Stravinsky, Prestini, & Schumann

Stravinsky, Prestini, & Schumann  

This concert is generously sponsored by Chuck and Dena Verrill.

IGOR STRAVINSKY
Suite Italienne                                                                           
Ian Swensen, violin • Weicong Zhang, piano

PAOLA PRESTINI
The Six Seasons of Trees 
Linda Chesis, flute • Jeffrey Zeigler, cello • Luke Rinderknecht, percussion

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63
Itamar Zorman, violin • Ahrim Kim, cello • Soyeon Kate Lee, piano

Program Notes

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Suite Italienne (1933)

The choreographer and impresario Sergei Diaghilev trawled through archives in Italy in 1919, looking for inspiration for a ballet about Pulcinella, a clownish and unlucky-in-love stock character from Italian commedia dell’arte. He scrounged up manuscripts to assorted arias, sonatas, and orchestral pieces that he believed were by the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, better known for his role in the rise of opera buffa in the early eighteenth century. (Diaghilev was wrong: much of the music he found was in fact by a range of other Italian Baroque musicians, including Domenico Gallo and Carlo Ignazio Monzo.) Diaghilev gave copies of the manuscripts to Igor Stravinsky, entreating him to use “Pergolesi” as a basis for the score to this new ballet. After some hesitation, Stravinsky agreed, choosing an assortment of these Baroque excerpts, orchestrating them, and modifying them with the changeable, asymmetrical rhythms and static harmonies that characterized his own music. The ballet, which debuted in 1920, marked the beginning of a new “neoclassical” phase in Stravinsky’s composing career. In the early 1930s, he returned to this music, collaborating with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and violinist Samuel Dushkin to compile Suite Italienne, a string-piano arrangement of select numbers from Pulcinella.

Stravinsky took the job of re-working another composer’s pieces seriously, writing that “it was a delicate task to breathe new life into scattered fragments and to create a whole from the isolated pages of a musician for whom I felt a special liking and tenderness.” In some movements of Suite Italienne, like the Introduzione and Sicilienne, he is light-handed and leaves the melodies and stately characters of the originals mostly unaltered. But he also expressed some quite aggressive attitudes about his source material, and in other parts of the suite he makes clear his desire to forcefully pull the music of the past into his present. In the penultimate Minuet, each time the main melody is played it is surrounded by more dissonances. This gradual introduction of twentieth-century harmonies paves the way for the wild metrical energy, flattened tonal hierarchies, and celebratory abandon of the Finale, where the musical preferences of Stravinsky himself are on full display. 

Program Note by Nicky Swett

PAOLA PRESTINI

The Six Seasons of Trees (2024)

Paola Prestini has provided the following note to accompany The Six Seasons of Trees:

I’ve been reading ‘Time Like an Ever Rolling Stream’ which is the title of an epistle the forester Guiffords Pinchot wrote for his son, reflecting on the beloved Sawkill that flows through the Pinchot estate in the Catskills, and describes both the changes of the seasons, but also the impact of the human, almost imperceptibly with the first indigenous populations, and then radically and violently with the arrival of the European colonists.

Simultaneously, I’ve been thinking of Bloom as described by the six seasons of trees as “Bare, Bud, Burst, Flower, Fruit, Fall”. This is a cycle that obviously repeats annually for trees, and all nature, but we also see the same stages in our own lives, and in the generations of our families, and in the rise and fall of our civilizations.

This would be the structural threadlike form for the work I create: Bloom: a healing cycle; thinking about the materiality of your instruments, spatialization, perhaps the sound of plants….

Plants do not suffer in silence. Instead, when thirsty or stressed, plants make “airborne sounds,” according to a study published today in Cell. Plants that need water or have recently had their stems cut produce up to roughly 35 sounds per hour, the authors found. But well-hydrated and uncut plants are much quieter, making only about one sound per hour. The reason you have probably never heard a thirsty plant make noise is that the sounds are ultrasonic — about 20-100 kilohertz. That means they are so high-pitched that very few humans could hear them. Some animals, however, probably can. Bats, mice and moths could potentially live in a world filled with the sounds of plants, and previous work by the same team has found that plants respond to the sounds made by animals, too. (Sources: nature.com, cell.com)

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 (1847)

By the time Robert Schumann set about composing his first Piano Trio in his late thirties, he had a number of models at his disposal: there was Beethoven’s cycle of trios, of course (of which Schumann especially enjoyed the “Ghost” and the “Archduke”); there was Schubert’s late E-Flat Major trio, which had beguiled Schumann during his adolescence, leading him to emulate aspects of it in his own piano quartet; there was Mendelssohn’s D minor trio, rightly described by Schumann as a “beautiful composition that years from now will delight our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” 

Closest to home, however, was Clara Schumann’s masterly Piano Trio in G Minor, completed in 1847. At that time, Clara continued to enjoy an international fame and reputation as a touring virtuoso that far exceeded Robert’s own as a composer, despite his being a decade her senior; and, more than mere inspiration, it seems likely that the success of Clara’s trio incited a certain competitive streak in her husband, spurring him to try his own hand at the genre. Once completed, the two trios—Clara’s and Robert’s—were customarily programmed together in concert (with Clara at the keyboard for both).

The Trio represented a turning point for the maturing composer: having reflected on his compositional process, Robert adopted what he called a “new method” involving charting out the architecture of the work in advance; if this sounds unremarkable, it was certainly a departure from his previous approach, which involved, in his words, writing bursts “in the heat of inspiration.” The “new method” enabled Schumann to hone a more densely contrapuntal style, interweaving and developing multiple themes in dynamic dialogue. And Clara, devoted as ever to her husband’s success, harbored only admiration for Robert’s achievement, describing the first movement as “one of the most beautiful first movements that I know.”

Program Note by Peter Asimov