TRAINS OF THOUGHT DE 3543 OULENC RIO 1 P T DELOS DE 3543 TRAINS OF THOUGHT DELOS DE 3543 TRAINS OF THOUGHT TRAINS OF THOUGHT FRANCIS POULENC: Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano VIET CUONG: Trains of Thought* DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: Romance from The Gadfly♦ A Spin Through Moscow from Moscow, Cheryomushki JEAN FRANÇAIX: Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano GIOACCHINO ROSSINI: Fantaisie Concertante on Themes from Semiramide *World Premiere Recording ◆ ◆ POULENC TRIO POULENC TRIO Total Playing Time: 58:31 POULENC TRIO Irina Kaplan Lande, piano Liang Wang, oboe Bryan Young, bassoon ORIGINAL ORIGINAL DIGITAL DIGITAL TRAINS OF THOUGHT POULENC TRIO Irina Kaplan Lande, piano Liang Wang, oboe Bryan Young, bassoon FRANCIS POULENC (1899-1963) JEAN FRANÇAIX (1912-1997) Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano 12:13 Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano (1994) 16:06 1. Lent – Presto (5:14) 2. Andante (3:48) 7. Adagio-Allegro molto (3:47) 3. Rondo (3:11) 8. Scherzo (3:45) 9. Andante (4:24) VIET CUONG (b. 1991) 10. Finale (4:10) (World Premiere Recording) GIOACCHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868) 4. Trains of Thought (12:18) Arr. Charles Triébert and Eugene Jancourt DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) 11. Fantaisie Concertante on Themes Arr. for Poulenc Trio by Anatoly Trofimov from Semiramide (12:17) 5. Romance, Op. 97 a (from the film score of The Gadfly) (3:05) Total Playing Time: (58:31) 6. A Spin Through Moscow (from the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki) (2:12) 2 “Above all, a composer should not aim to veyed, worked and exhausted.” Of his own be fashionable. If you are not fashionable work, Poulenc wrote, “I know perfectly well today, you may not be unfashionable to- that I’m not one of those composers who morrow.” —Francis Poulenc have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel, or Debussy, but I think rancis Poulenc was born in Paris on Jan- there’s room for ‘New’ music which doesn’t uary 7, 1899, and attained both a distinct mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t Fmusical voice and professional success at that the case with Mozart-Schubert?” an early age. During the 1920s, he was one of the leading spirits in a group of young French The Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano composers known as Les Six, whose music —one of Poulenc’s most popular chamber was often light, witty, satirical, and urbane. Les works—is in the spirit of an eighteenth-cen- Six sympathized with and were influenced by tury divertissement: light and witty, yet Satie, Stravinsky and neoclassicism, and were spiced with dissonances. Though the com- opposed to the cerebral music of Schoenberg bination of instruments is unusual, it is em- and to what they considered the religio-musi- inently logical, combining and contrasting cal excesses of their countryman Olivier Mes- the two members of the double-reed fam- siaen. Poulenc, in particular, often juxtaposed ily with the percussive quality of the piano. passages of wit and irony with lush, sentimen- While composing the Trio in Cannes in 1926, tal outpourings. Poulenc took the advice of Ravel (with whom he had been studying) and based the open- Poulenc composed orchestral works, cham- ing Presto on a Haydn Allegro. The closing ber music, ballets, concertos, film scores, Rondo’s refrain begins as a near perfect and operas, as well as powerful choral and quote of a well-known Beethoven melo- sacred music. The most important musical dy until it makes a surprising turn into the element to Poulenc was melody, and he is an fresh vocabulary of Poulenc’s own distinctive acknowledged master of French art songs, language. Poulenc hinted that he patterned with more than 130 songs to his credit. Nor- this movement after a piano concerto by bert Dufourcq writes that Poulenc “found his Saint-Saëns.The Andante is gracefully Mo- way to a vast treasury of undiscovered tunes zartean, though any suggestion of parody within an area that had, according to the is dispelled by alluring shifts of tonality and most up-to-date musical maps, been sur- chromaticism. The Trio is dedicated to Man- 3 uel de Falla, whom Poulenc had met at the events, but their journeys and destinations home of his teacher Ricardo Vines in 1918. can be unpredictable. In this way, the piece David Ewen writes, “Pictorially one is some- deals with the listener’s expectations and times reminded of a chase, sometimes a di- attempts to convincingly manipulate them. alogue. Normally, however, the main musical As the mind deviates from and returns to discourse is entrusted to the piano, while the an original idea, the idea’s return is often bassoon is relegated to the role of a discreet informed by its travels. References to the ex- commentator and the oboe is allowed to in- citing kinetic energy of an actual locomotive tensify the more lyrical flights. The very heart can be heard.” of Poulenc is in this adroit little work.” In the composer’s performance notes for the —Joseph Way oboe and bassoon, he explains that arrows attached to various accidentals throughout the piece indicate “timbral” notes that are Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by The slightly higher in pitch than the normally New York Times, Viet Cuong’s music seeks fingered notes. These are not meant to be to “leave you breathless” (The Philadelphia exact microtones; they are merely more Inquirer) by finding ways to introduce new life brightly colored tones. However, these tim- into time-honored musical ideas. He is a win- bral notes should still be quite distinguish- ner of the ASCAP Morton Gould Composers able from the normal notes. Award, Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composers Award, and Theodore Presser Foundation For the pianist, the composer writes that cer- Music Award, among many other honors. tain note-heads in the music indicate notes The Poulenc Trio met Viet at the Peabody where the pianist momentarily dampens the Conservatory in Baltimore, and asked him to string inside the piano with the idle hand. The write Trains of Thought in 2012. The com- resulting attack and tone should be softened poser describes his work thusly: and dull. The string should not be dampened so much as to obscure the pitch. “My goal in writing Trains of Thought was to aurally bring life to the mind’s stream of con- Trains of Thought was premiered by the sciousness. Ideas are usually interconnected Poulenc Trio at the National Gallery of Art in the mind through a cohesive sequence of in Washington, D.C., in May 2017, accompa- 4 nied by an original animated multimedia film by the time of Voynich’s death, and is esti- by visual artists Elizabeth and Alden Phelps. mated to have sold 2,500,000 copies in the Soviet Union alone. “Romance” is the most famous movement from Shostakovich’s film In a musical career spanning half a centu- score and was used in the BBC/PBS TV series r y, Dmitri Shostakovich composed in a Reilly, Ace of Spies. staggeringly diverse range of genres and styles. Beyond his fifteen symphonies and Moscow, Cheryomushki (1958) is a three- fifteen string quartets, Shostakovich also act comic operetta in a bewildering varia- wrote lesser-known works that offer much tion of styles, from the Romantic idiom to of the intrigue and interest found in his bet- the most vulgar popular songs. The satiri- ter-known pieces. With the reappraisal of cal plot deals with one of the most pressing Shostakovich in recent times, his light music concerns for urban Russians of the day: the is beginning to enjoy unprecedented popu- chronic housing shortage and the difficul- larity in concert halls and record catalogues. ties of securing livable conditions. “Cheryo- mushki” translates to “bird-cherry trees,” the The Gadfly (1955) is probably Shostakov- name of a real housing estate in southwest ich’s best-known film score. The film is based Moscow. “A Spin Through Moscow” is the on a novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich and tells a first of the four dancelike movements found story of faith, disillusionment, revolution, ro- in the orchestral suite from the operetta. mance, and heroism. Set in 1840s Italy under the dominance of Austria, a time of tumul- tuous revolt and uprisings, the story centers Jean Françaix was a French composer very on the illegitimate son of a cardinal who much in the neoclassical tradition of Pou- joins the fight to unite Italy. When caught, lenc: He eschewed the trends of atonality he faces the firing squad as a willing martyr. and the rejection of traditional form, choos- ing wit, color, and a supple lightness in the The Gadfly was an exceptionally popular service of producing musical “pleasure.” Pro- novel when it was published in the Soviet lific throughout his life, Françaix was a piano Union, exerting a considerable cultural in- virtuoso, an active performer, a skilled or- fluence. The book was compulsory reading chestrator, and a composer in myriad forms in the Soviet Union, was the top best-seller and for myriad ensembles. Like many great 5 French composers, Françaix had a skillful sidered guilty of false modesty. If he dissects penchant for the wind instruments. them into theme A and theme B, musicolo- gists will applaud, but musicians will find him The Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano was boring. If the work is of any value, it will need commissioned by the International Double no explanation; if it is of no value, no esoteric Reed Society for their twenty-fourth Festival commentary will render it any better . All in 1994. The Trio is astonishing for its mo- I ask my listeners is to open their ears and dernity and its accessibility.