Program Notes

 

Fanny Mendelssohn (1805 - 1847)                                               Selections from Das Jahr (April; November)

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Fanny Mendelssohn is one of the few female composers to actually grace the pages of music history books, and she certainly deserves to be there. Though Mendelssohn did not enjoy the immense fame of her brother Felix Mendelssohn as virtuoso pianist and composer, she was a highly accomplished pianist and composer in her own right. As a student of pianist Johann Philipp Kirnberger, who himself studied with Johann Sebastian Bach, Mendelssohn could play all of Bach’s 24 preludes and fugues from the first book of his Well Tempered Clavier from memory at the tender age of 13. Her compositional style was more Romantic than that of her brother, who was a staunch proponent for maintaining a Classical style of form, but with aspects of Romanticism.

 

Mendelssohn wrote the colossal piano cycle Das Jahr (The Year) in 1841. Comprised of 12 movements (plus epilogue), the work reflects the 12 months of an annum; specifically, it chronicles the happy year that she travelled abroad in Italy with her husband, Wilhelm Hensel. At 50 minutes in length, Das Jahr is one of the most substantial works written for solo piano. The selections to be performed today, “April” and “November,” present two beautifully contrasting characters within Mendelssohn’s (Hensel’s) travelogue. “April,” is marked capriccioso, and portrays the onset of spring with its con moto energy and beautifully bittersweet melody. “November” brings forth the beginning of winter with its desolate meandering in minor key, which leads to a fiery toccata in the style of Schubert.

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Victoria Bond (1945 - )                                                                                                 Blue and Green Music

I. Blue and Green
II. Blue
III. Green
IV. Dancing Colors

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Writes the composer, "Blue and Green Music is the name of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe on which I have based my string quartet. The painting is an abstract study in motion, color and form, with the interplay of those two colors that dance with each other in graceful, sensuous patterns. O’Keeffe was influenced by music and said, “Since I cannot sing, I paint.” Her painting is filled with music and it was my task to discover what it evoked. There clearly had to be two distinct motifs to express the two colors and once I had them, they developed their own sense of direction and form. Limiting myself to these two motifs, I have varied them during the course of this four-movement quartet to illuminate their many facets, from simple and austere through intense and forceful, concluding with a playful dance movement."

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Blue and Green Music by Georgia O'Keefe

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Amy Beach (1867 - 1944)                                                                               Piano Quintet in F# Minor, op. 67

I. Adagio - Allegro moderato
II. Adagio espressivo
III. Allegro agitato - Adagio come prima - Presto

Like Fanny Mendelssohn, American composer Amy Beach (maiden name Cheney) is one of the few female composers who have made it into the music history textbooks. Beach is considered to be America’s first successful female composer, “the most performed composer of her generation.” She was recognized as a prodigious pianist from an early age but neither her parents, nor later her husband Henry H. Beach, supported her pursuing a professional career as a soloist. Beach reluctantly agreed to limit her performances and focused on composition instead, publishing her works under the name Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. Following her husband’s death in 1910, Beach did return to the stage, touring Europe and the U.S. with great success, performing her own music and championing other female composers.

 

Beach wrote the Piano Quintet in December 1907 and premiered the work with the Hoffman String Quartet in Boston in 1908. Critics describe the piece as “truly modern” and “distinctly rhapsodic […] in the fashion of our time.” Comprised of three movements and roughly 30 minutes in length, the quintet’s luscious harmonies and thematic development evoke the spirit of Brahms without the work sounding derivative. Throughout the piece, Beach showcases the piano with virtuosic Lisztian figures that float above unison lines in the strings, but thematic material is offered soloistically to all players.

 

The first movement is in sonata form and opens in a hushed and mysterious atmosphere before the first violin introduces the first theme, a distinct reference to Brahms’ piano quintet that returns in various disguises throughout all three movements. The piano takes over with the second theme and the music tumbles through highly dramatic development before the recapitulation brings the movement to an elegant close. The second movement, in D-flat major, is in ternary form; it opens with a heart-wrenchingly beautiful melody in the violin, as if in a dream. The contrasting B section intensifies with chromatic harmonies before returning to the tranquil serenity of the movement’s opening. The third movement bursts out of the gate with a feverish intensity. Pizzicato strings and fiery scalar runs in the piano create a sense of restlessness that only slows in the middle section with a reprise of the first movement’s adagio theme. The Brahms’ theme reappears in the coda, this time in octaves in the strings, and with it, a triumphant conclusion.