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Illuminations
Festival Concert 4
August 19, 2022
Friday
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
Franz Schubert Notturno in E-flat Major for Piano Trio, Op. 148, D. 897
Jennifer Koh, violin; Wilhelmina Smith, cello; Thomas Sauer, piano
Nathalie Joachim Dam Mwen Yo
Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Photo montage by Nadia Todres (commissioned by SBC)
Alexander Scriabin Vers la flamme, Op. 72
Thomas Sauer, piano
Missy Mazzoli Vespers for Violin
Jennifer Koh, violin
Video by James Darrah
Robert Schumann Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47
Jennifer Koh, violin; Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola; Wilhelmina Smith, cello; Thomas Sauer, piano
Artists
Jennifer Koh, violin
Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola
Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Thomas Sauer, piano
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
Program Notes
by Mark Mandarano
The extent to which early music criticism and historical assessment owed a debt to Darwinian concepts of progress and evolution has frequently been underestimated. The intensified value placed on what was considered musically “progressive” raised the heat within a dialectic in European music between a rapidly accelerating march toward modernization versus the preservation of traditional methods. This debate notoriously swept up in its crosshairs two sides of music: the progenitors of the music of the future—Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner—against the traditionalists, represented by its leaders Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. Writing in 1845, the journalist Franz Brendel made an astute assessment of the standing of Mendelssohn and Schumann:
“Mendelssohn animates traditional forms, infusing them with his individuality; on the basis of tradition, he addresses new tasks. Schumann, on the other hand, emerges from his inwardness; he moves away from the fantastic humor and indulgence in fantasy of his earlier works and comes closer to an objective style and expression. Restless, passionate agitation gives way to a more restrained type of expression, traditional forms replace the self-generated ones.”
Brendel considered inwardness and the loyalty to traditional forms inadequate because they were too confined by the dead hand of the past. This point of view, however, defines progress narrowly in terms that, while widely accepted at the time, were advantageous only to certain parties. The bold and ingenious compositions on the program today expose the gaps in this pattern of thinking. Composers such as Nathalie Joachim, Missy Mazzoli, Scriabin, and others weave together present and past in ways that present a fuller realization of our heritage and our mutual future.
The composition by Nathalie Joachim incorporates the traditional songs of Haitian Creole women, which recorded and combined with music for cello transport the concert hall to a latitude that would have been unreachable via the evolutionary mode of thought. The composer has written the following about her piece:
“Dam Mwen Yo in Haitian Creole simply translates to “They Are My Ladies.” In Haiti, the cultural image of women is one of strength. They are pillars of their homes and communities, and are both fearless and loving, all while carrying the weight of their families and children on their backs. As a first generation Haitian-American, these women—my mother, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins—were central to my upbringing and my understanding of what it means to be a woman. In Dantan, Haiti-Sud, where my family is from, it is rare to walk down the countryside roads without hearing the voices of women—in the fields, cooking for their loved ones, gathering water at the wells with their babies. This piece and the voices within it are representative of these ladies—my ladies. And the cello sings their song—one of strength, beauty, pain, and simplicity in a familiar landscape.”
Missy Mazzoli’s work reanimates the sounds of centuries-old organs and choir music through electronic manipulation to build a cathedral to the future of what live performance can be:
“Vespers for Violin, for amplified violin and electronics, began as a reimagining of my recent composition Vespers for a New Dark Age. I sampled keyboards, vintage organs, voices, and strings from that composition, drenched them in delay and distortion, and re-worked them into a piece that can be performed by a soloist. The result is something completely separate from the original work, with only distant, nostalgic connections to the source material.”
Vespers for Violin was premiered at the Sounds of Music Festival in Groningen, Netherlands, in 2014. A recording was nominated for a Grammy award in 2019. Also in 2019, director James Darrah created a music video for the work featuring dancer Sam Shapiro.
Even Schubert, writing at the end of his brief life, defies precedent by writing a piece that, while it relies on conventional, even clichéd rhythms and motives, daringly remains in a harmonic and structural stasis, revealing that something new and vital arises when one disregards restrictive customs. Although classical composers such as Mozart and Haydn frequently composed music in the genre “notturno” in prior decades, their pieces portrayed the diverting social activities of an aristocratic courtly evening, whereas Schubert’s work is an entire stand-alone movement that captures the somber stillness of night.
Conversely, the work of Scriabin pursues, with almost fanatical devotion, the questions surrounding mankind’s need to proceed from darkness to light. Upon reaching his mature years as an artist, he began to write a series of works that he believed would bring about a transformation of society, all of them unifying music with the idea of illumination. There is a common theme of prophetic revelation behind Scriabin’s choices of subject matter, from Prometheus and the theft of fire and the dawning of man’s consciousness and creativity, through the Poem of Ecstasy and the Divine Poem. Scriabin wrote, “Fire is light, life, struggle, increase, abundance, and thought.” Vers la flamme presents a vision of mankind rushing toward the flame of revelation, consumed by illumination, simultaneously an apotheosis and an apocalypse. Poet Konstantin Balmont, Scriabin’s friend and champion, wrote, “Scriabin is the singing of a falling moon. Starlight in music. A flame’s movement. A burst of sunlight. The cry of soul to soul… A singing illumination of the air itself, in which he himself is a captive child of the Gods… all his music is light itself.”
Although Schumann’s Piano Quartet follows the traditional four-movement scheme, each movement abounds with surprises of structure and content. Schumann begins his Piano Quartet in E-flat major with a soft prayer that leads to an outburst of sunshine. At the end of the exposition, there is a false repeat, as though we have returned to the beginning; however, instead of a classical repetition of what we have already heard, the exposition is replayed and recomposed as tragedy. Ultimately all is set right once again. The Scherzo commences with quiet but demonic intensity. The movement follows an unusual structure, with two different Trio sections, the first of which is contrapuntal, with overlapping descending lines. A second Trio overlays a new, syncopated idea onto the demonic scherzo eighth notes. In the Andante, a song-like verse is introduced in three-quarter time by the cello, then taken up by the violin and the rest of the ensemble. Subsequently, there is a key change as well as a rare meter change to common time for a more chordal texture. The initial theme returns, now wreathed in a garland of sixteenth notes. The Finale starts with a torrential flow of notes to begin an impetuous fugue that is anything but academic. Once again, Schumann follows an unusual structure by interpolating a lengthy legato section where the romantic spirit once again asserts itself. After cycling through several lyrical ideas, the spirited music returns and, with increasingly animated counterpoint, ends on a note of brilliant jubilation.
By Mark Mandarano