Program Notes – Gryphon Trio Sunday Concert, Apr 14, 2013

Program Notes – Gryphon Trio Sunday Concert, Apr 14, 2013
Copyright © 2012 by Jason S. Heilman, Ph.D.
Trio in C Major, Hob. XV:27
composed in 1797 – duration: 20 minutes
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
By the 1790s, Joseph Haydn had become one of the most
famous composers in all of Europe. In contrast to his
previous life as a Kapellmeister to a noble court, where
he was constantly at his lord’s beck and call, obligated to
produce new works on demand, Haydn now enjoyed the
luxury of working on his own schedule. He was also free
to take trips abroad, and he did so, making two famous
voyages to London—first in 1791–92, then again in
1794–95—where he found he was already a celebrity. It
was on the first of these London journeys that Haydn,
stopping in the German town of Bonn, met a young musician named Ludwig van Beethoven, who later came to
Vienna and ultimately became Haydn’s most famous
student. On his second trip to London, Haydn met a virtuoso pianist named Theresa Jansen Bartolozzi, who
would become the dedicatee of many of his last works for
the keyboard, including his final set of three piano trios.
Interestingly, Haydn composed these three rather conservative trios a full four years after the appearance of
Beethoven’s brash young Opus 1 piano trios—works that
Haydn, as Beethoven’s teacher, had deemed unready for
public consumption. Comparing Beethoven’s first trios
with Haydn’s last gives a clear sense of the generational
change that was taking place in Viennese music.
During Haydn’s time, the piano trio was not a genre for
three equal instruments; rather, it was focused on the
pianist, with the violin serving as the second soloist and
the cello merely providing harmonic support. The C Major Trio that opens Haydn’s final set (No. 27 according to
the Hoboken catalog, but Haydn’s forty-fifth piano trio
overall) is no exception. In the first of the trio’s three
movements, a sonata-form allegro, the piano features
prominently in all of the refined main themes, frequently
mirrored by the violin. The second movement begins as a
gentle andante, led again by the piano, which is briefly
interrupted by a turbulent central section recalling
Haydn’s brooding Sturm und Drang phase. The presto
finale features an infectiously light and airy melody
passed between the piano and the strings, which recurs
regularly to bring the trio to a cheerful close.
Trio No. 4 in E minor, “Dumky”
composed in 1891 – duration: 30 minutes
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
The dumka (plural dumky) is a traditional Slavic musical
genre. Tracing its origins back to Ukrainian epic ballads,
it became a staple of many Slavic cultures by the nineteenth century. In the Czech lands, a dumka was defined
as a plaintive or melancholic piece that is broken up periodically by unexpectedly cheerful, up-tempo episodes.
In his effort to create a distinctly Czech musical style,
Antonín Dvořák drew upon the dumka genre frequently,
notably in the slow movements of his Opus 81 Piano
Quintet, his Tenth String Quartet, and his String Sextet,
as well as in two of his famous Slavonic Dances.
Although Dvořák’s music is strongly linked with Czech
nationalism, his skill and audacity in merging folk-like
melodies with Brahmsian classical rigor evolved considerably over the course of his career. When he composed
his fourth and final piano trio, shortly before accepting a
position as conservatory director in New York, Dvořák
boldly opted to discard the standard four-movement
format of his earlier trios and instead write a suite of six
dumky, each in a different key. Although each of the six
movements follows the same basic format (beginning
with a slow, plaintive melody that gets interrupted once
or twice by faster, more dancelike music before returning
at the end), the so-called “Dumky Trio” is hardly repetitive. Rather, Dvořák gives each movement its own
unique character, drawing on the diverse variety of
Czech folk melodies and rhythms.
The first three movements of the Dumky Trio flow into
one another without pauses, creating a sequence. Recalling the dumka’s origins in ballad singing, the first
two movements both feature plaintive solos in the
strings alternating with dancelike outbursts; this culminates with the flowing and tender andante third movement. The self-contained fourth movement unfolds like a
moderately-paced march interrupted by fleeting episodes. The allegro fifth movement begins with a bold
gesture in the solo cello, which is contrasted by even
faster music to give the movement a breezy, scherzo-like
feel. The lento maestoso finale begins with a dramatic
recitative, but culminates in relentless driving rhythms
for a resounding feeling of finality.
Lonesome Roads
composed in 2012 – duration: 16 minutes
Dan Visconti (b. 1982)
The music of Dan Visconti takes influences from American vernacular music (including jazz, bluegrass, and
rock) and creates new mixtures from these elements.
Trained as a classical violinist from an early age, Visconti
studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music
and at Yale, with Margaret Brouwer, Aaron Jay Kernis,
Ezra Laderman, and Zhou Long. The recipient of numerous awards, Visconti holds the Douglas Moore Fellowship in American Opera from the Metropolitan Opera.
Updates on his recent compositions and activities can be
found on his website, www.danvisconti.com.
Visconti’s newest piano trio, Lonesome Roads, was
commissioned in 2010 for the Gryphon, Deseret, and
Triple Helix piano trios by the Barlow Endowment for
Music Composition at Brigham Young University. In the
words of the composer:
Lonesome Roads was inspired by memories of
long, cross-country car trips and the rumbling,
uneven grooves that underscore a constantlyshifting landscape. Beginning from the faintest
murmurs, the music evokes a vast space that can
be alternately lonely, hypnotic, or hard-driving
and rhythmic. Across several brief, fragmentary
movements, the initial melodic murmurings assemble themselves into propulsive ostinato figures and wild, aggressive riffs colored with raw
timbres and powerful rhythms characteristic of
rock and beat-driven music. These movements
may be played in any order so that each ensemble
can make their own journey with the piece, which
becomes a kind of road atlas with many routes
connecting any two points. It’s pure “driving music”, a mixtape populated with the vastness, diversity, and flavor of the North American landscape.
Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67
composed in 1944 – duration: 25 minutes
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
During the Second World War, Dmitri Shostakovich’s
treatment at the hands of Stalin’s regime might have improved slightly, but his general well being did not. The
war had hit the Soviet Union particularly hard, and
Shostakovich was not immune from the suffering. He
and his family were living in Leningrad when the German troops encircled the city in 1941, cutting off all vital
supplies. Evacuation was only possible when the winter
freeze came, which created an ice bridge from the city,
but by this time, the death toll was reportedly exceeding
4,000 per day.
Shostakovich and his family were mercifully evacuated
six months into the two-year siege. Relocating to Samara
and then Moscow, he could begin composing again, yet
he was clearly moved by his experiences. After completing the defiant Leningrad Symphony and the somber
Eighth Symphony, Shostakovich refocused his output
from grandiose public gestures to the intimacies of
chamber music, creating one of his most important
compositions: his E Minor Piano Trio. Shostakovich’s
second work in the genre, after a one-movement trio
from his student days, the E Minor Trio was shaped by
two significant tragedies. One was personal: the recent
death of Ivan Sollertinsky, a musicologist and close
friend of Shostakovich’s, who had died suddenly of a
heart attack at age 42. The other tragedy was no less
than the Holocaust itself. After breaking the sieges of
Leningrad and Stalingrad, Soviet troops began making
their counterattack through Poland, where, by 1944, they
began to discover the Nazis’ death camps, relaying that
information back to the USSR months before it became
common knowledge in the West. With this atmosphere
of rampant death, Shostakovich’s wartime piano trio
took on the character of an elegy, both for his own personal friend and for the countless victims of Nazi horrors.
Typical for Shostakovich’s music of the period, the E Minor Trio begins with a quiet andante introduction, featuring the cello in its highest harmonics. This eventually
segues into a moderato main section comprised of a free
fugal dance that prefigures the last movement. The allegro con brio second movement features one of Shostakovich’s characteristic spinning-out melodies, which begins as a kind of canon started by the violin, building in
intensity to an abrupt end. The third movement changes
the overall tone immediately; this largo movement is
pervaded with the stark feeling of an elegy, and was likely intended as such by Shostakovich. This movement
segues directly into the allegretto finale, which, after a
leisurely pizzicato opening, gradually transforms into
round dance on Jewish-tinged melodies, one of which
would later make an appearance in the composer’s
Eighth String Quartet. This music grows in intensity
then gradually subsides, until a return of the stark piano
chords from the third movement brings the work to its
end in a contemplative mood.