SPOTLIGHT RECITAL: Très Coloré et Élégant
In chamber music, as in life, relationships are everything. For today’s recital, we’ll hear Protégé musician Zitong Wang take on Mozart’s dynamic Sonata in E-flat Major—written when he was just slightly younger than Zitong—followed by Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite for piano four hands with Artistic Director Gloria Chien. Next, longtime musical friends and collaborators Soovin Kim and Efe Baltacigil partner on Ravel’s homage to his unlikely friend and fellow composer, Claude Debussy.
PSU, College of the Arts, Lincoln Recital Hall
Tuesday, 7/18 • 12:00 pm
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- MOZART Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 282
MOZART (1756-1791)
Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 282 (12’)- CLAUDE DEBUSSY Petite Suite for Piano, Four Hands, L. 65
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Petite Suite for piano four hands (13’)
I. En bateau
II. Cortège
III. Menuet
IV. Ballet- MAURICE RAVEL Sonata for Violin and Cello, M. 73 (1920–22)
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Sonata for Violin and Cello, M. 73 (20’)I. Allegro
II. Très vif
III. Lent
IV. Vif, avec entrain
In 1920, Henry Prunières, a French musicologist and acquaintance of Maurice Ravel, founded a music magazine named revue musicale. To inaugurate it, Prunières commissioned ten well- known composers to write short works in tribute to the recently deceased Claude Debussy. For his contribution, Ravel wrote a short duo for violin and cello, which later became the first movement of his Sonata for Violin and Cello (completed in 1922).
Apparently, the first full performance of the Sonata was a “massacre,” though Ravel was not in attendance. The violinist, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, explained when she jokingly complained to Ravel that he expected the musicians “to play the flute on the violin and the drum on the cello.”
Ravel eventually came to see the sonata as a crucial turning point in his career, writing, “The music is stripped down to the bone. The allure of harmony is rejected, and increasingly the emphasis returns to the melody.” In writing such sparse, melodic music, Ravel was keeping up with the times, adapting the stripped-down style Debussy explored in his later years. The sonata’s four compact movements make the most of the atypical combination of instruments, approaching the sound of a string quartet at times and at others relishing the sparseness created by half a quartet. The music is atypically brash and dissonant for Ravel, perhaps suggesting that the trying years of World War I left him a changed person.
—© Ethan Allred
Artists
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Gloria Chien
Piano & Artistic Director
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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
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Zitong Wang
Piano, Protégé
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23-year-old Chinese pianist Zitong Wang made her solo recital debut at age 13 in Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing. She has performed at such venues as the Steinway Hall in New York, Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, Severance Hall in Cleveland, etc. She has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Galicia Symphony Orchestra, Hangzhou Philharmonic, etc. She has worked with conductors Jahja Ling, Xian Zhang, Lina Gonzalez-Granados, José Trigueros, and Yang Yang.
Among others, she is a first prize winner of the Rosalyn Tureck International Bach Competition and Virginia Waring International Concerto Competition, second prize in the Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, and first prize in Princeton Festival Competition and France Music Competition. She most recently won first prize and “Nelson Freire Prize” in the XXXIII Ferrol International Piano Competition in 2022. A devoted chamber musician, Zitong has played alongside with Meng-Chieh Liu, Don Liuzzi, Vera Quartet, Zora Quartet, etc. She has toured with Roberto Díaz and musicians from Curtis. As an active member of Curtis 20/21 ensemble, she has worked with composers Unsuk Chin, Bright Sheng, David Ludwig, and Alvin Singleton. In 2019 she participated in the Intimacy of Creativity conference for composers in Hong Kong as a guest pianist.
Born in Inner Mongolia, China, Zitong began piano lessons at age three and previously studied with Hua Chang and Yuan Sheng at the Central Conservatory of Music Affiliated Middle School in Beijing. At age thirteen, she entered the Curtis Institute of Music where she studied with Meng-Chieh Liu and Eleanor Sokoloff. She is currently pursuing her Master’s degree at New England Conservatory with Dang Thai Son.
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Soovin Kim
Violin & Artistic Director
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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.
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Efe Baltacigil
Cello
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Turkish cellist Efe Baltacigil finished his undergraduate studies in Istanbul, Turkey, before attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his last year of study, at the age of 23, he won the Associate Principal Cello position at the famous Philadelphia Orchestra.
Since 2011, he has held the position of Principal Cellist at the Seattle Symphony, and has appeared as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Seattle Symphony. Efe has had recital and concerto debuts in Carnegie Hall and has been a senior member of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont since 2017.
Efe performed as a soloist for Seattle Symphony’s 2022 Opening Night Gala and will play Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto with them in October 2023.
Besides music and his family, Efe enjoys windsurfing, sailing, drawing, and volleypong.