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Chen, Schumann, & Brahms
QIGANG CHEN
Voyage d’un Rêve
Anne Chao, flute • Rachel Yi, violin • Chi-Yun Liu, viola • Hayoung Moon, cello • June Han, harp
Luke Rinderknecht, percussion
CLARA WIECK SCHUMANN
Drei Romanzen, Op. 22
I. Andante molto
II. Allegretto
III. Leidenschaftlich Schnell
Sergiu Schwartz, violin • Jeewon Park, piano
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26
I. Allegro non troppo
II. Poco adagio
III. Scherzo. Poco allegro
IV. Finale Allegro
YooJin Jang, violin • Kirsten Docter, viola • Amir Eldan, cello • HieYon Choi, piano
QIGANG CHEN
Voyage d’un Rêve (1987)
Qigang Chen wrote Voyage d’un Rêve on commission from Radio France in 1986. He wrote the following program note to accompany its premiere:
Voyage d’un Rêve was written in 1987. At that time, I felt the general idea of “musical modernity,” in both research and in practice, was rather rigid — in fact, modern music often consisted of sonorities which were rather more conventional even than those of so-called “conservative” music.
Composing Voyage d’un Rêve was for me a sort of escape.
I wanted to simply whisper a love song, describe a silvery night, distance myself somewhat from Parisian intellectualism, and avoid overusing the major seventh and minor ninth… the readymade intervals so often used in “contemporary music,” despite their apparent complexity. Of course, at that time, I did not possess a great deal of self-confidence. So I wrote this work with much apprehension.
It was an experiment, but a precious experiment, and a starting point from which I have been able to gradually chart my path. Qigang Chen added the following postscript in correspondence with the program annotator: It is important to know that this was my first commission after I moved to France and it meant a lot to me as a young composer. Even when I read what I wrote 37 years ago I can feel vividly what I was thinking back then and what the atmosphere was like around me.
CLARA WIECK SCHUMANN
Drei Romanzen, Op. 22 (1853)
The “Romance” was a genre of predilection for both Robert and Clara Schumann. Derived from the sentimental vocal ballads of southern Europe, the instrumental romance grew in popularity in early nineteenth-century Germany as a character piece, free in form but maintaining the lyricism of its sung origins. The Schumanns also used Romances as vehicles for compositional dialogue: Robert and Clara exchanged Romances in 1839–40; and when Clara titled the slow movement of her Piano Concerto “Romanze,” Robert borrowed a passage from this movement for the opening of his Dichterliebe cycle.
The Three Romances, Op. 22, were also composed “in dialogue” with another close friend of the Schumanns — violinist Joseph Joachim, who had begun composing Romances of his own in 1850. Joachim, who had only just turned twenty, impressed the Schumanns with a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in 1853. Clara, having just completed another set of Three Romances for solo piano (Op. 21), responded by dedicating the Op. 22 set to Joachim, thereby initiating a creative partnership that would last several decades. Together, they brought the work on tours across Germany and England, and the Romances became a particular favorite of Joachim’s employer, the King of Hanover.
The Three Romances are poignant in that they are among Clara Schumann’s final works. When Robert died in 1856, Clara found herself in a precarious position, with seven children to take care of and in need of a stable revenue stream. She ceased composing, and for the four remaining decades of her life devoted herself to more reliably lucrative acts of performing, as well as promoting Robert’s legacy through arrangements and editions of his work and through pedagogy. Joachim remained a steadfast collaborator throughout these years, as her most frequent partner in performance, and as a fellow editor of Robert’s music.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26 (1857-1861)
There is a tradition, almost as old as the work itself, of comparing Brahms’ Second Piano Quartet to the late chamber music of Franz Schubert, on account of the broad dimensions of the work’s extended form and the patient unfurling of its developmental explorations. The comparison is historically apt: though Schubert had died five years before Brahms’ birth, his instrumental music in particular was undergoing a period of rediscovery in the mid-1850s, nourished in part by Brahms’ close friends, the Schumanns (Brahms spent a month visiting the Schumanns in 1853, the same year Clara composed her Drei Romanzen, Op. 22, heard on the first half of tonight’s program). It was Robert and Clara’s admiration for Schubert that first drove Brahms to study the composer’s works intensely during a period of doubt, reflection, and experimentation that yielded, by the end of the decade, to what musicologist James Webster has called Brahms’ “first maturity.”
The Schubertian imprint already may be located in the formal expansiveness of Brahms’ first piano quartet (in G Minor, to be performed on Sunday evening) — completed immediately before the second — except that the Schubert-like lyricism foregrounded in the second quartet is (like the second quartet as a whole) often overshadowed by the vigor and force of its older sibling. The two quartets also share Brahms’ first nods to Romungro (so-called Hungarian “Gypsy”) music in theirfinal movements: but while the first quartet’s unbridled Finale is explicitly marked “Alla Zingarese” (literally, “in the Gypsy style”), the Allegro that concludes the Second Quartet balances spirited syncopations with moments of tender suspension and almost courtly grace.
When Brahms completed the two quartets in 1861, he was not yet thirty years old, and had yet to relocate to Schubert’s city, Vienna: it was in his native Hamburg that the first of the quartets was premiered, with Clara on the piano. But with her encouragement (and a letter of introduction bearing her signature), Brahms departed for Vienna in autumn of the following year, whereupon his second quartet received its first performance — now with the composer at the keyboard — and where Brahms would unleash an outpouring of chamber music over the following few years, including his piano quintet, the second string sextet, and the horn trio.
Program Notes by Peter Asimov