Tonight Wolf Trap kicks off its
Discovery Series 2012-2013 season with the
Founder's Day Celebration performance by the
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Tonight's program is as follows...
David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
Jeremy Denk, piano
Jose Franch-Ballester, clarinet
John Zirbel, horn
Erin Keefe, violin
Paul Neubauer viola
Nicholas Canellakis, cello
Selections from Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 83 (1909)
Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Trio in E-flat Major for Horn, Violin, and Piano, Op. 40 (1865)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Sextet in C Major for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, Op. 37 (1935)
Ernő Dohnányi (1877-1960)
Selections from Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 83
Max Bruch, widely known and
respected in his day as a composer,
conductor, and teacher, received his
earliest music instruction from his
mother, a noted singer and pianist.
He began composing at 11, and by
14 had produced a symphony and a
string quartet, the latter garnering a
prize that allowed him to study with
Karl Reinecke and Ferdinand Hiller in
Cologne. His opera Die Loreley (1862)
and the choral work Frithjof (1864)
brought him his first public acclaim.
Bruch composed his Eight Pieces
for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 83
in 1909 in his 70th year for his son
Max Felix, a talented clarinetist who
also inspired a Double Concerto
(Op. 88) for his instrument and
viola from his father two years later. Like Brahms’s late works for
clarinet, the Eight Pieces favor rich,
mellow instrumental hues in the alto
range and an autumnal maturity of
expression, deeply felt but purged of
excess. Clarinet and viola are evenly
matched, singing together in duet
or conversing in dialogue, while the
piano serves as an accompanying
partner. Bruch intended that the
Eight Pieces be regarded as a set of
independent miniatures of various
styles rather than as an integrated
cycle and advised against playing all
of them together in concert (tonight’s
selections are Nos. 4, 6, 5, and 7).
The Pieces (they range from three to
six minutes in length) are straightforward
in structure—binary (A–B)
or ternary (A–B–A) for the first six,
compact sonata form for the last
two—and are, with one exception
(No. 7), all in thoughtful minor keys.
Trio in E-flat Major for Horn, Violin, and Piano. Op.40
For many years, Johannes Brahms
followed the sensible practice of the
Viennese gentry by abandoning the
city when the weather got hot. The
periods away from Vienna were not
merely times of relaxation for him but were actually working
holidays, and some of his greatest
scores were largely realized during
his various summer trips. Late in the
spring of 1865, Brahms took comfortable
rooms in Baden, which, he
wrote to a friend, “look out on three
sides at the dark, wooded mountains,
the roads winding up and down them,
and the pleasant houses.” It was while
walking upon the sylvan hillsides
above the town that the idea for the
Horn Trio occurred to him. He began
the work that summer and continued
it after his return to Vienna in the
fall, finishing the score in November.
The Trio’s opening movement,
written in a leisurely Andante tempo
(perhaps the speed of Brahms’s walk
upon the Baden hills), is disposed
in an unusual form: rather than
the traditional sonata-allegro, it
employs two alternating strains (A–B–A–B–A) whose relaxed
structure is the perfect vessel for this
amiable music. The energetic Scherzo
is countered by the lyrical melody
of the central trio section. Adagio
mesto—mournfully—Brahms marked
the following movement. Woven
almost imperceptibly into the horn
and violin lines soon after the return
of its opening strain is the echo of a
folk song that Brahms sang as a child,
“In der Weiden steht ein Haus” (“In
the meadow stands a house”), which,
transformed, becomes the principal
theme of the finale, a joyous and life affirming
answer to the sad plaint of
the preceding music.
Sextet in C Major for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, Op. 37
Ernő Dohnányi taught at the Berlin
Hochschule für Musik, a position
he assumed at the invitation of his
friend, the eminent violinist Joseph
Joachim. He returned to Budapest in
1915, becoming director of the Academy
in 1919 and musical director
of the Hungarian Radio in 1931. He
served as conductor of the Budapest
Philharmonic for the 25 years after
1919 while continuing to concertize
at home and abroad and remaining
active as a composer.
In 1944 Dohnányi left Hungary, a
victim of the raging political and militaristic
tides that swept the country
during World War II. He moved first
to Austria, then to Argentina, and
finally settled in Tallahassee in 1949
as pianist and composer-in-residence
at Florida State University, where
his students included the prominent
American composer Ellen Taaffe
Zwilich and his grandson, conductor
Christoph von Dohnányi. Though in
his 70s, Dohnányi’s abilities remained
unimpaired, and he continued an
active musical life. He appeared regularly
on campus and in guest engagements;
his last public performance was as conductor of the FSU Symphony
just three weeks before his death.
He died in New York on February 9,
1960 during a recording session.
The Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin,
Viola, Cello, and Piano is a work
of intense lyricism in Dohnányi’s
heightened Romantic style that draws
its structural strength from the music
of Brahms and its sense of continual
motivic development from Liszt. The
opening movement is based on two
themes: the first is a broadly arched
melody presented by the horn; the
other is a more tender strain initiated
by the viola. The second movement
(Intermezzo) begins and ends with
soft chorale passages but uses music
of a more dramatic character as its
extended central section, marked in
the score “in the manner of a march.” The following movement is a
series of free variations on the folk inflected
melody first given by the
clarinet. A transition based on the
first movement’s arching main theme
acts as a bridge to the spirited finale.
.jpg)
