January 14, 2024: Goldmund Quartet ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856) String Quartet No. 3 in A, Op. 41/3 January 14, 2024: Goldmund Quartet In reviewing a prizewinning quartet by Julius Schapler in 1842, Schumann observed that “the quartet has come to a standstill. Who does not know the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and who would wish to say anything against them? . . . the later generation, after all this time, has not been able to produce anything comparable. [Georges] Onslow alone met with success, and later Mendelssohn.” The canonization of the quartets of the great Classical masters left the composers of Schumann’s age feeling inadequate. Schumann and Brahms were each to publish three string quartets but only after suppressing several earlier ventures in the genre. Schumann apparently began one quartet in 1838 and three more the following year; none of these survives, unless certain ideas from them reappeared in the Opus 41 quartets of 1842. Schumann’s method of approaching the level of the Classical masters was to study their quartets intensely, as recorded in his household diary in the spring of 1842. The diary also reveals his depressed mood at the time, associated with his wife Clara’s extended concert tour; he mentions drinking too much and his inability to compose. Suddenly, however, his creative powers took over with such force that five shorts weeks after beginning the first of the Opus 41 quartets on June 4, all three were completed. He announced them to his wife Clara as “three children, barely born, and already completed and beautiful,” and arranged for a private performance of all three for Clara’s twenty-third birthday on September 13. The individuality of these quartets is remarkable in light of their having been composed one on top of the other. The Third Quartet takes up the key in which the First Quartet ended. The descending interval of a fifth that opens the A major Quartet’s brief slow introduction is often associated with Clara, but also may owe something to the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 31, no. 3. The falling fifth also introduces the main theme of the Allegro molto moderato and makes an appearance in the second theme. This interval (or its inversion as a rising fourth) assumes a prominent role throughout the work. The F-sharp minor second movement, instead of a scherzo, takes the form of a theme and variations, though the theme is not revealed until after three variations. The theme when finally presented, appears as a canon between the first violin and the viola, at a slower tempo. This and other contrapuntal sections in the Opus 41 Quartets reflect Schumann’s self-prescribed study of fugal techniques during the gloomy period of Clara’s absence. The passionate slow movement gives off a restless quality owing to its frequent changes of key. The dotted rhythm so prominent in the second violin part is then featured in the last movement. Schumann’s inspired finale combines the form of a rondo with that of a scherzo and trio, and includes certain elements of sonata form. Its scherzo-like features are welcome as Schumann had earlier used a theme and variation movement instead of a scherzo. The movement particularly contrasts the two keys of A major and F major, again taking up the discussion of these two keys that concerns the entire Opus 41 “cycle.” The key of A major is positively affirmed in a brilliant coda. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

ABOUT THE 2008-2009 SEASON 2008-2009 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

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2019 AT 3 PM QUARTETTO DI CREMONA AN ITALIAN JOURNEY BUY TICKETS QUARTETTO DI CREMONA “It’s a rare blend: breadth of sound and capriciousness combined with perfect tuning and ensemble has the players sounding absolutely of one voice… Nothing less than life-affirming.” — Grammophone FEATURING ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE BUY TICKETS The inaugural concert of the 2019 – 2020 season will showcase one of the most exciting chamber ensembles on the international stage. The Quartetto di Cremona received the 2019 Franco Buitoni Award in recognition of their exceptional contribution to promoting Italian chamber music throughout the world. Their musical journey will feature string quartets by four of Italy’s greatest composers. PROGRAM Luigi Boccherini Quartet in C, Op. 2, No. 6 Program Notes Giuseppe Verdi Quartet in E minor Program Notes Giacomo Puccini Crisantemi Program Notes Ottorino Respighi Quartet in D Program Notes Watch the Quartetto Di Cremona perform the first movement of Giuseppe Verdi’s Quartet in E minor:

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SOOHONG PARK, PIANO Pianist Soohong Park's artistry has resonated internationally, with regular performances in Germany and the UK, including celebrated appearances at Carnegie Hall in New York and the renowned Barbican Hall in London as part of the Guildhall Artists Ensemble under the tutelage of Ronan O'Hora from Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He further enriched his musical experience by participating in the IMS Prussia Cove in the UK in 2018 and reaching the finals of the prestigious Tongyeong Isang Yoon International Music Competition in 2019. His talents were further recognised when he won the Guildhall Gold Medal in 2020. In this season, he has made his debut at Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid and at Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona as a collaborative pianist. Pianist Soohong Park also explores the realm of composition. His composition, inspired by the remarkable female divers of Jeju Island garnered him the grand prize from the Jeju World Cultural Preservation Society in 2020.

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

BENJAMIN LUXON, ACTOR-NARRATOR Benjamin Luxon studied with Walther Gruner at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (while working part-time as a PE teacher in the East End) and established an international reputation as a singer at the age of 21 when he won the third prize at the 1961 ARD International Music Competition in Munich. Soon afterward he joined composer Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group. On their tour of the Soviet Union in 1963, he sang the roles of Sid and Tarquinius in Britten’s operas Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia , respectively. In 1971, Britten composed the title role of his television opera Owen Wingrave specifically for Luxon’s voice; Luxon created the role later that year with the English Opera Group. The following year, 1972, Luxon made his début at both the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden – creating the role of the Jester in Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera Taverner – and at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, where he sang the title role in Raymond Leppard’s realization of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Thereafter he became a frequent guest at both venues and also at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, USA. In 1974, Luxon began his long association with the English National Opera, which culminated in his appearance in the title role of Verdi’s Falstaff in 1992. He made his Metropolitan Opera début (as Eugene Onegin) in 1980, his La Scala début in 1986, and his Los Angeles début (as Wozzeck) in 1988. He sang in most of the major European opera houses and made frequent appearances in Munich (Bayerische Staatsoper) and Vienna (Wiener Staatsoper). In addition to his opera work, Luxon also developed a reputation as a concert-giver and recitalist with an unusually broad repertoire, ranging from early music through Lieder to contemporary song, music hall and folk music. He has also been recognised for his work rehabilitating parlour songs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly in partnership with Robert Tear. He made several appearances on BBC TV’s long-running Music Hall Variety show, The Good Old Days, both with Robert Tear and on his own. His rendition of the song ‘Give Me a ticket to Heaven’ always met with tremendous acclaim. It was the song for which the BBC received the largest feedback of any featured on the programme. Luxon has made more than one hundred recordings, many featuring early and mid twentieth-century British songwriting and folksong arrangements by composers such as Britten, George Butterworth, Percy Grainger, Ivor Gurney, Roger Quilter, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and Peter Warlock. His regular accompanist between 1961 and 1999 was the pianist David Willison. As a guest on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program, he said that his favourite piece of music is Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium. Luxon was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1986 Queen’s Birthday Honours.[1] Starting around 1990, Luxon began to be troubled by hearing loss. Though he explored a variety of conventional and ‘alternative’ treatments, continued fluctuation and deterioration in his hearing forced him to end his singing career by the end of the decade. Since then, however, Luxon has developed a career as a narrator and poetry reader, whilst continuing to give master classes and direct opera. He lives in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts in the U.S.

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January 19, 2020: Paul Lewis, piano LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Fantasia in G minor, Op. 77 January 19, 2020: Paul Lewis, piano Beethoven was miserable during the summer of 1809 owing to Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Vienna. The composer wrote of this time: We have passed through a great deal of misery. . . . Since May 4th, I have brought into the world little that is connected; only here and there a fragment. The whole course of events has affected me body and soul. . . . What a disturbing, wild life around me; nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts. The noise and confusion was especially hard to bear because the court and most of his friends had fled the city, communication was disrupted, and he was unable to spend his customary sojourn in the countryside where his creativity was always rejuvenated. Despite his mood and intermittent inability to write anything “connected,” he composed an impressive number of works during the invasion year: the Fifth Piano Concerto, the Harp Quartet, three piano sonatas (opp. 78, 79, and 81a), several lieder, and a number of miscellaneous pieces, among them the present Fantasia, op. 77. Though Beethoven may have begun writing down the Fantasia during this trying time, he may have actually conceived it in December 1808 for the same concert on which he premiered his Choral Fantasy , which begins with a grand piano introduction in improvisatory style. The solo “Fantasia” that he extemporized on that concert might well have been some form of the present work. In any case, he completed the Fantasia in October, after the armistice was signed and presumably during or following a stay in Hungary with his good friends the Brunsviks—Count Franz, who received the dedication, and his sister Therese. Billed in G minor, the remarkably free-ranging Fantasia touches on that key—never to return—with a cascading scale figure and somber chordal phrase. Repeating the gestures in an unrelated key, Beethoven moves on through a kaleidoscopic array of keys and thematic gestures, eventually settling sweetly in the distant key of B major. He then proposes a simple eight-measure theme in that key and treats it to seven variations before a broad coda reintroduces harmonic uncertainty—even a sweet variant of the theme in C major! The boisterous cascade and subdued chordal gesture of the opening return to settle his main B major key once and for all, to which he adds a comical sign-off. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 20, 2022: Steven Banks, Saxophonist-Composer Xak Bjerken, Piano, Principal Strings of The Met Orchestra WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Quartet for oboe (soprano saxophone) and strings, K. 370 November 20, 2022: Steven Banks, Saxophonist-Composer Xak Bjerken, Piano, Principal Strings of The Met Orchestra Mozart was entranced by what he called the “delightfully pure tone” of oboist Friedrich Ramm when they met in Mannheim in 1777. Ramm, who was thirty-three at the time, had served as principal oboe of the Mannheim Court Orchestra since he was nineteen, having joined the orchestra at the age of fourteen! Mozart presented him with a copy of his Oboe Concerto (written for Giuseppe Ferlendis in Salzburg), with which Ramm soon created a sensation. The following year in Paris, Ramm enthusiastically anticipated playing one of the four solo wind parts in Mozart’s newly composed Sinfonia concertante (now lost in its original form). Mozart reported that he “flew into a rage” when he learned its performance had been blocked by the director of the Concert Spirituel, Joseph Legros, owing to the machinations of rival composer Giuseppe Cambini. In the winter of 1780–81, Mozart met up with his friend Ramm again in Munich, where the composer was presenting his opera Idomeneo and where the oboist had moved with the court orchestra when Karl Theodor became Elector of Bavaria. There in the first months of 1781 Mozart wrote his Oboe Quartet for Ramm, thereby adding a priceless gem to the chamber music literature. In this performance, the soprano saxophone (henceforth referred to as “soloist”) takes the oboe part, presenting most of the work’s enchanting melodies and offering brilliant displays of virtuosity, particularly in the finale. Mozart even offers the wind player a chance for a cadenza in the slow movement. Lest this soloistic treatment and the three- rather than four-movement structure suggest a concerto, it should be said that the Quartet still engages the listener in the more intimate discourse of chamber music. Particularly alluring are the interchanges between the soloist and the violin, as in the first movement when Mozart’s “second theme” consists of the violin now rendering the opening theme while the soloist joins in with a soaring countermelody. The slow movement must have displayed Ramm’s singing tone admirably—and now does the same for that of Steven Banks. Indeed, Mozart treats the melody much like that of an aria, exhibiting not only the soloist’s ability to sustain a long line but to negotiate wide leaps such as he often required of his singers. The soloist dominates again in the Rondeau (Mozart employed the French spelling), presenting all three occurrences of the jolly refrain. The second contrasting episode contains an extremely unusual device for Mozart: the soloist switches to duple meter while the violin, viola, and cello carry on merrily in the prevailing triple meter, creating a delightful if brief tension. Passages of rapid figuration and further wide leaps test the soloist’s agility, and several times Mozart’s writing ascends to lofty heights—as at the piece’s conclusion—again demonstrating his full confidence in the artistry of his friend. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes