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2014/15 GREAT PERFORMERS
The Program
Sponsored by BNY Mellon
Wednesday Evening, March 4, 2015, at 7:30
Virtuoso Recitals
Joshua Bell, Violin
Sam Haywood, Piano
BEETHOVEN Violin Sonata No. 4 in A minor (1800)
Presto
Andante scherzoso, più allegretto
Allegro molto
GRIEG Violin Sonata No. 1 in F major (1865)
Allegro con brio
Allegretto quasi andantino—Più vivo—Tempo I
Allegro molto vivace
Intermission
BRAHMS Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major (1878–79)
Vivace ma non troppo
Adagio
Allegro molto moderato
BARTÓK Rhapsody No. 1 for violin and piano (1928, rev. 1929)
Lassú
Friss
Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off.
BNY Mellon is a Proud Sponsor of Great Performers.
This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center.
Steinway Piano
Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater
Adrienne Arsht Stage
Great Performers
BNY Mellon is a Proud Sponsor of Great Performers.
Support is provided by Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, The Florence Gould Foundation,
Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and
Friends of Lincoln Center.
Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Endowment support for Symphonic Masters is provided by the Leon Levy Fund.
Endowment support is also provided by UBS.
MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center.
Movado is an Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center.
United Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Center.
WABC-TV is the Official Broadcast Partner of Lincoln Center.
William Hill Estate Winery is the Official Wine of Lincoln Center.
UPCOMING VIRTUOSO RECITALS IN ALICE TULLY HALL:
Monday Evening, March 30, at 7:30
Lisa Batiashvili, Violin
Paul Lewis, Piano
SCHUBERT: Sonata in A major, D.574
SCHUBERT: Rondo brillant
BACH (arr. Busoni): Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland
TELEMANN: Fantaisie No. 4
BEETHOVEN: Violin Sonata No. 10 in G major
Presented by Lincoln Center’s Great Performers in association with the New York
Philharmonic. Lisa Batiashvili is the New York Philharmonic’s 2014/15 Mary and James G.
Wallach Artist-in-Residence.
Thursday Evening, May 7, at 7:30
Emanuel Ax, Piano
BIZET: Variations chromatiques
RAMEAU: Pièces de clavecin
DEBUSSY: Estampes; Hommage à Rameau, from Images, Series 1; L’isle joyeuse
CHOPIN: Four Scherzos
For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit LCGreatPerformers.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info
Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about program cancellations or to request a Great
Performers brochure.
Visit LCGreatPerformers.org for more information relating to this season’s programs.
Join the conversation: #LCGreatPerfs
We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might
distract the performers and your fellow audience members.
In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must
leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking
of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building.
Snapshot
Great Performers
By Paul Schiavo
Timeframe
The first sonatas for violin and keyboard, writ- ARTS
ten during the third quarter of the 18th cen1800
tury, featured the latter instrument heavily.
Beethoven’s Violin Sonata
Indeed, most “violin sonatas” were little
No. 4
Library of Congress founded in
more than keyboard sonatas with slight violin
Washington, D.C.
accompaniment. But by the turn of the 19th
century, the best composers had achieved a
1865
Grieg’s Sonata No. 1
more equitable balance between the two
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
instruments.
Adventures in Wonderland.
That development allowed subsequent generations of composers to use the violin sonata
as a vehicle for intricate musical thought.
The first to do so was Beethoven, whose
ten sonatas for violin and piano set the bar
for later composers. His Sonata in A minor,
Op. 23, which opens this evening’s concert,
presents a taut drama in its first movement,
followed by some characteristic Beethovenian humor in the second.
1879
Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1
Henry James’s Daisy Miller.
1929
Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 1
Elzie Segar creates Popeye
the Sailor comic strip.
SCIENCE
1800
Alessandro Volta devises the
first chemical battery.
Beethoven’s legacy of rigorous development
1865
of fertile melodic ideas within classic compoElizabeth Garrett Anderson is
sitional forms was carried into the latter half
the first woman to qualify as a
doctor in the UK.
of the 19th century primarily by Johannes
Brahms. In the 20th century Béla Bartók left a
1879
pair of fine sonatas for violin and piano, but he
Thomas A. Edison invents the
electric light.
found that the music he wrote, which was
heavily indebted to Hungarian folk fiddling,
1929
was better served by a simpler format. We
Tilly Edinger publishes Die
fossilen Gehirne (Fossil Brains).
hear this in the first of the composer’s two
Rhapsodies for violin and piano, where the
highly folkloric cast of Bartók’s invention is IN NEW YORK
well served by a design of linked slow and
1800
fast movements.
City’s first exclusively black
church is organized.
—Copyright © 2015 by Paul Schiavo
1865
Paid firefighters replace
volunteers in the city.
1879
Telephone exchange opens
on Nassau Street.
1929
The Museum of Modern
Art opens.
Notes on the Program
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
By Paul Schiavo
Violin Sonata No. 4 in A minor, Op. 23 (1800)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna
Approximate length: 21 minutes
Beethoven’s ten sonatas for violin and piano occupy a less exalted place
in the composer’s output than his 32 solo piano sonatas, his 16 string quartets, or his nine symphonies. Yet they are prized by violinists, and rightly
so. These pieces may not constitute so substantial a body of work as do
Beethoven’s contributions to other genres, but they are a cornerstone of
the violin’s chamber-music literature.
Beethoven wrote most of his violin sonatas (all but the last, in fact) relatively early in his career—specifically before 1804, the year he completed
his landmark “Eroica” Symphony. The composer had relocated to Vienna
from his native Bonn in 1792 and quickly made his mark as a pianist of
exceptional ability. But Beethoven also played the violin. As a boy, he had
performed on the instrument and on the viola, in the court orchestra of
Bonn. He continued to play the violin, even taking some lessons on the
instrument, after his move to Vienna. Though he never attained the virtuosity he commanded at the keyboard, Beethoven nevertheless had a more
than passing familiarity with the instrument and its capabilities. That
knowledge served him well when he began to compose violin sonatas in
the late 1790s.
The Sonata in A minor, Op. 23, dates from 1800. The first of its three
movements is marked Presto, an unusually fast tempo indication for a
sonata first movement, and its themes fairly gallop along. As the movement unfolds, Beethoven characteristically plays with fragments of his
melodic ideas, especially the initial subject, the brief figures passing
quickly between the two instruments.
The second movement is of a light character that justifies Beethoven’s designation of the music as scherzoso. While the finale returns us to A minor
after the major-key tonalities of the second movement, something of that
movement’s jocular spirit remains. The music begins quietly, but Beethoven
builds to an energetic peroration in the closing moments of the piece.
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
Violin Sonata No. 1 in F major, Op. 8 (1865)
EDVARD GRIEG
Born June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway
Died September 4, 1907, in Bergen
Approximate length: 24 minutes
Although many music lovers recognize Edvard Grieg as Norway’s greatest
composer, few know his music beyond the very popular Piano Concerto, the
orchestral suites derived from his incidental music to Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt,
and perhaps the attractive neo-classicism of his Holberg suite for strings. Only
a handful of the composer’s nearly 200 songs, some of them very beautiful,
make their way onto vocal recital programs. Similarly, only a fraction of his
piano solos, mostly a few of the Lyric Pieces, have become concert repertory.
But it is Grieg’s chamber music that has fallen most deeply into obscurity. This
last is especially regrettable with regard to the composer’s three violin
sonatas. These are among his most ambitious pieces for small ensembles,
and arguably the most successful.
Grieg wrote the first of these sonatas during the summer of 1865. He was still
a young composer, having just attained his 22nd birthday, and still very much
under the influence his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory. That school had
been founded by Felix Mendelssohn and counted Robert Schumann among its
early faculty. Although neither of those illustrious musicians was still alive
when Grieg trained there, the ideal of Romantic expression within Classical
forms, evident in much of their music, lived on at the school.
Grieg’s sonata upholds that ideal, though the piece reveals something more
personal as well: a Nordic character in certain passages, something that would
soon become a signature trait in the composer’s music. This is most apparent
in the central movement, whose principal melody might be that of a
Norwegian folk dance, and where droning double-stops from the violin evoke
rustic fiddling in the central episode. But we can detect a subtle Scandinavian
flavor in the harmonies of the opening movement, and in the minor-key lament
over a rustling figure for the piano that forms there a contrasting second subject. The finale begins with a swiftly flowing idea somewhat in the manner of
Schumann, but the movement’s second theme, introduced by the piano alone,
again hints at Norwegian folk music. (Grieg later develops this idea in fugal
counterpoint and finds it pregnant with unexpectedly passionate expression.)
In this movement, as throughout the sonata as a whole, one can only admire
the young composer’s shaping of his musical ideas, as well as the original harmonic touches he brings to the music.
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78 (1878–79)
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897, in Vienna
Approximate length: 27 minutes
Beginning in 1877, Brahms spent several summers at the Austrian lakeside village of Pörtschach. The beautiful surroundings in which this resort was set
seem to have inspired some of the composer’s finest works. Brahms’s first
season there produced the glowing Second Symphony. Two years later, in the
summer of 1879, he wrote his Violin Sonata in G major, Op. 78. Brahms’s circle received the sonata enthusiastically. Clara Schumann, one of the first to
see the score, wrote to the composer on July 10, 1879: “I must tell you how
deeply moved I am by your sonata. I received it today and of course played it
through at once, and had to cry my heart out afterwards with joy over it.”
Like the Second Symphony, the G-major Violin Sonata features a brief motif
that recurs throughout its pages, unifying its broad design. This is a three-note
iambic, or “dotted,” rhythm first heard in the opening moments of the work,
at the start of the poetic melody given out by the violin. Brahms subtly weaves
the same three-note rhythmic gesture into the two subsidiary themes that follow. Permeating much of the first movement, this motif becomes a “motto”
figure for the entire sonata.
The music of the ensuing Adagio alternates between two contrasting ideas: a
meditative subject begun by the piano, then taken up by the violin, and a
somber theme cloaked in minor-key harmonies. Here again, the asymmetrical
rhythm of the motto figure is prominent, though it now seems grave, almost
funereal, in character.
The third movement opens with a melody Brahms had used in one of the songs
that make up his Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 59. That piece is “Regenlied,” or
“Rain Song,” and the piano’s accompaniment to the violin’s melody presents a
steady rain-like patter of notes. Moreover, the first notes of that melody reproduce the rhythmic motto we encounter in the preceding movements. In both
this subject and a second one, given out by the two instruments in alternating
phrases, minor-key harmonies impart a bittersweet feeling. Only in the final
moments of the movement does Brahms steer the music into the soft tonal
light of its true home key, G major.
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
Rhapsody No. 1 for violin and piano, BB 94a (1928, rev. 1929)
BÉLA BARTÓK
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare,
Romania)
Died September 26, 1945, in New York
Approximate length: 11 minutes
For most of his life, Béla Bartók pursued a multifaceted career as composer,
pianist, teacher, and ethnomusicologist. Of these endeavors, the last was by
no means the least important. Bartók made numerous trips through the rural
areas of his native Hungary and several neighboring countries, collecting and
transcribing hundreds of folk melodies. This work came to have a profound
effect on his own compositions, in which Bartók frequently adopted the
melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic inflections of Hungarian and Balkan folk
music, and sometimes appropriated traditional melodies as their themes.
A vivid example of this practice is the composer’s two Rhapsodies for violin
and piano, written in 1928. (Bartók later transcribed the piano part for orchestra, but the original scoring with piano remains equally valid. Bartók cast each
Rhapsody in two sections, called Lassú and Friss, the Hungarian terms for
slow and fast. In Rhapsody No. 1, which we hear now, the opening Lassú is
marked by heavy drone harmonies supporting a violin melody of distinctly
Hungarian character. Bartók briefly considers a more lyrical second theme but
soon returns to a variant of his initial idea.
The second, or Friss, section begins with a dance-like tune resembling somewhat the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” which Aaron Copland quoted famously
in his ballet Appalachian Spring. The music accelerates as new melodic ideas
spin off from this theme, slowing only briefly before a final rush to the close.
Paul Schiavo serves as program annotator for the St. Louis and Seattle
Symphonies, and writes frequently for concerts at Lincoln Center.
—Copyright © 2015 by Paul Schiavo
BILL PHELPS
Meet the Artists
Great Performers I Meet the Artists
Joshua Bell
Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated violinists of his era. Now in his
third season as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields,
Mr. Bell is the first person to hold this post since Neville Marriner formed
the orchestra in 1958. Their first recording under Mr. Bell’s leadership, of
Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies (Sony Classical) debuted at
No. 1 on the Billboard Classical chart. Mr. Bell’s recording of the Bach violin concertos with the orchestra hit the top of the classical charts when it
was released in September 2014, coinciding with the airing of the HBO
documentary special Joshua Bell: A YoungArts MasterClass.
Mr. Bell has recorded more than 40 CDs garnering Mercury, Grammy,
Gramophone, and Echo Klassik awards. Recent releases include Musical
Gifts from Joshua Bell and Friends, French Impressions with pianist Jeremy
Denk, the eclectic At Home with Friends, the Defiance soundtrack, Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Berlin
Philharmonic, The Red Violin Concerto, Voice of the Violin, and Romance of
the Violin, which Billboard named the 2004 Classical CD of the Year, and
which also earned Mr. Bell recognition as the Classical Artist of the Year. His
discography encompasses critically acclaimed performances of the major
violin repertoire in addition to John Corigliano’s Oscar-winning soundtrack,
The Red Violin.
Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Mr. Bell received his first violin at age four
and at 12 began studying with Josef Gingold at Indiana University. Two
years later Mr. Bell came to national attention in his debut with Riccardo
Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. At 17 he debuted at Carnegie Hall.
Mr. Bell’s career has now spanned over 30 years as a soloist, chamber
musician, recording artist, and conductor, and he is an outspoken advocate
for classical music and keeping music education in schools. Mr. Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius.
Great Performers I Meet the Artists
PANOS DAMASKINIDIS
Sam Haywood
Sam Haywood has performed to critical acclaim in many of the world’s
major concert halls, including his
recent U.S. solo recital debut at the
Kennedy Center. As a chamber musician he is a regular duo partner of
Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis, and
he performs with many leading
chamber ensembles.
For Hyperion he has recorded the
piano works of Russian pianistcomposer Julius Isserlis, grandfather
of cellist Steven Isserlis. His latest album, Composers in Love, brings together
well-loved and lesser-known music inspired by composers’ muses. To celebrate Chopin’s bicentennial year, Mr. Haywood made the world premiere
recording on Chopin’s own Pleyel piano, part of the Cobbe Collection at
Hatchlands Park. He is also featured on Musical Gifts from Joshua Bell and
Friends for Sony Masterworks.
Following Mr. Haywood’s early success as the BBC Young Musician of the
Year, the Royal Philharmonic Society awarded him its prestigious Julius
Isserlis Scholarship. Mr. Haywood studied with Paul Badura-Skoda in Vienna,
where he began his enduring love affair with opera. At the Royal Academy of
Music in London, he was mentored by Maria Curcio, a pupil of Artur Schnabel.
He has given private performances for Princess Diana, Prince and Princess
Michael of Kent, Hillary Clinton, and Xi Jinping, president of China.
Alongside his busy solo and chamber music career, Mr. Haywood composes
and is founder and artistic director of the Solent Music Festival. He is also passionate about his work with young people. He is ambassador to the West
Lakes Academy, has written a children’s opera, and is regularly involved in
family concerts, workshops, and master classes. His Song of the Penguins for
bassoon and piano is published by Emerson Editions.
Lincoln Center’s Great Performers
Initiated in 1965, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series offers classical and
contemporary music performances from the world’s outstanding symphony
orchestras, vocalists, chamber ensembles, and recitalists. One of the most
significant music presentation series in the world, Great Performers runs from
October through June with offerings in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall,
Great Performers
Alice Tully Hall, Walter Reade Theater, and other performance spaces around
New York City. From symphonic masterworks, lieder recitals, and Sunday
morning coffee concerts to films and groundbreaking productions specially
commissioned by Lincoln Center, Great Performers offers a rich spectrum of
programming throughout the season.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) serves three primary roles: presenter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of
more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educational activities annually, LCPA offers 15 programs, series, and festivals including American Songbook, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Festival, Lincoln
Center Out of Doors, Midsummer Night Swing, the Mostly Mozart Festival,
and the White Light Festival, as well as the Emmy Award–winning Live From
Lincoln Center, which airs nationally on PBS. As manager of the Lincoln
Center campus, LCPA provides support and services for the Lincoln Center
complex and the 11 resident organizations. In addition, LCPA led a $1.2 billion
campus renovation, completed in October 2012.
Lincoln Center Programming Department
Jane Moss, Ehrenkranz Artistic Director
Hanako Yamaguchi, Director, Music Programming
Jon Nakagawa, Director, Contemporary Programming
Jill Sternheimer, Acting Director, Public Programming
Lisa Takemoto, Production Manager
Charles Cermele, Producer, Contemporary Programming
Kate Monaghan, Associate Director, Programming
Claudia Norman, Producer, Public Programming
Mauricio Lomelin, Associate Producer, Contemporary Programming
Julia Lin, Associate Producer
Nicole Cotton, Production Coordinator
Regina Grande, Assistant to the Artistic Director
Luna Shyr, Programming Publications Editor
Olivia Fortunato, House Seat Coordinator
Mr. Bell’s representation:
IMG Artists
www.imgartists.com