Friday March 08, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Christ and St. Stephen's Church, 120 West 69th Street, NYC

Tickets are $30 (open seating). Students under 25 with ID: $15 at the door.

Pianist Efi Hackmey and cellist Robert La Rue are joined by the outstanding young violinist William Wei in performing the Samuel Barber Cello Sonata, Beethoven's Kakadu Variations, Op. 121a for piano trio, and the G Major sonata for violin and pIano by Johannes Brahms.

Artists

William Wei (violin) is the Laureate of the 2015 Queen Elizabeth of Belgium International Violin Competition and received top prizes in the Thomas & Evon Cooper Competition and the Concerto Competition of the Juilliard School, where he recently completed his studies with scholarship support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. He has appeared as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre Nationale de Belgique, and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed at Museo del Violino in Cremona, Italy.
Efi Hackmey (piano) performs internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. Recent local appearances have included Bargemusic, the Kosciusko Foundation, the Friends of Mozart series, and the Arion Chamber Music series.
Robert La Rue (cello) was First Prize Winner of the National Society of Arts and Letters Cello Competition, whose jury chairman was Mstislav Rostropovitch. Cellist of the Alcott Piano Trio and member of the cello trio, VC3, he also plays in the New York City Opera Orchestra. He is Music Director of the Arion Chamber Music's concert series.

Notes on the Program

Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981)

Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 6 (1932)

Dear Mother,

I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it, because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. [. . .] I was meant to be a composer, and will be I am sure. [. . .] Don’t ask me to try and forget this unpleasant thing and go play football — Please — Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).

Thus nine-year-old Samuel Barber in a letter to his mother, expressing what seems as much a sense of doom as of vocation. But at its core — ‘I was meant to be a composer, and will be I am sure’ — lies a statement of the solid, unshakeable purposefulness that carried Barber through more than thirty-five years of unbroken activity, from youthful but assured works like his Cello Sonata and Dover Beach (both written while he was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music and both standard pieces in the concert repertoire to this day) through acknowledged early masterworks including the String Quartet (with its famous Adagio arranged for string orchestra and premiered by Toscanini) and the Violin Concerto, all the way to the disastrous premiere of his Antony and Cleopatra by the Metropolitan Opera, on the occasion of the opening of the new opera house at Lincoln Center. (Disastrous primarily owing to technical problems with Franco Zeffirelli’s sets and the general, gaudy vulgarity of his production — possibly an early foreshadowing of more recent problems at the Met) Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other awards and honors, Barber was throughout his career —and remains to this day — one of the most-performed American composers of the 20th century.

Barber displayed marked musical talent and specific interest in composing from an early age. His first known composition, a short piece for solo piano entitled Sadness, was written at age 7. Probably as a result of attending performances by his aunt, the eminent contralto Louise Homer, with the Metropolitan Opera, he made his first attempt at composing an opera (The Rose Tree) at age 10. His uncle, Sidney Homer (a composer whose songs were respectfully regarded in his day) recommended that Barber audition for the newly-founded Curtis Institute of Music. At the age of 14, in 1924, Samuel Barber became the second student admitted to the school.

In many ways, Barber’s years at Curtis determined the entire course of his life as a composer and a man. In his late teens he was to meet Gian-Carlo Menotti, a fellow student who became his life-partner. Meanwhile, he was a piano student of the legendary pedagogue, Isabelle Vengerova, and also studied voice and composition. His composition teacher, Rosario Scalero, had succeeded Ernest Bloch at the Mannes School of Music before joining the Curtis Faculty in 1927. Scalero taught a generation of distinguished American composers, including Leonard Bernstein, George Rochberg, Virgil Thomson, Hugo Weisgall, Lukas Foss, and Ned Rorem. Nearly all of them despised Scalero; Barber liked him well enough, at the time, to dedicate his Cello Sonata to him.

Written in Europe in 1932, towards the end of Barber’s years at Curtis and during a trip that Scalero had helped to arrange, the sonata was premiered the following year by Barber and fellow student, cellist Orlando Cole (subsequently a member of the Curtis faculty for 60 years). The piece won Barber a travel stipend from the Pulitzer Foundation (not to be confused with the two Pulitzer Prizes Barber was awarded later in life). In tandem with another work, Barber’s Op. 7, Music for a Scene from Shelley, it won the American Academy of Music’s Prix de Rome in 1935.

The Cello Sonata’s three movements adhere to traditional formal models. The first is a standard sonata allegro form, the second an ABA adagio—presto—adagio, and the third a return to sonata form distinguished by the drastic harmonic distance between the piano’s and cello’s statements of the theme (c and F#).

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)

Introduction and Ten Variations for PIano Trio on “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu”, Op. 121a

In 1794, the composer and conductor Wenzel Müller presented his operetta, Die Schwestern von Prag, at the Leopoldstadt Theater in Vienna (just three years after Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte received its premiere in the same city). A light, unchallenging, farcical work typical of the sort beloved by Viennese audiences, Die Schwestern remained in the Leopoldstadt’s repertory for twenty years and, together with his volumes of lieder (many of which are similarly light and full of what Austrians think is witty), was responsible for Müller’s enormous popularity during Beethoven’s lifetime. A few of Müller’s songs remain in the art-song repertoire of German-speaking countries to this day, but none has achieved more widespread and lasting recognition than “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” (‘I am the tailor, Cockatoo’). Sung fairly early on in the first act of Die Schwestern by a foolish servant disguised as a tailor’s apprentice, the song’s fame is the result of being selected by Beethoven for a theme on which to base a set of variations for piano trio. (Attentive listeners may notice a more than passing similarity between this theme and Papageno’s song, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, from Zauberflöte, for which Beethoven also wrote a set of variations, and ponder the coincidence of Papageno’s bird costume and a tailor bearing the name ‘Cockatoo’.)

The compositional history of the piece is somewhat uncertain. Although published, initially, in 1823 in London and 1824 in Vienna, a finished version existed in 1816, when it was rejected for publication by Breitkopf & Härtel. In his letter offering the variations to Härtel, Beethoven says of them, “They belong to my earlier works, but they are not among the reprehensible ones.” A set of variations on the ‘Kakadu’ theme is mentioned in correspondence by Beethoven’s brother in a letter from 1803 in such a way as to suggest that some version of them already existed by that time. Although this 1803 date has become the widely accepted one for their initial creation, scholars have suggested that some time in the 1790s may be more likely. What is clear is that most of the variations are typical of Beethoven’s ‘Early’ style, while the Introduction and the tenth, concluding variation suggest either substantial revision or entirely new composition around 1816, with likely further revision in the period 1822-23.

A solemn introduction in G minor which incorporates fragments of Müller’s tune seems to have been conceived to highlight the innocuousness of the theme when it finally arrives. The initial three variations feature each instrument in turn: Variation I is piano alone; Variation II is for violin and piano, and showcases the violin in vivacious figuration and ornamentation; Variation III, for cello and piano, gives the cello a more lyrical spotlight. The middle variations proceed along mostly conventional lines, introducing elements of imitative counterpoint and virtuosity — except, perhaps, for the seventh variation, in which the piano drops out to allow a brief duet for the strings — and not excluding the traditional minore variation (IX). The tenth, which begins with a presto somewhat reminiscent of the coda of the “Archduke” trio, is the most elaborate, incorporating, along the way, a virtuosic double fugato. Although the stylistic juxtaposition of Beethoven’s ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ compositional styles within a single work is regarded as problematic by some, in fact Beethoven succeeds in elegantly framing material from his early life with introductory and concluding material in his mature manner.

Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)

Sonata No. 1 in G Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 78 (1879)

During the summer of 1878, Johannes Brahms grew a beard. In September of that year he wrote to a friend, “I am coming back with a large beard. Prepare your wife for a most awful sight.” It was the inauguration of the iconic look with which Brahms has ever since been associated. During the same summer, he began work on his two best-loved contributions to the repertoire of the violin: his Violin Concerto, Op. 77, and the G major Violin Sonata, Op. 78. Although both works were ultimately completed for his friend and colleague, the great violinist Josef Joachim, the sonata seems to have been originally intended as a sonatina for Brahms’ godson, Felix Schumann, youngest child of Robert and Clara Schumann. Felix died (at age 24) early in 1879, and Brahms did not return to the work until the following summer; the sonata contains an expression of his grief. Finished by the time he arrived back in Vienna from his annual summer residency in the countryside, it received its first performance in Bonn in November of the same year.

When we speak of “Violin Sonata No. 1”, we mean the first that Brahms completed and published. An inveterate perfectionist (he claimed to have discarded twenty string quartets before completing one with which he was satisfied), he is known to have abandoned one violin sonata and may have thrown away three or four more. By the time of the G Major violin sonata, he had published only one other duo sonata — the Op. 38, for cello and piano. (The single movement that he contributed, in his youth, to the collaborative FAE Sonata, was never published in his lifetime.) Despite this, his handling of the partnership of the violin and piano is assured and masterful. The violin is frequently prominent (a fact which may be the result of the work’s having been conceived at the same time as the violin concerto) but never completely dominant. The piano’s role could be described with the same words Brahms used when writing about his early cello sonata, saying it “should be a partner — sometimes a leading, often a considerate and watchful partner but it should under no circumstances assume a purely accompanying role.”

The piece has its basis in a motif that appears in two of Brahms’s Op. 59 song “Regenlied” (‘Rain Song’) and “Nachklang” (‘Echo’) — for which reason it is sometimes referred to as the Regensonate. This melody provides the principal theme of the last movement of the sonata, and contributes a rhythmic element that will be an important feature throughout the other movements. In the first of the songs, rain poetically conjures dreams and memories of childhood. In the second, raindrops mingle with tears. When the rain passes and sunshine returns, “my burning tears glow doubly on my cheeks.”

The first movement is a G major sonata allegro form. The second is a large ternary form in E-flat; opening and concluding adagios frame a piu andante that transforms the distinctive dotted rhythm from the songs into a funeral march. The third movement is a rondo in G minor — only returning to G major in the coda — in which the main theme of the second movement adagio makes two reappearances.