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| Chamber Music at the Y: Bios and Program Notes |
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Tuesday, March 18: Ticket Information
Wednesday, March 19: Ticket Information |
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Meet the Artists |
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Program Notes |
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| Meet the Artists |
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| Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio |
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Since making their debut as the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at the White House for President Carter's inauguration in January 1977, pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson have set the standard for performance of the piano trio literature for more than 30 years. The Trio balances the careers of three internationally acclaimed soloists while making annual appearances at many of the world's major concert halls, commissioning new works, collaborating with such artists and ensembles as the Miami String Quartet and the Guarneri Quartet, and maintaining an active recording agenda. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio opened their 2007-08 season with a special Beethoven Trio marathon at the 92nd Street Y. Other engagements throughout the season include concerts in Massachusetts, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C. (Kennedy Center), Detroit, Miami and Indianapolis. The 2006-07 season saw major commemorations of the Trio's 30th Anniversary at Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y and the Kennedy Center, in addition to appearances throughout North America, including Philadelphia, Boston, La Jolla, Miami, Fort Worth, El Paso, Tucson, Princeton and Calgary. A European tour to Hamburg, Oldenburg and Erlangen (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal) and Copenhagen (Denmark) rounded off their anniversary season.
On the recording front, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio has entered into partnership with KOCH International Classics. In October 2006 KOCH released a disc of works by Arensky and Tchaikovsky, and the label has re-released many of the Trio's hallmark recordings, including chamber works of Maurice Ravel and Richard Danielpour, the complete sonatas and trios of Shostakovich, their collection of the complete Beethoven Trios and trios written especially for the group by Pärt, Zwilich, Kirchner and Silverman. Other highlights of their vast discography include a critically acclaimed all-Haydn CD (Dorian), recordings of the complete Mendelssohn and Brahms Trios (Vox Cum Laude), and Beethoven's Triple Concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra (Chandos).
In December 2001, Musical America named the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio the Ensemble of the Year for 2002. More recently, they were awarded the first annual Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artists Award by the Foundation for Recorded Music, and in the 2003-04 season they were named Chamber Ensemble in Residence at the Kennedy Center. Of particular pride is the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award (KLRITA), created by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit; presented every two years, the Award salutes the Trio's contribution to chamber music worldwide by encouraging the careers of promising young piano trios. The first recipient was the young American group, the Claremont Trio, and the second was the Trio con Brio Copenhagen of Denmark.
Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson have been members of the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music since 2005, while Joseph Kalichstein continues his long and admired teaching association with The Juilliard School of Music. |
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| Leila Josefowicz |
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| Violinist Leila Josefowicz came to national attention in 1994 when she made her Carnegie Hall debut with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Since then she has appeared with many of the world's most prestigious orchestras and eminent conductors, winning admiration for her honest, fresh approach and her dynamic virtuosity. Her recent engagements in North America include the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco, Toronto, National, Detroit, Baltimore and Pittsburgh symphonies and recitals in San Francisco, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. During this season, Josefowicz makes her subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony in Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, and New Jersey symphonies, among others. Equally active internationally, recent and upcoming engagements include the Royal Concertgebouw and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras; the London, Munich and Hong Kong philharmonics; and a fourth appearance at the London Proms. A close collaborator with leading composers of the day such as John Adams and Oliver Knussen, she is a strong advocate of new music, with upcoming premieres of concertos written for her by Steve Mackey and Colin Matthews. Among her numerous recordings are Solo, a disc of unaccompanied violin works; the Mendelssohn, Glazunov and Prokofiev concertos with the Montreal Symphony; a live recording of Adams' Violin Concerto with John Adams conducting; and Adams' Road Movies, which received a 2004 Grammy nomination. Her most recent releases are a recital disc and the Shostakovich Violin Sonata and Concerto No. 1 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994 as well as a 2007 United States Artists Cummings Fellowship, Josefowicz is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and currently performs on a Del Gesu made in 1724. |
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| Michael Tree |
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| Michael Tree received his first violin instruction from his father, before attending the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Efrem Zimbalist, Lea Luboshutz and Veda Reynolds. He has appeared as violin and viola soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Baltimore and New Jersey symphonies among others, and he has also participated in such leading festivals as Marlboro, Casals, Spoleto, Tanglewood, Israel, Taos, Aspen, Israel and Santa Fe. As a founding member of the Guarneri String Quartet, Tree has played in the major cities of the world. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch presented the Quartet with the New York City Seal of Recognition, an honor awarded for the first time. One of the most widely recorded musicians in the world, Tree has recorded over 80 chamber music works, including 10 piano quartets and quintets with Arthur Rubinstein. Other artists with whom he has recorded include Emanuel Ax, Richard Goode, Jaime Laredo, Yo-Yo Ma, Sharon Robinson, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman. These works appear on the Columbia, Nonesuch, RCA, Sony and Vanguard labels. His television credits include repeated performances on the Today Show and the first telecast of Chamber Music Live from Lincoln Center. A native of Newark (NJ), Tree serves on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music, Manhattan School of Music, University of Maryland and Rutgers University. |
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| Program Notes |
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| STRAVINSKY: Duo concertante for Violin and Piano |
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Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, in 1882 and died in New York in 1971. He wrote the Duo concertante for Violin and Piano in 1931-32.
Stravinsky composed his Violin Concerto in 1931 for the young Samuel Dushkin. Although Stravinsky (as conductor) and Dushkin (as soloist) received invitations to play the concerto all over Europe, the composer realized that their performances were limited to cities with a capable orchestra. It occurred to him that concerts might be more easily arranged if he wrote something for piano and violin, so that he and Dushkin could perform it almost anywhere. The result was the Duo concertante, composed between December 1931 and mid-July 1932.
It was atypical of Stravinsky at this time to admit to so practical a reason for the composition as needing the piece for his concert tours. But he found an aesthetic justification for writing a work for piano and violin, a medium he claimed (in his autobiography) to dislike.
In his later years, Stravinsky recalled that the work was in part inspired by a book on the Italian poet Petrarch. On the face of it, it is hard to find any connection between the music and the 14th century Italian poet. But what he meant, in an oblique way, was that he had been reading a study of Petrarch by the poet Charles-Albert Cingria, who had written that lyricism needs formal rules in order to generate art. The notion of "rules," of setting up a technical challenge with which to limit the infinite possibilities of the blank page, always appealed to Stravinsky. In this case, he apparently found some connection with pastoral poetry as a source idea. This is, no doubt, where he came up with the idea of naming three of the movements (two Eglogues and a Dithyrambe) after poetic types. The other two titles have more specific musical connotations: Cantilène and Gigue.
Though some passages in the Duo concertante suggest the spirit of pastoral life, it is at least as likely that Stravinsky was concerned with the technical problem of combining the percussive sound of the piano with the continuously produced sound of bowed strings. Despite the composer's apparent desire to make the work appear to be little more than a compositional exercise, he successfully exploits various features of both piano and violin to produce an effective concert piece. |
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| DANIELPOUR: The Book of Hours for Piano and Strings |
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Richard Danielpour was born in New York in 1956. The Book of Hours for Piano and Strings was written in 2006 in a co-commission from the 92nd Street Y. This is its New York premiere.
Richard Danielpour, a native New Yorker, has become one of the most often-performed composers of his generation. He is a superb pianist who studied at the New England Conservatory with Veronica Jochum and Gabriel Chodos and at Juilliard with Lorin Hollander. At NEC he also studied conducting with Benjamin Zander and composition with John Heiss. His principal composition work was at Juilliard, where his teachers were Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin.
Danielpour made his mark as a composer, with commissions and performances from many of the leading orchestras and soloists in this country and a growing catalogue of recordings, as well as residencies with the Seattle Symphony and the Pacific Symphony, both of which resulted in substantial new works. He is also deeply committed to music education and currently serves on the faculties of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Manhattan School of Music.
His concert works have been created for major orchestras all over the country and for leading ensembles like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with soprano Dawn Upshaw. He has also written for the theater, including two dance works from the mid-1990s, the opera Margaret Garner, with a libretto by Toni Morrison based on her novel Beloved. Richard Danielpour and the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio have connections going back a number of years before he composed The Book of Hours for them (with an added violist). The Trio commissioned him in 2000 to compose a memorial piece in response to a sudden, tragic death; this was A Child's Reliquary. He later scored the work for orchestra with violin and cello solos, played by Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson in the premiere with the Pacific Symphony conducted by Carl St. Clair. In 2002, he composed a gift for the silver wedding anniversary of the two players—In the Arms of the Beloved (Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra).
The Book of Hours was premiered by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, on December 14, 2006. The composer has conceived it with certain ideas and images in mind—which he discusses below—but these are not programmatic in the sense of intending to create actual pictures in the listener's mind so much as moods or psychological states that arise in the listener's mind during the course of its four movements.
About the work, Richard Danielpour writes:The Book of Hours (2006) is a piano quartet representing the 24-hour cycle, beginning with morning or first light. That the 24-hour cycle is itself a metaphor for the life cycle has always been of interest to me. Distinctly related in idea (though not in musical material) is an earlier work of mine, Psalms for piano solo. The three movements in that work are titled "Morning," "Afternoon" and "Evening."
As my friend, the late Stephen Albert, once said to me, turning 50 reminds one that there are a limited number of hours left in our lives. And so, having reached the half century milestone in January 2006, I am not only constantly reminded of our mortality, but also of the blessedness of being alive regardless of how good or bad a day we are having. This idea, of course, requires constant reminding. The Book of Hours was, for me, created to be one such reminder. It was also written to be a remembrance of one other idea—that all things live and die—and live again. |
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| Dvořák: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Major, Op. 81 |
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Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozevs, near Kralupy, in 1841 and died in Prague in 1904. He wrote the Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Major, Op. 81 in 1887.
Dvořák had written a piano quintet in A Major (which he called Op. 5) in the late summer of 1872. It was performed that November in Prague, but the composer himself was dissatisfied with it and destroyed his copy of the score. Fifteen years later he had second thoughts and asked the impresario of the concert to send him his own copy, which still survived, in order that he might attempt a revision. Though he made drastic changes, he still did not find the improvement great enough to induce him to offer the work to a publisher. Instead he decided to start over from scratch rather than waste further time on his juvenilia; a few months later he began his second piano quintet in A Major, an incomparably greater work. It was composed during one of the happiest periods of his life, when he had started to develop a wide reputation across Europe (and even reaching to America) but lived at home in Vysoká and writing in his best nationalistic vein. The composition took in all six weeks, from August 18 to October 3, 1887.
The most obvious nationalistic Czech element in the score is the second movement, labeled dumka, a term that Dvořák is responsible for introducing into musical terminology, although he could hardly define it precisely (or perhaps did not care to try. He used it a few years later as an overall title for the "Dumky" Trio, Op. 90; while that piece was still in manuscript form, Dvořák played it through in New York with two of his colleagues from the National Conservatory of Music. The cellist on that occasion was Victor Herbert, who recalled later: "We liked the composition immensely and I asked him what 'Dumbka' [sic] meant in Bohemia—he thought for a while—shook his head and said to our surprise: 'It means nothing—what does it mean?'" Grove's Dictionary of Music defines dumka (plural, dumky) as a Ukrainian word meaning "lament," usually used in music for a slow expressive movement containing a number of short contrasting sections (not all of them lugubrious).
Actually the variety of moods in the Quintet ranges as widely as anything in Dvořák's output. Although the quintet as a whole is in the major mode, the first theme turns almost immediately from A Major to A minor, and the second theme (first heard in the viola) is a pensive tune in C-sharp minor. The closing measures are assertive, but they do not entirely outweigh the grave character of much of the movement. We are thus prepared for the melancholy of the dumka, in F-sharp minor, that follows. A slow figure on the piano, decorated by tremolos to suggest folk improvisation, precedes and follows the main theme heard in the viola. This alternates with a contrasting lighter section in the major mode and later with a contrasting vivace, but the main lamenting theme keeps recurring throughout.
The Scherzo is called a Furiant by Dvořák, but it lacks the characteristic rhythmic shift (two bars of 3/4 fusing to form one of 3/2) of the genuine furiant—rather it is a waltz tinged with Bohemian accents. The middle section is haunted by ghostly recollections of the main tune. The Finale is more outgoing, with echoes of folk dances throughout and a vigorous, satisfying conclusion.
©2008 Steven Ledbetter
Tuesday, March 18: Ticket Information
Wednesday, March 19: Ticket Information |
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© 2009 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association
All Rights Reserved. |
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