CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy — A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute

Weill Recital Hall
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 7:00 PM

ENSEMBLE ACJW
Melissa Wegner, Soprano (Guest Artist)
Kyle Ferrill, Baritone (Guest Artist)
Elizabeth Janzen, Flute
Arthur Sato, Oboe
Romie de Guise-Langlois, Clarinet
Damian Primis, Bassoon
David Byrd-Marrow, Horn
Nathan Botts, Trumpet
Gabriela Martinez, Piano
Elizabeth Joy Roe, Piano
John Ostrowski, Percussion
Angelia Cho, Violin
Anna Elashvili, Violin
Leah Swann, Viola
Claire Bryant, Cello
Kristoffer Saebo, Bass
Alan Pierson, Ensemble Preparation

BRIGHT SHENG Four Movements for Piano Trio
BRIGHT SHENG Sweet May Again
POULENC Sextet for Piano and Winds
BARTÓK Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano
DAVID BRUCE Piosenki

The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education — is made possible by a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., with additional support from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, Suki Sandler, Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Susan and Ed Forst, and The William Petschek Family.

This partnership and Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007-2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

By Steven Ledbetter

BRIGHT SHENG Four Movements for Piano Trio
Born December 6, 1955, in Shanghai, China; currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Composed in 1990 on a commission from the Naumburg Foundation for the Peabody Trio, which gave the first performance that year, the Four Movements for Piano Trio received their Carnegie Hall premiere in Weill Recital Hall on November 30, 1993, with Deborah Wong, violin; Chris Finckel, cello; and Christopher Oldfather, piano.

Bright Sheng started piano studies in his native Shanghai at the age of five. After graduating from high school during the Cultural Revolution, he went to work as a pianist and timpanist in a music-dance company in Chinhai, the province that borders Tibet, where he had his first opportunity to study and collect Chinese folk music. After the Cultural Revolution, he was one of the first students accepted by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he earned his undergraduate degree in composition.

In 1982, he moved to New York, where he attended Queens College, CUNY, and Columbia University. Among his major influences are Chou Wen-Chung, Leonard Bernstein, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall. He was also a Tanglewood composition fellow in 1985. He has received a number of prizes both in China (in chamber music and art song composition) and in the US (including the National Endowment for Arts and Letters and the Naumburg Foundation), and his orchestral work H’UN (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966–1976 was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, as was the present Four Movements for Piano Trio, for 1991. As composer-in-residence with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he wrote the opera The Song of Mainun with librettist Andrew Porter. In 1992 he became composer-in-residence for the Seattle Symphony and recently for the New York City Ballet. He teaches at the University of Michigan.

The composer has written the following about the Four Movements:

Four Movements for Piano Trio is based on musical materials from My Song, a work for solo piano which I composed in 1988. In both works I sought to develop my own concept of “tonality” by unifying my mother tongue (Oriental classical and folk music) and father tongue (Western classical music). The Peabody Trio’s virtuosity also influenced the process of composition.

The folkloric style and prelude-like first movement of Four Movements for Piano Trio is constructed through the use of heterophony, a device typical of Oriental music. The second movement of the work is based on a humorous and joyful folk song from Se-Tsuan. In the third movement, a savage dance, the melody grows through a series of “Chinese sequences” (my own term to describe a type of melodic development each time the initial motive is repeated, consequently lengthening its duration and widening the tessitura). The last movement evokes a lonely nostalgia.


BRIGHT SHENG Sweet May Again
Composed in 2007, Sweet May Again was co-commissioned by Emanuel Ax, Edgar Meyer, and The Carnegie Hall Corporation, and received its premiere on April 14 at Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville; the New York premiere in Zankel Hall followed on April 20. The piece is dedicated to Edgar Meyer and Emanuel Ax.

The title Sweet May Again suggests a pastoral tranquility, perhaps on the order of the cheerful opening of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Such expectations will lead to shock when the work begins. The two instruments remain furiously busy in a virtuosic interplay of complex rhythms. The reason for this is inspiration from the William Carlos Williams poems and the composer’s awareness of the fact that he was writing for two virtuosos who could surpass any challenge he gave them.

Bright Sheng’s own brief comments explain this approach:

Aside from the obvious virtuosity of these two great musicians, my inspiration for the work also came from a short poem by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963):

The Locust Tree in Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

Again

I was especially intrigued by the structure of this short poem and the surprising final line. I wondered if I could emulate it in music: a work begins with a material which seems going its own way but unexpectedly turning into something almost unrelated, though gentle and comforting.

Francis Poulenc Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn
Born January 7, 1899, in Paris; died there January 30, 1963.

Originally composed in 1932, the Sextet for piano and winds as we know it today is the product of an extensive reworking in 1939. The work received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 15, 1959, with Harriet Wingreen, piano, and the New Art Wind Quintet: Martin Orenstein, flute; Melvin Kaplan, oboe; Charles Russo, clarinet; Morris Newman, bassoon; and Ralph Froelich, horn.

Critic Claude Rostand once wrote of Poulenc that he was “part monk, part guttersnipe,” a neat characterization of the two strikingly different aspects of his musical personality. Much of his work from the early 1920s, when he was associated with the highly publicized “Groupe des Six,” is lighthearted, even frivolous, sometimes bawdy, and thoroughly Parisian. An opposing strain appeared in his musical character in the mid-1930s, when the death of a close friend prompted the composition of a sacred choral work. Thereafter sacred and secular mingled almost equally in his output, and he could shift even within the context of a single phrase from melancholy or somber lyricism to nose-thumbing impertinence. As Ned Rorem said in a memorial tribute, Poulenc was “a whole man always interlocking soul and flesh, sacred and profane.”

Possessing the least formal musical education of any noted composer of his century, Poulenc learned from the music that he liked. His own comment is the best summary: “The music of Roussel, more cerebral than Satie’s, seems to me to have opened a door on the future. I admire it profoundly; it is disciplined, orderly, and yet full of feeling. I love Chabrier: España is a marvelous thing and the Marche joyeuse is a chef-d’oeuvre . . . I consider Manon and Werther [by Massenet] as part of French national folklore. And I enjoy the quadrilles of Offenbach. Finally my gods are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky. You may say, what a concoction! But that’s how I like music: taking my models everywhere, from what pleases me.”

Poulenc originally composed his Sextuor for piano and winds in 1932, but he was dissatisfied with the work and rewrote it entirely in 1939. In his typical way, Poulenc builds up his musical forms through the reiteration of small ideas in clearly demarcated sections; the large forms, too, are sectional—ternary for the first and second movements and a rondo for the finale. The Sextuor is a composition of enormous charm, hardly profound, but brilliantly written for the participating instruments. The piano (Poulenc’s own instrument) is without doubt the leader; it has scarcely a measure of rest in the entire work. The winds carry on a cheeky dialogue throughout. The work is essentially a divertissement, but sudden turns of mood and feeling recall the serious side of the composer. Yet its spirit remains fundamentally lighthearted.

BÉLA BARTÓK Contrasts, for violin, clarinet, and piano
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklos, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Romania); died September 26, 1945, in New York.

Composed in 1938 for clarinetist Benny Goodman and violinist Joseph Szigeti, Contrasts received its first performance (with the second movement omitted) at Carnegie Hall on January 9, 1939, with pianist Endre Petri; the first complete performance took place at the Columbia recording studio, with Bartók as pianist, in April 1940.

With one exception, all of Bartók’s chamber music is for stringed instruments, with or without the addition of a piano. Only once did he turn to a wind instrument, and that was occasioned by a commission from Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigeti. At the time Goodman was known only as a very popular jazz musician, not as a performer who also would commission and perform classical works. Bartók wrote Contrasts after having heard some records of the Benny Goodman band that Szigeti sent him. Far from trying to blend the three very different types of instruments into a single complex sonority, Bartók exploits the difference in sound production as much as possible (as the very title of the work suggests). He had long since become a past master of violin effects—multiple stops, bowed and pizzicato notes played simultaneously, glissandi, and so on; now he investigates the possibilities of the clarinet as well, while keeping the piano part (conceived for himself) modestly in the background.

The original plan, according to Goodman’s wish, was to have a two-movement work that would fit on a single 12-inch 78-rpm record, but Bartók found that he needed greater scope for the working out of his material, and the planned two movements became three with the addition of the slow middle movement. The music is strongly nationalistic, possibly Bartók’s musical response to the unchecked advance of Nazism. The Verbunkos, or recruiting dance, was a musical genre employed to encourage enlistments in the Hungarian army in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; thereafter it remained as a characteristically Hungarian musical genre featuring sharply dotted rhythms in a slow march tempo with ornamental turns, runs, and arpeggios decorating the melodic lines. In its fully developed historical form, the Verbunkos began with a slow section (lassu) followed by or alternating with a wild fast one (friss), and, indeed, the original two-movement plan of Contrasts was designed to reflect this format.

The Verbunkos ends with a clarinet cadenza that leads on to the languid slow movement, in which piano and clarinet begin by mirroring one another, while the piano contributes soft percussive tremolos inspired by Balinese gamelan music.

The fast dance, Sebes, begins with a short passage on a scordatura violin (with the E-string tuned to E-flat and the G-string to G-sharp), following which the violin is directed to return to a second, normally tuned instrument. This is the only example of scordatura in Bartók’s entire output. The outer sections of the dance are in a lively 2/4 meter, but the extended middle section uses what is often called “Bulgarian rhythm,” which Bartók learned in his folk music studies: (8+5)/8, or more properly (3+2+3+2+3)/8. When the original 2/4 returns, the dance gets wilder and wilder (with just a few momentarily tranquil passages and a cadenza for the violin) before reaching its brilliant conclusion.


DAVID BRUCE Piosenki
Born 1970; currently lives in St. Albans, England.

Composed on a commission from Carnegie Hall, Piosenki received its world premiere in Weill Recital Hall on April 15, 2007, with Melissa Wegner, soprano; Yang Yang, baritone; Lance Suzuki, flute; Carol McGonnell, clarinet; Peter Evans, trumpet; Adam Krauthamer, horn; Javier Diaz, percussion; Keats Dieffenbach, violin; Nadia Sirota, viola; Claire Bryant, cello; and Nathan Farrington, double bass.

David Bruce is a young English composer who has shown himself to be particularly effective in works involving theatrical elements, particularly in a number of chamber operas, of which the most recent, and most successful, was the full-length 2006 score Push! It led to a commission for a new full-length chamber opera (Taming of the Shrew, after Shakespeare) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and for the work to be heard here, which had its premiere just six months ago.

Bruce studied at Nottingham University with Jim Fulkerson and Nicholas Sackman, then earned his master’s degree at the Royal College of Music (working with Tim Salter and George Benjamin) and his doctorate at King’s College London, where he worked with Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

The ability to project character, personality, and emotion lies at the core of the opera composer’s art, whether a piece is intended for the theatrical stage or the stage of the imagination. In Piosenki, the latter is the case. Setting a series of colorful and expressive Polish poems relating to childhood, Bruce evokes the world of childhood and of Eastern Europe with great color and precision. His own comments provide the best guide to the nature of the work and the individual songs.

Piosenki is an attempt to reflect the varied and beautiful images of and from childhood, found in the wonderful children’s poems of Polish poet Julian Tuwim. Tuwim’s poems range from simple “playground rhymes” like “Dwa Michaly” and “Idzie Grzes” to the sophistry of “Dwa Wiatry” and “Mroz,” the very words of which (“Chrest I brzek, zgrzyt I stek”) so vividly capture the sound of the crunching, rattling sleigh.

What particularly attracted me was the range of different voices and view-points Tuwim gives us from poem to poem. Some poems, like “Ptasie plotki,” with its chorus of gossiping and squabbling birds appeal directly to the child’s imagination; others, like the rather dour “Rok i bieda”—which portrays each of the four seasons as a cause of consternation and misery—take on a sensibility that is almost adult. It is interesting to note that in the latter poem, Tuwim carefully keeps the language clean and simple to convey its rather deep message in language a child would fully understand. Overall, I tried to select poems that would reflect this range of Tuwim’s rich, complex, and unpatronising work.

Alongside seven of Tuwim’s poems I have interspersed four playground chants (wyliczanki in Polish), including the mean-spirited, name-calling “Pani Zosia” and rounding off in celebratory fashion with the nonsense rhyme “Trumf Trumf.”

I used the Polish word piosenki for the title, as it implies popular songs, as opposed to the more serious piesn, which implies an art song or lieder. The musical language of Piosenki draws on a wide range of folk influences from all over Eastern Europe, including the music of the Polish gorale (mountaineers), klezmer music (Tuwim himself was Jewish) and Gypsy music from Romania and Hungary. I have loved all of these varied, but closely related musics for many years, and these songs seemed an entirely appropriate place to explore that passion in greater depth.

The instrumentation in two of the songs merits special attention. “Smierdziel” (Smelly) uses three different instruments to produce similar flatulent effects: the lion’s roar, the Brazilian cuica, and, at the start, a bow hair tied to the violin’s G-string (a technique used by the Romanian group Taraf de Haidouks). In each instrument the sound is produced by the friction of rubbing the fingers along a string. In the final song, “Trumf Trumf,” I use a home-made folk instrument found in many countries around the world and called, variously, a largerphone, a zobstick, or a bushwhacker. I am grateful to Michael Ward-Bergman for introducing me to this instrument and for his guidance in how to build one.

Whilst Piosenki is not directly aimed at children (I hope they might enjoy the piece nonetheless!), my hope is that it presents a varied and truthful image of childhood—sometimes playful, sometimes serious—which, like Tuwim’s poems themselves, is not easy to sum up in words.

The nature and subject matter of the songs can be characterized briefly as follows:

1. “Dwa Michaly” (Two Michaels). Two Michaels dancing and spiralling round each other. The words similarly spiral around until the two Michaels collapse on the ground.
2. Mróz (“Frost”) The peasant boy is riding through the forest on his sleigh with sticks he has gathered. The frost, the sticks and the sleigh all scrape and screech, but as the poem’s last line says, together they create a music which makes the load seem lighter and the frost less harsh.
3. “Pani Zosia” (Mrs Zosia—playground chant). The words mean, “Mrs Zosia has a husband who is always drinking.”
4. “Smierdziel” (Smelly). The smelly boy complains about a terrible smell wherever he goes. He marches around, complaining, “Disgrace! Comrades, stand firm against from the stink!” One of the other boys responds, “Don’t protest when it’s you who’s the smelly one!”
5. “Siedzi Baba na cmentarzu” (Granny in the cemetery—playground chant). Granny sits in the cemetery and a ghost makes her jump, continuing without a break into:
6. “Stary Kowal” (This Old Cobbler—playground chant). This old cobbler cobbles, the music continues without a break into:
7. “Idzie Grzes” (Grzes walks along). A comic rhyme about the hapless Grzes, who walks along carrying a bag of sand. He doesn’t notice the sand is leaking and is happy the load is lighter; but when he gets home and finds the bag empty he has to go and get some more—and so on, and so on, and so on.
8. “Rok i Bieda” (The year and misery). There are four miseries in the world: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Though reluctantly in each case, the poet admits there are some advantages, such as the tasty blueberries growing in the summer forest.
9. “Dwa Wiatry” (Two Winds). A poetic description of two winds who chase each other around the orchard, before disappearing into the silence.
10. “Ptasie Plotki” (Gossiping birds). The cockrel came to the turkey and gossiped about the duck’s down. The duck came to the guinea-fowl and gossiped about the turkey’s beak—and so on, until in the end the whole yard was filled with flying feathers.
11. “Trumf Trumf” (Nonsense Chant)

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely on many aspects of classical music.