Download Program Notes - Music Academy of the West

Academy Festival Artists, July 5, 2016
PROGRAM NOTES
PAUL CHIHARA
Duo Lyrico (World Premiere)
Composed 2015
Duration ca. 10 minutes
Scored for violin and viola
Paul Chihara is distinguished as a composer of both film and concert music. Working with a
roster of directors that includes Sidney Lumet, Louis Malle, and Arthur Penn, Mr. Chihara has
composed scores for over 100 motion pictures and television series, including “Prince of the
City,” “The Morning After,” “Crossing Delancey,” and “China Beach.” He founded and chaired
the Visual Media (graduate film music) program at UCLA and is now a Distinguished Emeritus
Professor of Music at that school. He also teaches at NYU as an Artist Faculty in film music.
Mr. Chihara’s achievements in the field of concert music are equally impressive. His music has
been commissioned and performed by major orchestras in this country and abroad, as well as
by the New Juilliard Ensemble, Continuum, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and other
ensembles. Mr. Chihara has held composer residencies with the Los Angeles Chamber
Orchestra, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Marlboro Festival. His many awards include the Lili
Boulanger Memorial Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and prizes from the Guggenheim
Foundation, Naumberg Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund, National Endowment for the Arts,
and the Classical Recording Foundation, which named him Composer-of-the-Year.
Mr. Chihara attended the Music Academy of the West in 1958 as a scholarship violinist. “Those
weeks changed my life and my career,” he remembers. “I came to Santa Barbara as a violinist,
and left being determined to become a composer. It was a White Light experience!”
Duo Lyrico, which we hear now, receives its premiere performance this evening. The composer
has kindly furnished the following remarks about this piece:
Duo Lyrico was composed for dear friends and colleagues: the great virtuoso Glenn
Dicterow, on his retirement as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; and
his brilliant violist wife, Karen Dreyfus. It was for me a labor of love, and the piece is both an
artistic tribute and a musical portrait of two wonderful musicians and life-long friends from
Los Angeles and New York. The music is both lyric and very personal, built on two wellknown and beloved models: the hymn-like song “Bist Du Bei Mir,” from J.S. Bach’s Anna
Magdelana Buch, which Bach composed for his second wife, whom he adored; and the
second theme in Schubert’s immortal String Quintet in C, which begins on a unison for two
cellos, then grows into an unforgettable theme in two voices, certainly the very soul of
romantic music! Of course, the godfather of the violin-viola duo is Mozart, who composed
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two such pieces in 1783 for his friend Michael Haydn. It seems that the violin/viola duo
inspires the friendliest compositions and warmest musical thoughts!
ADAM SCHOENBERG
Winter Music
Composed 2012
Duration ca. 6 minutes
Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn
Adam Schoenberg, a Los Angeles resident and Assistant Professor of Composition at Occidental
College, wrote his woodwind quintet Winter Music to complement Samuel Barber’s Summer
Music, which follows on our program. Schoenberg has long admired that composition, which he
describes as “one of the best ever written for the medium.” He also reveres Barber as “a true
American composer who, along with Ives, Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein, helped define the
sound of American classical music.” Accordingly, he says, “I wanted to write a quintet that feels
American in spirit.”
Further inspiration came from the ensemble that commissioned the work, the Quintet of the
Americas. Its members proposed to Schoenberg the theme of the cosmos, “images of galaxies,
planets, and stars,” the composer explains. “With this in mind, I thought about what it would be
like to be on another planet. This led me to think about my New England roots, and how I [was]
living in Los Angeles and experiencing my first winter [there].” These varied thoughts and
experiences all contributed to shaping Winter Music. Schoenberg describes the work as “a
companion piece to the first part of Barber’s Summer Music, and my idea of life on a single
planet in one of the 170 billion galaxies located millions of light-years away from earth. That is,
a fantasy world somehow paralleling and reflecting my first winter in Los Angeles: magically
warm, fairy-tale like, whimsical, light, airy, and full of love.”
SAMUEL BARBER
Summer Music, Op. 31
Composed: 1955
Duration ca. 12 minutes
Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn
The woodwind quintet as a compositional genre originated during the early 19th century with
works by the Czech composer Anton Reicha and his German colleague Franz Danzi. A number of
important 20th-century composers — Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Elliott Carter
among them — also wrote music for the standard ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon,
and horn. Unlike Reicha and Danzi, both of whom wrote prolifically for woodwind quintet, none
of these musicians left more than one work in this form. The American composer Samuel
Barber also wrote a single woodwind quintet, one that bears a title as attractive as its music.
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Summer Music, as Barber called this piece, was composed in 1955 on commission from the
Chamber Music Society of Detroit. It received its premiere performance when a quintet from
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra played it on March 20, 1956, and it quickly was welcomed as a
valuable addition to the relatively slender woodwind quintet literature. As its title suggests, this
is music of generally pastoral, almost bucolic, character. The harmonic idiom is that of Barber at
his most accessible, the textures are airy, and the sonorities are sensitively dappled with the
aural colors of the five wind instruments.
Cast in a single movement, Summer Music is episodic in form, unfolding in a series of passages
that offer contrasting thematic ideas, moods, and tempi. Among these sections we find a
rhapsodic introduction that gives way to a wistful melody featuring the oboe; a rhythmic
march-like idea; a still more lively scherzando episode; and different permutations of these. The
result is music that seems to convey a nostalgic summer reverie.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, D. 898
Composed probably 1827-28
Duration ca. 40 minutes
Scored for violin, cello, and piano
Schubert’s final two years produced an astonishing harvest of music. This encompasses a series
of superb songs; the magnificent String Quintet in C; the Mass in E-Flat and several shorter
choral pieces; a trilogy of beautifully executed large-scale piano sonatas; several works for
piano four-hands, among them the extraordinary F Minor Fantasy; a number of short pieces for
solo piano, including the famous Impromptus; and two trios for piano and strings. Schubert
evidently completed the first of the piano trios, a piece in B-flat major entered as No. 898 in
Otto Deutsche’s comprehensive catalogue of the composer’s music, before the end of 1827. On
December 26 of that year, a piano trio by Schubert was heard during a concert in Vienna. The
composer, in a letter written shortly thereafter, declared that it was “admirably performed”
and “pleased very much.”
The likelihood that this work dates from the latter half of 1827 is remarkable not only for its
being part of the abundant productivity Schubert achieved at this time. The composer was then
also writing his sorrowful Winterrise song cycle, and its dark tone evidently influenced his
mood. One of his closest friends described him as “gloomy” during this period, and he
repeatedly declined invitations to social gatherings. Yet the B-flat Trio reflects nothing in the
way of melancholy. On the contrary, it gives us some of Schubert’s most felicitous writing.
There is a wonderful buoyancy to much of the music, and its occasional resort to minor-mode
harmonies are fleeting and hardly dispiriting. Rather, they seem shadows that pass briefly over
an otherwise sun-filled landscape, their effect being to throw its bright features into sharper
relief.
This musical landscape is one of broad vistas. Robert Schumann famously praised the “heavenly
length” of Schubert’s late music. While not so long as other major compositions of the
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composer’s last years, the B-flat Trio is expansive in the way it dwells on thematic ideas, and in
its sometimes leisurely progression across far-flung harmonic regions.
The first of its four movements opens with an assertive theme played by the two string
instruments over a rhythmic tattoo from the piano. Schubert allows this idea to unfold
ingeniously, then repeats it with the instruments trading roles before finally arriving at a gently
lyrical second subject, introduced by the cello. His extensive development of these themes
includes combining motifs from each of them in counterpoint.
Schubert begins the second movement with a lilting melody that might be a lullaby. More
animated material occupies the central portion of the movement, but the initial theme returns
to close this portion of the work on a note of gentle recollection. There follows a scherzo whose
insistent rhythms evince Beethoven’s influence on Schubert’s music, then a thematically rich
finale featuring prancing melodies and brilliant runs on the keyboard.
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