoriety. He has also, one might add, won more than composer of Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps more to 20 Grammy Awards as a composer and conductor. the point, Liszt composed scads of “paraphrases” on operatic scenes, in addition to his piano Boulez studied with Olivier Messiaen at the reductions of Beethoven’s and myriad Conservatoire, from which he graduated in 1945. The other borrowings. If his piano version of, say, the following year he began studies in with Prelude to Die Meistersinger illuminates Wagner’s René Leibowitz, who instructed Boulez in 12-tone aka magnificent counterpoint more cogently than in its serial technique. Boulez, more than almost anyone usual orchestral garb, the keyboard version of the else, extended the serialism of . A Liebestod revels in the music’s radiant chromatic year later he composed the Sonatine for Flute and and luxuriant passion. (A bit of lesser known Piano, one of his earliest 12-tone compositions and trivia: Liszt created the famous ultra-chromatic chord a fiercely difficult work for a flutist daring to deal sequence that opens Die Meistersinger that has with its great challenges and for the listener as well. challenged musicologists for a century-and-a-half.) The renowned flutist Ransom Wilson opined, “It is so worth it,” Ransom said. “Like most people, I thrive on challenge. For me to play this piece, I have to be in the very best shape I can be, just to execute it. It’s a motivator for me.”

summer festival // Laid out in one continuous movement divided powerful breezes. Simultaneously, —like the into four sections using the same tone row, the rest of Europe—was reeling from the horrors of the Sonatine abounds in such recognizable 20th-Century Great War, struggling to establish a new system to fill techniques as flutter-tonguing by the flute, (at the vacuum created by the dissolution of the defunct times imitated by the piano), frequent dynamic and Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bartók, too, grappled rhythmic changes within and between sections, plus with the challenge of coping with the cataclysmic many changes in meter, and fluctuating tempos—all changes about him, thrown into even higher relief by elements reflecting the strong influence of Anton his first marriage and subsequent divorce in August Webern. The eminent Belgian cognitive scientist 1923. His music from that period was dissonant, lean, Irène Deliège, deeply familiar with musical modernity, and acerbic and extended into the early 1930s. By noted that the premiere in 1947 met “with a great the last years of his life he had re-embraced a more many reservations, if not booing, and in consequence comfortable tonal vocabulary as exemplified by the the work was for a long time taboo to concert for and No. 3. organizers in Brussels.” Boulez revised the score in 1948, which led to a greater acknowledgement On commission from the German violinist and among critics, performers and audiences. teacher Erich Doflein, Bartók composed 44 Duos for Two Violins that combined dissonance and bitonality Given the challenges to even committed performers yet were designed to be playable by young students. of the composer, listeners coming to the Sonatine The work abounds in exciting rhythms and such for the first time will be forgiven for not grasping time-honored devices as canons and inversions its timbral nuances and other factors. The music and myriad other “tricks” aspiring violinists need has tendrils reaching back through Messiaen and to master. Though nominally pedagogical, Bartók Debussy, and even to the pointillistic landscapes of was too good a composer not to invest these short George Seurat, yet the overall language still seems appealing pieces with music drawn from his roots incredibly modern even though composed ca. 75 in Hungary and his vast knowledge of Central and years ago. Eastern European folk traditions.

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) (1797–1828) Duos for Two Violins, sz. 98 (selections) (1931) Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano in Most recent SCMS performance: Summer 2014 B-flat Major, D. 898 (1827) Most recent SCMS performance: Summer 2016 From 1904 through the end of the First World War, Bartók’s music was infused with Hungarian and other As a budding composer Franz Schubert enjoyed the Eastern European musical blood. In his own country, distinct advantage of growing up in a family whose he was known far more for his ethno-musicological favored pastime centered on in-home performance efforts than for his own compositions. The folk legacy of . At an age when most boys are was a deep wellspring that shaped his musical indulging in fantasies about heroic careers in the vocabulary. In the first two decades of the as yet military or what-not, young Franz was already an new century, Bartók also absorbed the sounds and adept on violin, viola, and piano, sang in the famed sensibilities of Debussy, strangely yet successfully Boys Choir, and actively composed a large melded with the exuberant orchestral palette of handful of string quartets. His teen years would give . By 1920 or thereabouts, Bartok had rise to astonishingly affecting and mature Lieder sniffed the unmistakable fragrances of Stravinsky’s and half-a-dozen fluent, melodious symphonies that polytonalism and Schoenberg’s ardent serialism; promised bigger things to come. After a near-fatal his own music could not but be affected by these encounter with syphilis in 1822, his music tapped into

july 31, 2020 // program notes the darker side of life, though he certainly was not so Schubert’s consummate song-writing genius comes death-obsessed to prevent his natural melodic gifts to the fore in the Andante un poco mosso where the from continuing to blossom in youthful radiance. cello “sings” the opening theme in response to the piano’s expressive accompaniment. Soon the violin If Schubert failed to achieve greatness in opera— and piano have their respective turns with the arioso his great unfulfilled wish—his last years brought main theme before the syncopated central section posterity a wealth of incomparable piano music, comes into focus. After several “false” beginnings, the “Great” C-Major , and a number of the recap proper begins with the piano stating a tune astonishingly beautiful chamber works. Among that similar, but not identical, to the opening theme of the ample cache of chamber music are his two piano movement. trios. The earlier of the pair, the bracing in B-flat Major, dates from the summer of 1827, though The third movement, an energetic Scherzo with a its first public performance had to wait until after the charming and popular Viennese waltz as Trio, clears composer’s death in November 1828 (there was a the palate for the buoyant finale. private performance on January 28, 1828). Though labeled Rondo, the closing movement has The opening Allegro moderato begins with a clear -allegro characteristics including a handsome, big-hearted theme played in octaves thoroughly worked out development section and by the strings against repeated eighth notes in almost no clear repetitions of the main theme, which the piano. The duple meter “feel” of the piano part is typically the sign of a Rondo’s A-B-A-C-A, etc. form. contrasts strongly with the triplet rhythm of the captured in words the essence string , imparting a rhythmic tension that adds of this work’s optimism: “One glance at Schubert’s supple power to the first movement. A meltingly [B-flat] Trio—and the troubles of our human lovely cantabile second theme lowers the voltage and existence disappear and all the world is fresh and offers complementary expansiveness to this large and bright again.” leisurely development section.

Program Notes by Steven Lowe

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