concert program v: Trio Transformations JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) July 31 and August 1 Trio Sonata no. 4 in c minor, BWV 1017 (ca. 1720) Siciliano: Largo Wednesday, July 31, 8:00 p.m., Stent Family Hall, Menlo School Allegro Adagio Thursday, August 1, 8:00 p.m., The Center for Performing Arts Allegro at Menlo-Atherton WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 –1791) PROGRAM OVERVIEW Piano Trio in G Major, K. 496 (1786) Allegro Like the string quartet, the piano trio is a musical tradition that Andante came into its own only after Bach’s death. Nevertheless, the Tema con variazioni: Allegretto – Adagio – Tempo primo piano trio repertoire remains indebted to Bach’s art. His sonatas INTERMISSION for violin and keyboard—typically performed with cello aug- menting the continuo, and which C. P. E. Bach referred to as JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) “harpsichord trios”—set a model for keyboard-and-strings writing Piano Trio no. 3 in c minor, op. 101 (1886) Allegro energico that Mozart and Brahms would affirm in subsequent generations. Presto non assai A hallowed tradition beauti fully disintegrates in Café Music, Paul Andante grazioso Schoenfield’s crack at “a kind of high-class dinner music,” which Allegro moderato CONCERT PROGRAMSCONCERT draws on Bach, Brahms, and Broadway. PAUL SCHOENFIELD (b. 1947) Café Music (1987) Jeffrey Kahane, piano; Joseph Swensen, violin; Carter Brey, cello SPECIAL THANKS Music@Menlo dedicates these performances to the following individuals with gratitude for their generous support: July 31: Lindy Barocchi and also to Kris Klint August 1: Michèle and Larry Corash Paul Klee (1879–1940). Abstract Trio, 1923. Watercolor and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with gouache and ink. © ARS, NY Music@Menlo 2013 Program Notes: Trio Transformations JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH begins with a quick-tempo Allegro as the first of its five movements. Though (Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach; died July 28, 1750, Leipzig) the limpid rhythms and pastoral nature of the siciliano that begins the Sonata Trio Sonata no. 4 in c minor, BWV 1017 no. 4 in c minor derive from an old dance of Sicily, the music’s mood and even the contours of its melody recall the profoundly moving mezzo-soprano aria Composed: ca. 1720 Erbarme dich from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: “Have mercy on me, Lord/ Fifteen Inventions for Keyboard, BWV Other works from this period: Regard my bitter weeping.” The following Allegro is a spacious movement of 772–786 (ca. 1720); Six English Suites, BWV 806–811 (1720); Brandenburg serious demeanor and richly varied counterpoint. The third movement drapes Concerti, BWV 1046–1051 (1721); Six French Suites, BWV 812–817 (ca. a poignant violin melody upon a cushion of gently insistent triplets in the 1722) keyboard. The sonata closes with a brilliant fugal Allegro. Approximate duration: 18 minutes —Dr. Richard E. Rodda From 1717 to 1723, Bach was Director of Music at the court of Anhalt- Cöthen, north of Leipzig. He liked his job. His employer, Prince Leopold, WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART was a well-educated man, twenty-four years old at the time he engaged (Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, Vienna) Bach. (Bach was thirty-two.) Leopold was fond of travel and books and paintings, but his real passion was music. He was an accomplished musician Piano Trio in G Major, K. 496 who not only played violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord well enough to Composed: 1786 join with the professionals in his household orchestra but also had an excep- Other works from this period: Detailed in the notes below tional bass voice. He started the court musical establishment in 1707 with Approximate duration: 27 minutes three players (his puritanical father had no use for music), and by the time of Bach’s appointment, it had grown to nearly twenty performers equipped Among Mozart’s most loyal friends during his last years in Vienna were with a fine set of instruments. It was for this group that Bach wrote many the members of the Jacquin family. The paterfamilias, Nikolaus Joseph of his outstanding instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concerti, von Jacquin, whom Mozart met through their mutual affiliation with the orchestral suites, violin concerti, and much of his chamber music. Leopold Masonic lodge, was a distinguished botanist and professor of chemistry appreciated Bach’s genius (his annual salary as Court Conductor was four at Vienna University who instilled the love of music in his children, Joseph hundred thalers, equal to that of the Court Marshal, Leopold’s second- Franz (twenty-one in 1787), Gottfried (nineteen), and Franzisca (eighteen). highest official), and Bach returned the compliment when he said of his Mozart was very fond of the Jacquins and visited them frequently to share prince, “He loved music, he was well acquainted with it, he understood it.” their dinner, play his music for them, and keep Franzisca up with her les- Bach was himself a skilled string player during those years. His son Carl sons when she proved to be one of his most talented piano students. For Philipp Emanuel recalled, “He played the violin cleanly and penetratingly. the entertainment of the household, Mozart composed (for Franzisca) the He understood to perfection the possibilities of the stringed instruments.” remarkable Piano Sonata for Four Hands (K. 497) and the Piano Trio in He composed most of his chamber works for violin, including the three B-flat Major (K. 502) during the summer and autumn of 1786, another trio and three partitas for unaccompanied violin and the six sonatas for sonatas later that year (K. 498, for clarinet, viola, and piano, known as the Kegelstatt), violin and keyboard (often augmented by a melody bass instrument, such and the K. 521 Sonata in 1787, as well as a bass aria (Mentre ti lascio, o figlia, as the cello at this performance), before he left Cöthen in 1723. K. 513) for brother Gottfried and several smaller pieces. Rounding out these As with every genre that he took up, Bach brought the development of PROGRAMSCONCERT delightful souvenirs of Mozart’s friendship with the Jacquins was the Trio the Baroque duo sonata to its zenith with his six violin sonatas, BWV 1014– for Piano, Violin, and Cello in G Major (K. 496), which he finished on July 1019. The twin forms of the sonata—for solo instrument with accompaniment 8, 1786. and for two treble instruments with the same supporting players—had ges- Mozart composed just six works for the convivial combination of tated in Italy early in the preceding century and been nurtured into mature piano, violin, and cello, one of the most popular home entertainment musical media by Arcangelo Corelli in the first five sets of his published works. genres among the dilettantes of Vienna during the decades around the The solo and trio sonatas were further categorized according to use and style turn of the nineteenth century. (Haydn wrote more than forty such trios and as the (“church sonata,” serious in expression and imitative sonata da chiesa Beethoven, eleven.) Except for the Trio in B-flat, K. 254 (which he desig- in texture) and the (“chamber sonata,” lighter in mood and sonata da camera nated as a “divertimento” in the manuscript), composed in Salzburg in 1776, dance-like in idiom). Bach’s most important technical contribution to the duo Mozart’s pieces cluster tightly in the years 1786 (K. 496 and 502) and 1788 sonata was in fully notating the keyboard part rather than just indicating the (K. 542, 548, and 564). These works were devised with some care to appeal customary chord symbols below the bass notes, which the players realized at to the lucrative amateur market, and the Viennese firm of Artaria made their discretion. This specificity allowed Bach to raise the keyboard from its three of them (K. 502, 542, and 548) available to the city’s music lovers role as accompanist to that of equal partner by using the right hand to play an in November 1788. (These pieces were intended to be played in “friendly, independent melodic line, so that his examples of the form exhibit a richness musical, social circles,” according to the composer.) As was typical of the of texture that approaches that of the trio sonata. genre at that time, Mozart’s trios entrusted the piano with the lion’s share of The six violin sonatas largely follow the structure and style of the sonata the musical task at hand; it doesn’t just provide the harmonic background da chiesa—four movements (slow–fast–slow–fast), imitative in texture, seri- for the ensemble but takes the lead in presenting the themes, proposing ous in expression—though one (no. 4 in c minor, BWV 1017) admits a lilting how they should best be worked out and appropriating such flights of virtu- siciliano as its opening movement and another (no. 6 in G Major, BWV 1019) osity as are allotted by the composer. As the genre developed in the later works of Haydn and those of Beethoven, the strings were allowed a greater www.musicatmenlo.org equality with the keyboard, so that such a work as Beethoven’s Archduke his friend Joseph Widmann, a poet and librettist of considerable distinction, Trio of 1811 exhibits a true democracy among the participants. convinced Brahms to join him in the ancient Swiss town of Thun, twenty-five Mozart’s Trio in G Major (K. 496) represents an intermediate point in kilometers south of Bern in the foothills of the Bernese Alps. Brahms rented the development of the form between the earliest examples, in which the a flower-laden villa on the shore of Lake Thun in the nearby hamlet of Hof- piano was “accompanied” by the virtually dispensable violin and cello, and stetten and settled in for a long, comfortable summer.