Beethoven, Ishizaki, & Brahms
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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 5 in D Major, Op. 102, No. 2
Amir Eldan, cello • Pei-Shan Lee, piano
HANNAH ISHIZAKI
Obon Uta (World Premiere)
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34
Itamar Zorman, Janet Ying, violin • Melissa Reardon, viola • Keiko Ying, cello • Ran Dank, piano
Program Notes
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 5 in D Major, Op. 102, No. 2 (1815)
The mid-1810s were a trying period for Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1812, he wrote a passionate letter to a woman identified only as “my immortal beloved” (probably either Antonie Brentano or Josephine Brunsvik, though her identity is still debated). He never sent this note, and soon after penning it he became convinced that he would live out his life alone; as he proclaimed to himself in his journal, “for you there is no longer happiness except in yourself, in your art.” Over the course of the 1810s, Beethoven became almost completely deaf, which contributed to his mounting sense of isolation; by 1818, he carried out most conversations via pen and paper. Around that time, he was also engaged in a painful battle for custody of his nephew Karl. Between 1815 and early 1818, he wrote very few fresh works, but those he did complete showed signs of a groundbreaking new style.
His two 1815 cello sonatas, published together as Op. 102, were among the only major pieces he finished during those transitional years, and both display an extraordinary level of expressive concision. The Allegro con brio of the D major Sonata, Op. 102, No. 2, is oddly brassy, full of ecstatic bursts and trumpet calls. It is extremely efficient music, shifting between themes and sections without great ceremony, a quality that lends poignancy to the few moments of stillness. The Adagio is the only proper slow movement that Beethoven wrote for cello and piano, and it has some of the spare, plaintive qualities that he would only replicate in his late string quartets. At the end of the Adagio, Beethoven writes a long, harmonically daring transition that sets up a playful, fugal finale. This closing movement is based on a jolly, almost trite, melody but it builds to something quite profound and meaningful—a procedure that he would go on to employ in many of the major works of his last period, from his “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata to his “Diabelli” Variations to the glorious finale of his Ninth Symphony.
Program Note by Nicky Swett
HANNAH ISHIZAKI
Obon Uta (2025) — World Premiere
Hannah Ishizaki has provided the following note to accompany Obon Uta:
Being half-Japanese, but growing up not speaking the language and without a large community in my hometown, I have often felt disconnected from my Japanese heritage. Recently, I have been trying to reconnect with my culture through music and dance. In developing this piece for Jeffrey Zeigler’s upcoming album, “We Were Fridays,” I spoke with Jeffrey about our shared half-Japanese heritages. “Obon Uta” is inspired by the festival Obon, which is a homecoming for both the living and the dead and a celebration of ancestors. A large part of the festival is communal dancing. Large groups of people of all ages come together to dance together, some in traditional dress, some in casual clothes, some who have practiced the dances, and others who are newcomers. The title, “Obon Uta” means Obon Song in Japanese. The piece consists of two main sections. The first is percussive and rhythmic, and it was inspired by the communal experience of breathing together, dancing together with cyclical sets of movements. The rhythmic patterns and cello timbres follow the sounds of the taiko drum and the vocal timbre of the musicians that usually occupy a central pillar around which these circular dances take place. The second part is based on the ebbing and flowing of the dance, with everyone not quite exactly dancing together, but creating a living, breathing, imperfect unison. The live cello emerges out of the loops, floating above, below, and in between all of the voices.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 (1864)
Brahms’ Piano Quintet belongs to an outpouring of chamber music from the early 1860s — the period musicologists generally call Brahms’ “first maturity” — which also gave rise to his two string sextets, his first two piano quartets, and the horn trio. The style Brahms cultivated during these years is partly accountable to his historicist sensibility: his appreciation for the large-scale formal arcs and emotional intensity of Beethoven, to be sure, but also his study of the unhurried melodies and harmonic sorcery of Schubert, whose instrumental music was considerably less known at that time.
But the final form of the Piano Quintet is also the result of Brahms’ dialogue with a trusted coterie of performers who offered critical feedback. The musical substance began its life scored for string quintet, with two cellos (suggesting that Brahms was keeping the score of Schubert’s glorious cello quintet nearby). He presented this version of the work to violinist Joseph Joachim, a close friend and tireless advocate of Brahms’ work. After rehearsing the work with colleagues, Joachim disclosed his misgivings to Brahms: “every line shows proof of an almost overwhelming creative strength, full of spirit through and through.” But, Joachim continued, “the instrumentation is not energetic enough to my ears to convey the powerful rhythmic convulsions; the sound is almost helplessly thin for the musical thought. Then again for long stretches everything lies too thickly. You surely can’t like it either: it sounds artificial!” After some unsatisfactory attempts to salvage the work as a string quintet, Brahms (always the perfectionist) burned the score, and decided to rearrange the work as a Sonata for Two Pianos. It was in this form that Op. 34 received its premiere in 1864, Brahms playing with Karl Tausig, a student of Liszt. But when Brahms shared this version with Clara Schumann, his confidante betrayed her own doubts: “The first time I played it I had the impression it was an arrangement. It cannot be called a sonata; rather, it is a work whose ideas you could — and should — distribute among the whole orchestra, as though out of a horn of plenty!” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Brahms ultimately found the perfect compromise in the Piano Quintet formation — something of a hybrid, preserving the best elements of both previous ventures — a genre which had been pioneered by Robert Schumann two decades prior. Unlike the string quintet, however, Brahms did not destroy the two-piano version, which continues to enjoy occasional performance to this day.
Program Note by Peter Asimov