BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Sunday, March 10, 1991, at 3 P.M
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BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Sunday, March 10, 1991, at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Malcolm Lowe, violin Harold Wright, clarinet Burton Fine, viola Richard Svoboda, bassoon Jules Eskin, cello Charles Kavalovski, horn Edwin Barker, double bass Charles Schlueter, trumpet Leone Buyse, flute Ronald Barron, trombone Alfred Genovese, oboe Everett Firth, percussion with GILBERT KALISH, piano WILLIAM HUDGINS, percussion MARTHA BABCOCK, cello GRANT LLEWELLYN, conductor MAX HOBART, violin FENWICK SMITH, flute WYNER Trapunto Junction, for brass trio and percussion (world premiere; commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Mr. and Mrs. Robert D. King) Messrs. SCHLUETER, BARRON, KAVALOVSKI, and HUDGINS GRANT LLEWELLYN, conductor COPLAND Elegies, for violin and viola Messrs. LOWE and FINE COPLAND Duo for flute and piano Rowing Poetic, somewhat mournful Lively with bounce Messrs. SMITH and KALISH INTERMISSION SCHUBERT String Quintet in C, D.956 Allegro ma non troppo Adagio Scherzo: Presto; Trio: Andante sostenuto Allegretto Messrs. LOWE, HOBART, FINE, ESKIN, and Ms. BABCOCK Baldwin piano Nonesuch, DG, RCA, and New World records This concert is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. ) Yehudi Wyner Trapunto Junction, for brass trio and percussion ( 1991 The son of composer and conductor Lazar Weiner, Yehudi Wyner (b.1929) was bom in Canada but raised in New York City, where he attended Juilliard as a pianist. He then studied composition at Yale with Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith and at Harvard with Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. Long a member of the Bach Aria Group, he has been active as a teacher at Yale, the State University of New York at Purchase, and currently at Brandeis; since 1975 he has been a member of the Tanglewood Music Center faculty. His early works are in a neoclassic vein; later compositions show a broadening and intermixture of influences, sometimes including elements from jazz or from the Jewish tradition. He composed Trapunto Junction on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Mr. and Mrs. Robert D. King; the work was completed earlier this year. The composer has provided the following commentary: What's in a name? Sometimes a lot. Sometimes it can reveal a great deal about the atmosphere of a piece of music, even about its construction and genesis. Clearly titles such as "symphony," "string quartet," "prelude," "sonata," "fugue" not only define the genre of a composition, but also put it in a cultural and historical context. The idea may be to continue a tradition or perhaps to contradict past models. But in any case the reference is intentional. But what of compositions that do not adopt historical precedents, which are fanciful and formally self'defining? How shall these be called so that the titles may intrigue, yet not mislead, the musical audience? Thus Debussy's La Mer may have been inspired by oceanic swells and images, yet it is by no means a formless series of watery impressions. On the contrary, it is a precisely calibrated composition of I symphonic dimension, though not of "symphonic" construction. Another example might be Rituel by Boulez, which conveys a sense of the intention of the music while not specifying a programmatic narrative. As for Trapunto Junction, the title says something about the origin of the piece, where some of it was composed; it makes some cultural references and reveals some of its constructive elements. First of all, the instrumental ensemble was specified by the BSO, with the intention of featuring brass and percussion players. Furthermore, the percussion battery was to be mobile enough to enable easy touring. (Marimba and vibraphone are everywhere available.) I thought in terms of an energetic piece, lots of quick, fairly noisy music, full of intricate syncopations, in the manner of a salsa band. Quieter moments are there, too, suggesting elements of popular music, such as a sentimental ballad, with shades of the small ensemble of Duke Ellington. These and other musical materials, which are from various, normally unrelated, sources, were then stitched together, somewhat in the manner of a quilt. I had recently seen a handsome book on quilts in America spanning a long history. The variety of the quilts was astounding. Clearly this "folk art" was capable of producing work of high artistic merit. One remarkable recent quilt was called "Tuxedo Junction" and was inspired by a popular recording by the Glenn Miller organization. With the references in my piece to popular music, quilting, to a kind of informal "assembling" of elements to create a form, I was tempted to use the title "Tuxedo Junction," but could not bring myself to invade that hallowed sanctuary. But since my composition was partially written in Italy, where the word "trapunto" means quilt or quilting, and since junction means an encounter, a joining together of places or elements, Trapunto Junction seemed like a fair title. -Yehudi Wyner Aaron Copland Elegies, for violin and viola Duo for flute and piano When Copland wrote his two Elegies for violin and viola in Mexico in 1932, he still had a reputation as a rather fearsome avant'gardist who wrote spiky, challenging music (though it was on this visit that Copland was taken by Carlos Chavez to a night spot called El Sal6n Mexico, which proved to be the germ of his first "popular" piece). The piece was surely performed, at least privately, but the standard Copland references offer no date. Copland, always intensely practical, reused some of the material from the first of the Elegies in his Statements for orchestra (1935), where it is to be found in the movement headed "Subjective." He called this the "final resting place" of the Elegies, and then, after a fashion, he "withdrew" the original work. The word "withdrew" actually appears in the first volume of Copland's autobiography, Copland to 1942, written with Vivian Pedis, but Perlis notes that it is not meant to suggest that he wanted to forbid performances of Elegies, simply that it had been, in his mind, superseded by Statements. But, of course, it is always stimulating to hear a gifted composer's first thoughts, later elaborated in a different way; the experience can cast a very illuminating light on his mind and work. Copland wrote the Duo for flute and piano-barring the Clarinet Concerto, his first extended work forsolo woodwind-in 1971 on a communal commission from students and colleagues of James Kincaid, for many years principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as a memorial tribute. The work was completed on March 9 and first performed at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia on October 3 by Elaine Shaffer and Hephzibah Menuhin. The first movement opens with a lyrical flute solo before the piano enters with the kind of spare but tender harmonic background familiar from such well-known scores as Appalachian Spring. Even when things get lively, the flute remains essentially a lyrical protagonist and finally returns to the material of the opening. The second movement is especially direct and uncomplex. The composer has noted, "I think it came off well because it has a certain mood that I connect with myself—a rather sad and wistful mood, I suppose." Its close links directly with the bright and snappy final movement. Franz Schubert String Quintet in C, D.956 Virtually nothing is known of the history of this, Schubert's greatest chamber composition, except that he turned to it in August 1828, only months before his tragically premature death in November, and probably completed the piece in September. We have no idea why he chose the particular ensemble (with two cellos, as Boccherini had done in his quintets, rather than the two violas Mozart preferred), nor if he wrote it at someone's request. He almost certainly never heard a performance, and the work was not published until a full quarter-century after the composer's death. Still, it remains the only truly great composition for a string quintet with two cellos; it outclasses Boccherini by a long shot and remained so overwhelming an example that even those composers who might have used it as a model gave up in the end and wrote their quintets with a second viola. Brahms, in particular, actually brought to conclusion the composition of a quintet in F minor directly modelled on Schubert's work; but he finally converted it into two alternative forms: the F minor quintet (for string quartet and piano), Opus 34a, and the sonata for two pianos, Opus 34b. Both versions retain clear references to their Schubertian inspiration, above all in the treatment of Neapolitan harmonic turns, of which Schubert's quintet is the unparalleled model. Schubert's ear for harmonic color is exploited here to a degree hitherto unknown. For example, as the quintet proceeds, what are called "Neapolitan relationships" come increasingly to the fore; these occur when one key seems to 'lean" on another that is a half-step lower. In the eighteenth century, such relationships occurred only briefly at the cadence to provide a colorful way of approaching the dominant. But Schubert expands the significance of these relationships so that entire sections of movements "lean" on the home key, giving a much wider and more piquant harmonic range, turned to vivid expressive use. In the slow movement, which begins with an unearthly stasis of almost mystical quality, the middle section is a contrastingly nervous passage in F minor, the Neapolitan relationship to the main key of E. Even more striking, perhaps, is the scherzo, which is as extroverted as one could wish for, only to have as its contrasting Trio a daringly imaginative slow section in D-flat (Neapolitan to the home key of C), asking urgent questions for which no answers are forthcoming.