steven isserlis connie shih

16 Pages·2017·1.37 MB·English

STEVEN
ISSERLIS
CELLO
CONNIE
SHIH
D E N V E R
PIANO
APRIL 25, 2017
CLAUDE DEBUSSY Cello Sonata
(1862-1918) Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto
Sérénade: Modérément animé
Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 65
(1810-1849) Allegro moderato
Scherzo
Largo
Finale. Allegro
INTERMISSION
REYNALDO HAHN Deux Improvisations sur des airs irlandais
(1875-1947) The Little Red-Lark (Le petit bouvreuil)
The Willow-Tree (Le Saule)

GABRIEL FAURÉ Cello Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 117
(1845-1924) Allegro
Andante
Allegro vivo
THOMAS ADÈS Lieux retrouvés
(b. 1971) Les eaux
La montagne
Les champs
La ville: Cancan macabre
STEVEN ISSERLIS
Acclaimed worldwide for his profound musicianship and
technical mastery, British cellist Steven Isserlis enjoys
a uniquely varied career as a soloist, chamber musician,
educator, author and broadcaster. He appears regularly
with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors,
including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic,
Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, and
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestras, and the Orchestra of the Age
of Enlightenment. He gives recitals every season in major
musical centres. As a chamber musician, he has curated
concert series for many prestigious venues, including the
Wigmore Hall, New York's 92nd Street Y, Zankel Hall,
and the Salzburg and Verbier festivals. Unusually, he
also directs chamber orchestras from the cello in classical
programs.
He has a strong interest in historical performance, working
with many period-instrument orchestras and giving recitals
with harpsichord and fortepiano. He is also a strong
advocate of contemporary music and has premiered many
new works including John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil,
Thomas Adès’s Lieux retrouvés, and Gyorgy Kurtag’s For
Steven.
As a writer and broadcaster, Steven contributes regularly
to publications including Gramophone, The Daily Telegraph,
and The Guardian. He has guest edited The Strad
magazine and makes regular appearances on BBC Radio,
including on the Today program, Soul Music. Most recently
he presented a documentary on BBC Radio 4, “Finding
Harpo’s Voice,” about his hero, Harpo Marx.
Steven’s award-winning discography includes
Bach’s complete Solo Cello Suites for Hyperion
(Gramophone’s Instrumental Album of the Year);
Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano with
Robert Levin; and the Elgar and Walton concertos with
the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi. Steven’s
latest release is the Brahms Double Concerto with Joshua
Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, coupled
with the 1854 version of Brahms’s B Major Piano Trio
(with Jeremy Denk).

As an educator Steven Isserlis gives frequent masterclasses
all around the world, and for the past twenty years he has
been Artistic Director of the International Musicians’
Seminar at Prussia Cove in Cornwall, where his fellow-
professors include Sir Andras Schiff, Thomas Adès, and
Ferenc Rados. He also enjoys playing for children, and
has created three musical stories with the composer Anne
Dudley. His two books for children, published by Faber’s,
have been translated into many languages. A new book,
a commentary on Schumann’s famous Advice for Young
Musicians, has recently been published by Faber’s.
The recipient of many awards, Steven Isserlis’s honors
include being made Commander of the Order of the
British Empire in recognition of his service to music, and
the Schumann Prize of the City of Zwickau. He is also one
of only two living cellists featured in the Gramophone Hall
of Fame.
He gives most of his concerts on the Marquis de Corberon
(Nelsova) Stradivarius of 1726, kindly loaned to him by the
Royal Academy of Music.
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CONNIE SHIH
The Canadian pianist, Connie Shih, is considered to be
one of Canada’s most outstanding artists. In 1993 she was
awarded the Sylva Gelber Award for most outstanding
classical artist under age 30. At the age of nine she made
her orchestral debut with Mendelssohn’s first Piano
Concerto with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. At the age
of 12 she was the youngest-ever protégé of Gyorgy Sebok,
and then continued her studies at the Curtis Institute
in Philadelphia with Claude Frank, himself a protégé of
CONNIE SHIH Arthur Schnabel. Later studies were undertaken with Fou
cello Ts’ong in Europe.
As soloist she has appeared extensively with orchestras
throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe. In a solo recital
setting, she has made numerous appearances in Canada,
the U.S., Iceland, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan,
and China. Connie has given chamber music performances
with many world-renowned musicians. To critical acclaim,
she appears regularly in recital with cellist Steven Isserlis.
Including chamber music appearances at the Wigmore and
Carnegie Halls, she performs at the prestigious Bath Music
Festival, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Weill Hall (N.Y.), and
at the Kronberg Festival. Her collaborations have included
Susan Gritton, Tabea Zimmerman, and Isabelle Faust.
Connie’s performances are frequently broadcast via
television and radio on CBC (Canada), BBC (U.K.), SWR,
NDR, and WDR (Germany) as well as on other television
and radio stations in North America and Europe.
She is on faculty at the Casalmaggiore Festival in Italy.
LEGACY GIFTS
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NOTES
Program Notes © Elizabeth Bergman
IN BRIEF DEBUSSY: CELLO
BORN: August 22, 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France SONATA
DIED: March 25, 1918 in Paris, France
FIRST PERFORMED: March 4, 1916 in London’s Aeolian Hall
MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC
PERFORMANCE: January 5, 2005 (David Finckel, cello,
and Wu Han, piano)
ESTIMATED DURATION: 12 minutes
Claude Debussy entered the Paris Conservatory in 1872
at 10 years old to study piano and musical rudiments.
Not cut out for a career as a solo performer, he began to
compose in 1879, writing songs, piano music, and a piano
trio while making his living as an accompanist. In 1884,
he won the coveted Prix de Rome, which funded two
years of study in Rome at the Villa Medici. Afterward, he
took a job with Nadezhda von Meck, a patron of the arts
who had inherited a railroad fortune (and who supported
Tchaikovsky throughout his mature career), playing in a
trio at her home in Moscow.
Returning to Paris in 1887, he fell in with the literary
crowd of Symbolists, admired the Javanese gamelan at the
1889 Universal Exposition, wrestled with the influence
of Richard Wagner’s music, and made his debut in the
Parisian musical world with his string quartet in 1893.
The Symbolists were interested in provoking their readers,
stimulating their imaginations to derive significance from
mere suggestion.
In his own efforts to find meaning apart from logic,
Debussy eschewed cause and effect in his music, avoided
standard forms, and shied away from conventional
harmonies. He worked with special scales that abandoned
the strict hierarchies and firm grounding of tonality to
create a feeling of timelessness. He also loved unusual
textures, especially open chords that seem to float one
to the next across the keyboard. Among his favorite
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Program Notes sounds were echo effects and bell-like timbres. Many of
Continued his compositions bear suggestive titles, which he often
placed at the end of a work, as if to startle the performer or
listener into reconsidering what was just played and heard.
Ultimately Debussy rejected the idea that his music should
be about anything particular, and certainly not about just
one thing.
His love of musical color, evocative effects, sparse textures,
and freewheeling musical lines can all be heard in the
cello sonata, a late work written in the midst of World
War I. The sonata has a nationalist agenda owing in part
to its historical context. To a former student Debussy
proclaimed, “French art needs to take revenge quite as
seriously as the French army does!” Revenge on what?
The tyranny of the German Classical and Romantic
tradition. The same year the cello sonata was composed
(1915), Debussy penned an important article calling for a
“pure French music.” Indeed something very French lies
hidden at the heart of the cello sonata: a cyclic design,
meaning that a theme from the beginning reappears at
the ending. This kind of recall exemplifies the “precision
and compactness of form” that, for Debussy, defined the
French style. Likewise the second and third movements
run into each other without interruption. Throughout, the
airy textures and lucid melodies exemplify the “clarity of
expression” that he prized, especially later in life.
The Prologue showcases graceful arabesques—lithe swoops
and turns—in the cello line, reaching a passionate climax
that quickly subsides. The Sérénade features crisp staccato
accents along with a wide variety of techniques: pizzicato,
flautendo (which requires the cellist to bow very lightly
over the end of the fingerboard to create a flute-like tone),
and portamenti (the sliding from one note to the next).
The movement comes to rest on a quietly sustained A, then
launches into a capricious, fleet-footed Finale.
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IN BRIEF CHOPIN: CELLO
.
BORN: March 1, 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, west of SONATA IN
Warsaw, Poland
G MINOR, OP. 65
DIED: October 17, 1849 in Paris, France
FIRST PERFORMED: The last three movements were first
publicly performed by Frédéric Chopin and Auguste
Franchomme (to whom the sonata was dedicated) at the
composer’s last public concert, at the Salle Pleyel on February
16, 1848.
MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC
PERFORMANCE: November 5, 2008
(Pieter Wispelwey, cello)
ESTIMATED DURATION: 28 minutes

Frédéric Chopin was a child of material and cultural
comforts, delicate constitution, and prodigious gifts. An
exceptional pianist from a solidly middle-class background,
he charmed the best of Polish society, yet longed to explore
the world outside Warsaw. After graduating from high
school in 1830, Chopin traveled to Vienna, but found
himself often homesick. “I am often in such a mood
that I curse the moment of my departure from my sweet
homeland,” he lamented to a friend. His nostalgia for
Poland colored his compositions. While in Vienna, he
wrote two sets of mazurkas, a Polish folk dance in triple
meter with a heavy accent on the second or third beats
(unlike a waltz, also in three beats but emphasizing the
first). These mazurkas are now among his most beloved
compositions. In 1831 he moved to Paris where he joined
a vibrant community of Polish émigrés. He quickly
established himself as a performer, composer, and teacher,
becoming close with fellow pianist-composer Franz Liszt
and his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult. Through
Liszt, Chopin met the novelist George Sand (pen name of
Amadine Dupin) in 1837. He was unimpressed by her at
their first meeting, but a second encounter the following
year led to their becoming romantic partners. Much of his
best music was composed during summers at her home
in Nohant, some 300 kilometers south of Paris. He never
returned to his native Poland.
friendsofchambermusic.com 5
Program Notes Devoting himself to the piano, Chopin developed as a
Continued composer in tandem with such 19th-century Romantic
genres as the nocturne, prelude, mazurka, and etude. Yet he
also composed a handful of other works for orchestra (two
piano concertos), chamber ensemble (a piano trio and cello
sonata), and an opus of solo songs. Nevertheless, the piano
appears in almost every piece he ever wrote and is certainly
an equal partner in the epic, nearly symphonic cello sonata.
Chopin’s last major composition, the sonata took him some
two years to write. “With my sonata for cello and piano,”
he confessed, “I am now contented, now discontented. I
lay it aside, then pick it up again.” He was most concerned
with achieving parity between the two instruments,
wanting to be sure the piano did not overwhelm the cello.
The first movement is a passionate, full-throated sonata
form that indeed achieves a perfect balance between the
instruments and between various musical modes: stormy,
virtuosic, songlike, tender, and tempestuous. The second
movement is much like a mazurka, with its triple meter,
quick tempo, and solid accents falling on the second
or third beat. The Largo may be brief, but it has been
described as the “expressive core” of the four-movement
sonata. It’s a nearly operatic duet between cello and piano
that testifies to Chopin’s commitment both to the work
itself and his affection for the cellist for whom it was
written, his friend Auguste Franchomme. The finale is a
kind of rondo with repeated and recurring themes that
reaches an unexpectedly sunny conclusion in a major key.
HAHN: DEUX IN BRIEF
IMPROVISATIONS BORN: August 9, 1874, Caracas, Venezuela
SUR DES AIRS DIED: January 28, 1947, Paris, France
IRLANDAIS FIRST PERFORMED: Circa 1911
MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC
PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this
work on our series.
ESTIMATED DURATION: 5 minutes
Born in Venezuela, composer Reynaldo Hahn came to
Paris with his family in 1877 at just three years old. A child
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prodigy, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at age ten,
studying composition and voice. There he was classmates
with Ravel and became friends with Fauré.
In the 1890s, while performing in the salons of Paris,
Hahn met the young Irish composer Augusta Holmès, a
fellow student at the Conservatoire. She introduced him
to traditional Irish songs, three of which he transcribed
for piano in four hands. Nearly two decades later, in 1911,
Hahn returned to those settings and recast the first and last
as two short works for cello and piano. Each melody is first
presented simply, then varied and elaborated. “The Red-
Lark” is a bouncy, jaunty tune in a rollicking 6/8 meter. In
contrast, “The Willow-Tree” is stately and somber, almost
akin to a processional.
IN BRIEF FAURÉ: CELLO
BORN: May 12, 1845, Pamiers, France SONATA NO. 2 IN
DIED: November 4, 1924, Paris, France G MINOR, OP. 117
FIRST PERFORMED: May 13, 1922 by cellist André Hekking
and pianist Alfred Cortot at a concert of the Société Nationale
de Musique
MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC
PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this
work on our series.
ESTIMATED DURATION:18 minutes
Gabriel Fauré has been described as “the master par
excellence of French music,” a “perfect mirror” of French
musical genius. His Cello Sonata, Op. 117 was written in
1921, late in the composer’s life but during an especially
productive period. Others of his generation had since
passed (Massenet, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns among them)
while a new crop of young French composers had come
of age to champion the cause of post-war Modernism.
But Fauré did not go gently into that good night; he
continued to exert his influence as the patriarch of French
music. He embodied a musical lineage stretching back
to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the origin in some
ways of the crucial cultural split between the French and
German musical traditions, while also embracing the
friendsofchambermusic.com 7
Program Notes new developments in musical style. As head of the Paris
Continued Conservatoire from 1905 to 1920, he aired out the stuffy
institution, allowing for greater experimentation and
modernizing the curriculum.
The first movement of Op. 117 showcases Fauré’s solid
training in counterpoint at the Conservatoire as the cello
and piano move in canon, trading the same musical lines
that then overlap. The fluidity of the cello part and surfeit
of figuration in the piano are wholly typical of Fauré’s
overflowing musical imagination. The second movement
Andante is a transcription of Fauré’s own Chant funéraire,
a work for band composed to mark the centenary of
Napoleon’s death. If in the first movement the two
musicians seem to be literally as well as figuratively on the
same page, sharing musical material and assuming similar
characters, in the third and final movement the cello and
piano take on more distinct roles. The piano is busy and
sprightly, whereas the cello continues its cantabile musings
in long-breathed phrases—at least until the stunning
climax. All three movements begin in the minor mode, but
end up in the more tranquil major.
ADÈS: LIEUX IN BRIEF
RETROUVÉS BORN: March 1, 1971, London, England
FIRST PERFORMED: By Steven Isserlis on June 21, 2009 at
the Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk,
UK
MOST RECENT FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC
PERFORMANCE: Tonight marks the first performance of this
work on our series.
ESTIMATED DURATION: 17 minutes
British composer Thomas Adès found early success as a
pianist, winning second prize in the BBC Young Musician
of the Year competition in 1989. A decade later, he
established himself as a leading composer by winning the
prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Music scholar Arnold
Whittall has compared Adès’s music to Ives, Ligeti, and
Janácˇek based on its many musical layers, romantic melodic
richness, and intricate sound world. “Not only can Adès’s
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