The Horse with the Lavender Eye Piano and Chamber Music by Stephen Hartke Includes Premiere Recordings

The Horse with the Lavender Eye Piano and Chamber Music by Stephen Hartke includes premiere recordings Richard Faria clarinet Ellen Jewett violin CHAN 10513 Xak Bjerken piano Los Angeles Piano Quartet Robert Millard Stephen Hartke (b. 1952) premiere recording The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997)* 17:24 Episodes for Violin, Clarinet and Piano 1 I Music of the Left. Left-handed 2:23 2 II The Servant of Two Masters. Quite manic 4:22 3 III Waltzing at the Abyss. Gingerly, but always moving along 3:58 4 IV Cancel My Rumba Lesson. Two Left Feet 6:32 premiere recording Selections from ‘Post-modern Homages’ (1984–92) 13: 03 for Piano 5 Sonatina-Fantasia (1987). Giubilante 3:45 6 Gymnopédie No. 4 (1984). Suave 3:06 7 Template (1985). Presto 3:12 Henrique Oswald (1852 –1931) 8 Estudo-Scherzo (1902). Presto-leggiero 1:24 in B flat minor • in b-Moll • en si bémol mineur 9 Sonatina DCXL (1991). Boppin’ along 1:25 Stephen Hartke 3 Sonata (1997– 98) 13:12 for Piano 17 IV The flames of the sun make the desert flower hysterical. Fiery 3:36 10 I Prelude. Massive – 3:00 18 V Personages and birds rejoicing at the arrival of 11 II Scherzo. Epicycles, Tap-dancing, and a night. Quietly energetic, with an air of innocence 4:15 Soft Shoe. Deft and lively – 6:09 TT 64:08 12 III Postlude. Floating 4:03 Richard Faria clarinet † The King of the Sun (1988) 20:03 Ellen Jewett violin* Tableaux for Violin, Viola, Cello and Piano Xak Bjerken piano 13 I Personages in the night guided by the phosphorescent Los Angeles Piano Quartet tracks of snails. Stealthily 2:17 Michi Wiancko violin† 14 II Dutch interior. Phantasmagorical 3:08 Katherine Murdock viola Peter Rejto cello 15 III Dancer listening to the organ in a Gothic cathedral. Granitic 5:45 Xak Bjerken piano 16 Interlude. Tempo of Movement I 0:54 4 5 Crumb, as well as the work of the nineteenth- lesson!’ All the movements have to do Stephen Hartke: Chamber and Piano Works century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, in one way or another with a sense and Looney Tunes. Hartke explains how it all of being off-balance – playing music works: with only one side of the body; being A first encounter with the music of from the mediaeval-inspired The King of the The ancient Japanese court, borrowing caught between insistent and conflicting Stephen Hartke works on two levels: a Sun, heard here, to the blues-inflected violin from the Chinese, was divided into demands; dancing dangerously close visceral response to the layered rhythms duo Oh, Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, left and right sides with ministries and to a precipice, and, finally, not really and instrumental colours, and a smiling from the surreal The Horse with the Lavender music specific to each. The image of this being able to dance the rumba at all. awareness that the fantastical stylistic Eye to the Biblical satire Sons of Noah. He official ‘Music of the Left’ suggested, Nonetheless, in the very end, a sense of diversity is a reflection of a musical polyglot. has composed concerti for the clarinettist first, the rather ceremonial character of calm and equilibrium comes to prevail. Whether Hartke is speaking in the tongue of Richard Stoltzman and the violinist Michelle my trio’s first movement, and also its mediaeval plainchant, bebop, Japanese court Makarski, and his collaboration with The technical quirk: all three instruments Post-modern Homages music, or some kaleidoscopic combination, Hilliard Ensemble has resulted in three are to be played by the left hand alone. The Post-modern Homages (1984 – 92) for he manages to make coherent a remoulding substantial works, including Symphony No. 3, In the second movement, the title of solo piano were not written as a set, and of various (and sometimes even imagined) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Carlo Goldoni’s play The Servant of Two thus the piano writing is very different in traditions. His music demands a deeply and based on an Old English elegy. Most Masters seemed to me an apt description each piece, but they share a common feature: engaged physical and emotional flexibility recently his acclaimed full-length opera of the performance dynamic, where the each was composed for a friend, and each on the instrument, often layering disparate The Greater Good, set during the Franco- piano, buffeted by conflicting demands, transforms aspects of an existing piece of rhythms or jumping quickly between quirky Prussian War, was premiered and recorded serves alternately as the accompaniment music, working with strictly limited musical non sequiturs and heartfelt tenderness. While by the Glimmerglass Opera. For Hartke, to the clarinet while the violin clamours means. Hartke composed the Sonatina- his band of artist friends is always present in this mixing of cultures and eras comes very for attention, and vice versa. The third Fantasia in honour of the seventieth birthday the music, it is rarely obvious – references are naturally; he is never pushing an agenda: movement was suggested by a chapter in of his composition teacher George Rochberg veiled and he avoids quotation. We composers write the music we do Machado de Assis’s novel Dom Casmurro (1918 – 2005) and makes free use of For Hartke, the connection between the because we like it. We do it as an offering wherein the narrator, observing that his Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 1. Gymnopédie mediaeval and modern started when he was to intrigue, please, entertain, stimulate, story seems to be waltzing at the abyss, No. 4, which Hartke dedicated to his wife, a child, growing up in Manhattan and singing and move. seeks to reassure his reader (falsely, as it Lisa Stidham, is a study in seventh chords. professionally as a child chorister, all the turns out) by saying, ‘Don’t worry, dear, The gentle lilt of its 3/4 metre and the while absorbing the crazy mix of music one The Horse with the Lavender Eye I’ll wheel about’. For the finale, I had in simultaneously fluid yet static harmony put can hear in any big city. His openness to a The trio The Horse with the Lavender Eye of mind a panel from one of R. Crumb’s the composer in mind of Erik Satie, hence blend of the abstract and the sacred, and his 1997 counts amongst its bewildering array of comics showing a character dashing the title. ‘Template’ was written while Hartke disregard for the boundaries between high inspirations a play by Carlo Goldoni, Japanese about in an apocalyptic frenzy, shouting, was on a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil and low art, is heard in his varied output, court music and the cartoons of Robert among other things, ‘Cancel my rumba in 1985, in response to a request by the 6 7 pianist José Eduardo Martins for an homage which starts the movement, that are interior, he based his composition on I welcomed it, for all its being somewhat to the Brazilian composer Henrique Oswald generated by the nesting of simple a picture postcard of a painting by convoluted and even arcane, because, (1852 –1931). Based upon Oswald’s Estudo- rhythmic wheels within wheels, thus the seventeenth-century Dutch genre quite simply, it was fun to do. Thus just Scherzo in B flat minor, the piece suggests producing lively syncopated melodic painter Jan Steen, but his treatment is as Miró’s painting is both whimsical and a performance of the etude at its stipulated figures. Some of the resulting motives so delightfully wilful and whimsical that serious, I have sought to accomplish the rapid tempo but with only a handful of its suggested tap-dancing to me, so I ran the original is barely recognisable. In my same thing in my music. notes actually sounded, the end result being with it, going so far as to place a rather ‘Dutch interior’, I subject the canon to © 2009 Xak Bjerken an entirely new piece. Oswald’s original idiosyncratic soft shoe as a ‘trio’ to the similar distortion, most notably rendering etude is heard immediately following. Finally, tap-dancing’s ‘minuet’. it as a violin solo; the underpinning Hartke wrote the Sonatina DCXL for his friend of this solo has nothing to do directly A student of Elsa Verdehr and Charles Donald Crockett, a colleague at the University The King of the Sun with the violin part, but evokes the Neidich, the clarinettist Richard Faria has of Southern California. In the tradition of the Hartke composed The King of the Sun, his spirit of mediaeval music in its form, performed throughout the United States at soggetto cavato it uses the notes D and C, most often-performed chamber work, for an estampie, and in its isorhythmic festivals such as the Skaneateles Festival, and D, H (B in English notation) and C, as its the Los Angeles Piano Quartet in 1988 on a structure. The canon also appears in the Bard Music Festival of the Hamptons and thematic material, and is signed at the end commission from Chamber Music America. He fourth movement, ‘The flames of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in with the notes S (E flat) and H – the notes explains the genesis of the work: sun make the desert flower hysterical’, collaborations with such groups as the alluding to the composers’ initials. The second movement (‘Dutch now compressed into the bright, violent Zephyros and Sylvan wind quintets, the Guild interior’) was composed last, and chords that open the piece, and then Trio and the Arianna, Atlantic and Ariadne Sonata for Piano thus, because it was written with returning at the end in a direct quotation string quartets.

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