Sunday March 4, 2018 at 3:00 pm

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

Program

Artists

VC3

• Elizabeth Anderson, cellist of the Cassatt Quartet, was also the cellist of the Naumburg Award winning Meliora Quartet. She is a member of the New York City Opera Orchestra.
• Käthe Jarka was formerly a member of the Shanghai Quartet, and is a longtime member of the Garden City Chamber Music Society. She has performed at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, Spoleto and Marlboro Music Festivals, and is a frequent presence on National Public Radio.
• Robert La Rue was First Prize winner of the National Society of Arts and Letters Cello Competition, whose jury chairman was Mstislav Rostropovitch. A former member of the New England String Quartet and a current member of the New York CIty Opera Orchestra, he is the Music Director of the Arion Chamber Music series.

Notes on the Program

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

Three Fantazias for Three Viols, Z. 732-4 (1680) (arr. Douglas Moore)

The music of Henry Purcell is often viewed as the culmination of a brilliant period of distinctive, uniquely English renaissance and early baroque music brought to an end by the combination of political upheavals (at times characterized by draconian puritanism), foreign influences imported by Continental dynasties, and the cultivated philistinism of the British upper classes (resulting in a dearth of patronage for native talent) -- perhaps, ultimately, also as a result of Purcell’s early death at the age of 35. With the death of Händel in the middle of the following century and, a generation later, of Johann Christian Bach, even distinguished foreigners largely abandoned Britain and British music entered a kind of dead zone from which it was not to emerge until the appearance of Edward Elgar and, later, Benjamin Britten. Throughout the 20th century, the British nation’s relation to its homegrown composers continued somewhat ambivalent: if Elgar was knighted and Britten became a lord, well, so did Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Born shortly before the Restoration, Purcell began his musical training as a boy chorister in Charles II’s Chapel Royal. He seems to have started writing music around the age of nine; the first of his compositions that can be reliably authenticated was completed at age 11. When his voice broke at 14, he entered a variety of apprenticeships that included serving as an assistant to the Keeper of the King’s Wind Instruments and a copyist at Westminster Abbey. At age 20 he became organist at the Abbey (his body is buried next to the organ there) and, a few years later, was also made organist of the Chapel Royal. He would divide the rest of his life between the duties entailed by these positions -- which included writing sacred music for the church and occasional music for his royal patron -- and music for the theater. His untimely death has been attributed variously to tuberculosis or to the effects of a chill caught after returning late from the theater to find that his wife had locked him out of his house.

The three Fantazias for Three Viols are part of a larger group of compositions for viol consorts ranging in number from three to seven players, all known to have been written in the summer of 1680, when Purcell would have been twenty years old. They are backward-looking works in more than one sense. By the 1680s, the heyday of the viol consort was past and, although the viola da gamba in particular continued to be an important instrument in chamber music for many decades (Carl Friedrich Abel, widely regarded as the last great virtuoso of the gamba, lived until 1787), its long eclipse -- by the more powerful violin, in particular -- was already underway. The densely imitative contrapuntal style in which the Fantazias are written was also falling out of fashion: influenced by French dynastic connections and Charles II’s long Continental exile, the English court preferred the lighter, less complex style that was fashionable across the Channel. The pieces were never published in Purcell’s lifetime and there is no indication that they were performed. This has led scholars to suggest that they were written as compositional exercises: a young composer mastering form and style. If so, they are exercises as much in expressivity as in part-writing or counterpoint, full of the same emotional intensity for which much of Purcell’s later music is justly famous.

Inessa Zaretsky

V3 (2015)

Russian-born pianist and composer Inessa Zaretsky is familiar to Arion audiences; she appeared in both capacities last season in a program which included her recent Passage for violin and piano. Director of the Swannanoa Chamber Music Festival in Asheville, North Carolina and co-director of the Phoenix Chamber Music Series here in New York, she has also been a resident pianist with the Craftsbury Chamber Players in Vermont for eight seasons. An award-winning composer, her music has been performed in England, Norway, Canada, Australia, Italy, Russia, and throughout the United States. She has collaborated with many notable musicians and ensembles, including the Miro, Enso, Jasper and Cassatt Quartets, the Kent/Blossom Festival Orchestra, musicians of the Boston and Chicago symphonies and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and members of the Metropolitan Opera. A graduate of Mannes College at the New School University, where she studied piano with Richard Goode and composition with Robert Cuckson, she is currently on the Piano Faculty there.

V3 was written specially for the three-cello ensemble, VC3, originally intended to be performed by them on Arion’s inaugural concert in December 2015. Today it receives its delayed world premiere. A sectional, single-movement work, it opens with a figure full of percussive, rhythmic vitality reminiscent of Bartók, soon interrupted by a contrasting, sustained idea that begins with some of the nature of a chorale but soon attains a more lyrical quality. In the course of several alternations of these ideas the piece acquires a form reminiscent of a rondo, concluding with a final return of the opening motif.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Sonata in G minor, BWV 1029 (arr. Robert La Rue)

For many years, scholars regarded the question of when Bach’s three sonatas for viola da gamba and cembalo were written as settled: the period of his service at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen (1717-1723). There are a number of circumstantial reasons for which this makes perfect sense. Prince Leopold was an enthusiastic amateur gambist; partly for this reason, the eminent gambist, Christian Ferdinand Abel, was employed at his court during Bach’s years there. Additionally, the first of the three sonatas, BWV 1027 in G major, was known to be a repurposing of a trio sonata, originally for two flutes and basso continuo, which was itself believed to date from Bach’s first year or two in Cöthen, if not from an earlier period in Weimar. (To confuse the issue further, this sonata for two flutes has a higher catalogue number than the version for gamba -- BWV 1039.)

More recently -- for a combination of esoteric and forensic reasons -- modern specialists (Christoph Wolff, Lawrence Dreyfus, Richard Jones et al.) have arrived at a kind of consensus favoring a much later period of Bach’s life: roughly 1736-41, during his many years of residence in Leipzig. It is thought that the sonatas form part of the catalogue of works that Bach composed as director of the Collegium Musicum concerts, held weekly at the Cafe Zimmerman.

There is evidence to suggest that Bach wrote as many as six such sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. Of those that survive, the third, in G minor, stands out in several ways, some of which are paradoxical. Bach’s first biographer, Spitta, described it as “of the greatest beauty and most striking originality”, and it is often numbered amongst the composer’s masterpieces of chamber music. It adheres, more strictly than its companions, to the clearly-delineated three-part writing that is the hallmark of the trio sonata. At the same time, unlike the other two gamba sonatas, it eschews the four-movement sonata da chiesa form in favor of a three-movement scheme which, taken together with the suggestion of ritornello in the first movement, most closely resembles a concerto. This has led at least one scholar to suggest that the sonata might actually have originated as a concerto for two flutes that has since been lost. Since Bach was an inveterate recycler of his own (and other people’s) music -- and because there is an unmistakably ‘Brandenburgy’ feel to this sonata -- there is no particular reason to doubt the likelihood of this provenance. On the other hand, Bach wrote several works in the concerto form for quite limited forces, perhaps the most familiar being his Concerto nach Italienischen Gusto, better known as the Italian Concerto, for harpsichord alone.

If the work did begin life as a concerto, this arrangement for three cellos possibly takes one step back in the direction of the original. Distributing the lines of the two hands of the sonata's keyboard part between two different players gives them a freedom and individuality that is all but impossible for one player to create alone, enlarging the work’s already considerable expressive and dramatic scope. At the same time, scoring the piece for three identical instruments gives it a sonic unity (unachievable either by gamba and harpsichord or, more commonly in modern performance, cello and piano) that highlights and complements its closely imitative contrapuntal style.

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

Gymnopédies (1888) (arr. Robert La Rue)

Born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie to mixed French and Scottish parents, Satie began his musical training at age six while living with his grandparents following the death of his mother. At age 13 he entered the Paris Conservatoire where he was called “the laziest student in the Conservatoire” and his work was assessed variously as “insignificant and laborious” and “worthless”. Asked to leave after two years, he was briefly readmitted at age 19 but, after another unsuccessful year of study, elected to enter the army, from which he was discharged after a few months with a bronchitic infection believed to be deliberately contracted. A somewhat rackety decade followed during which he began playing as a cabaret pianist, made significant and enduring artistic friendships (including Claude Debussy, romantic poet Patrice Contamine and, later, Maurice Ravel). He became, for a time, the composer and chapel-master of the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal, a Rosicrucian order from which he would later break to found his own Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur (Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor), of which he was the only known member.

Early in this same period, with his father’s financial assistance, he published his first mature compositions, amongst which were the three Gymnopédies -- undoubtedly the best-known and perhaps the most enduring works he ever wrote. They are some of the clearest examples of his professed desire to write music “without the sauerkraut” -- that is to say, free of German (and, more specifically, Wagnerian) influence: simple melodies created out of mostly stepwise motion, set to an equally uncomplicated accompaniment, with no hint of contrapuntal complexity, hardly a suggestion of harmonic directedness and none of ‘development’. Their brevity, along with the absence of any overt emotionalism, is as close to the opposite of Wagner as it is possible to imagine.

Although Satie stated that Flaubert’s novel, Salammbô, was his inspiration for his three Gymnopédies, there is no particular reason to suppose he meant it. During his lifetime he became well-known for giving ironical, misleading or frankly deceitful replies to questions about his work and personal life. Less than a year before writing the pieces, asked what his profession was by the proprietor of the Chat Noir cabaret, he replied: “gymnopaedist”. (In later years he preferred to refer to himself as a phonometrician -- ‘sound-measurer’ -- rather than as a composer.) Although the word refers to dances originating in a Spartan ceremony in classical Greece, a much closer and more contemporary source of inspiration is likelier, in a line from the poem “The Ancients” by Satie’s friend Contamine: “....the amber atoms gleaming in the fire mingle their sarabande with the gymnopaedia.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Trio in C Major, Op. 87 (arr. A. C. Prell)

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, it was with the intention of making his mark as a concert pianist and improviser while continuing his composition studies. An earlier trip to the city, undertaken in 1786 with the apparent -- and unrealized -- hope of studying with Mozart, had been curtailed after only a few months when news of his mother’s final illness caused Beethoven to return to Bonn. By the end of 1790, he had been introduced to Haydn (when the latter stopped in Bonn as he was returning from a trip to London) and arranged to study with the venerable composer. With the assistance and support of his employer, the Elector of Bonn, and his first important patron, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, he returned to Vienna for what was expected to be an extended but limited stay; in fact, Beethoven became a more or less permanent resident of Vienna for the rest of his life.

By this time he had already written a considerable amount of music. A number of these pieces were published, or at least publicly circulated, but few were ever assigned an opus number by Beethoven during his lifetime. They reflect his close study of the works of Mozart -- in particular, his violin sonatas -- under the direction of his teacher in Bonn, Christian Neefe. Both Neefe and Count von Waldstein believed Beethoven was destined to be a kind of successor or heir to Mozart and encouraged him to see himself that way but, while these early works are full of promise they make clear that, in at least one respect, Beethoven was no Mozart: he was not a prodigy of composition. Both his mastery of his craft and the location of his unique compositional voice (one that would single-handedly chart the course of Western music for much of the 19th century) were the result of years of study that continued well into adulthood. In this way he resembled Haydn far more than Mozart, a resemblance that may have frustrated and irritated him and accounted for some of the difficulties in his relationship with Haydn.

The Trio in C Major for Two Oboes and English Horn was written some time in 1794-5, shortly after Beethoven’s period of formal study with Haydn had come to an end (upon Haydn’s departure on another visit to London, where he was enjoying enormous popularity). Unlike many of the compositions on which Beethoven was at work during the mid-1790s (the Op. 1 piano trios, early sets of variations for cello and piano, the Op. 5 cello sonatas, and the early piano sonatas), it was not conceived as a performance vehicle for himself. Because it still has a very Mozartian flavor and was written for wind instruments (the court of the Elector of Bonn maintained a wind ensemble), some scholars have suggested that it was a piece from an earlier period that Beethoven brought with him to Vienna, or that he reworked into a larger-scale and more elaborate version, hoping (as with his Op. 3 string trio or the ‘Eyeglasses’ duo for viola and cello from the same period) to take advantage of the growing appetite and increasingly lucrative market for chamber music amongst musical amateurs. It proved highly popular and arrangements (without authorization from Beethoven) began appearing almost immediately, in versions for two flutes and viola, two clarinets and bassoon, two violins and cello, and for violin and piano.

By the middle of the next decade, as a result of his progressive hearing loss, public performances were becoming nearly impossible for Beethoven and an important source of income (and publicity) was lost to him. With the assistance of his brother he began collecting and revising early compositions and considering them for publication or republication. While only works that met his exacting standards were assigned opus numbers, the emphasis was on pieces that were likely to sell large numbers of copies. It is via this route that the trio acquired its deceptively high opus number -- in fact assigned to an arrangement for two violins and viola, not made by Beethoven but approved by him, and only retrospectively applied to the original version. The arrangement for three cellos heard today was made by the 19th century cellist, A.C. Prell.

Program Notes © Robert La Rue, 2018