STEVEN ISSERLIS CELLO CONNIE SHIH D E N V E R PIANO APRIL 25, 2017 CLAUDE DEBUSSY Cello Sonata (1862-1918) Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto Sérénade: Modérément animé Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 65 (1810-1849) Allegro moderato Scherzo Largo Finale. Allegro INTERMISSION REYNALDO HAHN Deux Improvisations sur des airs irlandais (1875-1947) The Little Red-Lark (Le petit bouvreuil) The Willow-Tree (Le Saule) GABRIEL FAURÉ Cello Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 117 (1845-1924) Allegro Andante Allegro vivo THOMAS ADÈS Lieux retrouvés (b. 1971) Les eaux La montagne Les champs La ville: Cancan macabre STEVEN ISSERLIS Acclaimed worldwide for his profound musicianship and technical mastery, British cellist Steven Isserlis enjoys a uniquely varied career as a soloist, chamber musician, educator, author and broadcaster. He appears regularly with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, and Zurich Tonhalle Orchestras, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. He gives recitals every season in major musical centres. As a chamber musician, he has curated concert series for many prestigious venues, including the Wigmore Hall, New York's 92nd Street Y, Zankel Hall, and the Salzburg and Verbier festivals. Unusually, he also directs chamber orchestras from the cello in classical programs. He has a strong interest in historical performance, working with many period-instrument orchestras and giving recitals with harpsichord and fortepiano. He is also a strong advocate of contemporary music and has premiered many new works including John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, Thomas Adès’s Lieux retrouvés, and Gyorgy Kurtag’s For Steven. As a writer and broadcaster, Steven contributes regularly to publications including Gramophone, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. He has guest edited The Strad magazine and makes regular appearances on BBC Radio, including on the Today program, Soul Music. Most recently he presented a documentary on BBC Radio 4, “Finding Harpo’s Voice,” about his hero, Harpo Marx. Steven’s award-winning discography includes Bach’s complete Solo Cello Suites for Hyperion (Gramophone’s Instrumental Album of the Year); Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano with Robert Levin; and the Elgar and Walton concertos with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi. Steven’s latest release is the Brahms Double Concerto with Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, coupled with the 1854 version of Brahms’s B Major Piano Trio (with Jeremy Denk). As an educator Steven Isserlis gives frequent masterclasses all around the world, and for the past twenty years he has been Artistic Director of the International Musicians’ Seminar at Prussia Cove in Cornwall, where his fellow- professors include Sir Andras Schiff, Thomas Adès, and Ferenc Rados. He also enjoys playing for children, and has created three musical stories with the composer Anne Dudley. His two books for children, published by Faber’s, have been translated into many languages. A new book, a commentary on Schumann’s famous Advice for Young Musicians, has recently been published by Faber’s. The recipient of many awards, Steven Isserlis’s honors include being made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his service to music, and the Schumann Prize of the City of Zwickau. He is also one of only two living cellists featured in the Gramophone Hall of Fame. He gives most of his concerts on the Marquis de Corberon (Nelsova) Stradivarius of 1726, kindly loaned to him by the Royal Academy of Music. friendsofchambermusic.com 1 CONNIE SHIH The Canadian pianist, Connie Shih, is considered to be one of Canada’s most outstanding artists. In 1993 she was awarded the Sylva Gelber Award for most outstanding classical artist under age 30. At the age of nine she made her orchestral debut with Mendelssohn’s first Piano Concerto with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. At the age of 12 she was the youngest-ever protégé of Gyorgy Sebok, and then continued her studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Claude Frank, himself a protégé of CONNIE SHIH Arthur Schnabel. Later studies were undertaken with Fou cello Ts’ong in Europe. As soloist she has appeared extensively with orchestras throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe. In a solo recital setting, she has made numerous appearances in Canada, the U.S., Iceland, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and China. Connie has given chamber music performances with many world-renowned musicians. To critical acclaim, she appears regularly in recital with cellist Steven Isserlis. Including chamber music appearances at the Wigmore and Carnegie Halls, she performs at the prestigious Bath Music Festival, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Weill Hall (N.Y.), and at the Kronberg Festival. Her collaborations have included Susan Gritton, Tabea Zimmerman, and Isabelle Faust. Connie’s performances are frequently broadcast via television and radio on CBC (Canada), BBC (U.K.), SWR, NDR, and WDR (Germany) as well as on other television and radio stations in North America and Europe. She is on faculty at the Casalmaggiore Festival in Italy. LEGACY GIFTS For those who want to leave a musical legacy, a planned or deferred gift to Friends of Chamber Music is a meaningful way for you to help insure our future artistic excellence and stability while providing enhanced tax benefits to you. Visit our website for more information. 2 friendsofchambermusic.com NOTES Program Notes © Elizabeth Bergman IN BRIEF DEBUSSY: CELLO BORN: August 22, 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France SONATA DIED: March 25, 1918 in Paris, France FIRST PERFORMED: March 4, 1916 in London’s Aeolian Hall MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE: January 5, 2005 (David Finckel, cello, and Wu Han, piano) ESTIMATED DURATION: 12 minutes Claude Debussy entered the Paris Conservatory in 1872 at 10 years old to study piano and musical rudiments. Not cut out for a career as a solo performer, he began to compose in 1879, writing songs, piano music, and a piano trio while making his living as an accompanist. In 1884, he won the coveted Prix de Rome, which funded two years of study in Rome at the Villa Medici. Afterward, he took a job with Nadezhda von Meck, a patron of the arts who had inherited a railroad fortune (and who supported Tchaikovsky throughout his mature career), playing in a trio at her home in Moscow. Returning to Paris in 1887, he fell in with the literary crowd of Symbolists, admired the Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Universal Exposition, wrestled with the influence of Richard Wagner’s music, and made his debut in the Parisian musical world with his string quartet in 1893. The Symbolists were interested in provoking their readers, stimulating their imaginations to derive significance from mere suggestion. In his own efforts to find meaning apart from logic, Debussy eschewed cause and effect in his music, avoided standard forms, and shied away from conventional harmonies. He worked with special scales that abandoned the strict hierarchies and firm grounding of tonality to create a feeling of timelessness. He also loved unusual textures, especially open chords that seem to float one to the next across the keyboard. Among his favorite friendsofchambermusic.com 3 Program Notes sounds were echo effects and bell-like timbres. Many of Continued his compositions bear suggestive titles, which he often placed at the end of a work, as if to startle the performer or listener into reconsidering what was just played and heard. Ultimately Debussy rejected the idea that his music should be about anything particular, and certainly not about just one thing. His love of musical color, evocative effects, sparse textures, and freewheeling musical lines can all be heard in the cello sonata, a late work written in the midst of World War I. The sonata has a nationalist agenda owing in part to its historical context. To a former student Debussy proclaimed, “French art needs to take revenge quite as seriously as the French army does!” Revenge on what? The tyranny of the German Classical and Romantic tradition. The same year the cello sonata was composed (1915), Debussy penned an important article calling for a “pure French music.” Indeed something very French lies hidden at the heart of the cello sonata: a cyclic design, meaning that a theme from the beginning reappears at the ending. This kind of recall exemplifies the “precision and compactness of form” that, for Debussy, defined the French style. Likewise the second and third movements run into each other without interruption. Throughout, the airy textures and lucid melodies exemplify the “clarity of expression” that he prized, especially later in life. The Prologue showcases graceful arabesques—lithe swoops and turns—in the cello line, reaching a passionate climax that quickly subsides. The Sérénade features crisp staccato accents along with a wide variety of techniques: pizzicato, flautendo (which requires the cellist to bow very lightly over the end of the fingerboard to create a flute-like tone), and portamenti (the sliding from one note to the next). The movement comes to rest on a quietly sustained A, then launches into a capricious, fleet-footed Finale. 4 friendsofchambermusic.com IN BRIEF CHOPIN: CELLO . BORN: March 1, 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, west of SONATA IN Warsaw, Poland G MINOR, OP. 65 DIED: October 17, 1849 in Paris, France FIRST PERFORMED: The last three movements were first publicly performed by Frédéric Chopin and Auguste Franchomme (to whom the sonata was dedicated) at the composer’s last public concert, at the Salle Pleyel on February 16, 1848. MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE: November 5, 2008 (Pieter Wispelwey, cello) ESTIMATED DURATION: 28 minutes Frédéric Chopin was a child of material and cultural comforts, delicate constitution, and prodigious gifts. An exceptional pianist from a solidly middle-class background, he charmed the best of Polish society, yet longed to explore the world outside Warsaw. After graduating from high school in 1830, Chopin traveled to Vienna, but found himself often homesick. “I am often in such a mood that I curse the moment of my departure from my sweet homeland,” he lamented to a friend. His nostalgia for Poland colored his compositions. While in Vienna, he wrote two sets of mazurkas, a Polish folk dance in triple meter with a heavy accent on the second or third beats (unlike a waltz, also in three beats but emphasizing the first). These mazurkas are now among his most beloved compositions. In 1831 he moved to Paris where he joined a vibrant community of Polish émigrés. He quickly established himself as a performer, composer, and teacher, becoming close with fellow pianist-composer Franz Liszt and his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult. Through Liszt, Chopin met the novelist George Sand (pen name of Amadine Dupin) in 1837. He was unimpressed by her at their first meeting, but a second encounter the following year led to their becoming romantic partners. Much of his best music was composed during summers at her home in Nohant, some 300 kilometers south of Paris. He never returned to his native Poland. friendsofchambermusic.com 5 Program Notes Devoting himself to the piano, Chopin developed as a Continued composer in tandem with such 19th-century Romantic genres as the nocturne, prelude, mazurka, and etude. Yet he also composed a handful of other works for orchestra (two piano concertos), chamber ensemble (a piano trio and cello sonata), and an opus of solo songs. Nevertheless, the piano appears in almost every piece he ever wrote and is certainly an equal partner in the epic, nearly symphonic cello sonata. Chopin’s last major composition, the sonata took him some two years to write. “With my sonata for cello and piano,” he confessed, “I am now contented, now discontented. I lay it aside, then pick it up again.” He was most concerned with achieving parity between the two instruments, wanting to be sure the piano did not overwhelm the cello. The first movement is a passionate, full-throated sonata form that indeed achieves a perfect balance between the instruments and between various musical modes: stormy, virtuosic, songlike, tender, and tempestuous. The second movement is much like a mazurka, with its triple meter, quick tempo, and solid accents falling on the second or third beat. The Largo may be brief, but it has been described as the “expressive core” of the four-movement sonata. It’s a nearly operatic duet between cello and piano that testifies to Chopin’s commitment both to the work itself and his affection for the cellist for whom it was written, his friend Auguste Franchomme. The finale is a kind of rondo with repeated and recurring themes that reaches an unexpectedly sunny conclusion in a major key. HAHN: DEUX IN BRIEF IMPROVISATIONS BORN: August 9, 1874, Caracas, Venezuela SUR DES AIRS DIED: January 28, 1947, Paris, France IRLANDAIS FIRST PERFORMED: Circa 1911 MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this work on our series. ESTIMATED DURATION: 5 minutes Born in Venezuela, composer Reynaldo Hahn came to Paris with his family in 1877 at just three years old. A child 6 friendsofchambermusic.com prodigy, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at age ten, studying composition and voice. There he was classmates with Ravel and became friends with Fauré. In the 1890s, while performing in the salons of Paris, Hahn met the young Irish composer Augusta Holmès, a fellow student at the Conservatoire. She introduced him to traditional Irish songs, three of which he transcribed for piano in four hands. Nearly two decades later, in 1911, Hahn returned to those settings and recast the first and last as two short works for cello and piano. Each melody is first presented simply, then varied and elaborated. “The Red- Lark” is a bouncy, jaunty tune in a rollicking 6/8 meter. In contrast, “The Willow-Tree” is stately and somber, almost akin to a processional. IN BRIEF FAURÉ: CELLO BORN: May 12, 1845, Pamiers, France SONATA NO. 2 IN DIED: November 4, 1924, Paris, France G MINOR, OP. 117 FIRST PERFORMED: May 13, 1922 by cellist André Hekking and pianist Alfred Cortot at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this work on our series. ESTIMATED DURATION:18 minutes Gabriel Fauré has been described as “the master par excellence of French music,” a “perfect mirror” of French musical genius. His Cello Sonata, Op. 117 was written in 1921, late in the composer’s life but during an especially productive period. Others of his generation had since passed (Massenet, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns among them) while a new crop of young French composers had come of age to champion the cause of post-war Modernism. But Fauré did not go gently into that good night; he continued to exert his influence as the patriarch of French music. He embodied a musical lineage stretching back to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the origin in some ways of the crucial cultural split between the French and German musical traditions, while also embracing the friendsofchambermusic.com 7 Program Notes new developments in musical style. As head of the Paris Continued Conservatoire from 1905 to 1920, he aired out the stuffy institution, allowing for greater experimentation and modernizing the curriculum. The first movement of Op. 117 showcases Fauré’s solid training in counterpoint at the Conservatoire as the cello and piano move in canon, trading the same musical lines that then overlap. The fluidity of the cello part and surfeit of figuration in the piano are wholly typical of Fauré’s overflowing musical imagination. The second movement Andante is a transcription of Fauré’s own Chant funéraire, a work for band composed to mark the centenary of Napoleon’s death. If in the first movement the two musicians seem to be literally as well as figuratively on the same page, sharing musical material and assuming similar characters, in the third and final movement the cello and piano take on more distinct roles. The piano is busy and sprightly, whereas the cello continues its cantabile musings in long-breathed phrases—at least until the stunning climax. All three movements begin in the minor mode, but end up in the more tranquil major. ADÈS: LIEUX IN BRIEF RETROUVÉS BORN: March 1, 1971, London, England FIRST PERFORMED: By Steven Isserlis on June 21, 2009 at the Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk, UK MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this work on our series. ESTIMATED DURATION: 17 minutes British composer Thomas Adès found early success as a pianist, winning second prize in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 1989. A decade later, he established himself as a leading composer by winning the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Music scholar Arnold Whittall has compared Adès’s music to Ives, Ligeti, and Janácˇek based on its many musical layers, romantic melodic richness, and intricate sound world. “Not only can Adès’s 8 friendsofchambermusic.com