FREE Open Rehearsal: GYÖRGY LIGETI Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano
Go behind the scenes and observe CMNW’s world-class musicians working together to put the finishing touches on the music for upcoming performances. An informal Q&A follows the rehearsal.
Artistic Directors Gloria Chien (piano) and Soovin Kim (violin) take the stage with hornist Radovan Vlatković to rehearse Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano.
This year’s open rehearsals are sponsored by:
George & Deborah Olsen
Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Wednesday, 7/17 • 11:00 am PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- GYÖRGY LIGETI Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano (1982)
GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923-2006) Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano (1982) (23’)
I. Andantino con tenerezza
II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico
III. Alla marcia
IV. Lamento: AdagioGyörgy Ligeti’s early compositions reflect the aesthetics of the post-WWII serialist style in which he was trained. By the late 1970s, however, Ligeti had reached a musical impasse. He composed nothing between 1977 and 1982; during that time, he sought out a more individual language to express his ideas. In a 1981 interview, Ligeti declared, “I reject both [the avant-garde and traditional style]. The Avant-garde, to which I am said to belong, has become academic. As for looking back, there’s no point in chewing over an outmoded style. I prefer to follow a third way: being myself, without paying heed either to categorizations or to fashionable gadgetry.” The following year, Ligeti completed his first composition in this “third way,” his Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano, “Hommage à Brahms.”
Don’t let the subtitle fool you; other than employing the same instruments used in Brahms’ 1865 Trio for Horn, there is nothing remotely Brahmsian in Ligeti’s music. During his self-imposed compositional hiatus, Ligeti had studied the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who experimented with tempo variations. Nancarrow’s original approach to music writing inspired Ligeti to experiment with multiple simultaneous tunings in the Horn Trio. “The piano plays as it is tuned, by definition, tempered,” Ligeti wrote. “The violin tuned in pure fifths deviates from the tempered tuning considerably—as always with chamber music for strings and piano. In a tonal violin/piano sonata of the Classical or Romantic period, the violinist tries to match the tuning of the piano to some degrees, at least in the slow movements. Though this always remains an approximation, it is part of the character of the genre. In my Trio … [although scored for a valved horn] I was thinking in terms of natural horns pitched in various keys, and I indicate these in the score. In this way, mostly untempered overtones occur, which tend to throw the violinist’s fingers off their mark. This is intentional, part of the riddle of this non-manifest musical language.”
The violin’s first three notes are a motif Ligeti used to unify all four movements. The Vivacissimo molto ritmico plays with different simultaneous subdivisions of an eight-beat pulse; 3+3+2 or 3+2+3. The brief Alla Marcia begins forcefully, but competing cross-rhythms in violin and piano cause musical stutters. The march rhythm fades into a steady pulse as the horn joins in. The closing Lamento: Adagio features a somber passacaglia built on a brief chromatic descending motif.
—© Elizabeth Schwartz
Artists
-
Gloria Chien
Piano & Artistic Director
-
Taiwanese-born pianist Gloria Chien has one of the most diverse musical lives as a noted performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard, and she performed again with the BSO with Keith Lockhart. She was subsequently selected by The Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the year, “who appears to excel in everything.” In recent seasons, she has performed as a recitalist and chamber musician at Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, the Dresden Chamber Music Festival, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. She performs frequently with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2009, she launched String Theory, a chamber music series in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has become one of the region’s premier classical music presenters. The following year she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo, a position she held for the next decade.
In 2017, she joined her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, as artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont. The duo became artistic directors at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon in 2020. They were named recipients of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 2021 for their efforts during the pandemic.
Most recently, Gloria was named Advisor of the newly launched Institute for Concert Artists at the New England Conservatory of Music. Gloria released two albums—her Gloria Chien LIVE from the Music@Menlo LIVE label and Here With You with acclaimed clarinetist Anthony McGill on Cedille Records.
Gloria received her bachelor, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the New England Conservatory of Music with Wha Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. She is Artist-in-Residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and she is a Steinway Artist.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
-
Soovin Kim
2025 YAI Faculty, Violin & Artistic Director
-
Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart, and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season. When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the 1st violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices and a two-disc set of Bach’s complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.
Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015. In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became artistic directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.
-
Radovan Vlatković
Horn
-
Born in Zagreb in 1962, Radovan Vlatković completed his studies with Professor Prerad Detiček at the Zagreb Academy of Music and Professor Michael Höltzel at the Music Academy in Detmold, Germany. He is the recipient of many first prizes in national and international competitions, including the Premio Ancona in 1979 and the ARD Competition in Munich in 1983—the first to be awarded to a horn player in fourteen years. This led to numerous invitations to music festivals throughout Europe including Salzburg, Vienna, Edinburgh, and Dubrovnik to name but a few, the Americas, Australia, Israel, and Korea, as well as regular appearances in Japan.
In 1998, he became Horn Professor at the renowned Mozarteum in Salzburg. Since 2000, he holds the Horn Chair “Canon” at the “Queen Sofia” School in Madrid.
Radovan Vlatković has appeared as soloist with many distinguished symphony and chamber orchestras including the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, Munich Chamber Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, Mozarteum Orchestra, Camerata Academica Salzburg, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Santa Cecilia Orchestra Rome, Rotterdam Philharmonie, the orchestras of Berne, Basel, and Zürich, the Lyon and Strassbourg Orchestras, NHK Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan and Yomiuri Orchestras, and Adelaide and Melbourne Orchestras.
Very much in demand as a chamber musician, he has performed at Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus, Svyatoslav Richter’s December Evenings in Moscow, Oleg Kagan and Natalia Gutman’s Kreuth, Rudolf Serkin’s Marlboro, András Schiff’s Mondsee, Vicenza and Ittingen Festivals, as well as Kuhmo, Prussia Cove, and Casals Festival in Prades.
In 2014, Vlatković was awarded an Honorary Membership of the Royal Academy of Music (Hon RAM), an honor bestowed upon only 300 distinguished musicians worldwide.
Radovan Vlatković plays a full double horn Model 20 M by Paxman of London.