Chien-Kim-Shifrin Trio: Tremendous Triad

CMNW ARTISTIC DIRECTORS & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMERITUS UNITE FOR A LIVELY EVENING

Bring together three CMNW musical giants and the sparks will fly! Artistic Directors Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim team up with Artistic Director Emeritus David Shifrin to offer a simply spectacular evening of their favorite duo and trio works. The vibrant evening includes Brahms’s gorgeous Clarinet Sonata No. 2, an abbreviated version of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, a soaring interpretation of Ravel’s violin sonata, and Bartók’s thrilling Contrasts. Is there a more stunning way to kick off our 55th season than with these fireworks?

Presented in collaboration with Oregon Bach Festival.

The Old Church
Saturday, 10/5 • 7:30 pm PT

Program

Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.

BRAHMS Clarinet Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 120, No. 2

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Clarinet Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 120, No. 2 (1894)

I. Allegro amabile
II. Allegro appassionato
III. Andante con moto — Allegro

In the fall of 1890, Brahms decided that he was through composing. At 57, he felt that he had said the things he wanted to, and he intended that his String Quintet in G Major, completed the summer before, should be his last work. He began clearing out his files, destroying old manuscripts he did not want to keep and publishing a few pieces he did. But he was fairly sure there would be no new music.

Then in 1891 Brahms met the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld and was captivated by his playing. Mühlfeld (1856-1907) had originally joined the Meiningen orchestra as a violinist. He taught himself to play the clarinet and soon became the principal clarinetist of that orchestra and later of the Bayreuth orchestra. So enthusiastic was Brahms about Mühlfeld’s playing that he came out of retirement and began to compose for him: from 1891 came a Clarinet Trio and the great Clarinet Quintet. Three years later Brahms wrote his final instrumental works for Mühlfeld, two sonatas for clarinet and piano.

Both sonatas share the autumnal quality of Brahms’s late music, though the Second Sonata is the more immediately friendly of the two. The opening tempo marking, Allegro amabile, sets the tone for the entire work, for this is indeed music full of love. The clarinet enters immediately with a lyric theme that seems to flow endlessly, and this quality of continuous lyricism extends throughout the movement. The poised and noble second subject (Brahms marks it sotto voce) helps maintain the mood of calm acceptance that characterizes this sonata. The Allegro appassionato is in the standard scherzo-and-trio form. The clarinet’s surging, twisting opening establishes the high energy level of this movement, and the trio section of characteristically Brahmsian nobility is all the more effective by contrast. The Andante con moto is a set of variations based on the clarinet’s opening theme. That theme undergoes four variations, all in 6/8 time, and then Brahms provides an unusual conclusion by shifting to 2/4 for the final variation and suddenly speeding the music up.

—© Eric Bromberger

IGOR STRAVINSKY L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) (1918)

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) L’Histoire du Soldat

Igor Stravinsky found himself forced into exile in neutral Switzerland to avoid war. Though Stravinsky longed to return to Russia, the Revolution of 1917 stymied plans for a homecoming; he would not return until 1962, nearly a decade after the death of Stalin and the beginning of the Russian cultural thaw.

Stravinsky and Swiss librettist C.F. Ramuz wrote L’Histoire du Soldat over a span of six months in 1918, as World War I was drawing to a close. “My profound emotion on reading the news of war,” wrote Stravinsky, “which roused patriotic feelings and a sense of sadness at being so distant from my country, found some alleviation in the delight with which I steeped myself in Russian folk poems.” A Faustian tale in the tradition of Russian folk theater, L’Histoire du Soldat tells of a soldier, Joseph, who meets the Devil and trades his violin for a magical book that can tell the future and bring tremendous wealth. Along the way, he rescues and marries a princess, but he cannot escape his diabolical bargain.

A slim wartime budget and a dearth of able musicians forced Stravinsky to write for a sparse ensemble. As with The Rite of Spring and The Firebird, this music writhes with protean rhythms: the opening Soldier’s March, for example, sees five time signatures in as many measures. Stravinsky’s penchant for pastiche reveals the composer’s fascination with new sound worlds as well as his sardonic wit. He incorporates elements of popular African American music into the score, including bluesy clarinet “smears” in the princess’s Ragtime dance. Carnivalesque and erupting in jazzy outbursts, the Dance of the Devil twists and contorts until the fiend himself collapses, defeated by the power of Joseph’s fiddle. Victory proves short-lived, as the percussive rhythms of hell ultimately best the soldier’s violin in the grotesque Triumphal March, which ends in a crescendo.

—© Andrew McIntyre

MAURICE RAVEL Violin Sonata No. 2, M. 77

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) Violin Sonata No. 2, M. 77 (17’)

I. Allegretto
II. Blues. Moderato
III. Perpetuum mobile. Allegro

Maurice Ravel’s music underwent a radical metamorphosis in the years after World War I. Those who associate Ravel with the refined melancholy of Pavane for a Dead Princess and the childlike delight of the Mother Goose Suite will find little in common, on first listening, with the sparse, occasionally discordant sounds of the Violin Sonata in G Major. Ravel’s final chamber composition demonstrates just how far he had traveled, musically speaking, from his earlier works, how receptive he was to musical styles of the 1920s, and how, despite all these changes, the music is still unmistakably Ravel’s.

Ravel began writing the sonata in 1923 for his friend and colleague Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. “It won’t be very difficult and it won’t sprain your wrist,” he assured her. A fine violinist, Jourdan-Morhange was Ravel’s technical advisor for several of his violin pieces, including Tzigane (1924). Working with Jourdan-Morhange awakened Ravel’s awareness of the essential differences between his instrument and hers. When he embarked on her sonata, Ravel decided to make those differences the structural focus of the work. “It was this independence I was aiming at when I wrote a sonata for violin and piano,” he later explained, “two incompatible instruments whose incompatibility is emphasized here, without any attempt being made to reconcile their contrasted characters.”

Despite Ravel’s tongue-in-cheek promise, the sonata turned out to be a challenge for both performer and composer. Jourdan-Morhange, who suffered from arthritis, was ultimately unable to give the premiere, while Ravel, who often completed his compositions quickly, took four years to finish it. “What a lot of trouble your confounded sonata has given me,” griped Ravel in a letter to Jourdan-Morhange.

The two outer movements spotlight the uncompromising differences between violin and piano, while the central Blues makes the then-new sound of jazz its central focus. All this talk of incompatible instruments suggests music at odds with itself. Ravel’s genius lies in creating music that is both spare, even austere, and simultaneously, startlingly, expressive.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

BÉLA BARTÓK Contrasts (1938)

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945) Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet & Piano, Sz. 111 (20’)

I. Verbunkos (Recruiting Dance)
II. Pihenö (Relaxation)
III. Sebes (Fast Dance)

Before the war officially started, Béla Bartók was consumed by his fear of impending disaster. In April 1938, he wrote of “the imminent danger that Hungary will surrender to this regime of thieves and murderers.” He contemplated emigration but had to stay for his ailing mother, who would soon pass away.

During these difficult months, the violinist Joseph Szigeti coordinated a commission from the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman for a “clarinet-violin duet with piano accompaniment.” Thus, during the final lead up to war, Bartók wrote an unusual work he called Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet & Piano, which he would soon play with Goodman and Szigeti when he arrived in the United States.

—© Ethan Allred

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