Friday April 27, 2018 at 7:30 pm

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

Program

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 Rostropovich. 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.
• 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.

Arion Chamber Music presents The Alcott Trio is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement / Creative Learning, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond.

Notes on the Program

Charles Ives (1874-­1954)

Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and Piano

“There is a great man living in this country -- a composer…...His name is Charles Ives.”

      ----Arnold Schoenberg, 1944

Until the time of his death, Charles Ives’s best-known published work was probably his Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax in which he delineated ‘creative ways to structure life insurance packages for people of means’. He is often credited with being the founder of modern estate planning; as a partner in the insurance firm of Ives & Myrick, he became an eminent and respected leader of the insurance industry. Few of his business colleagues were aware of the fact that he composed music.

Although he studied composition and theory at Yale with Horatio Parker -- then one of America’s more eminent composers -- the strongest and most lasting musical influence of Ives’s life was undoubtedly his father, George Ives, who had been a military band leader in the Union Army during the Civil War. Some of Charles Ives’s earliest musical memories included listening to marching bands under his father’s direction playing different tunes simultaneously on opposite sides of the town square in his native Danbury, Connecticut. George Ives also encouraged his son to experiment with bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. At 14, Charles became a church organist, developing a deep familiarity and love for the hymn tunes that found their way into many of his later compositions. As a teenager, he wrote a number of hymns and religious songs himself, as well as, at age 17, a set of Variations on “America” -- his earliest composition to become standard repertoire (it was ‘rediscovered’, edited and published in the late 1940s by the organist, E. Power Biggs, who performed it regularly). Ives later said of this piece: ‘father didn’t let me do it much, as it made the boys [in church] laugh.”

Much of Ives’s most accomplished musical output (including the Piano Trio) seems to date from a period of a little over a decade, between about 1906 and 1918. Fixing precise dates for his compositions is a difficult task, partly because he often spent years working on pieces -- in which case it is not always clear where ‘composition’ ended and ‘revision’ began -- but also because no one (including, apparently, Ives) seems to have thought it was especially important to keep track of their chronology until near the end of his life, by which time he had not composed actively for about 25 years. Work on the Piano Trio may have been begun as early as 1905. A completed version of it seems to have existed in 1911; it was extensively revised 1914-15.

The piece is cast in three movements. The first, Moderato, begins with a 27 measure dialogue between the cello and the piano followed by a second dialogue of identical length between the violin and piano at the conclusion of which the cello re-enters and the two dialogues are combined, each played simultaneously. The second movement is a scherzo with the -- at first glance -- exotic title TSIAJ. Soon enough the meaning of the acronym reveals itself: ‘This Scherzo Is A Joke’. It is in many ways Ives at his most ‘Ivesian’, dense with quotations of folk songs (Long, Long Ago, Hold the Fort, the Campbells are Coming, the Sailor’s Hornpipe, etc.), popular tunes of the day (Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, My Old Kentucky Home, etc.), hymn tunes (most extensively, There is a Fountain Filled With Blood), more than one college fraternity song and, possibly, a brief quote from Puccini’s La fanciulla del West. Many are quoted ‘incorrectly’ -- either adapted to Ives’s own purposes or as one might remember them, imperfectly, while walking down the street -- sometimes overlapping in barely-controlled chaos. The fact that the charm and the ‘point’ of this joke continue to elude some listeners even to this day would probably have amused Ives as much as anything he put down on paper. The last movement, Moderato con moto, returns to the more sober outlook of the first and introduces elements of uncomplicated lyricism as well. Quotation continues to the very end, this time including a song by Ives himself, written for (and rejected by) the Yale Glee Club and, finally, a dreamlike setting of Thomas Hastings’s Rock of Ages.

Ives suffered from a variety of health problems (including diabetes) throughout his life, experiencing a number of what were always referred to within his family as ‘heart attacks’. There is some reason to believe that these were in fact psychological events similar to nervous breakdowns. The first of them occurred in 1907, near the beginning of his long burst of activity as a composer; the second in 1918, near the end of it. In 1927 (as recounted much later by his widow), Ives came downstairs one morning with tears in his eyes and said: “Nothing sounds right.” From that point, until his death by stroke in 1954, he wrote no more music. He retired from business in 1930, and devoted his remaining years to revising earlier works (perhaps most notably his “Concord Sonata”) and quietly supporting the careers of other composers and musicians.

His own music was slow to gain recognition. He once claimed that Gustav Mahler had expressed an intention to premiere his [Ives’s] 3rd Symphony (The Camp Meeting) with the New York Philharmonic during the 1911-12 season. Mahler died in 1911 and it has never been possible to verify the story. The same symphony did eventually earn Ives a Pulitzer Prize -- in 1946, almost forty years after it had been completed. Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and (after his immigration to the United States) Arnold Schoenberg were fans and enthusiasts of Ives’s music, but their enthusiasm did little to popularize it. More was accomplished by the film composer, Bernard Herrmann (who championed Ives during his tenure as conductor of the CBS Symphony in the 1940s) and, later, by Leonard Bernstein, (who premiered Ives’s 2nd Symphony with the New York Philharmonic and recorded it along with the 'Fourth of July' movement from the New England Holidays Symphony). Some of his most enthusiastic admirers have come from the more popular end of the musical spectrum: Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead has named Charles Ives as one of his two musical heroes, and Frank Zappa has also cited him repeatedly as an influence.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97 “Archduke”

“In the case of how many compositions is the word ‘new’ misapplied! Never in Beethoven’s, and least of all in this, which is full of originality.”

      ----Ignaz Moscheles, 1814

Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, is only one among at least a dozen works (including the Missa Solemnis) that he dedicated to his friend, patron, and pupil Archduke Rudolph of Austria (youngest child of Austrian Emperor Leopold II), but it is the one to which the nickname “Archduke” has stuck -- possibly because of a perceived grandness of manner and scope that pervades the piece, most evidently in the first and third movements. Begun in the summer of 1810 and completed in spring of the following year, it was his last composition in the piano trio genre. In terms of his chamber music output, it represents a kind of apotheosis of his ‘Middle Period’ style (the Op. 95 string quartet, composed contemporaneously with “Archduke”, is already looking forward to the ‘Late Period’ in many significant ways).

The work is in the four-movement form that Beethoven adopted for piano trios from the very beginning (preferring it to the three-movement template established by Haydn and Mozart) with his Op. 1 -- and from which he departed only twice: in his Op. 11 clarinet trio and later in the “Ghost”. The first movement, in the expected sonata allegro form, is notable for a lengthy development with extended passages of string pizzicato. A scherzo follows, in the same key as the first movement but with a trio that explores the more distant areas of D-flat and E major. A slow movement, Andante cantabile, begins with a serene but deeply expressive chorale for the piano alone before revealing itself as a theme and variations form. It is followed, without pause, by a fourth movement rondo in which elements of humor and drama combine to create a sense of opera buffa -- concluding with an extended presto coda that visits the surprising key of A major before finding its way home to B-flat.

Although it is likely that the piece was performed privately shortly after its completion, its public premiere was delayed by a variety of factors: Beethoven’s preoccupation with the composition of large-scale works (the 7th and 8th symphonies, as well as the “Battle Symphony”, Wellington’s Victory), periods of ill-health, family difficulties with which he chose to embroil himself -- and his reluctance, despite the steady advance of his hearing loss, to place the premiere performances of his works for keyboard in the hands of other performers. (An attempt to perform his 5th piano concerto in 1811 was a notable failure.) So it was not until April, 1814 (204 years ago this month) that the trio was heard publicly for the first time, with the composer at the piano, assisted by Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Josef Linke (members of the Schuppanzigh Quartet that premiered most of Beethoven’s middle and late string quartets).

The composer, Louis Spohr, attended a rehearsal for this performance and gave this account: “In the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which was of little concern to Beethoven because he could not hear it. On account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part. I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate." (In fairness, Spohr may not have been among the most perceptive of listeners: he would later describe Beethoven’s late string quartets as “indecipherable, uncorrected horrors”.) The young Ignaz Moscheles (quoted above), wrote in somewhat more measured fashion: “His playing, aside from its intellectual element, satisfied me less, being wanting in clarity and precision; but I observed many traces of the grand style of playing which I had long recognized in his compositions."

A second performance of the same program, a few weeks later, was Beethoven’s last public appearance as a pianist.

Program Notes © Robert La Rue, 2018