Wiancko, Ogonek, Schulhoff, & Smetana

Wiancko, Ogonek, Schulhoff, & Smetana

PAUL WIANCKO (b. 1983)
Toy Bricks
Renée Jolles, violin • Abigail Leidy, David Ying, cello • Anthony Manzo, bass

ELIZABETH OGONEK (b. 1989)
Falling Up
Ben Smith, flute • Corinne Foley, English horn • Katelyn Waffer Poetker, clarinet • Zhengnan Wang, violin • Claire Eurim Kim, cello

ERWIN SCHULHOFF (1894 – 1942)
Duo for Violin and Cello
Robin Scott, violin • Amir Eldan, cello

BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824–1884)
Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15
Ayano Ninomiya, violin • Amir Eldan, cello • Tao Lin, piano

Program Notes

PAUL WIANCKO (b. 1983)
Toy Bricks                                                                                    

The string quartet repertoire has the appearance of a monolithic corpus of music for two violins, viola, and cello. While it is true that this has been the favored mix since the days of Joseph Haydn, composers have always entertained the possibility of writing for other groups of four string players. The young Gioachino Rossini wrote charming, if slightly juvenile, sonatas for two violins, cello, and double bass. In 1894, Anton Arensky wrote an elegiac quartet for violin, viola, and two cellos, a setup that in some ways forms a better string choir than the usual combination because it takes advantage of the cello’s capacity to double as bass and tenor. The cellist and composer Paul Wiancko has been playing in string quartets for much of his career, first in the Harlem Quartet and, since 2023, in the Kronos Quartet. But given his penchant for musical adventure and experimentation, it makes sense that one of the first quartets he wrote, Toy Bricks (2012, rev. 2021), was for the rare, low-string-heavy ensemble of double bass, two cellos, and violin.

He describes the piece as a “sweetly geometric toe-tapper.” The toe tapping comes from the violin’s repeated, chirping figure, which interacts with lightly syncopated entries in the other three instruments to create an infectious and persistent groove. As for the sweet geometry, the piece has an idiosyncratic but quite logical form, in which the toe-tapping refrain scaffolds improvisatory episodes that include a whirring set of arpeggios for the violin and a pizzicato solo for the second cello where the instrument sounds like an electric bass. At the end, a solemn chorale grows from underneath the violin’s chirps, and the whole piece closes on a shimmering seventh chord of the sort that a jazz trio might use to elegantly conclude its rendition of a standard.

ELIZABETH OGONEK (b. 1989)
Falling Up

Elizabeth Ogonek wrote Falling Up in 2015 for the Sheffield-based chamber music society Music in the Round, which that year had a spring festival focused on childhood-themed music. Ogonek composed her piece as a kind of intermezzo that weaves between two starkly contrasting poems on the topic. In “Enfance” by Arthur Rimbaud, the speaker waxes on the deceptively complex imaginative and emotional life of children, opining that “I’d gladly be the abandoned child on the pier setting out for the open sea, the young farm boy in the lane, whose forehead grazes the sky.” Shel Silverstein’s “Falling Up,” on the other hand, is a delightful nonsense poem that exhibits a carefree, if slightly reductive, view of the playful logic that obtains in the minds of children. Ogonek’s piece represents an aging process that mediates between the two texts, whereby the richness and intensity of childhood as a lived experience gives way to a narrower view of what it feels like to be a kid. As she explains it, “The narrative as a whole addresses the notion that the complexity of childhood is rarely remembered that way – that childishness is essentially an invention of the adult mind.”

She organizes Falling Up as a set of alternating variations on two themes. One is the tonal, vaguely pastoral melody introduced by the English horn at the outset. The other is the blaring, explosive, highly chromatic idea presented by the whole group shortly thereafter. Eventually, a bubbly, sextuplet-based third theme emerges, incorporating elements of both earlier subjects and leading the transformation that Ogonek aims to express in her music. Like many of her works, Falling Up ends with a deceptive denouement. Things appear to be fizzling out on the reconciliatory third theme, but then the three wind players instead bring the work to a close on a beguiling, chromatic, descending line marked “melting,” suggesting that whatever synthesis of these differing perspectives on childhood has been achieved in the piece is only provisional.

ERWIN SCHULHOFF (1894–1942)
Duo for Violin and Cello                                                              

In the late 1910s, the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff lived in Dresden and was all-in on the German avant-garde. Some of his music from this time was quite conceptual. In 1919 he wrote a proto-John-Cage movement for piano called In Futurum that consisted only of rests in absurd time signatures to be played “with expression and feeling.” He also wrote atonal, expressionist pieces in the manner of Arnold Schoenberg and his works often included rhythmic elements borrowed from American jazz, which he knew and loved from the frequent evenings he spent dancing in nightclubs. When he moved back to Prague in 1923, he developed an interest in folk music and his approach to composing became even more eclectic, accommodating the rhythms and modal harmonies of the traditional sounds of his home country while still enjoying moments of irony and luxurious dissonance.

His Duo for Violin and Cello dates from 1925, early on in this period of stylistic transition. In the first movement, he oscillates between several different ideas: open, pentatonic melodies that sound like folk songs; aggressive, sputtering, shot-gun rhythms; and cinematic, mournfully chromatic gestures of the sort that Schoenberg would write years later in his String Trio. In the second movement, a Zingaresca, both instruments engage in virtuosic combinations of bowing and plucking, a technique that was associated with the playing style of Romani musicians and sounds loosely like the Gardon, an Eastern European instrument that is both hammered and strummed. The Andantino is a touching duet, in which the sudden role switches of the instruments give the impression of a loving but slightly awkward conversation on a tragic topic. The finale rhymes elegantly with the opening movement, developing themes from earlier in the work until the cello leaps into action for a frantic, galloping presto and the two players dash to the finish in perfect unison.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett

BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824–1884)
Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15 

Czech composer Bedřich Smetana did not compose much chamber music. He is best remembered for his operas: he wrote eight, many of which were nationalist projects — renderings of Czech myths and history set to libretti in the Czech language. However, Smetana’s few chamber music compositions are tethered to deeply personal moments in his life in a way that his large-scale dramatic works are not; it was into intimate works, such as his Piano Trio and two string quartets, that the “father of Czech opera” chose to pour his rawest emotions.

Smetana composed his Piano Trio in 1855, in response to the tragic deaths of his first two daughters — Bedřiška (named for her father, and nicknamed Fritzi) and Gabriela — in quick succession. “Nothing can replace Fritzi, the angel whom death has stolen from us,” wrote the composer, describing the four-year-old as “an exceptionally talented child” who had already shown promise as a pianist and singer by the time she caught scarlet fever. Smetana’s pain is most openly displayed in the first movement, an elegy with a second subject apparently based on one of Fritzi’s favorite melodies. The second movement is a scherzo, although the “joke” is less sprightly than nervy, interspersed with episodes by turns poignant and despairing. The final movement, charged by a breathless two-against-three rhythmic motif, is interrupted by a funeral march that yields to a triumphal conclusion. Notwithstanding the disarming optimism of the coda, Smetana’s personal tragedies increased in the ensuing years: his fourth daughter died the following year, while his wife, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, would pass away in 1859.

Program Note by Peter Asimov