Bridge, Clarke, & Brahms

Bridge, CLARKE, & Brahms

REBECCA CLARKE (1886–1979)
Sonata for Viola and Piano
Rebecca Albers, viola • Tao Lin, piano

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)
Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60, “Werther”
Itamar Zorman, violin • Maiya Papach, viola • Amir Eldan, cello • Julian Martin, piano

Program Notes

FRANK BRIDGE

Phantasy for Piano Quartet in F-sharp Minor, H. 94 (1910)

The English businessman Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937), founder of a successful company that made industrial belts and cables, was also a violinist. He played in several amateur orchestras and small ensembles, he edited an encyclopedia of chamber music, he started a free sheet music library, and he sponsored many new compositions. He was interested in early music, particularly the freely-structured English “Fancies” for viol consort that proliferated in the 17th century, which he described as a “revelation” despite their formal and harmonic simplicity. To form a bridge between his time and that earlier heyday of British music, he decided to commission “Phantasies” for various chamber music combinations from young composers — pieces he hoped would be “The modern analogues of the fancies, conceived of course in modern idiom, and without their structural defects.” Frank Bridge, a composer and violist who had recently graduated from the Royal College of Music, won the special prize for his submission to Corbett’s “Phantasy” Quartet competition in 1905 and then took first prize for his “Phantasy” Trio in 1907. Cobbett was so pleased with Bridge’s work that he directly commissioned a “Phantasy” Piano Quartet from him in 1910.

Many British works of the early 20th century (especially those with a potentially nebulous heading like “Phantasy”) suffer from a somewhat languorous quality. Bridge’s “Phantasy” Quartet exhibits no such lugubriousness. The opening section is a melancholic yet rhythmically playful song set in a lilting 9/8 time. In the middle of the piece, Bridge writes a catchy witch’s dance, which blends the puckish charm of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the creepy-crawly chirps and whistles found in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Bridge eventually brings back the more sober opening material and transposes it to a major key. Shortly after, we hear chiming reminders of the devilish middle section in the high range of the piano, as if the dancing demons somehow made it to heaven and are now wishing us good fortune from above.

REBECCA CLARKE

Sonata for Viola and Piano (1919)

In 1916, composer and violist Rebecca Clarke absconded from London, where she was getting by as a freelance orchestral and chamber musician, and embarked on a series of tours in the United States. In the winter of 1918-19, she played a number of concerts in Hawaii and while there she learned of a competition organized by an eminent American music patron. “When I heard that a thousand-dollar prize for a viola sonata was being offered by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, I thought I would try my hand at one,” she explained in a program note she wrote years later. Clarke’s Sonata was anonymously reviewed together with more than 70 other works and wound up in a deadlock tie with a Suite for Viola and Piano by Ernest Bloch. Coolidge herself eventually stepped in and decided she liked Bloch’s piece better, but the jury elected to name Clarke’s sonata as runner-up, which gave her a huge amount of press and helped to significantly further her composition and performance careers.

Musicologist Liane Curtis has noted that some judges at this competition mistook Clarke’s Viola Sonata for a work by Maurice Ravel. This would have been a sensible guess; in the first movement, Clarke alternates between a noble, triumphant motif and a sultry secondary theme that is harmonized in a dreamy, impressionistic fashion. In the Vivace, Clark creates a wild, impetuous atmosphere full of sudden changes in dynamic, swirling piano glissandos, and cheeky viola harmonics. At the top of the score, she left an epitaph taken from the French poet Alfred de Musset’s La Nuit de Mai (May Night): “Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth/ Ferments tonight in the veins of God.” In the finale, the piano’s lonely opening melody sounds particularly lute-like. Clarke eventually recruits the main motif of the first movement to build to a stormy climax, bringing the piece to a close in a state of exuberant, Bacchic madness.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60, “Werther” (1855-75)

Although not completed until 1875, Brahms began sketches for his third Piano Quartet as early as 1855, around the time he also began composing what became his first Piano Quartet (in G Minor). At that time, he was profoundly distraught over his friend Robert Schumann — who had fallen gravely ill and was captive in an asylum. He soon became distraught over Clara, too, having fallen deeply in love with her during the time he spent by her and Robert’s side. Clara’s main preoccupation, however, was Robert’s condition, and Brahms’s affection remained tormentingly unrequited.

Brahms’s emotional state when he began work on the quartet was captured by the sardonic remarks he enclosed when sending the completed manuscript to the publisher, decades later: “On the cover you must have a picture, namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I’ll send you my photograph for the purpose.” German readers at the time would have recognized the grim allusion to Werther, the tragically lovestruck and eventually suicidal protagonist of Goethe’s most famous novel.

Both Robert and Clara Schumann are musically inscribed, moreover, into the Quartet’s opening theme. After two interrupted starts, the violin introduces a descending five-note motif (E-flat-D-C-B-C). This figure is adapted from Clara Schumann’s piano composition, Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20, which she performed for Brahms in 1854; that piece, in turn, was based on a theme used in her husband’s Bunte Blätter, Op. 99.

Program Note by Peter Asimov.