PHILIP SETZER, VIOLIN Violinist Philip Setzer, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and began studying violin at the age of five with his parents, both former violinists in the Cleveland Orchestra. He continued his studies with Josef Gingold and Rafael Druian, and later at the Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky. In 1967, Mr. Setzer won second prize at the Marjorie Merriweather Post Competition in Washington, DC, and in 1976 received a Bronze Medal at the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels. He has appeared with the National Symphony, Aspen Chamber Symphony (David Robertson, conductor), Memphis Symphony (Michael Stern), New Mexico and Puerto Rico Symphonies (Guillermo Figueroa), Omaha and Anchorage Symphonies (David Loebel) and on several occasions with the Cleveland Orchestra (Louis Lane). He has also participated in the Marlboro Music Festival. Mr. Setzer has been a regular faculty member of the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center. His article about those workshops appeared in The New York Times on the occasion of Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday celebration. He also teaches as Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at SUNY Stony Brook and has given master classes at schools around the world, including The Curtis Institute, London’s Royal Academy of Music, The San Francisco Conservatory, UCLA, The Cleveland Institute of Music and The Mannes School. The Noise of Time, a groundbreaking theater collaboration between the Emerson Quartet and Simon McBurney–about the life of Shostakovich–was based on an original idea of Mr. Setzer’s. In April of 1989, Mr. Setzer premiered Paul Epstein’s Matinee Concerto. This piece, dedicated to and written for Mr. Setzer, has since been performed by him in Hartford, New York, Cleveland, Boston and Aspen. Recently, Mr. Setzer has also been touring and recording the piano trios of Schubert and Mendelssohn with David Finckel and Wu Han.

CHEE-YUN, VIOLIN Chee-Yun has performed with many of the world's foremost orchestras and conductors. Orchestral highlights include her tours of the United States with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas and Japan with the NHK Symphony, a concert with the Seoul Philharmonic conducted by Myung-Whun Chung that was broadcast on national television, and a benefit for UNESCO with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Avery Fisher Hall. Chee-Yun has performed with such distinguished conductors as Michael Tilson Thomas, Jaap van Zweden, Manfred Honeck, Hans Graf, James DePriest, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Krzysztof Penderecki, Neeme Järvi, Pinchas Zukerman, Giancarlo Guerrero, José Luis Gomez, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and Carlos Kalmar. She has appeared with the Toronto, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Atlanta, and National symphony orchestras, as well as with the Saint Paul and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestras. Other orchestral engagements include performances with the Orquesta Sinfonia Nacional and the Mobile and Pasadena Symphonies, in addition to appearances with the National Philharmonic, Colorado and Pacific Symphonies, and the Tucson, Detroit, and Pensacola symphony orchestras. A champion of contemporary music, Chee-Yun has performed Christopher Theofanidis’ Violin Concerto conducted by David Alan Miller as part of the Albany Symphony's American Festival, in addition to performing Kevin Puts’ Violin Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. As a recitalist, Chee-Yun has performed in many major U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Career highlights include appearances at the Kennedy Center's "Salute to Slava" gala honoring Mstislav Rostropovich and with the Mostly Mozart Festival on tour in Japan, as well as a performance with Michael Tilson Thomas in the inaugural season of Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall and the U.S. premiere of Penderecki’s Sonata No. 2 with pianist Barry Douglas. In 2016, Chee-Yun performed as a guest artist for the Secretary General at the United Nations in celebration of Korea's National Foundation Day and the 25th anniversary of South Korea joining the UN. Other career highlights include recitals in St. Paul, Buffalo, Omaha, Scottsdale, and Washington, D.C., duo recitals with cellist Alisa Weilerstein, a recital tour with pianist Alessio Bax, and a performance at American Ballet Theatre's fall gala. Firmly committed to chamber music, Chee-Yun has toured with Music from Marlboro and appears frequently with Spoleto USA, a project she has been associated with since its inception. Additional chamber music appearances include performances at the Ravinia, Aspen, Bravo! Vail Valley, La Jolla, Caramoor, Green Music, Santa Fe, Orcas Island, Hawaii Performing Arts, and Bridgehampton festivals in the U.S.; the Great Mountains Music Festival in South Korea; the Clandeboye Festival with Camerata Ireland in Northern Ireland; the Opera Theatre and Music Festival in Lucca, Italy; the Colmar Festival in France; the Beethoven and Penderecki festivals in Poland; and the Kirishima Festival in Japan. Chee-Yun has received exceptional acclaim as a recording artist since the release of her debut album of virtuoso encore pieces in 1993. Her recent recording of the Penderecki Violin Concerto No. 2 on Naxos was acclaimed as "an engrossing, masterly performance" (The Strad) and "a performance of staggering virtuosity and musicality" (American Record Guide). Her releases on the Denon label include Mendelssohn's E-minor Violin Concerto, Vieuxtemps' Violin Concerto No. 5, Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole and Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 with the London Philharmonic under the direction of Maestro Lopez-Cobos, and violin sonatas from Debussy, Fauré, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Szymanowski, Brahms and Strauss. Two compilation discs, Vocalise d'amour and The Very Best of Chee-Yun, feature highlights of Chee-Yun's earlier recordings. In 2007, Chee-Yun recorded the Beethoven Triple Concerto with Camerata Ireland, pianist Barry Douglas, and cellist Andrés Diaz for Satirino Records. In 2008, Decca/Korea released Serenata Notturno, an album of light classics that went platinum within six months of its release. Chee-Yun has performed frequently on National Public Radio's Performance Today and on WQXR and WNYC radio in New York City. She has been featured on KTV,a children's program on the cable network CNBC, A Prairie Home Companion, Public Radio International, and numerous syndicated and local radio programs across the world. She has appeared on PBS as a special guest on Victor Borge's Then and Now 3, in a live broadcast at Atlanta’s Spivey Hall concurrent with the Olympic Games, and on ESPN performing the theme for the X Games. In 2009, she also appeared in an episode of HBO's hit series Curb Your Enthusiasm. A short documentary film about Chee-Yun, “Chee-Yun: Seasons on the Road,” premiered in 2017 and is available on YouTube . Chee-Yun's first public performance at age eight took place in her native Seoul after she won the Grand Prize of the Korean Times Competition. At 13, she came to the United States and was invited to perform Vieuxtemps’ Concerto No. 5 in a Young People's Concert with the New York Philharmonic. Two years later, she appeared as soloist with the New York String Orchestra under Alexander Schneider at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. In 1989, she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and a year later she became the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. In Korea, Chee-Yun studied with Nam Yun Kim. In the United States, she has worked with Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang, Daniel Phillips, and Felix Galimir (chamber music) at The Juilliard School. In addition to her active performance and recording schedule, Chee-Yun is a dedicated and enthusiastic educator. She gives master classes around the world and has held several teaching posts at notable music schools and universities. Her past faculty positions have included serving as the resident Starling Soloist and Adjunct Professor of Violin at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and as Visiting Professor of Music (Violin) at the Indiana University School of Music. From 2007 to 2017, she served as Artist-in-Residence and Professor of Violin at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

HESPÈRION XXI, EARLY MUSIC ENSEMBLE Ancient music’s most important value stems from its ability as a universal artistic language to transmit feelings, emotions and ancestral ideas that even today can enthrall the contemporary listener. With a repertoire that encompasses the period between the 10th and 18th centuries, Hespèrion XXI searches continuously for new points of union between the East and West, with a clear desire for integration and for the recovery of international musical heritage, especially that of the Mediterranean basin and with links to the New World. In 1974 Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras, together with Lorenzo Alpert and Hopkinson Smith, founded the ancient music ensemble Hespèrion XX in Basel as a way of recovering and disseminating the rich and fascinating musical repertoire prior to the 19th century on the basis of historical criteria and the use of original instruments. The name Hespèrion means “an inhabitant of Hesperia”, which in ancient Greek referred to the two most westerly peninsulas in Europe: the Iberian and the Italian. It was also the name given to the planet Venus as it appeared in the west. At the turn of the 21st century Hespèrion XX became known as Hespèrion XXI. Today Hespèrion XXI is central to the understanding of the music of the period between the Middle Ages and the Baroque. Their labours to recover works, scores, instruments and unpublished documents have a double and incalculable value. On one hand, their rigorous research provides new information and understanding about the historical knowledge of the period, and on the other hand, the exquisite performances enable people to freely enjoy the aesthetic and spiritual delicacy of the works of this period. Right from the beginning Hespèrion XXI set out on a clearly innovative and artistic course that would lead to the establishment of a school in the field of ancient music because they conceived, and continue to conceive, ancient music as an experimental musical tool and with it they seek the maximum beauty and expressiveness in their performances. Any musician in the field of ancient music will have a commitment to the original spirit of each work and has to learn to connect with it by studying the composer, the instruments of the period, the work itself and the circumstances surrounding it. But as a craftsman in the art of music, he is also obliged to make decisions about the piece being played: a musician’s capacity to connect the past with the present and to connect culture with its dissemination depend on his skill, creativity and capacity to transmit emotions. Hespèrion XXI’s repertoire includes, amongst others, the music of the Sephardi Jews, Castilian romances, pieces from the Spanish Golden Age, and Europa de les Nacions. Some of their most celebrated concert programmes are Les Cantigues de Santa Maria d’Alfons X El Savi, La Diàspora Sefardí, the music of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Armenia and the Folías Criollas. Thanks to the outstanding work of numerous musicians and collaborators who have worked with the ensemble over all these years Hespèrion XXI still plays a key role in the recovery and reappraisal of the musical heritage, and one that has great resonance throughout the world. The group has published more than 60 CDs and performs concerts for the whole world, appearing regularly at the great international festivals of ancient music.

April 2, 2023: PAUL WATKINS, CELLO; BORIS BERMAN, PIANO JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Sonata in E minor for cello and piano, Op. 38 April 2, 2023: PAUL WATKINS, CELLO; BORIS BERMAN, PIANO In 1862 Brahms composed three movements of a cello sonata—his first duo sonata. He put it aside, however, until June 1865 when he added a fugal finale to complete the E minor Sonata for amateur cellist Josef Gänsbacher, who had helped secure his appointment as director of the Vienna Singakademie for the 1863–64 season. At the time Gänbacher was practicing law and giving piano and singing lessons, but eventually devoted himself exclusively to teaching singing. By 1866, when Brahms published the piece, he had deleted the Adagio movement, leaving a three-movement work of curious proportions—an expansive first movement, a minuet-like movement with the air of a valse triste (sad waltz), and a powerful fugal closing movement. A manuscript of the deleted slow movement apparently existed until the 1930s, unlike the typical scenario in which Brahms destroyed his discarded movements. Beloved as a three-movement work, the E minor Sonata takes up the cello-piano tradition of Beethoven, paying homage to the earlier master’s last cello sonata (D major, op. 102, no. 2) by including a fugue as its finale. But Brahms also looks back even further to Bach, whom he also revered greatly. Gänsbacher tells of visiting Brahms after the death of his mother in 1865 and finding him sobbing and playing Bach at the piano—neither of which activity he interrupted despite Gänsbacher’s presence. As pointed out by many commentators, Brahms’s fugue subject bears a striking similarity to Contrapunctus 13 from Bach’s celebrated Art of Fugue. Some have also suggested an additional but more tenuous link between Brahms’s first movement and Bach’s Contrapuntus 3. Naturally Brahms creates his own rich musical language despite his indebtedness to his predecessors. The remarkable, continually evolving main theme of his first movement rises out of the depths, showing off the cello’s lowest register before highlighting the upper register with impassioned lyricism. The second theme is remarkable for its close imitation between cello and piano, as is the exposition’s closing theme for its consolatory effect aided by a shift to the major mode and rocking accompaniment. In the Allegretto quasi Menuetto, the two outer sections project a sad kind of whimsy, something Mahler evoked when he came to write the second movement of his Second Symphony. In the center Brahms provides a flowing trio full of Romantic arpeggios, poignant lyricism, and gentle hesitations. Brahms shatters the gentle mood with the jagged leaping figure and ensuing bustle that constitutes his fugue subject. He then proceeds by ingeniously combining elements of fugue and sonata form, introducing a lovely flowing second theme that gives respite at critical junctures from the contrapuntal intricacies of his fugal material. The grand last appearance of the fugue subject launches a coda that hurtles to its exhilarating conclusion at breakneck speed. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

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LYSANDER PIANO TRIO Itamar Zorman, Violin
 Michael Katz, Cello
 Liza Stepanova, Piano The Lysander Piano Trio has been praised by The Strad for its “incredible ensemble, passionate playing, articulate and imaginative ideas and wide palette of colors” and by The Washington Post for “an uncommon degree of heart-on-the-sleeve emotional frankness” and “vivid engagement carried by soaring, ripely Romantic playing.” The group has developed a reputation for exciting programming, finding creative ways to connect well-known masterworks with pieces by lesser-known and underrepresented composers, discovering common threads across cultures and times. The Trio’s debut recording After A Dream (CAG Records) was acclaimed by The New York Times for its “polished and spirited interpretations.” Its most recent album, Mirrors, featuring world-premiere recordings of six works the ensemble has commissioned or premiered, was released in early 2021 by First Hand Records . In the 2023-24 season, the Trio performs at series around the US, Canada, and Israel including their debuts at Parlance Chamber Concerts, Feldman Chamber Music Society, Chamber Music Society of Williamsburg, Northeast Kingdom Classical Series, Blue Hill Concert Association, University of Idaho's Auditorium Chamber Music Series, Nelson Overture Concerts Society, Kelowna Chamber Concert Association, and Israel's Keshet Eilon. In the spring of 2023, the Lysander "brought the house down" (Dumbarton Concerts) with its new tango-infused collaboration with Argentine bandoneon player and composer JP Jofre and looks forward to continuing the collaboration in upcoming seasons. Highlights of the past few seasons include a return engagement at Atlanta’s premier chamber music series at Spivey Hall, a multi-concert residency with Chamber Music Tulsa, a weeklong series of performances and educational activities at New Orleans’s Crescent City Chamber Music Festival, and appearances with Massachusetts’ Valley Classical Concerts, Chamber Music Raleigh, Lee University's Presidential Concert Series, Concerts International Memphis, Sanibel Music Festival, Florida Keys Concert Association, and Shelter Island Friends of Music, among others. In addition, the ensemble performed in concerts and residencies across the United States as a featured touring group of Allied Concert Services. The Lysander Trio also performed abroad in recent seasons, notably at Calgary Pro Musica in Canada, Pro Musica San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, and a tour of Israel. The Lysander Piano Trio has spent over a decade performing around the US with appearances at notable venues such as the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Los Angeles’ Da Camera Society, San Francisco’s Music at Kohl Mansion, West Palm Beach's Kravis Center and Norton Museum of Art, Juneau Jazz and Classics, and notable college venues including Middlebury College, Clemson University, Purdue University’s Convocations Series, and University of Illinois’ Krannert Center. Summer and festival appearances include the Bard Music Festival, Cooperstown Summer Music Festival, Copenhagen Summer Festival, The Chautauqua Institution, Princeton University Summer Chamber Concerts, and a critically acclaimed recital at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among special projects, the Trio recently collaborated with clarinetist Charles Neidich in a unique program presented by the Chamber Music Society of Philadelphia and Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music. Orchestral engagements include Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with the DuPage Symphony Orchestra, University of Wyoming Symphony Orchestra and Greenwich Village Orchestra in New York City. The Lysander Piano Trio frequently performs in New York City, where the ensemble first launched in the 2010-11 season. The New York Times lauded the ensemble’s Weill Recital Hall debut at Carnegie Hall as “…rich sound and nuanced musicianship… resulting in a finely hued collaboration among the three musicians.” Other notable New York dates are Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and David Rubinstein Atrium, Schneider Concerts Chamber Music Series at the New School, National Sawdust, Merkin Concert Hall, and the Mostly Mozart Festival’s 50th Anniversary season at David Geffen Hall. The Trio has a long-standing commitment to working with living composers and building a new repertoire for the piano trio. The ensemble’s commissions include Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron (2017), co-commissioned by Concert Artists Guild and premiered at Weill Recital Hall; Ghostwritten Variations , by Venezuelan-American composer Reinaldo Moya; Jakub Ciupinski’s The Black Mirror ; and Four Movements Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” penned by four pre-teen composers of ComposerCraft from NYC’s Kaufman Music Center and premiered at Merkin Concert Hall in 2014. Lysander members also premiered Jennifer Higdon’s Love Sweet for soprano and piano trio, which received its world-premiere recording together with acclaimed soprano Sarah Shafer on the group’s 2021 release, Mirrors . Beyond its praise from Musical America for being “strikingly inventive…meticulous” and from The Strad for its “evocative moments,” Gramophone celebrated Mirrors by noting that “all six of this release’s compositions benefit from the Lysander Trio’s finely honed ensemble values and well-characterised solo contributions.” The Lysander Piano Trio, whose name is inspired by the character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , was formed at The Juilliard School. The Trio studied with Ronald Copes of the Juilliard String Quartet, the late Joseph Kalichstein and Seymour Lipkin, and had a memorable masterclass with Alfred Brendel. Early in their career, Lysander became a standout at competitions, with top honors at the 2010 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the 2011 Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition (Grand Prize), the 2011 J. C. Arriaga Chamber Music Competition (First Prize), and the 2012 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition.

LIABILITY WAIVER Parlance Chamber Concerts’s Covid-19 Liability Waiver Parlance Chamber Concerts is committed to the health and safety of our audience members, performers, and staff. While we are taking measures to protect our attendees, artists, volunteers, and employees, the risk of contracting Covid-19 and other contagious diseases may exist in any public space. To protect Parlance Chamber Concert’s ability to continue presenting public events, I agree: By purchasing tickets and entering Parlance Chamber Concerts’s performance venue (West Side Presbyterian Church), I will comply with all policies, guidelines, and preventive measures implemented by Parlance Chamber Concerts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Parlance Chamber Concerts cannot guarantee that I will not be exposed to and contract COVID-19 or other contagious diseases, and all those entering our performance venue do so at their own risk. I accept the risk of being exposed to, contracting, or spreading COVID-19 or other contagious diseases along with all consequential damages. I waive any right to bring any claims, including but not limited to claims of negligence. Masking is encouraged but optional and proof of vaccination is no longer required for admittance to Parlance Chamber Concerts’s events.

2017-2018 ARTIST ROSTER ALESSIO BAX, PIANO CHIARA STRING QUARTET MARK HOLLOWAY, VIOLA MIHAI MARICA, CELLO CLARA NEUBAUER, VIOLIN PETER SERKIN, PIANO DANBI UM, VIOLIN RAFAEL FIGUEROA, CELLO BENJAMIN BEILMAN, VIOLIN 2017 LUCILLE CHUNG, PIANO SEAN LEE, VIOLIN ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT, PIANO OLIVER NEUBAUER, VIOLIN EMILY DAGGETT SMITH, VIOLIN ORION WEISS, PIANO MICHAEL BROWN, PIANO GILAD COHEN, COMPOSER LOS ANGELES GUITAR QUARTET KERRY McDERMOTT, violin PAUL NEUBAUER, VIOLA ARNAUD SUSSMANN, VIOLIN THE DANISH STRING QUARTET

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2022 AT 4 PM EMERSON STRING QUARTET VALEDICTORY CONCERT BUY TICKETS DAVID FINCKEL, CELLO “His playing has great warmth and expressiveness coupled with a noble, aristocratic restraint.” — Strings Magazine GUILLERMO FIGUEROA, VIOLA EMERSON STRING QUARTET “With musicians like this there must be some hope for humanity.” — The Times (London) FEATURING ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE BUY TICKETS The Emerson String Quartet has maintained its status as one of the world’s most illustrious chamber ensembles for more than 45 years. In honor of their final season, this special valedictory concert will bring back two Emersonian laureates — the quartet’s original violist, Guillermo Figueroa, and longtime cellist, David Finckel — for a musical reunion that will conclude with Johannes Brahms’s radiant String Sextet No. 2 in G major. Don’t miss this unforgettable event! PROGRAM Joseph Haydn String Quartet in G, Op. 33, No. 5 Program Notes Dmitri Shostakovich String Quartet No. 12 in D-flat, Op. 133 Program Notes Johannes Brahms String Sextet No. 2 in G, Op. 36 Program Notes Watch the Emerson String Quartet perform Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet at Parlance Chamber Concerts:

BILL CHARLAP, PIANIST Pianist Bill Charlap was born in New York City into a musical family, and began his piano studies at the age of three. His father, Moose Charlap, was a Broadway composer and songwriter whose credits included the score to the Mary Martin production of Peter Pan, as well as popular songs recorded by such artists as Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan and Rosemary Clooney. His mother, Sandy Stewart, is a popular singer who toured with Benny Goodman, co-starred on TV’s Perry Como Show and received a Grammy nomination for her hit single, “My Coloring Book.” In the late ’80s, Charlap joined baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet and he has been the pianist in alto saxophonist Phil Woods’ Quintet since 1995. He has also performed and recorded with Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett, Freddy Cole, Houston Person and Jim Hall, among others. In 1997, he formed his trio of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington. The group has recorded seven CDs including 2004’s Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein (Blue Note), for which he received a Grammy nomination. Their most recent Blue Note release is: The Bill Charlap Trio: Live At The Village Vanguard (2007). He has twice received the pianist of the year Jazz Award from the Jazz Journalists Association. For the last three years, Charlap has been the Artistic Director of Jazz In July, a six concert series at the 92nd Street Y’s Tisch Center for the Arts. He has produced several concerts for Jazz at Lincoln Center, and an evening of George Gershwin’s music at The Hollywood Bowl. “Jazz pianist Bill Charlap approaches a song the way a lover approaches his beloved. When he sits down to play, the result is an embrace, an act of possession.” -Time Magazine “Charlap scores a direct hit to the heart.” -Entertainment Weekly

March 26, 2017: Jerusalem String Quartet ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904) String Quartet No. 13 in G major, op. 106 March 26, 2017: Jerusalem String Quartet Dvořák endured three homesick years in New York as director of the National Conservatory of Music, with one blissful sojourn in his beloved Czechoslovakia for the summer of 1894. When he again returned home for the summer of 1895, nothing could persuade him to return to America, yet despite feeling “inexpressibly happy,” he was unable to compose anything new for several months. Then in a great rush in November and December he completed the G major Quartet, op. 106, followed by the A-flat major, op. 105. The Bohemian Quartet gave the first performance of Opus 106 in Prague on October 9, 1896. The G major Quartet shows the composer embarking on a new path, and one wonders what would have followed these last two quartets had he lived beyond sixty-three years. Would he have developed a “late” style by continuing to work in short fragmented motives instead of extended melodic lines, and let his building of these motives increasingly dictate his forms? Would he have made even more bold harmonic experiments? Here in one of Dvořák’s finest first movements, he creates a first theme area from brief gestures—repeated leaps, trills, oscillating descending triplets and alternating chords—and a second idea that one commentator aptly described as “a funny little unison bear-dance motive.” The second theme, though more lyrical, also consists of fragments, based on a repeating four-note motive. His harmonic explorations here and his transformation of materials as he develops and recapitulates show consummate skill. The slow movement is one of chamber music’s most beautiful. Dvořák treats his poetic main theme—which shows a remnant of American influence in its pentatonic configuration—in a series of rich, free variations, alternating major and minor modes as he loved to do. The freedom of his conception, shaped more by pauses and pacing than by cadential divisions, lends an originality to his form and allows him to build to a impressive climax. In the galloping scherzo, Dvořák delights in certain unexpected features, such as the crazy duet between viola and cello that serves as an accompaniment to a new statement of the main theme. Another surprise is the “false” trio, in which the lyrical pentatonic melody first presented by the viola shows a kinship with the second movement’s main theme. The “real” trio introduces a gently rocking pastoral theme, punctuated by trills and fleeting arpeggios. The finale begins with a slow anticipation of its jolly, syncopated main theme. With great structural freedom, Dvořák strings together a series of themes that includes a more extended exploration of his slow introduction, which in turn brings a chain of developmental reminiscences from his first movement. It is fascinating to see Dvořák making further developments across movements, rather than including a development section proper. He rounds out the movement with a lusty recall of his exuberant main theme. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

CONNIE SHIH, PIANO The Canadian pianist, Connie Shih, is repeatedly 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 Arthur Schnabel. Later studies were undertaken with Fou Tsong in Europe. As soloist, she has appeared extensively with orchestras throughout Canada, the U.S.A. and Europe. In a solo recital setting, she has made countless 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 Maxim Vengerov, Tabea Zimmerman, and Isabelle Faust. Connie regularly tours North America and Europe with Steven Isserlis, and includes a tour of Asia with Joshua Bell. In addition she appears at concert venues across Germany with the cellist Manuel Fischer-Dieskau with whom she recorded the first-ever CD of the Sonatas for piano and cello by Carl Reinecke and the complete Beethoven sonatas. Her CD with Steven Isserlis on the BIS label was recently released. 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 various television and radio stations in North America and Europe. She is on faculty at the Casalmaggiore Festival in Italy.