Friday, May 2 at 7:00 pm
Sunday, May 4 at 2:00 pm
Ned Rorem (1923-2022)
Pas de Trois for oboe, violin, and piano
The Palace at Four A.M.
Mechanical
Duet for Three Voices
Pas de Trois
Three Sisters
The Nursery at Four P.M.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Piano Quartet in E-flat major, op. 47
Sostenuto assai—Allegro ma non troppo
Scherzo. Molto vivace
Andante cantabile
Finale. Vivace
~~~ Intermission ~~~
Edgar Meyer (b. 1960)
Duet No. 2 for cello and double bass
Edmundo Villani-Côrtes (b. 1930)
7ª folha do diário de um Saci for cello and double bass
Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849)
Grand Septet in E-flat major for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, violin, viola, cello, and
double bass, op. 62
Adagio—Allegro
Adagio
Minuet. Moderato
Andante
Scherzo. Prestissimo
Finale. Allegro vivace
Ned Rorem
Pas de trois
Ned Rorem received his early musical instruction in his hometown, Richmond, Indiana, and in Chicago, studied briefly at the Curtis Institute, spent several years in New York, and completed his training in Paris. In 1980 he joined the Curtis faculty and mentored many young composers over two decades. If at times his writings about musicians and music attracted more attention than his music itself, Rorem composed prolifically in a style often described as Neo-Romantic. He was particularly renowned for his songs—over 400 of them—though he also composed numerous instrumental works and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for an orchestral suite, Air Music. Pas de trois, like many of his instrumental works, consists of a series of short sections; it dates from 2002. Rorem said that he added the titles of the movements after the music had been composed.
Robert Schumann
Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47
1842 was Schumann’s great year for chamber music: between that June and November he composed his three string quartets, op. 41; the great quintet for piano and strings, op. 44; and this piano quartet. The quintet has tended to overshadow the other four works, as it is not only a fine piece in its own terms but it defined an important new genre of chamber music. This piano quartet, though, is musically just as worthwhile and also just as important historically. Mozart had established the piano quartet as an ensemble with his two great quartets of the 1780s, but in the fifty years following, it had become a secondary genre. Many piano quartets had been composed and published, but they were by lesser composers or by younger composers on their way to better things—Mendelssohn, for instance, wrote three as a teenager but none in his later years.
Schumann’s piano quartet is the first real masterpiece of the genre since Mozart’s, and it helped reawaken the interest of composers in the combination. As Mozart’s piano quartets have three movements, Schumann’s is also the first great piano quartet to follow the four-movement pattern common in large nineteenth-century instrumental works. The piano quartets of such composers as Brahms, Dvořák, and Fauré followed Schumann’s lead in this regard. Schumann, in turn, seems to have had Beethoven very much in mind in the overall style of his own work.
While the piano quintet is notable for its spontaneous flow of ideas, in this quartet Schumann takes a more studied approach, building his themes out of short motifs as Beethoven does and thereby achieving more inner cohesion. The slow Sostenuto (Sustained) introduction to the first movement is just long enough to present the four-note germ of the theme that opens the main section. The four-note idea sets the fast part of the movement in motion and recurs frequently thereafter; eventually Schumann introduces a contrasting idea with a strong offbeat. The Sostenuto opening returns before the development section of the movement (as does the slow introduction to the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata for piano, op. 13), but the movement runs its normal course thereafter.
The second movement is the scherzo, the fast inner movement of the structure. It is an agitated movement in perpetual motion, much of it in bare octaves. There are two contrasting episodes, but the perpetual-motion music soon reasserts itself in both. The broad melody in the cello that opens the third movement belongs to a type Beethoven favored. After a contrasting episode, the melody returns in the viola, while Schumann directs the cellist to retune the bottom string on the instrument from C to B-flat. When this is done, the cello has the melody once more, but then settles on a sustained low B-flat (impossible without the retuning). The other instruments in turn play a motif consisting of three notes separated by wide leaps; the movement ends in an unsettled fashion.
Those three notes prove to be the main motif of the last movement of the quartet. After a triumphant initial combined statement, the viola, piano, and violin in turn come in with rapid passagework in imitation. (There are several possible models for this sort of opening among Beethoven’s finales.) The cello now introduces a flowing melody that provides the main element of contrast to the opening material of the movement. Schumann expertly works out these ideas in the course of the movement, bringing the quartet to a rousing conclusion.
Edgar Meyer
Duet no. 2
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Edgar Meyer grew up in Tennessee. He began studying double bass at the age of five and has gone on to an international career as composer and headline performer, with numerous Grammy awards. He is at home in many musical traditions, bluegrass being one of the more prominent ones. He received a MacArthur Award in 2002 and joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute the following year. While much of his music features his own instrument, alone or in combination, one of his better-known works is a violin concerto he composed for Hilary Hahn.
Meyer has recorded this duet with Yo-Yo Ma on the album “Appalachian Journey.” It sounds a bit like a Baroque piece based on a repeating bass line, but with an American accent. For most of it the two instruments play quietly with one syncopated against the other; two lively contrasting passages with multiple stopping suggest a hoedown might be about to start, but both soon return to the quiet material.
Edmundo Villani-Côrtes
7ª folha do diário de um Saci
A leading Brazilian composer, pianist, and educator, Edmundo Villani-Côrtes has composed over 200 works, including film scores and concert music of many sorts. Saci is a supernatural prankster character in Brazilian folklore, often portrayed as a one-legged Black man smoking a pipe and wearing a red cap that allows him to appear and disappear as he wishes. A “page from his diary” is a subject that seems to call out for musical treatment.
Conradin Kreutzer
Grand Septet in E-flat major for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, violin, viola, cello, and
double bass, op. 62
Ten years younger than Beethoven, Conradin Kreutzer was born in the Southwest German town of Messkirch. His career as an operatic composer and conductor took him to many posts in Germany and Austria, including stints in the major Viennese theaters. Of his many operas, two works of 1834 were outstanding successes, Das Nachtlager von Granada (A Night’s Shelter in Granada) and Der Verschwender (The Spendthrift), the latter still performed occasionally in Vienna. This Septet is his best-known instrumental work. Kreutzer crossed paths with Beethoven in Vienna on a number of occasions and may even have studied with J. G. Albrechtsberger, one of Beethoven’s teachers. (By coincidence, Kreutzer lived for a time in the same house in Vienna in which Vivaldi had died in 1741—though Vivaldi had been so completely forgotten in the nineteenth century that Kreutzer may never have heard of him.) Kreutzer’s Grand Septet has almost the same sequence of movements set in the same keys as Beethoven’s Septet for the same group of instruments, which was one of the latter’s most popular works during his lifetime. (Beethoven in turn may have taken his key and movement scheme with minor changes from Mozart’s great Divertimento in E-flat major for string trio, K. 563.) Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who took part in many premieres of works by Beethoven and Schubert, played violin in the first performance.
The slow introduction demonstrates that Kreutzer enjoys colorful harmonic twists and elaborate melodic figuration, as one might expect from an operatic composer of the time. The following Allegro, though, is based on a very square musical idea that simply marches up and down the scale, suggesting that Kreutzer—again, like some other operatic composers—had some difficulty integrating his more expressive material into the musical structure required by a large instrumental work. In the Adagio second movement, Kreutzer is freer to indulge his fancy. The Menuetto is reminiscent of Mozart. In the fourth movement, Kreutzer departs considerably from the Beethoven model: where Beethoven wrote a set of variations, Kreutzer writes a portentous minor-key introduction leading into a peaceful Andante. The Scherzo flies by rapidly. The last movement is saturated with a figure of three short notes followed by two longer ones. Both the technique and the figure itself are familiar Beethoven gestures. Kreutzer handles them with admirable dexterity, bringing the Septet to a lively conclusion.
Program annnotator Stephen C. Fisher received his Ph.D. in the history and theory of music from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Penn and at Widener University. He has edited volumes of the collected works of Joseph Haydn and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and published articles in numerous journals as well as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He plays viola in a number of avocational groups performing orchestral, chamber, and theater music.