Program
Tchaikovsky
Piano Trio in A minor,
Op. 50 “Elegiac”
Jennifer Higdon
Piano Trio
Pale Yellow
Fiery Red
SEPTEMBER 28th, 2011
Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.
The Lincoln Trio
The Lincoln Trio takes its name from their home, the land of Lincoln. Under the auspices of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, the trio gave a highly publicized Lincoln Bicentennial tour including a kickoff celebration in Springfield, Illinois, with President Obama. The Trio has appeared at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven Chamber Music Series among many other series. The Lincoln Trio is also ensemble-in-residence at the Music Institute of Chicago.
Program Notes
“Pale Yellow” and “Fiery Red”
Jennifer Higdon
Jennifer Higdon, born in Brooklyn on December 31, 1962, grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and majored in flute performance at Bowling State University. She earned an Artist’s Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music where she now holds the Milton L. Rock Chair in Compositional Studies. She obtained a master’s and doctoral degree in composition from the University of Pennsylvania studying with George Crumb. She says of her career, “Because I came to classical music very differently than most people, the newer stuff has more appeal for me than the older.” In 2010 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto and the 2010 Grammy Award for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto.
Synesthesia is the concomitant experience of mixed sensations and Higdon indicates she has always been fascinated by the connection between painting and music. In 2000 her one movement tone poem, “Blue Cathedral”, memorialized her brother who died from cancer. Premiered in 2000 it has become one of the most frequently performed orchestral works by a living American composer. Higdon is the composer of a wide range of chamber music, including works for the flute, saxophone and clarinet, a woodwind quintet, a sonata for viola and piano, and a number of string quartets. The piano trio, “Pale Yellow” and “Fiery Red” was commissioned in 2003 by the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, Vail, Colorado. Higdon says of this work that the colors she has chosen to title each movement reflect the very different moods and energy of the music. The first movement, “Pale Yellow”, opens with a gentle hymn-like theme stated by the piano. As the string instruments enter, the color brightens as the flowing and harmonious texture moves forward in a gentle rising and falling pattern. The movement concludes with a return to the opening quiet mood. By contrast, “Fiery Red”, is structured in a ternary form. The outer segments are rapid, percussive and dissonant; the middle section is quiet and delicate in texture. The opening music returns and ends in a brilliant finale.
Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
In December 1882 Tchaikovsky wrote his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, reminding her of the time two years earlier when she had encouraged him to write a piano trio and he had expressed an antipathy to the sonority of the piano combined with string instruments. Now he was informing her that he had already written the beginning of a trio. Following the death of his former teacher, friend, piano virtuoso and director of the Moscow Conservatory, Nicholas Rubenstein, Tchaikovsky had wished to enshrine his memory in a composition with a substantial piano part. The Trio in A Minor was begun in December 1881 and completed by February 9, 1882 in time for a private performance at the Moscow Conservatory on March 23rd of that same year, the first anniversary of Rubenstein’s death. Substantial revisions followed this event and the work received its first public performance on October 23, 1882. The score bears the dedication, “To the memory of a great artist.”
The trio is cast in two lengthy movements: the first is titled Pezzo elegiaco and the second movement consists of a theme and eleven variations. This two movement structure calls to mind Beethoven’s final 32nd piano sonata, Op. 111. The first movement of the trio, an extended sonata form structure, begins with a beautiful and very personal theme presented by the cello that becomes the motto for the entire trio. Woven into this design are four distinctive themes. The movement ends quietly with the strings playing a transformation of the motto theme. The piano writing in this trio stretches the limits of the instrument and the performer with passages of prolonged technical brilliance and massive chordal sonority. Similarly the string writing is both demanding and orchestral in its dimension.
The second movement, Tema con Variazioni, is based on a folk-like theme recalling a countryside picnic that Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein attended in 1873 flavored by the singing and dancing of local peasants. The lovely theme derives its Russian character from the repetition of two-bar phrases. The eleven variations that follow are highlighted by a scherzo-like variation (Variation III), the music box sonority of Variation V, a waltz that is the essence of the composer’s music for the ballet (Variation VI), an energetic fugue (Variation VIII), a mournful elegy (Variation IX), and a Chopinesque mazurka (Variation X). The second movement of the trio concludes with the massive Variazione: Finale e Coda that includes a reprise of the elegiac music of Variation IX and a funereal setting of the motto theme of the first movement. With the composer’s permission, the sections Variation VIII and the Variazione: Finale e Coda are often, as they are today, omitted in recordings and performance.
Following a tradition established earlier by Bedřich Smetena whose piano trio in G Minor of 1855 commemorated the death of a beloved daughter, the elegiac character of the Tchaikovsky trio would inspire Sergey Rachmaninoff to write his Trio Élégiaque in G minor dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s memory, and in the 20th Century inspired Dmitri Shostakovich to write his Trio in E Minor, Op. 67 in memory of his dear friend, Ivan Sollertinsky.
Program notes James L. Franklin, M .D.
The Chicago Chamber Music Society
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