Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 8pm First Congregational Church Gidon Kremer, violin Daniil Trifonov, piano PROGRAM Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Fantasia for Piano in D minor, K. 397 (1782) Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996) Sonata No. 5 for Violin and Piano in G minor, Op. 53 (1953) Andante con moto Allegro molto Allegro moderato Allegro — Andante — Allegretto Mozart Sonata for Piano and Violin in E-flat major, K. 481 (1785) Molto allegro Adagio Thema con variazioni: Allegretto INTERMISSION Weinberg Sonata No. 3 for Solo Violin, Op. 126 (1978) Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, D. 934 (1827) Andante molto — Allegretto — Andantino — Tempo I — Allegro vivace — Allegretto — Presto Funded, in part, by the Koret Foundation, this performance is part of Cal Performances’ – Koret Recital Series, which brings world-class artists to our community. This performance is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Liz and Greg Lutz and Lance and Dalia Nagel. Cal Performances’ – season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. CAL PERFORMANCES 15 PROGRAM NOTES Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (;A?@–;AC;) Romanticism. Repetitions of this sad song are Fantasia for Piano in D minor, K. =CA twice interrupted by sweeping cadenza-like eruptions be fore the Fantasia pauses on an in - Composed in 1782. conclusive harmony, takes a small breath, and trots off with a cheerful D major melody of In 1782, one year after he had bolted from opera buffa jocularity. Mozart, perhaps unsure Salzburg to take up life as a freelance composer of how to bring these two vastly different kinds and pianist in Vienna, Mozart developed a new, of music into balance, did not finish notating gleaming admiration for the music of Bach, the piece. When the score was published by Handel and other masters of the early 18th cen - Breitkopf und Härtel in the 1870s as pa rt of the tury. He had been exposed to the works of such complete Mozart edition, the editors tacked on Italian Baroque composers as Leo, Caldara, a few measures of the opera buffa tune to round Durante, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Salzburg, out the work. A very different effect, chosen by where their scores were used for performance some performers, is achieved by recalling the and for study, but his interest in Bach grew Bachian strains of the beginning to bring the from his association in Vienna with Baron Fantasia to a solemn close. Gottfried van Swieten, the Court Librarian and musical amateur who had developed a taste for Mieczysław Weinberg (;C;C–;CC@) the contrapuntal glories of German music Sonata No. ? for Violin and Piano in G minor, while serving as ambassador to the Prussian Op. ?= court at Berlin. Van Swieten, who is also re - membered as the librettist for Haydn’s orato - Composed in 1953. Premièred on December 30, rios The Creation and The Seasons , produced a 1955, in Glinko Concert Hall in Leningrad by vi - weekly series of concerts in Vienna devoted to olinist Mikhail Vayman and pianist Mariya “ancient music,” and hired the best available Karandashova. musicians, including Mozart, to perform and arrange the compositions for these events. Mieczysław Weinberg occupied one of the (Among other projects for van Swieten, Mozart most unlikely career niches of any 20th-century scored Handel’s Messiah for classical orchestra.) musician: a Polish-born Jewish refugee who be - Mozart, perhaps history’s greatest adept at ab - came one of the Soviet Union’s most distin - sorbing musical styles, learned much about the guished composers. Weinberg, born in Warsaw fine workings of Baroque music from his close on December 8, 1919 (he is also known by his involvement with the compositions of Bach transliterated Russian name, Moisei Vainberg), and Handel. came from a musical family and studied piano In addition to the enriched contrapuntal tex - and composition at the local conservatory. tures that increasingly figured in his composi - Soon after his graduation in 1939, he fled be - tions, Mozart also discovered from Bach’s fore the Nazi invasion of Poland to Minsk, preludes, fantasies and toccatas how to fix the where he became a student of Vassily Zolotarev. evanescence of improvisation into a finished Weinberg lived in Tashkent from 1941 to 1943 work. He tried out just such a passage of mus - and then settled in Moscow, where he be - ing, seemingly spontaneous broken chords, a friended Shostakovich and other leading Soviet technique found often in the preludes of Bach’s musicians and quickly rose to prominence. He The Well-Tempered Clavier , to begin the managed to escape the 1948 purges that with - Fantasia in D minor that he wrote in Vienna in ered the spirits and careers of many eminent 1782. For all of its simplicity, this is one of the Soviet musicians by adhering to a conservative most deeply moving moments in Mozart’s idiom deemed appropriate by the authorities, music. These opening gestures are followed by but he was jailed in 1953 on a trumped-up a plaintive, chromatically inflected melody that charge of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” (Not is indebted less to Johann Sebastian than to that only had Weinberg been shadowed by the se - master’s Son No. 2, Carl Philipp Emanuel cret police ever since his father-in-law, (1714–1788), whose strikingly emotional Solomon Mikhoels, the celebrated Jewish actor works were an important catalyst of musical and artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES Theater, was executed on Stalin’s order in Piano Concerto (K. 482) on December 16, just January 1948, but his wife’s uncle, a physician at four days after putting the finishing touches on the Kremlin, had recently been labeled an the Piano and Violin Sonata in the same key (K. “enemy of the people.”) Shostakovich came to 481). He had recently received a commission his defense and he was released after 11 weeks from Emperor Joseph II for a musical diversion in prison. Weinberg lived quietly thereafter in (The Impresario ) to be given at the orangerie of Moscow and composed prolifically until his the Schönbrunn Palace in February, and was death in 1996, creating a large catalog of works making revisions and additions to Idomeneo for that contains six operas, four operettas, three a revival of that opera in March. Work on nu - ballets, 25 symphonies (many with program - merous chamber and vocal pieces was also matic associations, including one “In Memory squeezed into his schedule, as was the tutelage of Dmitri Shostakovich”), numerous concerted of a sizable group of private students and at least compositions, 17 string quartets, much cham - a half-dozen public concerts for which he acted ber music, songs, choral works, piano pieces, as impresario, publicist, composer, and per - and incidental and film music. “In his music,” former. His main concern at the time, however, wrote Russian-born musicologist and lexicog - was the composition of The Marriage of Figaro, rapher Nicolas Slonimsky, “he followed the which he was readying for production in the precepts of ‘social realism’ in its ethnic aspects; spring as soon as the theaters opened following according to the subject of the composition, he the end of the Lenten prohibition of operatic made use of Jewish, Polish, Moldavian, or performances. Mozart’s father, Leopold, wrote Armenian folk melos , in tasteful harmonic that his son was “up to his ears” in work during arrangements devoid of abrasive dissonances.” those winter months. The Violin Sonata No. 5 was the first work Despite the commissions, the grand plans, Weinberg composed after being released from and the facility with which he worked, however, prison in 1953; he dedicated the score to Mozart was troubled. Always something of a Shostakovich for his help in securing his free - spendthrift, he was sinking into a difficult, debt- dom. Sadness and anger, the residues of his in - ridden financial situation from which he never carceration, mingle in the Sonata, though the did extricate himself. The first of what became a latter is expressed more often as cynicism than steady stream of letters to friends begging for as rage. The Sonata opens with a wistful theme money was sent to Franz Anton Hoffmeister, his whose modalism and poignant lyricism echo publisher, on November 20, 1785. “I take refuge Weinberg’s Jewish heritage. The movement be - with you, and ask you to assist me with some comes more impassioned as it unfolds but re - money, which I very much need at this mo - turns to its quiet introspection before the close. ment,” Mozart pleaded. Hoffmeister responded, The second movement is agitated and driving, either with a loan or an advance against future diminishing its tension only in two brief inter - publications. Mozart’s health, like his finances, vening episodes. The diabolical quality that was also showing signs of deterioration. Though makes the third movement something of a not yet 30, he was often seriously ill, and was al - scherzo macabre is countered by a broad violin ready plagued by thoughts of his own death. A melody at the center. Reminiscences of the first few months after his letter to Hoffmeister, he movement frame the finale and enfold a craggy wrote, “I never lie down at night without re - central fugue and passages on either side based flecting that—young as I am—I may not live to on a long, rhapsodic melody shared by violin see another day.” Many of the works of 1785 re - and keyboard. flect his growing seriousness of mind: the D minor Concerto (K. 466), the last two of the Mozart “Haydn” Quartets (K. 464 and K. 465), the Sonata for Piano and Violin in E-flat major, C minor Piano Fantasia (K.