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Illuminations
Festival Concert 3
August 16, 2022
Tuesday
7:30 pm – Festival Concert
Lincoln Theater
Masks are required to be worn at all times during the concert. While we strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated, proof of vaccination is no longer required to attend.
Tickets available in advance or at the door.
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
PROGRAM
Anna Thorvaldsdottir Trajectories
Thomas Sauer, piano
Visuals by Sigurður Guðjónsson
Bruce Adolphe Are There Not a Thousand Forms of Sorrow? (co-commissioned by Salt Bay Chamberfest)
Sean Lee and Jennifer Frautschi, violins; Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola; Sophie Shao and Wilhelmina Smith, cellos
Antonín Dvořák Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81
Jennifer Frautschi and Sean Lee, violins; Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola; Sophie Shao, cello; Thomas Sauer, piano
Artists
Jennifer Frautschi, violin
Sean Lee, violin
Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola
Sophie Shao, cello
Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Thomas Sauer, piano
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
Program Notes
by Mark Mandarano
Philosopher Alva Noë, who explores the nexus of art, perception, and consciousness, has written:
“All perceptual experience is a matter of bringing the world into focus by achieving the right kind of skillful access to it, the right kind of understanding. Art matters because art recapitulates this basic fact about perceptual consciousness. Art is human experience, in the small, and so it is, in a way, a model or guide to our basic situation. “
While this is something that many of us understand on an intuitive level, when we blend several senses, as is the case with Trajectories, the collaborative work for electronic sounds, prepared piano, and visual installation created by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Sigurður Guðjónsson, it begins to beg the question of how we assimilate these actual and metaphorical experiences into a greater understanding. The composers on this program explore the idea of darkness as a means of expression and in relation to forms of light. In the visual medium, it is useful to be reminded that darkness is a necessary pretext for light in the same way that silence is a pretext for music. As the great jazz musician Thelonius Monk was given to saying, “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.”
Trajectories was commissioned by the Reykjavik Center for Visual Music and premiered at the festival of RCVM in January 2014. The score consists of atmospheric pre-recorded electronic sounds with which a pianist interacts, often bypassing the keyboard to strike the strings inside the piano with mallets or glide over them with fingertips or pluck with fingernails. The projected element presents an evolving visual scape where points of light drift within a black field. The philosopher Jóhannes Dagsson wrote about this work:
“It is a guide to a part of perceptual experience where sound and visual perception are in unison. This model has been constructed to immerse us in a bodily experience; light, darkness, movement, and sound are presented as pure….This is a feast for our senses, we are guided by the sparse elements of the work to experiences; romantic, dramatic, filled with arctic night and white light of almost unearthly kind….The interrupted flow, the sounds from the piano, the visible mass, the darkness, the light, the movements, the trajectories directly experienced seem to model metaphysics, seem to offer perceptual access to something that is usually thought to be the subject of thought. This is a part of our basic situation that we seldom get the chance to see, but when we do, we do so in art.”
Composer Bruce Adolphe approaches the poetic idea of darkness as an emotional state in his quintet for strings from 2017. In addressing the intention of this piece, he has written: “The title of this quintet is taken from Ethan Canin’s novel A Doubter’s Almanac: “Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child’s future?” The dark resonance of Ethan Canin’s text set a musical process in motion for me, and this quintet was for me the most direct way to express my own sorrows.”While the music itself is expressive of mournful personal and shared emotions, the circumstance that brought it about was, on the other hand, a happy one: the 50th anniversary of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and a consortium commission including Salt Bay Chamberfest, about which the composer says, “My affiliation with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center began in 1992 with a commission from then artistic director Fred Sherry to compose a clarinet quintet for the incoming artistic director, David Shifrin. This year, 2022, is my 30th year with CMS. I have been friends with the vast majority of musicians who have performed here since its beginnings, when I was a student, and I have always felt lucky to be part of the international community of musicians that comes to CMS to play.” The music, born out of a remarkably long productive collaboration and written for this specific institution, nevertheless can reach a broader audience. “When music is very personal, as this work is, it is also universal. The meaning of music is different for every listener but beyond the specificity of words, there is some shared understanding. Music transcends borders, politics, religion, and even cultures. It brings a thousand forms of joy.”
Reaching the universal through the specific was one of the most frequently remarked upon qualities of the music of Antonín Dvořák. At a time when music created in Germany, France, and Italy was considered the norm, music from other cultures was considered through a regionalist or nationalist lens. This was, indeed, one of the factors that helped Dvořák land on the musical map with such resounding success. Yet it was a two-edged cultural habit in that, while being pigeon-holed into a specialized group, one’s music might not be taken as seriously or seen for what it is outside of its national or tribal voice. Dvořák saw himself in multiple ways: as a Czech composer, with a deep understanding of Moravian, Slavic, and Bohemian idioms; but also as a participant in the broader tradition as established by iconic forebears. For Dvořák, the model of Schubert may have been the preeminent example: “In originality of harmony and modulation, and in his gift of orchestral coloring, Schubert has no superior. Schumann and Liszt are descendants of Schubert…and as for myself, I cordially acknowledge my great obligations to him.” Dvořák also noted that Schubert’s parents were from Moravia and acknowledged that, “in Schubert’s pianoforte music, perhaps even more than in his other compositions, we find a Slavic trait which he was the first to introduce prominently into art-music, namely the quaint alternation of major and minor within the same period.”
This alternation of major and minor forms the basis of Dvořák’s own characteristic mixing of dark and light hues. At the very beginning of the Piano Quartet in A major, we hear the cello sing out what can only be called a “tune,” much closer to a Schubert lied than to a terse motivic germinal idea like we would find in Beethoven or Brahms. And immediately, the sunny A major is intruded upon by duskier tones borrowed from the minor, setting up an intense mixture of sorrow and joy that produces a sincere and authentic flavor that each element would lack without the other. The second movement is an example of a Dumka, a traditional dance whose structure relies upon sectional alterations between weightier tramping phrases and whirling exuberance. The Furiant, a fast dance that stands in for a scherzo, is built upon syncopations (and has much in common with the scherzo from Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor). The Finale proceeds in an almost uninterrupted flow of ebullient ensemble playing, resolving the mixed colors of the prior movements into a realm of pure radiance.
By Mark Mandarano