Cuong, Rachmaninoff, & Beethoven

Cuong, Rachmaninoff, & Beethoven

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VIET CUONG
Windmill
Isabelle Jamois, flute • Rachel Yi, violin • Cheyoon Kaylin Lee, cello • Luke Rinderknecht, vibraphone

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor, Op. 19
David Ying, cello • Jon Nakamatsu, piano

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, “Archduke”
Robin Scott, violin • Daniel McDonough, cello • HieYon Choi, piano

program notes

VIET CUONG

Windmill (2013)

Viet Cuong has provided the following note to accompany Windmill, commissioned by the Cadillac Moon Ensemble:

I was born and spent the first four years of my life in southern California. Though I was quite young and don’t recall many memories of living there, I (for whatever reason) do remember looking out the window of the car and admiring ranks of windmills perched on the hills by the highway. Perhaps this memory was ingrained in my brain simply because it was so stunning; watching a hundred windmills spinning their blades in conjunction with the rolling wind is quite a sight. They’re modern marvels — and strangely statuesque. For years I would think back to this memory, and I knew I had to write a piece with it in mind one day.

I thought that the instrumentation of the Cadillac Moon Ensemble would work very well with the “windmill” concept: the idea of four different instruments driven by a single, common force resonates quite nicely with what I mentioned above. However, when I learned that the concert would be themed around indulgences, I wondered if there was a way to bring another conceptual level to the piece. More memories then came to me…this time of my high school literature classes, when we studied George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the windmill symbolizes power and manipulation, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote, where the windmill represents Don Quixote’s indulgences in fantasy.

As luck would have it, I then remembered more instances of windmills in my college life. At Peabody/JHU I took a course on French and German cabarets at the turn of the century. The Montmartre area of Paris was (in)famous for its cabarets during those years, and the area’s windmills, especially at Moulin Rouge and Moulin de la Galette, became iconic motifs of the cabarets. These windmills for me represent indulgences of revelry and flesh.

Windmill is therefore a unifying piece for several reasons. It brings together many slices of my life, as well as the quirky, unconventional instrumentation of the CME. Because the four instruments of the ensemble have such distinct characters, I thought it would be a fun challenge to meld them into a “single instrument,” and other times create a “fiolinophone,” “cellophone,” or “vibraphlute” by combining two or three of the instruments. The main motif, borrowed from a piano piece I wrote last year, sits on an A and flows perpetually through the entire work. As the motive is passed through each of the four performers, the surrounding landscape’s harmonies and textures subtly shift. It’s almost as if the motif recalls wind flowing through a row of four windmills.

Thank you so much to Roberta, Patti, Meaghan, and Sean for everything they do, and for their remarkable patience and trust in me as I was writing the piece.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF 

Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor, Op. 19 (1901)

Sergei Rachmaninoff had reason to be confident going into the premiere of his First Symphony in St. Petersburg in 1897. His recent orchestral tone poem The Rock had gained the endorsement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and was well received when it was first performed. But the debut of the symphony was a personal and professional trainwreck. The conducting of Alexander Glazunov (who was drunk, according to a later account of Rachmaninoff’s wife) was lackluster and the performance was chaotic. Rachmaninoff got severe feedback on the work from critics, mentors, and colleagues, but he also sincerely disliked the piece himself, at least as he heard it realized in rehearsals. The fallout from the event severely damaged his self-confidence and he stopped composing for a few years. 

It took the convergence of several factors to get him writing again, including a budding romance with his cousin, Natalya Satina, prospective collaborations with good friends, and sessions with Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a psychotherapist and hypnotist. At the end of 1900, Rachmaninoff gave a successful public performance of two movements of his new piano concerto (No. 2 in C Minor) and then decided to spend two years focusing mostly on composition. One of his first comeback works was the Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor, which he started in the summer of 1901 and premiered that December with the cellist and dedicatee Anatoly Brandukov.

Rachmaninoff expressed frustration that the piece was sometimes referred to as a “Cello Sonata” as opposed to a sonata for both cello and piano. Subsequently, many scholars and musicians who admire the work have nevertheless discussed it as if it were a piano concerto with cello accompaniment, displaying conspicuous “problems of instrumental balance” in the words of musicologist Geoffrey Norris. Certainly, the keyboard writing is very virtuosic, but this is true of numerous nineteenth-century duo sonatas; Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms both wrote works for these two instruments full of astonishing feats at the piano. In truth, Rachmaninoff’s sonata is extremely well-distributed chamber music: both musicians sing, accompany, and occasionally growl to great effect. When the pianist gets a sublime solo turn, the cellist always soon takes up the theme and the two players build together.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, “Archduke” (1811)

The family life of Archduke Rudolph, this trio’s dedicatee, offers a glimpse into the sprawling web of Europe’s ruling class, the likes of whom Beethoven relied upon for patronage throughout his career. Rudolph was born in Florence in 1788, the youngest son of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Maria Luisa of Spain. In 1790, Leopold acceeded to the throne as Holy Roman Emperor, relocating to its seat in Vienna. It was a fraught time to hold such power, not least because of the revolutionary agitations in France which imperiled the life of his sister, Marie Antoinette, and threatened to reverberate across Europe. 

When Leopold died in 1792, his eldest son, Franz, succeeded him, and young Rudolph followed him to Vienna. Yet while Franz absorbed the myriad military and political pressures of his position — fending off Napoleon on the battlefront only to swallow an extraordinary personal humiliation when his daughter married Napoleon in 1810 — his younger brother Rudolph enjoyed a life of aristocratic leisure. Taking advantage of the accoutrements of palace life, he showed a particular penchant for music, taking lessons first from the court composer, Anton Teyber, before studying privately with Beethoven during his adolescence. Beethoven, meanwhile, demonstrated his respect to his well-placed student by dedicating several of his most monumental compositions to the Archduke — including the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, the “Emperor” Concerto, and the Missa Solemnis — dedications which were politically savvy, to be sure, but which also reflected the genuine and enduring affection and gratitude Beethoven felt toward his pupil. By the time Beethoven composed the “Archduke” Trio in 1811, Rudolph, along with two other of Beethoven’s princely patrons, had made their pact to support Beethoven financially as long as he remained in Vienna. 

The “Archduke” would be Beethoven’s final trio, and his most grand, exemplifying the composer’s particular ability to traverse vast expressive expanses and subvert expectations. But these qualities are overshadowed by the trio’s prevailing sense of stately stability (wishfully, perhaps, given the political realities)—whether in the warm and consonant dignity of the piano’s opening subject, or in the hymn-like reverence of the third movement’s theme and variations.

Program Notes by Peter Asimov