May 21, 2023: Kevin Zhu, violin; Albert Cano Smit, piano JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Sonata in A, Op. 100 for violin and piano May 21, 2023: Kevin Zhu, violin; Albert Cano Smit, piano Brahms composed the A major Violin Sonata during the summer of 1886 in idyllic Hofstetten, Switzerland. That summer he eagerly anticipated the visit of Hermine Spies, the young contralto for whom he wrote many of his late songs. He noted that the Sonata’s second theme quotes one of the songs he wrote with her in mind, “Wie Melodien zieht es mir” (As if melodies were moving), op. 105, no. 1. Commentators have also linked “Komm bald” (Come soon), op. 97, no. 6, with this movement and found references in the finale to two other Opus 105 songs, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (My slumber grows more and more peaceful)—which climaxes with the same words, “Komm’, O komme bald”—and “Auf dem Kirchhofe” (In the churchyard). Brahms’s friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg was moved to characterize the entire A major Sonata as “a caress.” As was his custom, Brahms himself participated in the premiere of the Sonata on December 2, 1886, with violinist Joseph Hellmesberger, leader of the Hellmesberger Quartet and enthusiastic supporter of the composer. The performance occurred a little over a week after Brahms had accompanied Hermine in her Viennese debut recital. The first movement breathes the kind of lyricism associated with Brahms’s songs whether or not one hears the specific allusions. It is the second theme in this sonata form that recalls his lovely “Wie Melodien,” borrowing the first phrase only, which Brahms varies rhythmically and gives a new continuation. The tune reappears in the recapitulation and furnishes the violin’s last utterance to close the coda. The second movement combines a slow movement and scherzo in alternating sections, in a manner similar to the middle movement of the F major Quintet. Each returning section brings a subtle variation of its former appearance. Brahms marked the finale “Allegretto grazioso quasi Andante” in order to achieve a non-hurried, graceful atmosphere. The climactic phrase “Come, o come soon” (from “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer”) can be detected in the rondo theme. The first contrasting episode introduces a haze of arpeggiated chords rather than a “tune” before the rondo refrain returns, but the second episode sounds more traditionally songful. A variation of the first theme returns in the coda, extended by warm double stops in the home key. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

March 11, 2018: Benjamin Beilman, Violin; Orion Weiss, piano FREDERIC RZEWSKI Demons for violin and piano (2017) March 11, 2018: Benjamin Beilman, Violin; Orion Weiss, piano Dynamic, engaging, and committed to social issues, pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard, where he studied with Randall Thompson and Walter Piston, and his master’s degree at Princeton, where his teachers included Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. Following additional studies with Luigi Dallapiccola on a Fulbright scholarship in Florence, Rzewski began making a name for himself as a performer and teacher of new music in Europe. In 1966 in Rome he cofounded Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), where he explored collaborative improvisation. Rzewski returned to New York in 1971 but later took a post at the Royal Conservatory in Liège and continued to work with MEV in Rome. He has taught periodically at other renowned institutions, in particular the universities of Cincinnati, SUNY–Buffalo, California–San Diego as well as Yale, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and the Berlin Hochschule der Künste. As both composer and performer, Rzewski has long focused on issues that dominate the headlines. Coming Together (1972), for example, sets a letter by Attica State Prison inmate Sam Melville who was later killed in the Attica riots, and Rzewski’s monumental piano work The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975) presents a set of variations on Sergio Ortega’s song for the mass mobilization of working-class people. More recently, Songs of Insurrection for piano (2016) treats melodies by imprisoned soldiers at a Nazi concentration camp, Korean peasants of the Donghak Rebellion, and Irish nationalists during the “Easter Rising,” among many others. To Rzewski’s credit, his works are incredibly moving and show a characteristic drive whether he employs atonal or tonal techniques, incorporates improvisation or not, or treats his own or popular melodies. Rzewski composed Demons in the spring and summer of 2017 for violinist Benjamin Beilman and pianist Orion Weiss on a commission from Music Accord. Dedicated to author and political activist Angela Davis, the work receives its premiere on March 3, 2018, in Baltimore at the Carice Smith Performing Arts Center and continues its round of premiere performances in Boston at the Longy School of Music, here on the Parlance Chamber Concerts, and in Heidelberg, Germany. The composer writes: “In Dostoyevsky’s 1871 novel of the same name, the character Kirillov kills himself in order ‘to become God.” Inspired by the Russian Nihilist movement of the 1860s and specifically by the charismatic figure Nechayev, Dostoyevsky’s book is a study of the self-destructive forces present in the Russian society of his time. It foreshadows Lenin and the Revolution of 1917, as well as the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud, and had a deep influence on writers like Mann, whose Doctor Faustus is a similar study of modern Germany. “While it is futile to try to express musical ideas in words, it is possible to say that my piece is a meditation on similar trends in the world of today. “In early November 2016, I had the honor to assist at a spectacular performance of my composition Coming Together of 1972 at the San Francisco Conservatory, with Angela Davis as the speaking soloist, a few days before the presidential elections. There was a public discussion that followed. Davis seemed to know the results already. She said that if the Left had done its job, the present situation would not have arisen. “These and similar ideas were all going through my head as I was writing Demons a few months later. I am not religious, and don’t know much about devils and such, but as an artist I cannot help feeling sensitive to whatever it is that awakens these ideas in humans, causing them to go crazy. I am not sure that scientists or doctors understand these things any better than writers or musicians. Perhaps, on the contrary, although we cannot explain them in rational terms, we can nevertheless throw some light on them, in our own way. “My piece is in four movements, and so is a kind of sonata. . . . There are periodic references to two songs throughout the piece: “Iroes,” made popular in the 1990s by the singer Maria Dimitriadis, and a song that became known during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (notably as performed by Barbara Dane), “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which also provided the title for the recent book of Angela Davis. “Thanks to a new generation of classical musicians like Benjamin Beilman, there is a revival of interest among younger players in new music that in some way continues the classical tradition. One can only hope that this trend will continue. Although Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a ruthless system following its relentless course independently of human will continues to be valid, there are nonetheless reasons to think that alternatives are possible. As Mark Twain put it, prophecy is really hard, especially when it’s about the future.” © Jane Vial Jaffe *Commissioned by Music Accord for Benjamin Beilman. Comprised of top classical music presenting organizations throughout the United States, Music Accord is a consortium that commissions news works in the chamber music, instrumental recital, and song genres. The consortium’s goal is to create a significant number of new works and to ensure presentation of these works in venues throughout this country and, if the occasion arises, internationally. For more information, please go to www.musicaccord.org . Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 2, 2014 – Sharon Isbin, guitar ENRIQUE GRANADOS (1867–1916) Spanish Dance in E minor, Op. 37, no. 5 November 2, 2014 – Sharon Isbin, guitar Enrique Granados is known chiefly for his colorful Spanish Dances (1892–1911) and his Goyescas (1911), piano pieces inspired by the paintings and etchings of Goya. He achieved great fame as a pianist in his native Spain and in Paris, where he had studied for two years, but his intense dislike of travel limited his touring. Many of Granados’s activities centered around Barcelona, where he had received much of his early musical training. In 1901 he founded a school there—the Academia Granados. Tragically, travel was at the heart of his untimely death. In 1916 he had reluctantly made the sea voyage to attend the Metropolitan’s highly successful premiere of his opera Goyescas , and had postponed his voyage home in order to play for President Woodrow Wilson. Having missed his ship to Spain, he sailed instead to Liverpool where he boarded the Sussex for Dieppe. The Sussex was torpedoed by a German submarine and, though Granados was picked up by a lifeboat, he jumped into the water to save his wife; both were drowned. Granados had published his Spanish Dances in four sets of three beginning in 1892. They were greatly admired by Massenet, Cui, Saint-Saëns, and Grieg because of their new and distinctive expression of folk characteristics of many different regions of Spain. TheDances are often referred to by descriptive titles, only one of which—Villanesca (No. 4)—appeared in the original edition. Several of the Dances acquired titles when they were published separately during Granados’s lifetime. The famous No. 5 is often referred to as “Andaluza” as it represents that southern region of Spain. It follows a simple A-B-A form, with the interesting touch that the chordal “B” section is previewed toward the end of the “A” section. The strumming and picking effects that the piano imitated in the original, return to the instrument of their inspiration in the transcription by Miguel Llobet. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 4, 2018: Alessio Bax, piano MODEST MUSORGSKY (1839-1881) Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks November 4, 2018: Alessio Bax, piano Vladimir Stasov, who championed everything “progressive” and “truly Russian” in all forms of art, held gatherings of painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers at his home, and it was probably there in 1870 that Musorgsky met the lively architect, designer, and painter Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann. The great friendship that sprang up was cut short, however, when three years later Hartmann died suddenly of an aneurism. It was the grief-stricken Musorgsky who informed Stasov in Vienna by an almost incoherent letter that paraphrased King Lear: “What a terrible blow! ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,’—and creatures like Hartmann must die!” In Hartmann’s honor, Stasov organized a memorial exhibition for the spring of 1874 that featured not only watercolors and drawings, but architectural sketches and designs for jewelry, useful objects, stage sets, and costumes. The display inspired Musorgsky’s famous Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano piece that depicts ten works in the exhibition, with an eleventh recurring “picture,” Promenade, which portrays the composer himself walking through the gallery. Uncharacteristically enthusiastic about his progress, Musorgsky completed the entire composition in a single burst of twenty days. He dedicated the work to Stasov, who penned a preface to the original edition that describes the artworks that Musorgsky depicted—essential, since many of the items disappeared after the exhibition was dismantled. In its original piano version, Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition had been somewhat overlooked, but the work was immensely popularized by Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of 1922. That exposure rekindled interest in the piano original, which wonderfully documents Musorgsky’s belief in the elemental power of sheer inspiration, which for him took precedence over harmonic, structural, and pianistic convention. Today we hear the Ballet of Unhatched Chicks, which Stasov’s preface described as “Hartmann’s sketch of costumes for a picturesque scene in the ballet Trilby.” The exhibition catalog describes them as “canary chicks, enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor” with “heads put on like helmets.” Fortunately, this sketch still exists, but Musorgsky’s imagination led him further than costume sketches to depict a delightful pecking spree. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

ABOUT THE 2014-2015 SEASON 2014-2015 SEASON Artist Roster Parlance Program Notes LOCATION At West Side Presbyterian Church 6 South Monroe Street Ridgewood, NJ 07450 For map and directions, click here . CONCERT AMENITIES Whee lchair Accessible Fr e e Parking for all concerts

September 25, 2016: Jason Vieaux, guitar; Escher String Quartet LUIGI BOCCHERINI (1743-1805) Quintet in D for guitar and string September 25, 2016: Jason Vieaux, guitar; Escher String Quartet Boccherini achieved widespread recognition in his day both as a cellist and as an extremely prolific composer, primarily of chamber music. He wrote more than 100 string quintets, close to 100 string quartets, and some 150 other chamber works, including more than thirty cello sonatas. He became especially celebrated for his string quintets in the two-violin, viola, two-cello configuration, contributing more to the genre than any other composer in history. Many of them were written while he served as “virtuoso of the chamber and composer of music” at the Aranjuez court of the Infante Don Luis, younger brother of the king of Spain. The quintets were to be played by a court quartet made up of the Font family, father and three sons, plus Boccherini himself. The renown Boccherini enjoyed in his prime is attested to by the remarks of the typically cautious Charles Burney, famed eighteenth-century historian, who rated him “among the greatest masters who have ever written for the violin or violoncello,” placing him second only to Haydn. The taste for Boccherini’s elegant, galant style waned, however, and he died in Madrid in poverty. Many gaps exist in our knowledge of Boccherini’s life and works, made worse by the destruction of many of his manuscripts and his own thematic catalog in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a periodic resurgence of interest in his music: Gérard’s thematic catalog was published in 1969, and hence the “G.” in the listings of the composer’s works. A complete edition was begun in the 1970s, and a manuscript containing eighteen cello sonatas—three not known since Boccerini’s time—was discovered in 1982; yet most of his music awaits rediscovery. Boccherini mentioned in a letter to the publisher Pleyel in December 1798 that he had just completed six guitar quintets—guitar with string quartet—for the Marquis de Bénavent, for which the guitar-playing Marquis apparently paid the composer 100 francs apiece. These Quintets were most likely those that survive in a copy made in the 1820s by François de Fossa, a military man who was also a talented guitarist and composer. The present D major Quintet, which is fourth in that collection, is the only one of the six that also survives in another manuscript. It was published together with two other guitar quintets (different than those for the Marquis) in 1925 in Leipzig. The Marquis’s Quintets were not published until 1973, after the enterprising Ruggero Chiesa located them in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Following a common practice of the period, Boccherini adapted material from earlier sources to fulfill the Marquis’s commission. Thus he transcribed the Pastorale and the Allegro maestoso of the D major Guitar Quintet from the first two movements of a 1771 String Quintet in the same key (G. 270, op. 12, no. 6); the Grave assai and the colorful Fandango he borrowed from the opening of another D major String Quintet (G. 341, op. 50, no. 2), written in 1788. Together these movements make a stellar guitar quintet—the last movement, the Fandango, is perhaps even more fitting with guitar as one of the instruments rather than a second cello as in the original. The Pastorale is a lovely movement, with the sweetness of parallel thirds and the lilting rhythms in 6/8 meter that one would expect from the genre. Characteristic of all Boccherini’s guitar quintets, the guitar alternates between passages in which it takes a leading role and passages in which it accompanies the bowed strings. The cello is particularly featured in the Allegro maestoso, at the outset and later in its highest register, reminding us of Boccherini’s prowess as a cellist. The Grave assai serves as the slow introduction to the crowning Fandango, which begins softly enough, but erupts into a high-spirited affair. Boccherini even adds actual castanets to the accompaniment as in the folk-dance models of his adopted country of Spain. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

December 5, 2021: Paul Jacobs, organ JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 547 December 5, 2021: Paul Jacobs, organ Dating has proved extremely elusive for this remarkably masterful, surprisingly underperformed work. Scholars have proposed dates as early as c. 1719, which would mean post-Weimar (see note for BWV 532 for more about Weimar) when Bach was in Cöthen serving Prince Leopold as Kapellmeister, and as late as the 1740s in Leipzig (see note for Sinfonia from Cantata 29 for more about Leipzig), with some middle ground as “by 1725” (early Leipzig). The complexity of both movements and the parallels between them argue for Leipzig, but Bach’s mixture of originality, tradition, and scattered similarities to various works surely account for the differing opinions. Both the Prelude and the Fugue employ short pithy motives that give no hint of the spontaneous excursions that Bach spins out nor what scholar Peter Williams calls their “carefully planned finality.” Each of the first three bars of the Prelude offers a distinct shape that proves recognizable in many variations throughout. The leaping jagged middle idea provides the basis for the leaping pedal, which never takes up the other two shapes. Bach creates the finality that will have its parallel in the Fugue with dramatic chords and a final sustained low pedal note that all point to home. The Fugue subject also operates in one-bar segments, seemingly unfolding as a four-voice fugue with each manual responsible for two of the voices and a palpable absence of pedal. Unusual for Bach, he presents five slightly varied expositions with imaginative ways of linking them and the sheer number of times we hear the subject in myriad ways is stunning. Suddenly, two-thirds of the way into the fugue, the pedal thunders out in a fifth voice with the subject in longer note values (augmentation) while the other four voices perform miraculous strettos and inversions of the subject—pure contrapuntal wizardry. The coda takes place over the same low home pedal that Bach employed in the Prelude, now providing even grander finality by sustaining to the very end. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

March 29, 2015 – Matthew Polenzani, tenor; Ken Noda, piano SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981) Hermit Songs, Op. 29 March 29, 2015 – Matthew Polenzani, tenor; Ken Noda, piano Samuel Barber excelled in both singing and composition as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Upon graduation he worked briefly as a baritone for NBC on the Music Guild Series and was even hired for his own series of weekly song broadcasts in 1935. As a composer he was naturally drawn to vocal expression—two-thirds of his compositions consist of songs—but even his instrumental works are infused with a lyrical impulse. In November 1952, Barber was already a well-established composer and had just completed his lighthearted ballet Souvenirs, when another project seized his fancy, drawing on his love of Irish literature and poetry. He wrote to his uncle, composer Sidney Homer, who served as his mentor for much of his career: I have come across some poems of the 10th century, translated into Modern English by various people, and am making a song cycle of them, to be called, perhaps “Hermit Songs.” These were extraordinary men, monks or hermits or what not, and they wrote these little poems on the corners of MSS they were illuminating or just copying. I find them very direct, unspoiled, and often curiously contemporaneous in feeling. Barber himself was something of a hermit, often holing up to compose, so the idea of these ancient scholars scribbling in unguarded moments greatly appealed to him. He elaborated further in his printed preface: They are settings of anonymous Irish texts of the eighth to thirteenth centuries written by monks and scholars, often on the margins of manuscripts they were copying or illuminating—perhaps not always meant to be seen by their Father Superiors. They are small poems, thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in straightforward, droll, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life these men led, close to nature, to animals, and to God. Some are very literal translation, and others, where existing translation seemed inadequate, were especially made by W. H. Auden [“The Monk and his Cat” and “The Praises of God”] and Chester Kallman [“St. Ita’s Vision”]. Barber composed four of the Hermit Songs immediately and by mid-February had completed the other six. A year after he had begun, he received a commission for the cycle from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation—Mrs. Coolidge had been a great supporter of his work for thirty years. Barber’s search for the ideal singer to present the songs culminated with Leontyne Price, who had recently become known for her portrayal of Bess in Porgy and Bess but had yet to make her recital debut. Price, with Barber at the piano, gave the first performance at the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on Mrs. Coolidge’s eighty-ninth birthday, October 30, 1953. She presented them again with the composer in April in Rome at the Twentieth-Century Music Conference and in November at her New York recital debut—thus began a long and rewarding friendship. The ten songs vary considerably in length and mood according to their subjects, from the tender lullaby of “St. Ita’s Vision” to the bombast of “Sea-Snatch.” But they make a cohesive group based in part on ancient-sounding fourths and fifths and other shared motivic material (a descending whole tone followed by a descending fourth appears in eight of the songs). Whether fast or slow, jaunty or reflective, Barber’s style of declamation fits the text precisely because he allows unhampered metric flow by omitting time signatures altogether. Attested to by the frequency of their performance and by the remarkable number of studies devoted to both their textual and musical analysis, The Hermit Songs rank among the great songs cycles of the twentieth century. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

September 29, 2024: Edward Arron, Carter Brey, Rafael Figueroa, and Zvi Plesser, cellos Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Air from Orchestra Suite No. 3 in D arr. for four cellos September 29, 2024: Edward Arron, Carter Brey, Rafael Figueroa, and Zvi Plesser, cellos When music scholars began sifting through Bach’s long-forgotten works in the nineteenth century, they came across four orchestral masterpieces that they catalogued as “orchestral suites” because of their similarity to suites for keyboard or individual string instruments—and simply to avoid confusion. Bach, however, had called them “ouvertures” in the tradition of his German contemporaries, who used the term for an orchestral work consisting of an overture and several dance movements in the French style. Bach most likely wrote his Third Orchestral Suite around 1731 in Leipzig where he was music director at the University of Leipzig, director of the Collegium Musicum, Kantor of the Thomasschule, music overseer at four major churches, and composer of music for all these entities. Though he may have composed some of the orchestral suites earlier, the earliest existing copies date from Bach’s Leipzig days, so we can assume he performed all of them there with the Collegium Musicum. The Third Suite may be the most famous of the four on account of its sublime Air. One of the most popular and arranged pieces of all time, it achieved special notoriety through August Wilhelmj’s version for the violin G string (1871). This afternoon our four cellists play the arrangement by the Finckel Cello Quartet. The Air’s binary form—two halves, each repeated—and its “stepping” bass overlaid with a long, sustained melodic line are standard Baroque procedures, but its poignant effect transcends all formulas. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 20, 2024: Modigliani Quartet Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 67 October 20, 2024: Modigliani Quartet Brahms composed his third and last quartet, op. 67, in 1875 at Ziegelhausen, near Heidelberg, on one of his extended summer holidays. Completed and published the following year, it received its first public performance by the celebrated quartet led by his friend Joseph Joachim at the Berlin Singakademie on October 30, 1876. Brahms dedicated the work to his musical friend Professor Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann, a physiologist in Utrecht. The B-flat major Quartet differs greatly in character from its two preceding quartets, op. 51, nos. 1 and 2, both minor key works of a more serious nature. Brahms’s last quartet, a predominantly sunny work, may have served as a kind of release after the completion of his weighty First Symphony, and the piece abounds in unusual touches. The Vivace has a dance-like character more often reserved for last movements. The opening hunting call in 6/8 meter is frequently likened to Mozart’s Hunt Quartet (K. 458) but may also recall the Scherzo of Brahms’s own B-flat Sextet (op. 18). In the second theme area Brahms ingeniously juxtaposes and combines another dance type in 2/4 with the preceding 6/8 rhythms. The Andante contains another unusual rhythmic feature in its middle section: two bars of 5/4 interrupting the 4/4 meter reflect the improvisatory character of the phrase development. Another striking feature is the return of the opening theme, disguised in an elaborate variation on itself and beginning in the third-related “wrong” key of D major. The third movement shows the composer’s fondness for “scherzo alternatives,” since a scherzo would have seemed redundant after the first movement. Brahms’s innovative color scheme of unmuted viola in combination with the three other muted instruments has often been noted; equally memorable is the viola’s absence when the Trio (so marked) begins as a true trio of violins and cello, which then become the background for another viola melody. The finale, one of Brahms’s great achievements in variation form, provides the weight one might have expected from the opening movement. The crowning glory of the movement, and indeed of the work, is the recall of two themes from the first movement in the last two variations, not as mere cyclic reminiscence, but exhibiting their close ties with the variation theme itself. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 15, 2015 – Jeremy Denk, piano; Stefan Jackiw, violin JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, op. 100 November 15, 2015 – Jeremy Denk, piano; Stefan Jackiw, violin Brahms composed the A major Violin Sonata during the summer of 1886 in idyllic Hofstetten, Switzerland. That summer he eagerly anticipated the visit of Hermine Spies, the young contralto for whom he wrote many of his late songs. He noted that the Sonata’s second theme quotes one of the songs he wrote with her in mind, “Wie Melodien zieht es mir” (As if melodies were moving), op. 105, no. 1. Commentators have also linked “Komm bald” (Come soon), op. 97, no. 6, with this movement and found references in the finale to two other Opus 105 songs, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (My slumber grows more and more peaceful)—which climaxes with the words, “Komm’, O komme bald ”—and “Auf dem Kirchhofe” (In the churchyard). Brahms’s friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg was moved to characterize the entire A major Sonata as “a caress.” As was his custom, Brahms himself participated in the premiere of the Sonata on December 2, 1886, with violinist Joseph Hellmesberger, leader of the Hellmesberger Quartet and enthusiastic supporter of the composer. The performance occurred a little over a week after Brahms had accompanied Hermine in her Viennese debut recital. The first movement breathes the kind of lyricism associated with Brahms’s songs whether or not one hears the specific allusions. It is the second theme in this sonata form that recalls his lovely “Wie Melodien,” borrowing the first phrase only, which Brahms varies rhythmically and gives a new continuation. The tune reappears in the recapitulation and furnishes the violin’s last utterance to close the coda. The second movement combines a slow movement and scherzo in alternating sections, in a manner similar to the middle movement of the F major Quintet. Each returning section brings a subtle variation of its former appearance. Brahms marked the finale “Allegretto grazioso quasi Andante” in order to achieve a non-hurried, graceful atmosphere. The climactic phrase “Come, o come soon” (from “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer”) can be detected in the rondo theme. The first contrasting episode introduces a haze of arpeggiated chords rather than a “tune” before the rondo refrain returns, but the second episode sounds more traditionally songful. A variation of the first theme returns in the coda, extended by warm double stops in the home key. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 15, 2023: Lysander Piano Trio Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) Andante con moto for piano trio October 15, 2023: Lysander Piano Trio By 1878, when Grieg set out to write a piano trio, he had earned recognition as Norway’s foremost composer. He had made important connections in Germany through his studies in Leipzig and had won renown in Copenhagen as well as in his native Bergen, but it was not without great effort. Influenced by violinist Ole Bull, Grieg had begun incorporating Norwegian folk idioms into his compositions, but he struggled to meet expectations in the larger forms of the chamber music medium because of his natural inclination to short, self-contained, lyrical melodies. Grieg had just completed his G minor String Quartet in the summer of 1878, which he said “is not intended to bring trivialities to market. It strives towards breadth, soaring flight and above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written. I needed to do this as a study. Now I shall tackle another piece of chamber music; I think in that way I shall find myself again.” Yet he composed only one movement of the projected piano trio, the Andante con moto in C minor. He made notes on the manuscript suggesting he might revise it, but he never returned to it nor did he write any other piano trio. After Grieg’s death, his friend, Leipzig-born Dutch pianist and composer Julius Röntgen (who also played a role in this afternoon’s second work), unearthed the Andante con moto and wrote to Grieg’s widow, Nina Hagerup Grieg, saying, “It is a beautiful piece and completely in order. . . . What a solemnity it conveys! How he can’t get enough of that single theme, that even in the major mode retains its mourning character, and then develops so beautifully its full power. . . . The piece can very well stand by itself and does not at all give the impression of being a fragment, as it constitutes a perfect entity in itself.” The piece was not published, however, until 1978 in the Grieg Critical Edition. Grieg’s monothematic movement is so striking because of how often Grieg showcases his theme in octave unison, first presented by the piano after a hushed introduction of string chords. Whereas the major-mode section offers contrast—and one might consider it considerably less “mournful” than Röntgen suggested—there is no doubt about the overall dark intensity of the piece, which rises to a dramatic climax before ebbing quietly. Return to Parlance Program Notes