NWS’s first chamber music concert of the season celebrates the violin with concert artist Anthony Marwood. The rhapsodic beauty of Ernest Chausson’s Concerto mines Marwood’s virtuosic talents, while Giuseppe Tartini’s is a spark of Baroque brilliance. Offerings by two of today’s hottest rising stars include Chris Cerrone’s Recovering, in which a musical idea by Stravinsky is reimagined as a road map to hope with musicians scattered around the hall, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s tone poem, which brings to life her childhood dream of walking hand-in-hand with Mozart and pays homage to her mother’s Peruvian heritage.

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Program

Christopher Cerrone

Recovering (2012)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

Since completing his studies at the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, Christopher Cerrone has become one of his generation’s most accomplished composers. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and the winner of the Rome Prize in 2015, Cerrone has written for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Calder Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird and the Albany Symphony, where he was a composer-in-residence. Recovering was commissioned by The Academy, a joint program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute. Cerrone wrote the following program note.

Recovering is about gradually coming back to how things were, and in the process becoming something new. When wounds heal, new skin grows back in its place.

In Recovering I selected a brief moment from the “Pastorale” of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat and froze it. This gesture is first played by a sustained vibraphone, coated in a delicate haze of breath sounds arranged to surround the audience—as in recovery, breathing is the most basic element. Stravinsky’s gesture gradually thaws and gains direction, joined by evolving sounds in the strings. In time, tiny alterations to the gesture—a displaced octave, a new pitch, different harmonies, and finally a regular pulse—recontextualize it completely from its origins in L’Histoire. Only at this point does the music reach a state of repose and stability, if only temporarily.

Recovering is dedicated to my teacher and friend Nils Vigeland, who first introduced me to the wonders of Stravinsky, particularly L’Histoire.

                              – Christopher Cerrone

Giuseppe Tartini

Concerto in B minor for Violin, Strings and Continuo, D. 125 (date unknown)
Approximate duration: 13 minutes

A self-taught violinist and scholar with deeply mystical leanings, Giuseppe Tartini created groundbreaking compositions and theoretical treatises that helped shape the final decades of the Baroque era. He spent most of his career as the concertmaster for Saint Anthony’s Basilica in Padua where he performed the violin concertos and sonatas that comprise the vast majority of his work as a composer. Like other thought leaders of the Enlightenment, Tartini probed the natural world to understand its essential, rational truths. Some of his most significant realizations concerned the vibrations that occur when two pitches sound simultaneously, as in a violin’s double-stop, creating an effect still known as the “Tartini tone.”

Although he did not write music to be sung, Tartini sought to emulate the “universality and perfection” of the human voice, which he considered a more natural form of expression than the artifice of instrumental technique. A hallmark of his concertos, including this example in B minor, is the subtle and artful application of virtuosity, avoiding flashiness for its own sake. His textures also tend to be quite light and transparent, often supporting the soloist with accompaniment from the upper strings rather than the basso continuo group. These qualities especially stand out in this Concerto’s central Larghetto movement, a wordless aria that Tartini labeled “Lascia ch’io dica addio” (“Let me bid you farewell”).

Gabriela Lena Frank

Canto de Harawi: "Amadeoso" (2005)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

When Gabriela Lena Frank appeared on a list of “the top 35 female composers in classical music” compiled in 2017 by The Washington Post, chief critic Anne Midgette pointed to the significance of Frank’s “multiculturalism” and her practice of “mingling folk feeling with compositional sophistication.” Born in Berkeley to a mother of Peruvian-Chinese heritage and a father from a Lithuanian-Jewish background, Frank has embraced her ancestry, especially her connection to Peru, where she has traveled extensively. When she wrote this trio for Da Camera of Houston in 2005, she referenced the Harawi, a type of love song from the Andean musical tradition that stretches back to the Inca Empire. Flutes made from cane or wood figure prominently in Peruvian folk music to this day. Frank wrote the following program note:

Canto de Harawi: “Amadeoso” for flute, clarinet and piano is a short, moody work inspired by an active dream life in my childhood that I’ve sought to reclaim, with varying levels of success, as an adult. So frequent were my night excursions into fantasy as a child that I grew accustomed to actually naming the ones that visited me on a recurring basis. “Amadeoso” was one of these, growing out of the strong impression made on me by the film Amadeus released in 1984. This work is a concise tone poem, inspired by a dream where I walk hand-in-hand with Mozart, passing through such unlikely scenes as my old backyard garden, a deserted playground and an ominous cavern that frightened me during a family camping trip.

                              – Gabriela Lena Frank

Ernest Chausson

Concerto in D major for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 21 (1889-91)
Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Ernest Chausson only embraced music in his early 20s, defying his father’s wishes that he practice law. He enrolled at the Paris Conservatory where he studied with Franck and Massenet, and he also fell under the sway of Wagner, whose operas he heard firsthand in Bayreuth in 1879 and 1880. Chausson was able to live off his father’s fortune while he developed his musical voice at his own pace, including the eight years he spent writing his largest work, an opera on the subject of King Arthur.

Amid work on that opera, Chausson spent two years drafting the Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, his first foray into chamber music since the Piano Trio he wrote as a student. By labeling it Concert (to use the French term), Chausson was not proclaiming this music to be a concerto in the Romantic sense of a work for soloist and orchestra; instead he was evoking the Baroque tradition of a group concerto or concerto grosso, in which multiple featured instruments interact with a larger ensemble. Chausson convinced the superstar Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, a Franck ally, to introduce the Concerto in Brussels in 1892.

Chausson took after Franck in favoring large, cyclical forms derived from a unifying theme. To begin the Concerto, a three-note motive sounds twice, with a performance instruction that translates as “determined” or “purposeful.” Those same three notes initiate a calm introduction, and they also launch the animated body of the movement, heading a theme introduced by the solo violin and piano.

The short second movement is a Sicilienne, a dance style that harks back to the Baroque era, with a main theme that rocks between the first and last notes of the three-note motto. In the Grave third movement, the quartet often rests while the violin and piano play in the manner of a sonata. The primary melody slinks downward in a series of slow sighs—again evoking the Baroque era through this typical gesture of a lament—while the piano gradually elaborates and accelerates an alluring pattern of sinking and rising chromatic tones. The wide-ranging finale completes this cyclical form by referencing earlier themes, including the all-important three notes from the beginning.

-- Copyright © 2018 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.