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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2021 AT 3 PM HAYDN SEEKING BUY TICKETS ESCHER STRING QUARTET “The Escher players seemed to make time stand still, effortlessly distilling the essence of this introspective music with expressive warmth and a natural confiding intimacy.” — Chicago Classical Review ROMAN RABINOVICH, PIANO “Mr. Rabinovich performed with uncommon sensitivity and feeling, playing with a wonderful brio and spontaneity, crisp rhythmic bite, and abundant colorings.” — The New York Times FEATURING ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE BUY TICKETS Mozart called Haydn a “great man and my dearest friend,” and Beethoven knelt before Haydn on his 76th birthday to fervently kiss his hands and forehead. Haydn’s celebrated wit, grace, and eloquence will be richly on display in this musical survey of his seminal chamber works for piano, string quartets, and piano trio. As a special treat, the multitalented pianist Roman Rabinovich will accompany his own short animated film entitled “Imaginary Encounters with Haydn.” PROGRAM Claude Debussy Hommage à Haydn Program Notes Joseph Haydn String Quartet in G, Op. 77, No. 1 Program Notes Joseph Haydn Piano Sonata No. 50 in C Hob. XVI: 50 Program Notes Maurice Ravel Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn Program Notes Joseph Haydn String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 76, No. 4 (“Sunrise”) Program Notes Joseph Haydn Piano Trio in G, Hob. XV: 25 (“Gypsy”) Program Notes Watch Roman Rabinovich play Haydn’s Piano Sonata in G, Hob XVI 39:

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2021 AT 3 PM PAUL JACOBS, ORGAN WELCOME BACH, PAUL JACOBS! BUY TICKETS PAUL JACOBS, ORGAN FEATURING ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE BUY TICKETS It will be an honor to welcome back America’s foremost organist, Paul Jacobs. The inimitable virtuoso will introduce and perform a selection of towering masterpieces by Johann Sebastian Bach , composed and arranged especially for the King of Instruments. PROGRAM J.S. Bach Sinfonia from Cantata, BWV 29 (arr. Marcel Dupre) Program Notes J.S. Bach Trio Sonata in E Minor, BWV 528 Program Notes J.S. Bach Air on the G String , Suite No. 3, BWV 1068 Program Notes J.S. Bach Concerto in D Minor after Vivaldi, BWV 596 Program Notes J.S. Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582 Program Notes J.S. Bach Arioso from Cantata, BWV 156 Program Notes J.S. Bach Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532 Program Notes Watch Paul Jacobs perform and introduce Bach’s organ music at NPR: Watch Paul Jacobs discuss and play Bach’s organ music at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City:

November 12, 2023: Angel Blue, soprano; Bryan Wagorn, piano GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924) Mélodies November 12, 2023: Angel Blue, soprano; Bryan Wagorn, piano Fauré’s first work, “Le papillon et la fleur,” was a mélodie (song) composed in 1861 when he was a sixteen-year-old student at the École Niedermeyer. He continued to compose mélodies throughout his long life, penning his last set, L’horizon chimérique, in 1922. He progressed from writing primarily romances to working in a mature style—influenced by poet Paul Verlaine—beginning with the celebrated “Clair de lune,” and eventually focusing his attention on the song cycle and its many interconnections. Often considered the master of French song composers, Fauré left his mark on all who followed, including Debussy, Ravel, and Roussel. Fauré loved texts that permitted him to create a mood or set a scene rather than those that restricted him to illustrative details and he altered texts of lesser poets when it suited his purpose. Verlaine’s poetry drew a new style from him, a more continuous flow and more use of modality, though he still concentrated on atmosphere rather than on each textual nuance, as Debussy did at roughly the same time. Fauré’s first Verlaine setting, “Clair de lune” (1887), is subtitled “minuet,” the composer’s response to the eighteenth-century images in the text of elegant statues, parks, and masqueraders. Verlaine’s Mandoline, which describes eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte serenaders, was set by Fauré in 1891, having already attracted Debussy in 1882. Fauré permitted himself to repeat the opening verse to achieve a ternary form. His accompaniment figures suggest the plucked mandolin. In 1884, submerged beneath Fauré’s musically serene exterior, there lurked a certain violence, which erupted in “Fleur jetée.” One of Fauré’s most successful Silvestre settings, it recalls Schubert’s “Erlkönig” in its savage repeated octaves and blustering scales. The voice part is no less dramatic as the rejected lover implores the wind to dry up her broken heart. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

December 7, 2025: The Tallis Scholars THE TALLIS SCHOLARS “MOTHER AND CHILD” December 7, 2025: The Tallis Scholars THE TALLIS SCHOLARS – Programme Notes Programme: ‘Mother & Child’ Tallis: Missa Puer natus - Gloria Byrd: Votive Mass of the Virgin Ave maris stella Rorate Caeli Tollite portas Ave Maria Ecce virgo concipiet Matthew Martin: Salve Regina* ---interval --- Tallis: Missa Puer natus - Sanctus and Agnus Britten: Hymn to the Virgin Taverner: Mater Christi Nesbett: Magnificat *composer’s note to follow in November 2025 One of the most common types of Orthodox icon features the Theotokos , the ‘Godbearer’, and depicts the Blessed Virgin Mary, usually with the Christ-child on her lap (or, occasionally, mystically represented in her womb). This programme likewise focusses on the heavenly duo of Mother and Child, with music in honour of the Virgin Mary interspersed with a grand mass celebrating the birth of her child, Jesus. In fact, it was not only the birth of the Christ being celebrated in Thomas Tallis’ mass, but the expectation of another child King. In 1554, Queen Mary had recently married Philip of Spain, in a union designed to strengthen England's newly-restored bond to Roman Catholicism (after the Protestant dalliances of her brother's short reign). In addition, Mary seemed to most observers to be pregnant. Accordingly, there is a sense of jubilance in Thomas Tallis's grand, seven-voice mass, which was likely first performed at this time. It is based on the plainsong 'Puer natus est nobis' – 'A boy is born to us, and a son is given to us whose government shall be upon his shoulders'. Even though the text of the chant is not used, the allusion encoded into the DNA of the music would have been picked up by those who heard it. It was an expression of hope, that the throne of Catholic England might be granted the security of a male heir. The unusual original scoring of the work – seven voices at low pitch – can probably be attributed to the presence of Philip's Capilla Flamenca, or 'Flemish Chapel Choir', who would have accompanied their King to England. It is conceivable that the mass was envisaged for joint performance by the two royal choirs together. Philip's choir also contained composers of considerable repute, including Philippe de Monte. It's not inconceivable that Tallis saw an occasion to demonstrate the virtues of English music to his continental rival. The English composer rose to the challenge, demonstrating virtuosic skill in the assembly of the mass. The plainchant is slowed down, and runs in long notes in the tenor voice. The composer juxtaposes this (by this time somewhat old-fashioned) technique with more modern features which were associated with 'continental' composition, such as close imitation between the other voices. This allows him to maintain musical interest whilst the chant is deployed in such long notes (in the Agnus Dei, one such note sounds for a nearly unbroken stretch of thirty-one bars!). An unusual, even experimental work, the mass must surely have impressed those who heard it, in its skilful composition and fervour. Around fifty years later, Tallis’ colleague William Byrd embarked on a monumental project: a complete set of compositions for use in the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. The following selection of motets, drawn from the Gradualia collection, mostly belong to the celebration of a Votive Mass for the Blessed Virgin. The strophic, intimate Ave maris stella is for only three voices, providing an immediate textural contrast with Tallis’ mass. Rorate caeli , featuring the powerful imagery of the heavens coming down to earth and raining righteousness upon it finds a match in Byrd’s fervent setting. Ever alive to the nuance of the words, the composer characterises each section carefully, leading to a doxology of awesome solidity. Tollite portas is notable for its frequent rising melodic phrases to musically depict the lifting up of the gates, while Ecce virgo concipiet builds towards ringing repetitions of the name by which the child shall be called: Emmanuel. For A Hymn to the Virgin , the youthful Benjamin Britten turned to a macaronic carol – that is, one in which the text is in both Latin and the vernacular – originally dating from the 13th-century. In an early example of the astonishing compositional fecundity he was to display throughout his life, the eighteen-year old composer divides the choir, allocating the Latin exclamations to a semi-chorus, as if in an angelic, hieratic commentary on the earthly Incarnation. Such hymns to the Virgin Mary have a long history. When John Taverner was employed at the new Cardinal College in the early sixteenth century, its statutes included a direction that antiphons to her be sung daily. Mater Christi sanctissima is a confident work of polyphony, making full use of the five-voice texture by alternating statements for upper and lower voices. In this case, the opening invocation to Mary is really a sort of preamble to the true prayer. In the first part, Mary is asked to pray her son to listen to our pleas. This done, in the second part we may pray directly to Jesus for the gift of grace and his Holy Spirit. Of John Nesbett’s life we know little, save that he worked for a time at Canterbury Cathedral. His Magnificat , an attractive and useful setting, is found in the Eton Choirbook, one of the most important sources of early Tudor polyphony to have survived. The piece alternates chanted verses of the canticle with full polyphony, exhibiting the unhurried and virtuosic style common to the pieces in this collection, and concludes with a ringing final ‘Amen’. © James M. Potter, 2025. Return to Parlance Program Notes

March 9, 2025: Ravel’s 150th Birthday Concert, with Erika Baikoff, Soprano; Soohong Park, piano Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Air de feu from L’enfante et les sortileges March 9, 2025: Ravel’s 150th Birthday Concert, with Erika Baikoff, Soprano; Soohong Park, piano Colette (known only by her surname), one of the most influential French writers of the twentieth century, penned the libretto for her Ballet pour ma fille (Ballet for my daughter) in 1916 at the request of Paris Opéra director Jacques Rouché, who wanted something avant-garde and engaging for younger audience members. Ravel accepted the commission to write the music, but owing to numerous delays—among them his World War I service and the emotional consequences of the death of his mother—he did not begin writing in earnest until 1924. Yet the project, which he envisioned as an opera rather than a ballet, had remained alive in his mind because the subject matter so appealed to him. All of his life he was attracted to the worlds of children, animals, and magic, so bringing Colette=s enchanted characters to life with musical imagery elicited one of the most witty and touching manifestations of his genius. The one-act opera—actually labeled fantasy lyrique and now titled L=enfant et les sortilèges (The child and the spells)—premiered at Monte Carlo on March 21, 1925. The production’s unbashedly enthusiastic reception was contrasted almost a year later by its stormy reception in Paris at the Opéra-Comique. The Paris critics were divided as to the opera’s merits, and as to the audience, Colette wrote to her daughter: “L=enfant et les sortilèges is playing twice a week before a packed but turbulent house. The partisans of traditional music do not forgive Ravel for his instrumental and vocal audacities. The modernists applaud and boo the others, and during the >meowed= duet there is a dreadful uproar.” The story revolves around a naughty child, who is impudent to his mother, tortures his pets, and destroys everything in his room. When the exhausted child tries to sink into an armchair, all of these objects come to life and turn against him. In the garden, the animals and insects also remind him of how he has mistreated them. Afraid and lonely, he cries out “Maman” (Mother), which only infuriates the animals further. In the ensuing frenzy a squirrel is hurt and the child binds up its wounded paw. This show of compassion immediately changes the animals’ opinion of him, and they realize they can help the child by imitating the cry for his mother. The sheer number of characters gave an unusually broad range for Ravel’s skills as a parodist and miniaturist. He wrote a remarkable coloratura soprano aria for the Fire that colorfully depicts this character jumping out of the fireplace and flickering brilliantly about the room in vocal runs, leaps, turns as it threatens: “I warm the good, but I burn the wicked.” —©Jane Vial Jaffe Test and Translation LE FEU Arrière! Je réchauffe les bons, je réchauffe les bons, mais je brûle les méchants. Petit barbare imprudent, tu as insulté à tous les Dieux bienveillants qui tendaient entre le malheur et toi la fragile barrière! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Tu as brandi le tisonnier, renversé la bouilloire, éparpillé les allumettes, gare! Gare au Feu dansant! Tu fondrais comme un flocon sur sa langue écarlate! Ah! Gare! Je réchauffe les bons! Gare! Je brûle les méchants! Gare! Gare! Ah! Gare à toi! FIRE Back! I warm the good, I warm the good, but I burn the wicked. You reckless little barbarian, you have insulted all the benevolent Gods who stretched the fragile barrier between misfortune and you! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! You have brandished the poker, knocked over the kettle, scattered the matches, watch out! Watch out for the dancing Fire! You would melt like a snowflake on its scarlet tongue! Ah! Watch out! I warm the good! Watch out! I burn the wicked! Watch out! Watch out! Ah! Watch out for you! Return to Parlance Program Notes

April 23, 2017: Isabel Leonard, mezzo-soprano; Warren Jones, piano FREDERIC CHOPIN (1810-1849) Four Mazurkas, op. 67 April 23, 2017: Isabel Leonard, mezzo-soprano; Warren Jones, piano Chopin’s elaboration of dance forms raised them to a high art, and he brought special prominence to the dances related to his native Poland—the mazurka and the polonaise. The mazurka , named for the Mazur people of Mazovia, is one of several turning dances for couples, typically in triple meter like the waltz. Three types of folk dances share the designation: the masur or masurek of lively, sometimes fiery character; the obertas or oberek of faster tempo and merrier character; and the kujawiak , a slow dance from the Kujawy region often in the minor mode and melancholy in expression. All share a basic rhythm that shifts the accent unsystematically to the second or third beat of the measure. Chopin composed over fifty mazurkas, typically in simple ternary form and sometimes adopting the traditional phrase structure of two or four sections of six or eight measures, each repeated. The Four Mazurkas, op. 67, were published posthumously in 1855, bringing together four pieces written at different times in the composer’s life. No. 1 in G major he is said to have copied into an album of Anna Młokosiewicz in 1835, when she and her father were “taking the waters” in Karlovy Vary, but he may have written it much earlier, possibly in Vienna or even Warsaw. It merrily unfolds in a simple ternary form with bounding dance characteristics point that seem to suggest an earlier time. The Mazurka in G minor, placed second in the posthumous collection, is the last mazurka Chopin wrote. (Jeffrey Kallberg has shown that the unfinished F minor Mazurka, op. 68, no. 4, was not his last, as previously thought.) He likely composed it after his return to Paris from Scotland, in the winter of 1848 or the spring of 1849, a time of great loneliness and rapidly sinking health. A wistful melody marks the outer sections, contrasted by a livelier central section with chromatic sequencing, leaping grace notes, and a recitative-like passage leading back to the opening. The piece shows the “new simplicity” of many of his late works. The manuscript of No. 3, in C major, belonged to a Mme. Hoffmann, possibly the writer Kelmentyna (née Tańska), but there was also an Adelina Hoffman who owned a ladies’ fashion shop in Warsaw who could have been its recipient. Composed in 1835, the piece features an easily swinging nostalgia in its outer sections surrounding a brief interlude of hesitating chordal phrases. The Opus 67 set closes with the Mazurka in A minor, for which three versions exist. The earliest manuscript, dated 1846, once belonged to Brahms. Chopin clearly favored the key of A minor for melancholic or contemplative expression in his Mazurkas, for he composed seven in that key. Again in A-B-A form, this mazurka’s outer sections feature delicately ornamented melodic lines that often end in a descent or in seeming resignation. By contrast the middle section provides sunnier tunefulness, if still touched by moments of yearning. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

April 13, 2025: Quartetto Di Cremona Osvaldo Golijov (1960) Tenebrae April 13, 2025: Quartetto Di Cremona Golijov commanded international attention in 2000 with the premiere of his St. Mark Passion , commissioned in honor of the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death. He had steadily been winning over influential musicians, beginning with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which premiered his Yiddishbbuk at Tanglewood in 1992, and he has enjoyed collaborations with such dynamic artists as the Kronos Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Yo-Yo Ma, Gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, Mexican rock band Cafe Tacuba, tablas virtuoso Zakir Hussain, and legendary Argentine musician and producer Gustavo Santaolalla. His music typically combines his Argentine and Eastern European Jewish musical heritages with Western art music. Highlights of Golijov’s career include his groundbreaking chamber opera Ainadamar, based on the life of Federico García Lorca and featuring Dawn Upshaw, which premiered to great acclaim in 2003, the same year Golijov received the coveted MacArthur “genius grant.” The Metropolitan Opera just presented a critically acclaimed new production of Ainadamar in the fall of 2024, coproduced by Detroit Opera, Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, and Welsh National Opera. Golijov’s recent works include The Given Note , a violin concerto for Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights, and the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis , which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and which premiered in suite form by the Chicago Symphony the following fall. Golijov has held numerous residencies with major orchestras and in the 2012–13 season held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. Since 1991 he has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, where he is Loyola Professor of Music. “I wrote Tenebrae ,” explained the composer, “as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. “I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme leçon de tenebrae , using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.” —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

February 8, 2015 – David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873–1943) Sonata for Cello and Piano in g minor, Op. 19 February 8, 2015 – David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano In the wake of the successful completion of his Second Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov spent the summer of 1901 on the family’s country estate Ivanovka in the Tambov region, several days’ travel to the south of Moscow. To judge by his letters, it was only after he returned to Moscow in late September that he began to work on the sonata, the performance of which was already planned. The Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 19, was composed in the fall and early winter of 1901 for the cellist Anatoly Brandukov. Towards the end of the last movement, Rachmaninov wrote the date “November 20th”. At the very end he wrote “December 12th”, showing that he revised the ending immediately after the first performance. The work debuted in Moscow, on December 2nd 1901, by Anatoly Brandukov, with the composer at the piano. By mid-November he was crying off social engagements, complaining that “my work’s going badly, and there’s not much time left. I’m depressed…” On November 30th however he sent a message to the composer Taneyev inviting him to a rehearsal at 11.30 that morning. By the following January 15th he was hard at work on the final proofs of the piece: ‘I’ve found almost no mistakes’. In later years Rachmaninov remembered his cello sonata as one of a series of pieces through which, with the help of Dr. Nikolai Dahl, after a long period of depression and inability to create, he was born again as a composer: ‘I felt that Dr. Dahl’s treatment had strengthened my nervous system to a miraculous degree… The joy of creating lasted the next two years, and I wrote a number of large and small pieces including the Sonata for Cello…’ © Gerard McBurney Return to Parlance Program Notes

CONRAD TAO, PIANO The only classical musician on Forbes’ 2011 “30 Under 30” list of people changing theworld, 18-year-old Chinese-American pianist Conrad Tao was found playing children’s songs on the piano at 18 months of age. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he gave his first piano recital at age 4; four years later, he made his concerto debut performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 414. In June of 2011, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and the Department of Education named Conrad a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, while the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him a YoungArts gold medal in music. Later that year, Conrad was named a Gilmore Young Artist, an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. In May of 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. In January of 2012, Conrad’s performance of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was hailed by the Detroit News as “a blazing debut…a performance no less seductive in its lyrical beauty than hair-raising in its technical brilliance.” Following a recital at Carnegie’s Weill Hall in February of 2012, the New York Times wrote of the “lovely colors and poetic nuances” of his Liszt, and the eloquence and “fiery panache” of his Prokofiev. Later that year, in June, a writer for All Things Strings attended Conrad’s performance at the Montréal Chamber Music Festival and noted that “Tao is ready for his own TV show: he plays music as if the composer were at his side, with color, joy, and spontaneous poetry. He composes, studies, researches, writes…like that whiz kid on the West Coast, Conrad Tao should be licensed to operate by the time he’s 21.” Sporting a truly international career, Conrad has appeared as soloist in the United States with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, and the Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, and San Francisco Symphonies, among others. He has made multiple tours of Europe, giving solo recitals in Paris, London, Munich, Berlin, and Verbier, and performed with orchestras in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Moscow, and Singapore. Highlights of his 2012-2013 season include two more tours of Europe, including a concerto debut at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and a third reëngagement at the Louvre in Paris, appearances at the Mostly Mozart and Aspen Music Festivals, debuts with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada and a return to Asia with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and performances of all five Beethoven piano concertos in the United States. As an accomplished composer, Conrad has won eight consecutive ASCAP Morton GouldYoung Composer Awards since 2004; he also received BMI’s Carlos Surinach prize in 2005. For the 2012-2013 season, Conrad has been commissioned by the Hong Kong Philharmonic to write a concert overture ringing in their new season – frequent colleague Jaap von Zweden’s inaugural season there as music director – as well as celebrating the region’s annual China Day. He was also asked by the Dallas Symphony to compose a work observing the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which will be performed in November of 2013. As an award-winning violinist, Conrad has performed with orchestras in Pennsylvania and Florida; in 2009, he gave nine performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor (followed by Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor in the second half) with the Symphony of the Americas in Boca Raton. Conrad’s violin prowess was featured on Jackie Evancho’s Dream With Me PBS special, on which Conrad also traded spots with David Foster behind the piano. Conrad is an exclusive EMI recording artist. His first album, released as an iTunes exclusive in February of 2012 as part of the “Juilliard Sessions” series, comprised works by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Conrad himself. His second record will also prominently feature Conrad’s own compositions, and is expected for release in 2013. Conrad currently attends the Columbia University/Juilliard School joint degree program and studies piano with Professors Yoheved Kaplinsky and Choong Mo Kang at Juilliard. He studies composition with Professor Christopher Theofanidis of Yale University, and studied violin with Ms. Catherine Cho for five years at Juilliard’s Pre-College Division.

September 24, 2017: Rafael Figueroa, cello GASPAR CASSADÓ (1897-1966) Sardana and Jota from Suite for Solo Cello September 24, 2017: Rafael Figueroa, cello Young prodigy Gaspar Cassadó began his music training early with his organist-composer father. The family moved to Paris to insure the best teachers—the great Jacques Thibaud for his violinist brother and Casals for him. Casals’s playing and mentoring left an indelible impression on the young Gaspar, who became acquainted with all the leading musicians in Paris—he also studied composition with Ravel and Falla. Influenced by his mentor’s legendary performances of the Bach solo cello suites, Cassadó composed one of his own in 1926, successfully transferring the idea of Bach’s stylized Baroque dances to dance forms of his own Spanish heritage. The Sardana, reflecting the national Catalonian circle dance, unfolds in two parts: slow and stately (dancer holding hands with arms down) and fast and exuberant (arms up). The final movement alternates an introspective Intermezzo with a lively triple-meter Jota, which evokes the guitars and castanets of the dance’s northern Spanish roots. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

December 19, 2017: Alessio Bax, piano; Lucille Chung, piano WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI (1913-1994) Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos December 19, 2017: Alessio Bax, piano; Lucille Chung, piano After Stalin’s death in 1953, Witold Lutosławski, along with Krzysztof Penderecki, led Polish composers in a great renaissance, bringing recognition to Polish music that had been lacking since the days of Chopin. Lutosławski had concurrently studied composition at the Warsaw Conservatory and mathematics at the University of Warsaw. In the 1960s he became internationally known as a conductor of his own works and taught and lectured on composition in Europe and the United States. Lutosławski’s style went through many stages—a folk music stage greatly influenced by Bartók, a twelve-tone phase, and a period in which he developed his own system that permitted him, he said, “to move within the scope of twelve tones, outside both the tonal system and conventional dodecaphony.” In the 1960s he became interested in aleatory techniques to enhance textural effects, not, as he said, “to free myself of part of my responsibility for the work by transferring it to the players,” but to achieve “a particular result in sound.” His exceptional attention to structure and detail and his careful working methods resulted in long periods of revision and polishing for most works—ten years in the case of the Third Symphony. His list of works, therefore, is relatively short, but each is of consistently high quality. During the Second World War, Lutosławski played piano in cafés (kawiarnie ) in order to make a living and as a means of public expression. He sometimes accompanied other artists and often performed together with composer and conductor Andrzej Panufnik in a duo piano team. Their concerts included light and serious music of all periods from Bach to Debussy, in arrangements on which he and Panufnik had collaborated. More than 200 of these arrangements were destroyed in the Warsaw Uprising, but one survived, the Wariacje na temat Paganiniego (Variations on a theme of Paganini), an arrangement by Lutosławski alone, which he published after the war. As in all their arrangements, one part was harder than the other, because Lutosławski was a better pianist than Panufnik; Lutosławski took the first piano part in the present arrangement. The Paganini theme is the famous one from the twenty-fourth Caprice for solo violin, which Paganini himself was the first to vary, and which has since attracted numerous composers, such as Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Blacher, Ginastera, Rochberg, and popular composers John Dankworth and Andrew Lloyd Webber. But where the most famous of these works—the Brahms and Rachmaninoff—present original variations on the theme, Lutosławski’s follows Paganini’s model closely; that is, Lutosławski “transcribed” Paganini’s variations. That is not to say Lutosławski’s Variations sound like products of the Romantic era—instead he used great imagination and twentieth-century vocabulary in transferring the violinistic passages to two pianos. The rapid string crossings in the second variation, for example, become rapidly alternating chromatically neighboring chords, and the thirds and tenths in the sixth variation are treated in canon and inversion with widely spaced triads in the first piano and octaves a third apart in the second piano. Though Lutosławski keeps the piece grounded in A minor, he introduces striking harmonic deviations, juxtapositions, and superimpositions. The first half of the second half of the theme, for example, begins in A major in the first piano while the second piano begins in E-flat, a tritone away. Lutosławski decided to trade Paganini’s arpeggiated conclusion for a brilliant, elaborate restatement of the theme—amounting to another variation—which is capped by a coda that increases in volume and speed to the end. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 18, 2009 – David Chan, violin; Jeewon Park, piano, Rafael Figueroa, cello JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Trio in B Major, Op. 8, for violin, cello, and piano October 18, 2009 – David Chan, violin; Jeewon Park, piano, Rafael Figueroa, cello Johannes Brahms’ Piano Trio, Opus 8, is in many respects a paradoxical work. Progressing from a radiant B major to a tragic B minor, the piece juxtaposes passages of luxurious warmth and optimism and music of turbulence and despair. It is also, in the version heard most often today, simultaneously one of Brahms’ earliest and latest works. He had already started composing the trio in 1853, when the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim gave the 20-year-old Brahms a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann. Brahms’ meeting with the Schumanns at their Düsseldorf home marked an important turning point in his life and career. The Schumanns received him with enormous enthusiasm and generosity. They invited him to stay with them for several weeks, initiating a close friendship that would last for the rest of their lives. Schumann wrote glowingly about the younger composer in his influential journal The New Leipzig Musical Times, and he introduced Brahms to the head of the prominent music publishing firm Breitkopf & Härtel. This greatly enhanced Brahms’ prospects for a successful composing career. The following February, while still working on the trio, Brahms received the distressing news of Robert Schumann’s suicide attempt. He hastened back to Düsseldorf to comfort the Schumann family. It was under those dark circumstances that he completed the piece later that year. Perhaps this brush with tragedy associated with his mentor altered the emotional trajectory of the work, diverting it from its luminous B-major beginning and setting on the course towards its stormy B-minor conclusion. Toward the end of his life Brahms, now the most respected of living composers, changed music publishers. Fritz Simrock bought the rights to all of Brahms’ works from Breitkopf & Härtel for the purpose of publishing them in a new edition. Simrock offered Brahms the opportunity to revise some of his earliest works for the release of the new edition. Brahms, ever the perfectionist – he had burned his first twenty string quartets and postponed composing his first symphony until his mid-40s – decided to revisit his 35-year-old trio, Op. 8. After performing the new version in 1890, Brahms wrote to a friend, saying, “Do you still remember the B major trio from our early days, and wouldn’t you be curious to hear it now, as I have (instead of placing a wig on it!) taken the hair and combed and ordered it a bit…?” This was quite an understatement. In fact, he had shortened the overall length of the work by a third, substantially rewriting the middle sections of the first, third, and fourth movements. Only the Scherzo remained essentially unchanged from its original version. The final work seamlessly blends the impetuosity and passion of his youth with the technical assurance and architectural mastery of his maturity. The first movement begins like a cello sonata, unleashing a glorious cello melody that continues for 23 measures before it is finally joined by the violin. The atmosphere of the movement is wise and reassuring, demonstrating that, even at an early age, his musical sensibilities were already well-formed and recognizably “Brahmsian.” The Scherzo begins in a stealthily portentous B minor. Compressed staccato phrases are interwoven with longer thematic threads that foreshadow surprises ahead. Sudden fortissimo outbursts crash through the texture, dissolving into delicate piano filigree and quiet passagework in the strings. The contrasting trio introduces a melody of expansive warmth and maturity. The third movement alternates between solemn piano and string chorales, eventually blending the two into a sustained, meditative texture. The music then gives way to a long-lined, soulful cello solo. The solemn chorale textures return toward the end of the movement, now accompanied by ethereal ornaments in the right hand of the piano. The final movement is a musical battle between hope and despair. A quietly agitated opening explodes into major-key passages of great exuberance and exultation. Finally, though, the music retreats back into agitation and concern, and the trio concludes in a burst of stormy, B-minor turbulence. By Michael Parloff Return to Parlance Program Notes