Friday April 12, 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.

The Alcott Trio -- Adrienne Kim (piano), Emily Popham (violin) and Robert La Rue (cello) -- returns, performing Mozart's C Major Trio, K. 548, Schubert's "Notturno" in E flat, D. 897. the Schumann D Minor Trio, Op. 63, and Lumen nimiä / "Names of Snow" by the young Finnish composer, Ilari Kaila.

Artists

The Alcott Trio

Adrienne Kim (piano), a former member of Chamber Music Society Two at Lincoln Center, performs extensively as soloist and chamber musician, and has recorded for the Koch, Capstone and Centaur labels.
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 Arion Chamber Music's concert series.
Emily Popham (violin) has appeared throughout the United States, Europe, Korea, and Israel as a soloist and collaborative chamber musician. As a member of Ensemble ACJW from 2010 to 2012, she appeared in venues that range from Weill Recital Hall to Rikers Island. She has been a featured artist at the Library of Congress as first violinist of the Degas String Quartet, and toured North Carolina for residency work at universities and elementary schools.

Program Notes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Piano Trio in C Major, K. 548 (1788)

By the summer of 1788, Austria was several months into an expensive and unpopular war with the Ottoman Empire, as part of a military alliance contracted by Emperor Joseph II with Catherine the Great of Russia. A period of optimistic modernization and relative prosperity came to an abrupt end. The imposition of new taxes to pay for the expense of the war and fear of conscription caused aristocratic families to abandon Vienna for their rural or foreign estates. For musicians who relied on a combination of aristocratic patronage, public performances, and sales of compositions to the prosperous middle classes, the result was hard times and straitened circumstances.

1788 had begun optimistically for Mozart. The ecstatic reception of Don Giovanni in Prague in the autumn of the previous year seem to promise similar success for its eventual Vienna premiere (in May, 1788). His appointment as “chamber composer” to Joseph II (replacing Gluck, who had recently died) in December of 1787 suggested he had finally put his foot on a rung of the ladder of Imperial patronage. But Don Giovanni fizzled in Vienna -- it was tepidly received there, and enthusiasm for it did not grow among the Viennese during the course of its few performances. And the court position was essentially a sinecure (aimed mainly at discouraging Mozart from leaving Vienna in search of better opportunities); its salary was not sufficient to offset the decline in other sources of income.

The Mozarts’ move from their fashionable apartment in the center of the city to more modest (though also more spacious) quarters in a northern suburb seems to have been undertaken with the intention of economizing. It may also have involved the anticipation of a growing family. But surviving financial records suggest that not much meaningful expense was actually saved, and the long series of “begging letters” preserved by Mozart’s Masonic friend, Michael Puchberg, begins around this time: Mozart’s tendency to live up to and beyond the limits of his income and to make no provision for professional or financial reverses was catching up with him. And, in late June of 1788, the Mozarts’ 6-month old daughter, Theresia Constanzia, died.

Despite this personal tragedy, mounting money problems, and the disruptions of a household move, the summer of 1788 was a productive one for Mozart. It was devoted chiefly to the writing of his last three symphonies: No. 39 in E-flat, No. 40 (the ‘Great’ G minor) and No. 41 (‘Jupiter’). These seem to have been intended as featured works on a projected series of concerts to be held in a newly-opened casino in Vienna (“Concerts at the Casino”), but no record of such concerts actually having taken place has ever been found, so it seems possible that they were cancelled for lack of funds (or interest). The iconic “Sonata semplice”, K. 545, for piano, and two of Mozart’s late piano trios -- the E Major, K. 542, and the C Major, K. 548 -- were also composed during this summer.

The C Major trio was written in early July, between the completion of the 39th Symphony and the beginning of the 40th, just days after the death of Mozart’s infant daughter. It bears scant trace of this sorrowful event, sharing instead some of the exuberance (as well as they key) of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony that would be written a few weeks later. Mozart follows the model established by Haydn for piano trios in the mid-1780s, but also enlarges upon the independence of the string parts (in particular emancipating the cello from the constant doubling of the piano bass line). A sonata form Allegro first movement is followed by an Andante cantabile in the subdominant that, somewhat unusually, also incorporates a complete sonata form. The concluding rondo turns the descending perfect fourth of the opening motive of the first movement on its head and, operating at a kind of molecular motivic level, contains elements of the second movement’s principal theme as well. This, along with the arpeggiated figuration of the coda, lends a cyclic feel to the work as a whole.

Ilari Kaila (b. 1978)
Lumen nimiä / Names of Snow (2007)

“Ever since taking my very first piano lessons, I was always more interested in searching for interesting chords or new sounds on the instrument than practicing my homework. I vividly remember coming up with a chord progression that I was totally mesmerized by. The feeling back then was similar to what it still is these days – of making a discovery, rather than constructing something.”
-- Ilari Kaila

The music of Finnish/American composer Ilari Kaila has been variously described as “haunting” (Steve Smith, New York Times), “soulful” (Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times), “lyrical” (Heather Leviston, Classic Melbourne), and “powerfully resonating” (Helsingin Sanomat). He is currently Composer in Residence at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Locally, his music has been performed at the New York International Fringe Festival, the MATA series, the Chelsea Music Festival, and at Scandinavia House (the cultural center of the Nordic-American Foundation). He has worked with the Aizuri and Escher string quartets and composers Olli Mustonen and Bright Sheng; his music has been performed by the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, the Avanti Chamber Orchestra (on their tour of Japan), and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (at Australia’s Metropolitan Festival). Mr. Kaila has taught harmony and counterpoint at Columbia University, and has also taught composition as part of a collaborative consortium involving the Sibelius Academy, the Finnish Radio Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, and the Finnish National Opera. Following his studies at Finland’s Sibelius Academy, he was awarded a PhD in Composition at SUNY Stony Brook. In addition to his work as a composer, teacher, and pianist, he writes freelance investigative journalism for periodicals in the U.S. and Finland, and has produced documentaries for the Finnish Broadcasting Company.

About his approach to composition, Mr. Kaila has said this: “I spend countless hours improvising on the piano. At some point, there’s a discovery of something striking, often a harmonic idea. And you keep exploring it at the piano or with pencil and paper, or both, listening to it, trying to figure out what it wants to do, how it wants to develop, what kind of form it suggests. And you kind of spin out the music from there. There are very contrasting phases in the process. When I’m systematically fleshing out or exploring the material, I sometimes like to sit in a coffee shop, and don’t mind people chattering around me or music blaring in the background.” And, of his finished compositions: “Everyone will hear something different. I’m hesitant to influence their experience with words.”

Names of Snow is a short, single-movement work in three distinct sections.It was commissioned by cellist Roi Ruottinen and premiered by him, with violinist Susanna Suorttanen and the composer at the piano, at Scandinavia House in New York City in 2007.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Notturno, D. 897 (1827)

It has become common to exaggerate the degree of obscurity in which Schubert worked as a composer. Although it is true that he is only known to have given a single public performance in his career and that an overwhelmingly large proportion of his compositional output was unpublished during his lifetime, by the time of his death he had 89 published opuses. (As a comparison, by the same age, Beethoven’s opus-count was somewhere in the mid-30s.) As might be expected, many of Schubert’s published works were songs, but these included the early masterpiece, Erlkönig (his Op. 1) as well as the two great cycles, Die schöne Müllerin (Op. 25) and Winterreise (Op. 89 -- the first half of this monumental work was brought out early in 1828; proofs for the second half were still awaiting correction at the time of Schubert’s death in November of the same year; it was published a little over a month later). Among several works given notable first performances in his lifetime by prominent musicians was his String Quartet in A minor, Op. 29, published in 1824 and premiered the same year by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, the most eminent string quartet of the time in Vienna.

The reasons for Schubert’s failure to attract wider attention sooner were cumulative and probably began with a certain amount of unfortunate timing. The long disorders and confusions of the Napoleonic Wars were hard on Austria, and the Congress of Vienna was expensive; by the time Schubert was attempting to make his way as a young composer, the exhausted Viennese had a marked preference for light, frivolous entertainments. At the same time, the old system of musical patronage was giving way to a newer model that depended less on the enthusiasm of wealthy and powerful individuals and more on the building -- over time -- of a broader, more middle class audience.

Schubert’s retiring nature, attested to by many who knew him, made it difficult for him to establish and maintain the widespread professional connections necessary to advance a career. Some of this shyness and diffidence arose out of embarrassment about his appearance. The nickname given to him by friends -- “Schwammerl” -- translates as ‘little mushroom’ and alluded principally to his diminutive stature (not quite five feet tall) and pudginess, but also to a certain carelessness about his personal dress and hygiene. Symptoms of the syphilis which he contracted some time after 1820 developed progressively, and signs of these and of the mercury treatments he took to combat them increased his self-consciousness in social situations and public appearances. As his health deteriorated he was often in physical pain and given to depressive melancholy.

The fact that he was arrested and ‘severely reprimanded’ by the Austrian police in 1820, along with several of his closest friends, and that one of their number was tried and imprisoned for over a year before being permanently exiled from Vienna, probably did not help things. Around the same time he developed a preoccupation with works for the stage, writing more than twenty of these, many of which were rejected for production or banned outright by authorities, often because of the subject or content of their librettos. The few that were produced were markedly unsuccessful and did little or nothing to further his fortunes.

It is the mature keyboard and chamber works -- most dating from the final four years of Schubert’s life -- which, along with the lieder, quickly became his most cherished and frequently performed works in the years immediately following his death. They have remained so ever since. Alongside the two colossal piano trios, Op. 99 and 100, the Notturno in E-flat, Op. 148, ranks as a minor piece. It is generally assumed to be Schubert's first version of a slow movement for the Op. 99 (B-flat) trio, though there is no conclusive proof that this is the case. Composed during a period when Schubert was often ill and increasingly convinced that his death was imminent -- it was completed in the autumn of 1827 -- it is all but unvisited by the dark moods that color many of his other late works (especially Winterreise -- the second half of which also dates from late in 1827).

In the 18th century, notturno (‘nocturne’) was used interchangeably with divertimento, serenata, or cassatio to designate multi-movement, instrumental works for light entertainment, typically performed in the evening. It was only with John Field, and subsequently with Chopin, that ‘Nocturne’ achieved the specific sense it now has. The title of this work was, in any case, not of Schubert’s choosing (it was identified by him only as an ‘Adagio’), and was probably given to it at the time of its first publication, in 1845. It is written in an extended ternary form -- ABABA -- with the ‘B’ sections transitioning from 4/4 to 3/4, and incorporating, in the first instance, a modulation from E-flat to the harmonically somewhat distant key of E major (functioning as a kind of Neapolitan in a theoretical enharmonic F-flat). The second B section occurs in the more usual, third-related key of C Major. Its ardor once more dissipates and a final, truncated return of the opening idea serves as a coda.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 63 (1847)

Although established as a genre of chamber music by Haydn and significantly developed by Mozart, it was Beethoven who finally moved the piano trio closer to the center of the compositional map, comparable in scope and seriousness of intent to the string quartet. His three early trios, published as his Opus 1 and intended as a statement of his arrival as a composer, were also written as a means of showing off his pianistic virtuosity in his own performances.

In this light it is interesting that Robert Schumann, with similar aspirations for a career as a virtuoso pianist, should have waited until nearly the end of his productive life as a composer to produce his first piano trio. Of course, Schumann’s pianistic ambitions were confounded early on by an injury to his right hand. The story of a “finger-stretching device” put about by his teacher and eventual father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck (who feared that his reputation as a piano teacher might suffer as a result of Schumann’s debility) has remained popular despite being discredited by Clara Schumann. Certainly, crackpot mechanical novelties claiming to build hand strength and promote dexterity and facility abounded in the 19th century, but there is no evidence that Schumann ever used one, and the details of Wieck’s story are not supported by Robert’s description of the problem as “an affliction of the whole hand”.

Whatever its nature, the injury caused Schumann to turn his attention to composition, where the piano, alone, remained the focus: he wrote almost exclusively for the instrument for the better part of a decade. Papillons, Carnaval, the Symphonic Etudes, the Davidsbündlertänze, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana and the Fantasie in C all date from this period. Along the way, he suffered his first major depressive episode (thought to have been brought on by the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law in an epidemic of cholera). He also founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, became engaged to the 16-year-old adopted daughter of a wealthy Czech nobleman and broke off the engagement when he discovered that she would have no inheritance, and promptly transferred his affections to the 15-year-old Clara Wieck (who, as a budding concert pianist already on her way to a major international career, represented Schumann’s lost dreams for himself). A long and increasingly difficult engagement, famously degenerating into legal action between Schumann and Friedrich Wieck, ended with Robert and Clara’s marriage on the day before her 21st birthday, in the autumn of 1840.

By the time of their wedding Schumann’s Liederjahr (“Year of Song”) was already well underway. After saying, as late as 1839 that he “rated vocal writing below instrumental music and never thought of it as a great art” he proceeded to write more than 150 works for voice in the space of 12 months, including the great cycles, Liederkreis, Frauenliebe un-leben and Dichterliebe, considered by many to represent some of the supreme achievements of art-song writing in the 19th century. Though the following few years did not quite sustain the same feverish creative pace (Dichterliebe was written in the space of four days), they were productive: 1841 included two symphonies (one of which was among the first large-scale compositions to employ true “cyclic form”) as well as the one-movement Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra that was later reworked and expanded into the great Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54; 1842 amounted to a “Year of Chamber Music”, with the appearance of his three Op. 41 string quartets, the piano quartet, and the piano quintet. Throughout this period he was also at work on the oratorical Paradise and the Peri, the only major work he completed in 1843.

In the aftermath an extended trip to Russia (in the company of Clara, who was on tour) in the first half of 1844, Schumann fell victim to a second extended period of “nervous prostration”. Fits of shivering apparently unrelated to his general health, an unshakable sense of the anticipation of death, a previously unknown fear of heights, a weird dread of metallic objects (including such things as keys and shaving implements) an episode of tinnitus (or possibly the auditory hallucination of tinnitus) and intervals when he was “not really . . . able to abide music at all . . . as it cuts into my nerves as if with knives” were among the persistent aspects of his affliction. He did not feel fully recovered until mid-1846. Later, he would come to see this period of debility as a turning point in his life as a composer: “I used to write practically all of my pieces in the heat of inspiration, and many were completed with almost unthinkable rapidity. . . . Only from the year 1845, when I began to invent and work out everything in my head, did a completely new method of composition begin to develop.”

The Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63 is eminently representative of this ‘new method’. Schumann’s inspiration and motivation in writing seem to have been two-fold. In 1846 Clara Schumann published her own Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17. Although she was inclined to dismiss it as “effeminate and sentimental”, it was enthusiastically and respectfully received. Amongst those whose praised it was the Schumanns’ friend and colleague, Felix Mendelssohn, who declared himself “impressed”, noting, in particular, fugato passages in the last movement. Numerous commentators have suggested that Robert, who was still at this point adjusting to being married to a woman with a much larger, international professional reputation than his own, conceived his trio in competition with his wife’s, with the intention of asserting his role as the composer in the house. Or it may have been a more straightforward reaction to the quality and success of the piece. Or a bit of both.

The other source of inspiration appears to have been Mendelssohn’s great D minor piano trio of 1839. While Schumann wrote admiringly about the “Ghost” and “Archduke” trios of Beethoven, and Schubert’s E-flat trio, he reserved especially glowing terms for Mendelssohn’s, calling it “the most masterful trio of the present era. . . . It is a beautiful composition that years from now will delight our grandchildren and great grandchildren”. True enough. The fact that Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s trios are in the same key, and that the heads of the principal themes of the first movements of each are virtually identical in contour, cannot be complete coincidence.

Schumann’s ‘working out’ of the elements of his composition is on a granular, Beethovenian level, evident on the small scale and the large, but it is so comprehensive that it would take pages to delineate. As an example, in the first movement -- Mit Energie und Leidenschaft (“with energy and fervor”) -- an opening theme that commences with an ascending fourth and features half steps prominently, contributes the material for the second theme, in which the half-steps are stacked chromatically and followed by a descending (arpeggiated) fifth (the inversion of the fourth). While the movement as a whole mostly adheres to the sonata allegro form, Schumann audaciously introduces an entirely new theme in the middle of the development. In a moment of magic, the music stops completely and an obbligato is heard (in which the interval of the fourth from the principal theme is prominent), sul ponticello, played first by the cello alone and then with violin, over quiet triplet chords in the piano. It emerges that the true ‘tune’ is in the chorale-like chords of the piano, which then receives lengthy treatment before the recapitulation.

The second movement, Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch (“Lively, definitely not too hasty”) is a scherzo that begins with a two-measure introduction in a moment of harmonic uncertainty but settles quickly into the third-related, “relative” key of F major. The principal motif of the scherzo proper -- a rhythmically springy ascending figure -- begins, like that of the first movement, on A and covers the same interval as the head of the first movement (A-F). A figure from the two-bar introduction progressively acquires more significance, transformed into dizzy, chromatic whirls of eighth notes. The trio section subtracts the dotted rhythm from the scherzo theme and explores the same ascending 6th (A-F) canonically between the three players.

Next, Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung (“slowly, with inner feeling”), in A minor -- another key in a third-relationship to the previous one. The bleakly tragic opening theme of the violin once again begins on A, but here it is the tonic of the movement’s key, and we feel we have reached the still center of the piece. The entrance of the cello moves things toward a middle section -- Bewegter (“moving”) -- in F major, of simpler texture and greater optimism, before a truncated return of the Langsam, which leads, attacca, into the last movement: Mit Feuer (“with fire”). The harmonic ambiguities and air of tragedy vanish in a sunny D Major sonata movement with a lengthy coda, in many ways the most conventional and straightforward movement in this remarkable trio.