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Poulenc, Pinto Correia, Moszowski, & Vaughan Williams
FRANCIS POULENC
Sonata for Violin and Piano, FP 119
Ani Schnarch, violin • Tao Lin, piano
ANDREIA PINTO CORREIA
Cântico
Itamar Zorman, violin
MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI
Suite in G Minor, Op. 71
Itamar Zorman, Robin Scott, violin • Tao Lin, piano
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Piano Quintet in C Minor
Renée Jolles, violin • Melissa Reardon, viola • Amir Eldan, cello • Tracy Rowell, bass • Liza Stepanova, piano
Program Notes
FRANCIS POULENC
Sonata for Violin and Piano, FP 119 (1942–1943)
For Francis Poulenc, string instruments were a serious source of frustration. He had an evident gift for wind writing. His Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet (1932) blends the humorous, music-hall style associated with many of his colleagues composing in 1920s and 30s Paris with a more sober, even spiritual outlook. Poulenc’s late works for solo winds and piano, including the flute sonata and the enigmatic Elegie for Horn, are considered masterpieces for those instruments. He found strings a less convincing medium, at one point admitting to the critic Claude Rostand that he thought “nothing is further from human breath than the bow-stroke.” Poulenc was quite self-critical, and though he had tried to write violin sonatas—once in 1918 and twice in the 1920s—these attempts have all been lost to the garbage can.
He at last completed a Violin Sonata in 1943 thanks to an extra-musical inspiration, though he continued toying with the piece until the end of that decade. He was a great admirer of the life and work of Spanish poet and activist Federico García Lorca. Struck by a line from one of his poems, “La guitarra hace llorar a los sueños” (The guitar makes dreams weep), Poulenc wrote a sweet Intermezzo for violin and piano in which each lamenting phrase has corresponding plucked commentary. This thoughtful interlude became the middle part of a three-movement work, which Poulenc dedicated to Lorca. The fiery opening Allegro has more screaming than weeping. True to Poulenc’s practice, the second half of the movement displays a parade of styles, including a Baroque-like “French Overture” with dramatic, dotted rhythms and a searing Romantic theme sung by the violin over keyboard triplets. The finale is a “Presto tragico,” and the terse opening motif does indeed evoke a breathy, chromatic sob. In a characteristic touch, Poulenc weaves a bit of freewheeling circus music into the intense, perpetual-motion texture. A cadenza, marked “very violent and very free,” brings the piece to an abrupt close, and the very last sonority, a combination of plucked octaves in the violin and a bright piano chord, lingers in the air like the dramatic, final strum of a guitar.
Program Note by Nicky Swett
ANDREIA PINTO CORREIA
Cântico (2022)
Andreia Pinto Correia has provided the following note to accompany Cântico:
Cântico in Portuguese can be translated as “canticle,” signifying an ode or tribute. This short work for solo violin was written in memory of a dear friend and patron. A chant-like melodic passage gradually expands in ascending gestures, continuously increasing in tension. New melodic material is interspersed with the initial chant-like solenne sospirando passages, creating a cyclical form with a ritualistic, contemplative atmosphere.
Co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Patricia Plum Wylde, Cântico was composed in memory of Merwin Geffen and in honor of Norman Solomon.
MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI
Suite in G Minor, Op. 71
In his early thirties, German pianist Moritz Moszkowski suffered from a nervous disorder that prematurely ended his days as a touring musician, after which point he focused more intently on composition. His reputation as a composer was built almost entirely on the strength and virtuosity of his solo piano and chamber music. The Opus 71 Suite for Two Violins and Piano is a case in point. In its glorification of the two instruments with which Moszkowski was most intimately familiar, the violin and piano, the suite reveals him to be a composer of great imagination. The suite comprises four movements. The opening Allegro energico begins with a hot-blooded descending theme in the violins. One impressive trait of the suite is made evident right away: despite the absence of a viola or cello, the music never feels texturally thin. The second movement is built on deeply affecting melodies, betraying Moszkowski’s penchant for the music of Schumann and Mendelssohn. The nostalgic air of the slow movement likewise bespeaks the deep Romantic influence on Moszkowski’s language. The final movement proceeds with a rhythmic vitality that suggests the tarantella, an energetic Italian dance popularly thought to counter the poison of a spider bite. A contrasting middle section is marked by a mellifluous lyricism, but the élan of the main theme returns; Moszkowski even steps it up a notch for the finale’s coda, which brings the suite to an exuberant close.
Program Note by Patrick Castillo
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Piano Quintet in C Minor (1903–1905)
Vaughan Williams’s Piano Quintet in C Minor, composed in 1903 and revised over the two subsequent years, belongs to a clutch of quintets for various instrumental arrangements composed around the turn of the twentieth century. At that point, despite his intensive studies at Cambridge and at the Royal College of Music, Vaughan Williams had not yet had two vital experiences — his encounter with English folk music, and his studies in Paris with Maurice Ravel — which proved decisive in shaping his mature compositional voice. As a result, he came to view these early chamber works as immature, and never published them; it was only in 1999 that Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s second wife, authorized the resurrection and publication of the Quintet in view of the fiftieth anniversary of Ralph’s death.
The Quintet inhabits a late romantic idiom that invites comparison with Brahms—whose chamber works were taken as models at the Royal College under the instruction of Stanford and others. While the instrumentation recalls that of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with its double bass in lieu of a second violin, the atmosphere is altogether different, with the deeper registers deployed to a more brooding effect than Schubert’s gallant divertimento. If anything in the work seems to foreshadow Vaughan Williams’s mature voice, it is the slow movement: a solemnly harmonized and rhythmically elastic chorale, adapted from the song “Silent Noon”, composed contemporaneously. Yet even as Vaughan Williams suppressed publication of this early effort, he must have had a certain soft spot for it: he recuperated the theme of the Finale — a Fantasia in variations form — five decades later when composing his Violin Sonata (1954).
Program Note by Peter Asimov