Program
Bach
Italian Concerto in F Major, BWV 971
Schumann
Piano Quartet in E Flat Major, Op. 47 — movements 3 and 4
Brahms
Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60 "Werther"
MARCH 5th, 2008
Wednesday at 11 a.m.
The Berlin Piano Quartet
The Jacques Thibaud String Trio, prize-winner in the prestigious 1999 Bonn Chamber Music Competition, was founded at the Berlin School of Art in 1994. Since then, the ensemble has performed throughout Europe, Japan and North America receiving tremendous acclaim from audiences and critics alike. The Trio received a standing ovation when it performed with flutist, Eugenia Zukerman, for the Chicago Chamber Music Society in the 1990’s. The Trio continued successful performances both in the U.S. and the major international musical venues. The New York Times lauded its playing as “spontaneous and commanding.”
The Berlin Piano Quartet was founded in 2000 when the Jacques Thibaud String Trio met and first performed with the Shanghai-born pianist Tao Lin at the Mainly Mozart Festival in Miami. Since then, they toured extensively together with three re-engagements at Mainly Mozart and concerts at NYC’s Rockefeller University, Washington, D.C.’s Dumbarton Concerts, Chautauqua, and the Athenaeum in La Jolla, CA. Mr. Lin was awarded top prizes in the competitions of the National Society of Arts and Letters, the Music Teacher’s National Association and the Palm Beach International Invitational. He was also a finalist in the First International Piano Competition and the First Osaka International Chamber Music Competition as a member of the Shanghai Trio. Mr. Lin’s numerous other prizes include the Alexander Tcherepnin Award
Program Notes
Johann Sebastian Bach
Italian Concerto in F Major, BWV 971
(arranged for string trio by Laszlo Varga)
This very popular keyboard work, a concert favorite of contemporary pianists, was composed and published by Bach in 1735 and appeared in the second part of a monumental four part publishing project, the Clavier – Ubüng (Keyboard Studies). Bach titled the work Concerto nach italiäischem Gusto (Concerto in Italian Taste) and as such reflects his mastery of the Italian concerto style. As Court Organist and Cammer Musicus in Weimar (1708 -1714), Bach had made a thorough study of the violin concertos from Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Estro armonica, Op. 3 and the concertos of both Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello and Giuseppe Torelli preparing organ and harpsichord transcriptions of these works. The “Italian Concerto” reflects his mastery of the ritornello concerto-style with alternating tutti and solo passages and is heard in all of his magnificent instrumental music written while he was employed in Weimar. The music is of such beauty and vitality that it is immediately accessible.
Robert Schumann
Piano Quartet in E Flat Major, Op. 47
Schumann’s piano quartet was composed between October 25th and November 26th, 1842 in what is referred to as his “Chamber Music Year”. That year, in similarly brief intervals, he composed five additional works in the chamber music genre: the three string quartets of Op. 41, the piano quintet in E flat major, Op. 44, and the Phantasiestücke (for piano trio), Op.88. For Robert it was a year of personal crisis in his marriage to Clara. On February 18th, they embarked on a North German concert tour primarily to highlight Clara’s pianism. The whirlwind of rehearsals, soirées, and public performances in Bremen, Oldenburg (where Robert was excluded from attending a court concert given in Clara’s honor) and Hamburg culminated on March 9th in a dreadful night in sordid accommodations above a noisy pub. The next day Robert fled back to Leipzig and Clara with a suitable female companion continued on to Copenhagen. It was not until early June that Robert actually began work on the string quartets. His venture into the world of chamber music stemmed from earlier study including the composition of an unpublished piano quintet in C minor in 1829 and in 1839, weekly “quartet mornings” spent with colleagues from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
The E-flat piano quartet was written for and dedicated to Count Matvei Wielhorsky, an accomplished amateur cellist, a fact reflected in the prominence and difficulty of the cello part throughout the work. The premiere was given in Leipzig on December 8th, 1844 by Ferdinand David (violinist and dedicatee of the Mendelssohn Octet), Neils W. Gade (violist, friend and himself a composer), Count Weilhorsky (cello) and Clara Schumann (piano).
Perhaps as a nod to Weilhorsky, the third movement begins with a gorgeous cello melody transformed in a series of five variations with a central chorale-like episode between the 2nd and 3rd variation. Toward the end of the movement, the cellist lowers the C-string a whole-step to serve as a B-flat pedal tone. The movement ends with a prefiguration of the opening theme and fugue that introduces the exuberant theme filled fourth movement of the quartet.
Johannes Brahms
Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60 “Werther”
The extraordinary twenty-five works Brahms contributed to the chamber music literature were composed over a forty year period beginning in 1854 with the first version of his Piano Trio Op. 8 and continuing until the summer of 1894 with the publication of the sonatas Op. 120, No.1 and 2 for clarinet and piano. With this impressive record Brahms can be credited with “upholding the chamber music tradition at a time when the interests of Wagner, Liszt and other ‘progressive’ composers lay in the radically different directions of the music drama and symphonic poem”. Of the three piano quartets written by Brahms, the Op. 60 quartet is unique by virtue of its long gestation and the very personal clues Brahms gave as to its expressive content. Initially it was composed in 1854 as a three movement work in the key of C# minor. This was a period of great emotional upheaval for the 21- year old Brahms. He was confronting the mental illness of his benefactor and friend, Robert Schumann, and his evolving love for Robert’s wife Clara.
The initial version of the quartet received a trial performance, but dissatisfied with the work, Brahms put the manuscript aside. In its present form, completed in 1873 -1874, he retained the first movement, transposing it down a half-step to the key of C minor. The third movement of the 1854 quartet was revised and became the second movement in the final version. The third and fourth movements were newly composed prompting Brahms to write his publisher, Fitz Simrock, in 1875, “I am now only learning a few things - this quartet is half old, half new - the whole creature is therefore good for nothing. Furthermore you might display a picture on the title-page. Namely a head-with a pistol pointing at it. Now you can form an idea of the music! I will send you my photograph for this purpose! You could give it a blue frockcoat, yellow trousers, and riding boots since you appear to like color prints.” Similar references to the emotional content of the first movement were given to his friend Herman Dieters and the Viennese surgeon and violist, Theodor Billroth, and fit the description of the morbidly sentimental hero of Goethe’s epistolary novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, who kills himself for the unrequited love of a married woman.
If all this is not enough, the first movement, tragic throughout, is encrypted in its opening measures with a transposed version of the CLARA motive Robert Schumann used in his D Minor Fourth Symphony. The second movement in 6/8 rhythm is characteristic of other scherzos written by Brahms notably that from the Piano Quintet Op. 34. The slow movement of the quartet, in E major, begins with a cello solo that is one of his longest most luxuriant melodies, perhaps an allusion to the slow movement of Schumann’s piano quartet. It bears a similar key relationship to the Adagio used by Brahms in his First Symphony, a work also in C minor. The finale begins with a long violin solo against a relentless moto perpetuo piano accompaniment and anticipates the last movement of his unwritten G major violin and piano sonata, Op. 68. It also bears a relationship to his song Regenlied, with its mood of anxiety and regret, composed during the time he was again occupied with the quartet.
Program notes by James L. Franklin, M.D.
The Chicago Chamber Music Society
P.O. Box 350
Kenilworth, IL 60043
Phone: 847.251.1400
ext. 0