Program Notes Trio Con Brio Copenhagen April 1, 2015
Program Notes © Elizabeth Bergman
Per Nørgård: Spell
Per Nørgård (1932–) was born in Copenhagen and grew up listening to Classical music, but he was often dissatisfied with what he heard. “I would listen to Beethoven and Wagner, and so on,” he recalled, “but I always felt there was something lacking.” That something was “the Nordic mind,” the subject of a famous polemic he wrote in 1956. Nordic composers needed to be aware of international musical trends, he argued, but also should tap into their own unique, shared culture, history, and even climate.
Nørgård’s own life and work reflect just this kind of productive relationship between the global and the local. He studied music history and composition at the Royal Danish Conservatory, then moved on to Paris where he worked with the esteemed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Like Philip Glass, another of Boulanger’s students, Nørgård pursued an interest in repeated patterns, numerical operations, organic structures, musical iterations, reiterations, and variations—all elements of the style known as Minimalism. Nørgård himself coins the untranslatable term lydtidsbillede, which means something like “image of sound in time,” to describe his pulsing rhythms. Spell arises from complex musical theories about how two notes can “unfold infinitely” to generate “a constantly expanding melody.” But the abstract compositional ideas are ultimately meant to reflect both the endless variety and essential unity of the human experience.
Tonight marks the first performance of this work on our series.
Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) learned the fundamentals of music from his mother, who quickly recognized her son’s talents—and her daughter’s too. She sent both Felix and his older sister Fanny to study piano and composition with the leading teacher in Berlin. While Fanny was subsequently shunted into the typical life of an obedient daughter, wife, and mother, Felix attended Berlin University, became friends with Goethe, developed a successful career as a conductor, spearheaded the revival of Bach’s music in Europe, and made a name for himself as a composer. (Fanny actually never abandoned composition, and even had some of her songs published under her brother’s name.)
Felix presented the manuscript of the C-minor Piano Trio to his sister as a birthday present in 1845. At the time, he had stepped back from his extraordinarily busy career as a conductor and arts administrator to devote himself to composition. It was a productive sabbatical. The second piano trio followed close on the heels of the first trio and came just a year after the violin concerto. It would be one of Mendelssohn’s last major chamber works; he died only two years later.
Mendelssohn’s music always seems somehow tied to his biography. He was born into a loving, sophisticated family, and by all accounts was himself a genial person—the opposite of the long- suffering, tortured artist (the stereotype of his contemporary, Schumann). But beneath the happy surface of his life and work lies an incredible depth of talent and skill. Especially notable is the interplay among the three musicians, the way the two main themes in the first movement are traded among them. The second movement sounds much like a song without words. The Scherzo is magical fairy music—Mendelssohn had a particular gift for evoking the fantastic. (One of his greatest orchestral pieces is a setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) The finale reflects his experiences as a choral conductor, featuring a quotation of the Protestant doxology, best known today with the words “Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.”
Tonight marks the first performance of this work on our series.
Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was the first famous graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied piano, flute, organ, music theory, and composition from 1862 to 1865. He was later recruited to be a founding member of the faculty at the newly created Moscow Conservatory. Reportedly an extreme taskmaster, Tchaikovsky resented the time that teaching stole from composing, although within just a few years he managed to write some of his early masterworks and most popular pieces, including the orchestral fantasy Romeo and Juliet (1869), the ballet Swan Lake (1875), the First Piano Concerto (1875), the opera Eugene Onegin (1879), and the Fourth Symphony (1878). In 1878, he officially quit the Conservatory and devoted himself to composing and performing, living on an allowance from the wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck. After years of traveling around Europe and America, Tchaikovsky returned to Russia in 1885 and became a de facto court composer, thanks to a yearly stipend from the Tsar. He died suddenly, at age 53, from cholera some nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.
The Piano Trio was composed in 1881–1882 as a memorial work for pianist Nikolay Rubinstein—hence the title of the first movement, Elegy. The music begins restlessly but soon turns mournful, with the piano leading a kind of a funeral march. The second movement is a set of variations on a graceful theme. It’s like a happy memory, one that fades away with a recall of the melancholy first movement. Tchaikovsky’s musical memorial set a precedent: in 1893, Rachmaninoff dedicated his piano trio, titled “Elegiac,” to Tchaikovsky.
Last performed on our series: January 17, 1979 (Borodin Trio).