Prokofiev, Yun, & Brahms

Prokofiev, Yun, & Brahms

This concert is sold out. Please email Lori Hopkinson if you would like to be placed on a waiting list.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Major, Op. 94a
Ayano Ninomiya, violin • Pei-Shan Lee, piano

ISANG YUN
Duo for Cello and Harp
Denise Djokic, cello • June Han, harp

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60, “Werther”
Mikhail Kopelman, violin • Phillip Ying, viola • Edward Arron, cello • Pei-Shan Lee, piano

program notes

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Major, Op. 94a (1944)

Sergei Prokofiev was one of a group of high-profile composers who were evacuated from Moscow after Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War Two. In 1942, he settled for a while in Alma-Ata (now known as Almaty) in present-day Kazakhstan, and while there he arranged a commission for a flute sonata from Levon Atovmyan, head of the Soviet Composer’s Union. Prokofiev had long wanted to write for this instrument, which he felt was neglected, but the committee was hesitant to sponsor flute music, feeling it would likely be performed less than a piano or violin sonata. After some negotiation they relented and Prokofiev set to work on the piece, only to find it was slow going. By the time he finished the Flute Sonata in D major (Op. 94) in the summer of 1943, Prokofiev had been displaced yet again, to the city of Perm in the Ural Mountains. After his return to Moscow in October of that year, he showed the piece to violinist David Oistrakh, who suggested that the composer arrange it for violin and marked up the flute part with recommendations. Oistrakh and the pianist Lev Oborin gave the premiere of the completed violin sonata version in June 1944 and it was first published in 1946; ironically, given Prokofiev’s insistence on the choice of instrument, the flute version was not released in his lifetime.

Prokofiev loved to fill his phrases with big leaps. It’s a very pianistic way of writing tunes—sequences of several larger intervals in a row are generally more practical to realize on a keyboard than when singing or playing a violin—but there is something powerful about the combination of position shifts and string crossings required to execute his stretch-filled melodies on a string instrument. The Andante from this sonata has a particular sense of yearning that comes from the violinist having to create a smooth line across very different registers of the instrument. The bubbly refrain of the closing Allegro con brio likewise traverses a broad swath of the violin’s range, which gives the music a virtuosic raucousness. It’s surprisingly upbeat music for something written while the world was at war, but Prokofiev’s distinct form of ecstatic merriment rarely feels escapist; it’s always just a little too close to the verge of chaos.

ISANG YUN

Duo for Cello and Harp (1984)

In a lecture he delivered at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 1993, Isang Yun explained that “the fundamental element of my compositions is, to put it concretely, an individual tone. A countless number of variant possibilities inhere in an individual tone.” In practice, sections of his pieces begin by emphasizing a single pitch, which he called the “Hauptton” or “Main Tone.” Yun then ornaments that tone using neighboring notes, harmonizations, slides, and subtle shifts in timbre. Over the course of a phrase or longer passage, he shifts the focus to the ornamentations themselves, allowing the memory of the original Hauptton to fade.

Yun was born in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1917, but he spent much of his career in Berlin, where he lived in exile after he was abducted, arrested, and tortured by the South Korean government in the late 1960s for alleged communist activities. Music theorist Sinae Kim has suggested that the Hauptton method was a means for him to meaningfully integrate “Eastern” and “Western” approaches to music — a major preoccupation for several generations of East Asian composers working in the European tradition. The main tones of his pieces are somewhat akin to the home keys or tonics found in many works in the Western canon, and Yun wrote almost exclusively for Western instruments. But his distinctive way of varying notes draws on the techniques and sounds of instruments from Korea and other parts of East Asia, and he aimed to infuse his larger work structures with a sense of the endless flow of time, an important element of Taoist philosophy.

He wrote his Duo for Cello and Harp in 1984 for a festival of Korean art in Ingelheim am Rhein, West Germany. His “Hauptton” approach is most perceivable in the second movement, in which the cello periodically returns to plucking the open D string before ornamenting that note and spinning off in other directions. In the final movement, which is centered on an F Minor triad rather than a single note, Yun’s loose variations on the core pitches of that chord create a boundless musical atmosphere. As he explained in a 1985 talk on his musical practice, “The beginning of my music is actually a continuation of something that has already been ringing without sounding. Likewise, the seeming end of my music in fact belongs to the unheard sound of the future, and will continue to ring in the unheard sound.”

Program Notes by Nicky Swett

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60, “Werther” (1875)

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 (Eb-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 Bünte Blatter, Op. 99.

Program Note by Peter Asimov