BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Sunday, October 24, 1993, at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Malcolm Lowe, violin Richard Svoboda, bassoon Rebecca Young, viola Charles Kavalovski, horn Jules Eskin, cello Charles Schlueter, trumpet Edwin Barker, double bass Ronald Barron, trombone Alfred Genovese, oboe Everett Firth, percussion Thomas Martin, clarinet with GILBERT KALISH, piano and harmonium FENWICK SMITH, flute CRAIG NORDSTROM, clarinet and bass clarinet MARYLOU SPEAKER CHURCHILL, violin YEHUDI WYNER, piano BEETHOVEN Trio in C minor for violin, viola, and cello, Opus 9, No. 3 Allegro con spirito Adagio con espressione Scherzo: Allegro molto e vivace Finale: Presto Mr. LOWE, Ms. YOUNG, and Mr. ESKIN ZWILICH Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players Marziale Lento con moto Allegro energico Mr. SCHLUETER; Messrs. SMITH, NORDSTROM, BARKER, FIRTH, and KALISH BUSONI Berceuse elegiaque, Opus 42 (arranged by Erwin Stein) Messrs. SMITH, MARTIN, LOWE; Ms. CHURCHILL and Ms. YOUNG; Messrs. ESKIN, BARKER, KALISH, and WYNER INTERMISSION program continues. DVORAK Quintet in G for two violins, viola, cello, and bass, Opus 77 Allegro con fuoco Scherzo: Allegro vivace Poco andante Finale: Allegro assai Mr. LOWE, Ms. CHURCHILL, Ms. YOUNG, Mr. ESKIN, and Mr. BARKER 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. Ludwig van Beethoven Trio in C minor for violin, viola, and cello, Opus 9, No. 3 Though Beethoven's real instrument was the piano, he was also a string player; as a teenager he made his living playing viola in the opera orchestra of his native Bonn. After moving to Vienna, Beethoven held off composing a symphony or a string quartet, genres in which Haydn, with whom he studied briefly, was preeminent. But he approached the string quartet by way of the string trio. About 1795-96, after composing his Opus 3 trio for violin, viola, and cello (modeled on Mozart), he began sketching his Opus 9 trios and the Serenade for string trio published as Opus 8. It was through these that he worked out the problems of chamber music writing. The last of the Opus 9 trios is in C minor, the key often associated with Beethoven's more dramatic and forceful musical gestures. There is already the same energy that we know from the middle-period works, and the same lyrical counterfoil to the dramatic quality of the whole. The first four notes present the earliest version of one of Beethoven's basic musical ideas, a figure that lies at the heart of several of the late string quartets. The elaborate decorations of the second movement embellish what is in essence a melody of the greatest simplicity. The scherzo races along with splendid energy, with the instruments scored in such a way as to range from delicate chamber effects to a nearly orchestral sonority. The finale has a rhetorical force in which we can see Beethoven the young Turk, with all the characteristic impatience of youth, but also with something that promises future conquests beyond this remarkable early accomplishment. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players Even before she won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony No. 1, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was developing an enviable reputation for writing music that was original, identifiably hers, and accessible to performers and audiences alike. From 1975, when Pierre Boulez led the Juilliard Orchestra in her Symposium for orchestra (1973), she has not lacked for enthusiastic performers, including major orchestras and chamber ensembles well beyond the purview of the "new-music specialists." But the recognition that came with the Pulitzer was unusually large, simply because she happened to be the first woman to have won the prize. Born in Miami, Florida, in 1939, Zwilich's professional training began at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she received her bachelor's and master's degrees. At Juilliard she studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions and in 1975 became the first woman to be awarded a DMA in composition from that school. During these years she was also active as a professional violinist, having studied at Florida State with longtime BSO concertmaster Richard Burgin and with Ivan Galamian in New York. No doubt one of the reasons performers enjoy her work is that she knows, from long personal experience, precisely what it is that makes music both challenging and enjoyable to play. Though she made her living for a time as a violinist, Ellen Zwilich also played the trumpet through high school and college, and her love of that instmment shows throughout the Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players, composed in 1984 on a consortium commission from three new-music ensembles, one of them Boston's own Collage. The three movements are laid out in the traditional but still effective pattern of fast-slow-fast. The movements are linked by a musical motto, something that might be called the quintessential trumpet gesture, an assertive rising arpeggio that begins what the composer frankly calls "a virtuoso trumpet piece." The progress of the score allows for plenty of dialogue between the soloist and the other five players, lots of rhythmic games, and at least a hint of Stravinskyan neo- classicism, but from beginning to end it is the trumpet that joyously leads the way. Ferruccio Busoni Berceuse elegiaque, Opus 42 Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) composed the Berceuse elegiaque originally for orchestra, in memory of his mother, who died on October 3, 1909. Gustav Mahler led the New York Philharmonic in the first performance on February 21, 1910. The present performance is of a chamber version by Erwin Stein (formerly attributed to Arnold Schoenberg) for the Society for Private Musical Performances during a period when Schoenberg and his circle frequently offered chamber versions of relatively rarely-heard contemporary compositions. Though Busoni's family emphasized the Italian part of his background, his musical training was at the outset almost totally Germanic. As a child he occupied himself both as pianist and as composer. His father took him to Vienna, where he entered the Conservatory at nine and appeared before the Viennese public as a pianist two months before his tenth birthday. During the following decade he lived in Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig (where he came to know Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sinding, Mahler, and Delius). Moving still farther north, he was recommended to the Helsinki Conservatory, where he met Sibelius, and then went on to Moscow. Though offered a professorship in Moscow, he decided to pursue his career as a pianist in the United States. He moved to Boston in 1891, where he hoped to continue as a performer while teaching piano at the New England Conservatory. He resigned after a year, but remained fond of Boston and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (especially under the directorship of his old friend Arthur Nikisch). Busoni settled in Berlin, where, ironically, a performance of Verdi's brand new Falstaff induced him to rediscover the Italian side of his own birthright. Suddenly he began to look for ways to combine the best elements of German art with the special characteristics of the Italian: the directness, the clarity, and the theatricality of gesture. Busoni's Berceuse elegiaque, subtitled Des Marines Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter ("The man's cradle song by his mother's bier"), is an expansion of an elegy he had written for solo piano in 1907 under the conviction that experimentation with musical expression could best be carried out at first in small character pieces. When his mother died in 1909, his thoughts returned to the earlier work, which he had considered one of his most successful piano pieces, and he expanded it into an orchestral score. Berceuse means "lullaby," and this one is typical in its gently rocking rhythms, but far more striking in its sustained mood of sombre — pensiveness, its "elegiac" quality. Each instrument provides its own subtle touch providing a particular challenge to the arranger of this chamber version. Antonin Dvorak Quintet in G for two violins, viola, cello, and bass, Opus 77 To judge from its opus number, the G major string quintet must have been composed after the Scherzo capriccioso, Opus 66, the Seventh Symphony, Opus 70, and the second set of Slavonic Dances, Opus 72: in short, a work of the mature Dvorak. That is exactly what Dvorak's publisher Simrock wanted prospective purchasers to think. Actually it was written more than ten years earlier than its published opus number would suggest (the composer himself called it Opus 18 and objected violently, if fruitlessly, to Simrock's deceit). Dvorak turned to the quintet with double bass after finishing his one-act opera The Stubborn Lovers early in 1875. The quintet was completed by March and submitted (anonymously, as the rules required) to a musical competition; the manuscript bore only the inscription "To his country." Selected unanimously by the judges, the work received its first performance the following March. At that time it had five movements, an Intermezzo in B major standing in second place. But Dvorak decided that two slow movements overdid it, so he removed the Intermezzo, later publishing it separately as the Nocturne for strings, Opus 40. The judges who first saw the manuscript of the quintet awarded it the prize on account of its "noble theme, the technical mastery of polyphonic composition, the mastery of form and... knowledge of the instruments." The player benefiting most from the presence of the double bass in the ensemble is the cellist, who, freed from the customary duties of harmonic support, has much more opportunity to range widely in the thematic interplay of the lines.