Ludwig, Penderecki, Mahler, & Franck

Ludwig, Penderecki, Mahler, & Franck

DAVID LUDWIG (b. 1974)
Canzoniere
Linda Chesis, flute • Robin Scott, Janet Ying, violin • Phillip Ying, viola • David Ying, cello

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI (1933–2020)
Duo Concertante for Violin and Bass 
Ayano Ninomiya, violin • Anthony Manzo, bass

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Piano Quartet in A Minor  
Renée Jolles, violin • Melissa Reardon, viola • Ahrim Kim, cello • Tao Lin, piano

CÉSAR FRANCK (1822–1890)
Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major
Robin Scott, violin • Ran Dank, piano 

Program Notes

DAVID LUDWIG (b. 1974)
Canzoniere (2010)   

The inspiration for the music is a madrigal from Monteverdi’s wonderful setting of the Petrarchan sonnet Or che ‘l ciel e la terra.

Like in so much of Petrarch’s poetry, Or che ‘l ciel e la terra is full of description of love and longing, all set in a  dream-like world balanced between nature and the man-made. Monteverdi saw the opportunity in this text to create a vivid and varied work inspired by Petrarch’s words. I was inspired by both the words and the music, and so set out to write my own piece reflecting on the works of these two authors.

The first movement is a direct quote from Monteverdi that one might not notice on the surface. I used his harmonies (all of them!) but stretched chords to the extreme ends of the range. The second movement draws less directly from the composer’s work, and more from the text: “War is my state of being, of both anger and pain / And only thinking of her brings some peace.” The third movement begins with another quote–the opening of this part takes directly from Monteverdi’s, and the text plays a definite role in the music. The final movement alternates between my own close canon of flute and piano and Monteverdi’s last chords–the ending to his madrigal is one of the most beautiful passages in music that I know. I was so haunted by these notes that I was sure I had to include them in my own piece.

Petrarch’s entire collection of sonnets is called the “Canzoniere,” which means simply “Songbook.” The piece was commissioned through the Anthony P. Checchia Composers Project of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and was funded by a grant from William M. Hollis and Andrea Baldeck, M.D. The original Canzoniere for Flute and Piano was written for Marina Piccinnini and was premiered with pianist Benjamin Hochman in November 2010 at the American Philosophical Society. This arrangement, for flutist Linda Chesis and the Ensō Quartet, was completed in 2014.

Petrarch’s poem below:

Or che ‘l ciel e la terra e ‘l vento tace
E le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,
Notte ‘l carro stellato in giro mena,
E nel suo letto il mar senz’ onda giace,

Veggio, penso, ardo, piango; e chi mi sface
Sempre m’è in anzi per mia dolce pena:
Guerra e il mio stato d’ira e di duol piena;
E sol di lei pensando ho qualche pace.

Così sol d’una chiara fonte viva
Move ‘l dolce l’amaro ond’ io mi pasco;
Una man sola mi risana e punge.
Perchè ‘l mio martir non giunge a riva
Mille volt’il dì moro e mille nasco;
Tanto da la salute mia son lunge.

Now, while the heavens and earth and wind are still
And beats and birds are locked in sleep,
Night’s chariot of stars makes its circles
And within its bed, the ocean lies without waves,
I watch, I ponder, I burn, I weep; and she who causes this
Is always present to my sweet pain:
War is my state of being, of both anger and pain;
And only thinking of her brings some peace.

And so, from a single pure fountain
Flows the sweetness and bitterness of my passion;
A single hand restores me and wounds me.
Since my suffering knows no end
A thousand times a day I die, a thousand times am born;
So great is the distance to my salvation.

Program Note and Translation by David Ludwig

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI (1933–2020)
Duo Concertante for Violin and Bass (2010)                   

In the mid-1970s, the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki developed a highly consistent, sonorous, tonally idiosyncratic musical language. He saturated his melodies with lamenting chains of descending half-steps and vertiginous leaps up the dissonant interval of a tritone. He tended to harmonize these tunes with diminished and augmented chords—highly symmetrical and flexible stacks of notes in which, unlike in major or minor chords, all the constituent intervals have the same basic size and sound. He laid his themes out in capricious, scherzo-like structures punctuated by rhythmically loose cadenzas. Penderecki used this style of writing in string quartets, symphonies, operas, and everything in between. But it comes through particularly clearly in his works for one or two string instruments like his Cadenza for Viola (1984), his Solo Cello Suite (1994–2013), and his Duo Concertante for the rare combination of violin and double bass.

Penderecki wrote the Duo Concertante in 2010 on a commission from the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation. Mutter gave its premiere in March of the following year together with one of the foundation’s grant recipients, bassist Roman Patkoló. At the start of the piece, one musician holds a fixed pitch while the other presents an expressive, meterless soliloquy, and then they switch functions a few times. The extreme range difference between the instruments makes these changes in role particularly satisfying, because though the violin and bass play similar themes, there is a remarkable difference in effect between a melody that is belted from below a celestial drone and one that is sung and scraped out above a gravelly, low pedal point. Eventually, Penderecki introduces his characteristic fluttering, scherzando textures and the Duo Concertante quickly becomes a showpiece, with the two players scampering around, using noisy instrumental special effects, and dancing a virtuosic and intermittently macabre jig.                                                      

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Piano Quartet in A Minor (1878)                               

When he was at the Vienna Conservatory in the 1870s, Gustav Mahler jumped from piece to piece, struggling to get complete compositions down on paper. His close friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner recalled him admitting to her years later that “in those days, I couldn’t be bothered with all that — my mind was too restless and unstable. I skipped from one draft to another and finished most of them merely in my head. But I knew every note of them, and could play them whenever they were wanted — until, one day, I found I’d forgotten them.” 

He was very critical of his own work when he was a student, especially of music that found success with teachers and competition juries. Still, he held one youthful piece in particularly high esteem: a piano quartet, which he said “proved a great success.” Mahler came to believe this quartet was lost, but in fact the manuscript of the first movement and a snippet of the second survived. As his only extant piece of instrumental chamber music, it provides a small-scale window into the early style of a man who would go on to create unprecedentedly massive symphonies and song cycles. 

In the quartet’s ominous opening, slow triplets in the right hand of the piano create a hazy atmosphere while the left hand of the piano presents the piece’s principal motif: a figure that rises a minor sixth and then falls back down a half-step. We hear this gesture many times over the course of the movement, and Mahler fixates on it to the point of madness and obsession in the broad development section. For contrast, he writes a striking, dramatic bit of counterpoint in which the strings and keyboard play against one another in an off-Baroque fashion that anticipates the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett

— Intermission —

CÉSAR FRANCK (1822–1890)
Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major (1886)               

Walloon-born César Franck was a late-blooming composer, having first made his name as a piano prodigy and virtuosic improviser, then as titular organist at the Parisian basilica of Sainte Clotilde, and finally as a renowned pedagogue at the Paris Conservatoire. The Sonata for Violin and Piano, which Franck composed at the age of 63, forms — along with the Piano Quintet, the String Quartet, the Symphony in D, and the symphonic poem Psyché — a compositional outpouring that occupied the final dozen years of his life. This string of works is notable for combining a feverish emotive intensity with progressive approaches to form and development.

In the Sonata for Violin and Piano, Franck’s predilection for harmonic complexity is on full display; the satisfaction is less that of a scenic detour, and more that of working out a challenging puzzle, forging a path through a chromatic labyrinth while generating energy from the frictions caused along the way. His unceasing, sometimes tortuous modulations give the impression of a music always in transition, its trajectory often unpredictable, thereby accruing a frankly erotic harmonic tension in a manner reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — which made a profound impression on him when he heard it in 1874. Amid such wilderness, it becomes all the more important to cling to the melodic themes, which are introduced in one movement and recycled in subsequent movements. For example, the opening melodic contour of the first movement returns with poignance at the start of the Recitativo-Fantasia (and again, even more exquisitely, toward the end of that movement). Franck learned this strategy from Franz Liszt but made it fully his own, inspiring subsequent generations of composers (including Maurice Ravel and Vincent d’Indy) to experiment with such so-called “cyclical” themes in their own compositions. 

The Sonata is also noteworthy for its exceptional difficulty for violinist and pianist alike. Franck, who was perfectly up to the pianistic challenges himself, presented the work as a wedding present to Belgian virtuoso violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, then age 28, who performed it at the ceremony, having learnt it that very morning. Since then, the Sonata has lived additional afterlives in the form of arrangements for cello (most famously), viola, and even flute.

Program Note by Peter Asimov