KARI DOCTER, CELLO Kari Jane Docter, cello, is a native of Minneapolis, MN. She was a student of Eleonore Schoenfeld at the University of Southern California, and graduated magna cum lauda from Rice University, where she studied with Norman Fischer. Upon graduation from Juilliard, as a masters’ student of Joel Krosnick, Kari entered the professional orchestra scene, which took her from the New World Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Utah Symphony, to the Minnesota Orchestra, where she played two seasons. In the fall of 2002, she joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. A lover of chamber music, Kari has been heard at such prestigious music festivals as Marlboro, Tanglewood, and the Grand Teton Music Festival, as well as on the smaller stages of Carnegie Hall with the MET Chamber Ensemble. She can be seen on Wynton Marsalis’ PBS series, “Marsalis on Music” performing with Yo-Yo Ma.

February 8, 2015 – David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119 (1949) February 8, 2015 – David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano In 1936, after nearly fifteen years spent living in Paris and traveling worldwide, Sergey Prokofiev, admittedly “patriotic and homesick” and longing to “see the real winter again and hear the Russian language in my ears,” moved back to the Soviet Union with his non-Russian wife and two sons. Relocating during one of the most savage political and social periods in Russian history, Prokofiev was set on establishing himself as one of Russia’s greatest composers. Rachmaninov had his hold on America, Stravinsky claimed Europe, and Shostakovich had just been censored by Stalin. Prokofiev kept his passport to tour without having to petition, but upon routine inspection it was confiscated without return, grounding Prokofiev in Moscow for the remainder of his life. The late 1930s saw very few public debuts of Prokofiev’s works, save the Cello Concerto op. 58 (1938) and Romeo and Juliet (1936), both met with negative criticism. In the years following World War II, seeking to recover the Soviet “socialist realism” ideal of art, Andrey Zhdanov, the leading Soviet cultural policy maker, passed a series of resolutions affecting literature, art, film, and finally, in 1948, music. This decree stunted artistic growth in the Soviet Union until Stalin’s death, lasting out the remaining years of Prokofiev’s life. The elderly composer grew ill and deeply insecure. Much of his work had been banned from public performance, and though still composing, he hardly was living the pampered lifestyle he had anticipated returning to Russia. Prokofiev’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, remarkably, was permitted by the Committee of Artistic Affairs to receive a public premiere. It was debuted in 1950 by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatsoslav Richter, with the first movement bearing the quote, “Mankind–that has a proud sound.” Despite the sheer horror that besieged Prokofiev at the time of the work’s composition, the work remains remarkably expressive. The first movement, marked Andante grave, opens with a resounding call by the cello, followed by a short call-and-response folk melody between the cello and piano. A throbbing interlude brings the main theme, a cheery and flippant duet. The movement slows as the cello rings out a beautiful harmonic cadence, and the second theme enters much more heavily mechanically than the first. The second movement, a playful Scherzo and Trio, follows suit. A percussive pizzicato entrance transmutes to a complacent romantic trio section. The final Allegro ma non tanto remains timid, with melodies and chordal structure based heavily on Russian folk music. The movement lacks not energy nor drive, yet each climax, rather than developing in timbre and expressive nature, actually becomes more simplistic; sometimes diminishing down to a single note piano melody. The coda recounts the opening resonant notes of the cello in a grand duet statement, marking a turbulent and virtuosic conclusion. ©2013 Andrew Goldstein Return to Parlance Program Notes

SUNDAY, MARCH 10, 2024 AT 4 PM GOODE PLAYS BEETHOVEN RICHARD GOODE, PIANO “Every time we hear him, he impresses us as better than we remembered, surprising us, surpassing our expectations and communicating perceptions that stay in the mind.” — Gramophone ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE BUY TICKETS Hailed for music-making of tremendous emotional power, depth and expressiveness, Richard Goode is one of today's most revered artists, drawing capacity audiences and raves the world over. The New York Times, in reviewing his Carnegie Hall performance praised his “majestic, profound readings... Mr. Goode’s playing throughout was organic and inspired, the noble, introspective themes unfolding with a simplicity that rendered them all the more moving.” Widely acknowledged as one of today’s premier Beethoven interpreters, Richard Goode will perform late works including Six Bagatelles from Op. 119, Sonata No. 30 in E, Op. 109, and the monumental “Diabelli Variations ,” Op. 120, widely considered one of the greatest sets of variations ever composed. 2023-2024 SEASON October 15, 202 3 Lysander Piano Trio November 12, 2023 Angel Blue, soprano Bryan Wagorn, piano December 3, 2023 Brentano String Quartet Antioch Chamber Choir January 14, 2024 Goldmund String Quartet February 18, 2024 Candlelit Music of The Spirit March 10, 2024 Richard Goode, Piano Late Beethoven April 7, 2024 Jordi Savall, Conductor Hespèrion XXI May 12, 2024 Mothers Day Concert June 2, 2024 Mozart’s Double Concertos 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 FEATURING BUY TICKETS Richard Goode , piano PROGRAM Beethoven Program Notes Six Bagatelles from Op. 119 Beethoven Program Notes Sonata No. 30 in E, Op. 109 Beethoven The Diabelli Variations, Op. 120 Program Notes Watch Richard Goode perform the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110:

September 29, 2024: Edward Arron, Carter Brey, Rafael Figueroa, and Zvi Plesser, cellos Georg Goltermann (1824-1898) Serenade Op. 119, No. 2 for four cellos September 29, 2024: Edward Arron, Carter Brey, Rafael Figueroa, and Zvi Plesser, cellos Following cello studies in Hanover with August Christian Prell (student of Romberg), Georg Goltermann studied in Munich with Joseph Menter and soon embarked on a short career as a touring virtuoso. Having also studied composition with Ignaz Lachner, Goltermann began receiving recognition for his compositions such as his Symphony in A and his First Cello Concerto. He stopped touring in 1852 to become music director in Würzburg, but he left just one year later for Frankfurt where he served briefly as assistant music director before rising to principal music director in 1874. Goltermann’s prolific body of work went on to include further orchestral pieces, seven more cello concertos, myriad songs—many with cello and piano accompaniment—and dozens of character pieces for cello and piano. He is best remembered for his cello concertos (No. 4 in particular), which continue to be valued as effective teaching tools, and—owing to the huge popularity of ensemble music for multiple cellos—his Deux morceaux (Romance and Serenade) for four cellos, op. 119. The work was first published in 1895 and dedicated to cellist Ferdinand Forino, professor at the newly founded Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. Of the two lush, lyrical pieces—Romance and Serenade—we hear the second, a luxurious A-B-A form in which the contrasting center section explores some colorful harmonic inflections before settling back into the opening music. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 19, 2017: Los Angeles Guitar Quartet MUSIC FROM THE TIME OF CERVANTES, ARRANGED FOR FOUR GUITARS Music from the Time of Cervantes (arr. W. Kanengiser) November 19, 2017: Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Jácaras – Anonymous (17th century) El Villano – Antonio Martín y Coll Diferéncias Sobre Las Folias – Antonio Martín y Coll Chacona (“La Vida Bona”) – Juan Arañéz Oy Comamos – Juan de Encina In March 2009, LAGQ debuted the theatrical production “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote” with British actor/comedian John Cleese. Interweaving tales from the classic novel with arrangements of pieces that Cervantes could have heard in his lifetime, it melded music and storytelling. Tonight’s recital includes selections from this production. Jácaras is an anonymous canción (“No hay que decir primor”) from the 17th century. With raucous strumming and castanets imitating horses’ hooves, it accompanies Don Quixote’s departure from his farm to become an adventuring knight. El Villano (“The Rustic”) is a country dance from the anthology “Flores de Música” collected by Antonio Martín y Coll. It introduces Sancho Panza, Quixote’s trusty squire. Diferéncias Sobre Las Folias is a set of variations contrasting on the famous harmonic progression, Folias de Espana. It tells of the famous argument between knight and squire, and of their reconciliation. Chacona (“La Vida Bona”), from the Libro Segunda de Tonos y Villancicos (1624) by Juan Arañes, is one of the most celebrated early examples of the form. The chacona, which by Bach’s time had become one of the most noble and profound of all dance forms, was a suggestive and prohibited danza in 1500s Spain, almost their version of our macarena. It features the lines, “here’s to the good life, good little life: let’s do the Chacona”). Oy comamos y bebamos is a four-voice villancico from the Cancionero Palacio, written by Juan de Encina. The opening stanza is “Hoy comamos y bebamos, y cantemos y holguemos, que mañana ayunaremos” (Today we eat and drink, and sing and make merry, for tomorrow we must fast”). It serves as a fitting epilogue for Don Quixote’s quixotic character. Return to Parlance Program Notes

April 13, 2025; Quartetto Di Cremona Claude Debussy (1862-1918) String Quartet April 13, 2025; Quartetto Di Cremona Debussy composed his only String Quartet in 1893 amid work on his orchestral Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune . The chamber work marks the transition between Debussy’s youthful and mature styles—bridging the academic world of his Paris Conservatory training with the dreamy, coloristic world of the Faune . In a larger sense it both glances back to the nineteenth-century heritage of Wagner and Franck and looks to the future with original and imaginative ideas that would influence the course of music. The Quartet is Debussy’s only work that bears an opus number and names a key, as if he were thinking of the weighty history of the genre. The work’s tonal center may be G, but “minor” tells little about Debussy’s harmonic scheme. The first movement relies heavily upon the centuries-old Phrygian mode on G and on D. The second movement alternates and combines G major pizzicato chords with an accelerated and chromatically altered version of the first movement’s opening motive, further blurring distinctions between major and minor. The slow movement, placed third in the order of movements, centers around D-flat, the remotest possible key from “home.” Completed in February 1893, the Quartet was premiered December 29 by the Ysaÿe Quartet on a concert that brought Debussy’s music to the notice of many for the first time. Critics initially seemed somewhat baffled—some were uncomfortable with the Quartet’s original ideas, others felt the allure of its new sounds and suspected their importance for the future. The Quartet exhibits a certain cyclicism or the reuse of themes across movements—not as distinctly unmistakable entities in the manner of his conservatory teacher Franck but as alterations of previous ideas. This creation of new possibilities contributes to the music’s fluid quality. Variants of the first movement’s main theme appear throughout the Quartet, some more obviously related than others. Debussy relied more on the motive’s rhythmic characteristics and general contours than on its harmonic scheme and exact melodic details. In the scherzo, the texture and timbre immediately strike the ear even as the thematic ideas clearly derive from the first movement’s main motive, beginning with the viola’s quickened and obsessively repeated version. The murmuring accompaniment in the next section, over which the first violin plays an elongated version of the motive, provide a coloristic effect that Debussy was to employ frequently, particularly in his orchestral works. The often noted Russian character of the slow movement probably has its roots in Debussy’s sojourn in Russia as part of a piano trio employed by Madame Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s patroness. Whereas the movement indulges in a kind of Romantic-period expression, it also foreshadows the new style of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune . The finale bridges the preceding movement by opening in the same remote key and quiet mood. Recitative-like musings from cello and first violin alternate with all four parts echoing chromatic and rhythmic variants of the main motive. The bridging continues in an animated passage that harks back to the textures and rhythms of the scherzo. Debussy then launches the finale proper with an agitated theme above shifting open-fifth chords. He recalls passages of all the movements, but in altered form so they seem to evolve rather than reprise. Tempo and textural changes abound, which apparently unsettled some of the early critics. The final exciting coda offers yet another look at the germinal motive. Debussy optimistically called the work “Premier quatuor ” as if he expected more to follow. He began a second quartet the following year, primarily to please his friend, composer Ernest Chausson, who had been surprisingly disappointed with the “First.” The two had a falling out, however, and Debussy never returned to the project. The Premier quatuor also contributed to the professional animosity between Debussy and Ravel. When Ravel’s Quartet in F appeared in 1902, the parallels with Debussy’s work were obvious—such as the shadowy accompanimental sixteenth-note figures in the first movement and the pizzicatos in the scherzo—igniting a firestorm in the press about the quartets’ rival virtues. Debussy is said to have written to the younger, harassed composer urging him not to change a note of his work, but this letter has never come to light. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

September 29, 2024: Zvi Plesser, cello; Jeewon Park, piano Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Andante from Sonata in G minor, Op. 19 for cello and piano September 29, 2024: Zvi Plesser, cello; Jeewon Park, piano Rachmaninoff had sunk into a depression after the failure of his First Symphony in 1897, and it took the hypnotic treatment—or the sympathetic conversations—with Dr. Nicolai Dahl to bring him out of it. The spectacular result of his “cure,” for which the composer remained eternally grateful to Dr. Dahl, was his famous Second Piano Concerto in 1900, followed by the Cello Sonata in 1901. Rachmaninoff wrote the Sonata for cellist Anatoly Brandukov, with whom he gave the first performance in Moscow on December 2, 1901. Though much of the piece had been composed that summer, Rachmaninoff dated the manuscript December 12, 1901, after the premiere, indicating that he had some second thoughts that he incorporated in the final version. With its sweeping passion and melodic appeal, much in the same vein as the Second Piano Concerto, the Cello Sonata has enjoyed immense popularity. Its virtuoso piano part makes it an especially attractive vehicle for the pianist, but cellists, too, revel in its luxurious melodies. Regrettably it was Rachmaninoff’s last piece of chamber music. The slow movement basks in Rachmaninoff’s rich, songful style, initiated by the piano. The central section in the minor mode comes to a dramatic climax before the varied return of the main theme. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 4, 2015 – Richard Goode, piano JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Sechs Klavierstücke (Six Piano Pieces), op. 118 October 4, 2015 – Richard Goode, piano In the four sets of piano pieces that appeared in 1892–93, opp. 116–119, Brahms took up the writing of “miniatures” that he had begun with the Ballades, op. 10, and the Piano Pieces, op. 76. The later pieces, particularly the intermezzos, which make up fourteen of the twenty pieces in these four sets, tend generally toward the introspective, though flashes of youthful exuberance flare up occasionally—in the outer sections of both the Ballade, op. 118, no. 3, and the Capriccio, op. 116, no. 7, for example. No precise chronology can be determined for these pieces, yet the structural economy and tendency toward harmonic and textural “impressionism” all point to Brahms’s late style. Four of the six pieces in Opus 118 are labeled “intermezzo,” Brahms’s nonspecific designation that covers a fairly wide range, from the opening passionate, stormy Intermezzo (op. 118, no. 1) to the desolate, haunting tone picture of the last (no. 6). The first of these, laid out in two sections, each repeated, presents a recurring feature in Brahms’s works, namely a descending melodic shape. Many have associated the descending line, which recurs particularly in the late works, with resignation on the part of the composer. The closing Intermezzo in E-flat minor casts its tragic spell from the opening single-voice theme, fashioned from only three neighboring pitches. Its inward aspect gives no hint of the intensity of the climax in the middle section. Similar in nature to the “cradle-song” intermezzos, op. 117, the serene, beautiful A major Intermezzo (no. 2), lies within the grasp of good amateur players, and hence is one of the best known of these pieces. Its more restless middle section, full of Brahms’s beloved three-against two rhythms, contains several well-integrated contrapuntal devices. Imitation between the two hands is also important in the quietly agitated F minor Intermezzo (no. 4), both in the opening section and in the chordal textures of the middle section. The G minor Ballade (no. 3) provides contrast to all the other pieces in the set with its bold and lively spirit. One of its playful aspects is the brief recall of the opening theme in the “wrong” key (D-sharp minor) in the middle of the central section. The fifth piece, which Brahms labeled “Romanze,” again suggests a cradle song with its melodic directness and rocking chordal accompaniment; the impression continues in the middle section with its melodic decorations over a rocking repeated pattern in the bass. Brahms’s masterful variation techniques are apparent not only here, but in the elaborations of the basic material in the outer sections. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

DAVID GOULD, BASSET HORN David Gould is the bass clarinetist with the American Ballet Theatre Orchestra in New York City. He has performed with The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, National Symphony, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, L’Orchestre National de France, and Philadelphia Orchestra. Gould has given master classes, concerts, and lectures at many prestigious schools such as the Boston Conservatory, Colburn School, Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, and the University of Michigan. He has edited and corrected etudes by Alessio, Labanchi, and Stark and pieces by Paul Jeanjean and Rene de Boisdeffre for International Music Diffusion (IMD). He has recorded for Naxos, Mode Records, and MSR Classics. David Gould is a graduate of the Juilliard School and was awarded the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship, to study music in France. He is a unanimous first prize winner from the Conservatoire National de Region de Versailles in France. He studied with Michel Arrignon, Philippe Cuper, Stanley Drucker, Jacques Lancelot, and David Weber. David Gould is a performing artist and clinician for Buffet Crampon and Vandoren Paris.

THE CALIDORE STRING QUARTET The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct” and by the Los Angeles Times for its balance of “intellect and expression.” After their Kennedy Center debut the Washington Post proclaimed that “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one…The grateful audience left enriched and, I suspect, a little more human than it arrived.” The Calidore String Quartet has enjoyed an impressive number of accolades, including their most recent award of the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. The Calidore made international headlines as the winner of the $100,000 Grand-Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition, the largest prize for chamber music in the world. Also in 2016, the quartet became the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and was named BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, an honor that brings with it recordings, international radio broadcasts and appearances in Britain’s most prominent venues and festivals. Formed in 2010 at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, the quartet has also received top prizes in the ARD Munich, Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake and Hamburg competitions. The Calidore String Quartet regularly performs in prestigious venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia such as Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, Berlin Konzerthaus, Brussels BOZAR, Cologne Philharmonie, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Hall and at many significant festivals, including the BBC Proms, Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, Music@Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The Calidore have given world-premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Hannah Lash and Benjamin Dean Taylor. The Calidore has collaborated with many esteemed artists and ensembles, including Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Joshua Bell, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan, Paul Coletti, David Finckel, Wu Han, Paul Neubauer, Ronald Leonard, Paul Watkins, and the Emerson and Ebéne Quartets, among others. The Calidore has studied closely with such luminaries as the Emerson Quartet, David Finckel, Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, Günther Pichler, Guillaume Sutre, Paul Coletti, Ronald Leonard and the Quatuor Ebène. The Calidore String Quartet’s debut album for Signum Records, including quartets by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janáček and Golijov, will be released in October 2018. The Calidore String Quartet’s other three commercial recordings include quartets by Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, recorded live in concert at the 2016 Music@Menlo Festival; Serenade: Music from the Great War, featuring music for String Quartet by Hindemith, Milhaud and Stravinsky, Ernst Toch and Jacques de la Presle on the French label Editions Hortus; and the quartet’s February 2015 debut recording of quartets by Mendelssohn and Haydn for which Gramophone dubbed the Calidore String Quartet “the epitome of confidence and finesse.” The Calidore were featured as Young Artists-in-Residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today and their performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Korean Broadcasting Corporation, Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Hamburg), and were featured on German national television as part of a documentary produced by ARD public broadcasting. As a passionate supporter of music education, the Calidore String Quartet is committed to mentoring and educating young musicians, students and audiences. The Calidore serves as visiting guest artists at the University of Delaware School of Music and has conducted master classes and residencies at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Stony Brook University and UCLA. Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.”

March 29, 2015 – Matthew Polenzani, tenor; Ken Noda, piano LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Adelaide, Op. 46 March 29, 2015 – Matthew Polenzani, tenor; Ken Noda, piano Having moved from Bonn in 1792, Beethoven, in his twenties, was in the process of making a name for himself as a composer and pianist in Vienna. Greatly enamored of Friedrich von Matthison’s poetry, he was especially captivated by Adelaide, which must have resonated with his own yearnings for romantic involvement with women who proved unattainable. In fact, he may have conceived his “cantata,” as he called it, for the beautiful singer Magdalena Willmann—a Bonn acquaintance who arrived in Vienna in 1794 and to whom he proposed unsuccessfully. Making many sketches, Beethoven set the poem in 1794–95 in a style that shows an Italianate-Romantic fervor, but also possibly the Classic influence of “O Tuneful Voice” by Haydn, with whom he had just been studying. Marriage proposal aside, Willman did give the first performance on April 7, 1797, and Beethoven published the song that year with a dedication to Matthison—unbeknownst to the poet. Three years later Beethoven wrote humbly to Matthison saying, “I cannot explain why I dedicated a work to you which came directly from my heart, but never acquainted you with its existence,” except that “at first I did not know where you lived” (a flimsy excuse), and also “from diffidence” (likely), and that even now he was sending the song “with a feeling of timidity.” As it turned out, Matthison greatly appreciated the song, as we know from his introduction to an 1825 edition of his collected poems: “Several composers have animated this little lyric fantasy through music; none of them, however, according to my deepest conviction, cast the text into deeper shade with his melody than the genius Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna.” “Adelaide” became one of Beethoven’s most popular songs—a favorite especially in salons and in numerous arrangements by other composers. Beethoven’s setting is through-composed—every stanza fit with new music, even the refrain “Adelaide”—and divided into two parts, the first three stanzas at a slow tempo followed by a fast section comprising the last stanza. The dreamlike opening section suggests the beloved’s wandering with triplet motion and many key changes—influenced by Haydn’s song, perhaps?—and the rapturous closing section suggests the poet’s reuniting in death with the beloved who was unattainable in life. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

May 8, 2022: Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Anna Polonsky, piano; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello; Michael Parloff, lecturer WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Violin Sonata in G major, K. 373a (K. 379) May 8, 2022: Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Anna Polonsky, piano; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello; Michael Parloff, lecturer Mozart wrote from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg on April 8, 1781: Today (for I am writing at eleven o’clock at night) we had a concert, where three of my compositions were performed—new ones, of course; a rondo for a concerto for Brunetti; a sonata with violin accompaniment for myself, which I composed last night between eleven and twelve (but in order to be able to finish it, I wrote out only the accompaniment for Brunetti and retained my own part in my head); and then a rondo for Ceccarelli, which he had to repeat. The three pieces were his Rondo for violin and orchestra (K. 373), the present G major Sonata, and the aria in rondo form “Or che il ciel” (K. 374). The occasion for this chamber concert was a command performance for the archbishop of Salzburg, who was visiting Vienna and had summoned a group of Salzburg musicians to perform for him and his father, Prince Rudolf Joseph Colloredo. Mozart had brought little music with him, and hence had to compose with haste. Clearly for him it went without saying how quickly the participants—among them violinist Antonio Brunetti and male soprano Francesco Ceccarelli—had to learn their parts, but it’s still astounding! The letter is informative in so many ways. First, we note how quickly Mozart was able to compose music of enduring substance, and, second, how for him the mechanical process of writing down the composition was something that could be taken care of later, for the creative part had already been accomplished in his mind. Further, we are reminded how Mozart viewed the present Sonata—and his others in this genre—as keyboard sonatas, with violin accompaniment. Mozart’s manuscript of the G major Violin Sonata gives testimony to the haste of the work’s genesis, but nothing in the listening experience betrays anything other than thoughtfulness having been lavished upon the piece. The first movement is remarkable for its serene, extended opening section in the major mode, which is almost a movement in itself. The suspenseful open ending (on the dominant) unleashes a stormy G minor fast section in sonata form, in which the two instruments unleash pelting rain, lightning bolts, and sighing figures with equal passion. The second and final movement is a graceful theme with five charming variations, followed by a return to the theme with a decorative coda. Of special interest is Mozart’s dramatic use of minor-mode harmonies at the outset of the second half in variations 1, 2, 3, and 5. What is so remarkable is that this striking feature is not present in the original theme. The entire course of the fourth variation unfolds in the minor mode except for a brief hint of major at the analogous spot. Variation 5 returns to the major mode with its sweetly ornamented melody supported by pizzicato broken chords in the manner of a serenader’s guitar. The “minor-mode switch” makes its most theatrical impression in this final variation. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes