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

Weill Recital Hall
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Ensemble ACJW

JANÁČEK Mládí
MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE Piano Trio No. 1
BRAHMS Piano Quintet

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 Irving Harris Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, with additional support from Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Susan and Ed Forst, The William Petschek Family, and Suki Sandler.

This performance is made possible in part by a generous grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

Leoš Janáèek (1854–1928)
Mládí

Janáèek was in a nostalgic frame of mind in the summer of 1924. Max Brod’s newly published biography, for which the composer had painstakingly supplied a great deal of material, had released a flood of bittersweet memories. Moreover, the celebration of his 70th birthday, on July 3, had inevitably focused international attention on Brno’s most celebrated citizen. That very day, Janáèek quietly slipped away to Hukvaldy, his native village in the Moravian mountains. It was in this peaceful retreat, over the next three weeks, that he composed a four-movement wind sextet which he described to his lover, Kamila Stösslová, as “a sort of memoir of youth.”

Mládí (Youth) is scored for a standard wind-quintet ensemble (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn), fortified by the stentorian voice of a bass clarinet. Contemporary with Janáèek’s opera The Makropoulos Affair, the work exhibits many of the traits of his mature style, in particular the insistent repetition of short melodic motives and irregular, speech-like rhythmic patterns. The autobiographical content is largely implicit. According to an anonymous program note published in a local Brno newspaper—which may or may not have been sanctioned by the composer—the jaunty opening Allegro expresses Janáèek’s reminiscences of “childhood in his native school in Hukvaldy,” while the wistful lyricism of the Andante sostenuto recalls “the sad scenes of parting from his mother at the station in Brno,” where he studied as a chorister in the Augustinian monastery.

The third movement, a perky double-time march, is derived from a duet for piccolo and piano that Janáèek had written several weeks earlier and presented as a token of appreciation to his hard-working copyist, a member of Brno’s National Theater Orchestra. That piece, in turn, evoked images of the town square in Old Brno, which the composer remembered as being “gray and red with Prussian soldiers in the summer of 1866. It resounded with the banging of the tin drums and the screeching of the piccolos.” The “wild music” of the military band, he wrote in 1923, “continues ringing in my ears to this day.” This is an apt description of the Vivace, in which the strutting piccolo confidently prepares the way for the composer’s “courageous leap into life” as embodied in the final Allegro animato.

The first performance of Mládí, which took place in Brno on October 21, 1924, was marred by a memorable mishap. Janáèek’s wife recalled that when the clarinetist brought his instrument into the concert hall from the cold, “one of the keys got damaged somehow so that it didn’t give out a sound. And it was unfortunately just that note that was the most prominent in my husband’s piece.” The unwitting clarinetist didn’t become aware of the problem until after the performance began. He did the best he could under the circumstances, playing his part as if nothing was amiss, while calmly omitting the defective note. Janáèek, however, flew into a rage. Rushing backstage after the concert, he chewed the poor clarinetist out, then announced to the startled audience that the piece they had just enthusiastically applauded was not his composition after all.


MARC-ANDRÉ DELBAVIE (b. 1961)
Piano Trio No. 1

Marc-André Delbavie has risen to the front rank of contemporary composers largely on the strength of his remarkable ability to please audiences without writing down to them. Delbavie’s avant-garde credentials are impeccable: a stint at IRCAM, the Parisian citadel of new music, in the 1970s and ‘80s; conducting studies with Pierre Boulez; and a steady stream of commissions from major orchestras and ensembles in Europe and the US. All of which suggests that the 47-year-old Frenchman could easily have built a successful career as an enfant terrible. Instead he has won an enviable reputation—and considerable popularity—as a member of that rare breed of composer whose music is both satisfying to sophisticated palates and accessible to the everyday listener.

For most of past decade, Delbavie has been preoccupied with creating large-scale symphonic works and concertos, many of which feature unconventional spatial arrangements for the players. Whether the single-movement Piano Trio, which received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall last spring, represents a one-off detour or a significant new departure for this adventurous and prolific composer remains to be seen. Certainly its subtly textured and highly coloristic sound world recalls much of Delbavie’s earlier work. So does his concern with organic process and thematic transformation, as distinct from formal structures based on discreet musical events.

“In every way, the music is transforming,” Delbavie once remarked in another context. “Everything is always evolving. Some of the time, what you hear in the transformation is like something you already knew. You think it’s a melody you could know, but it’s not. We don’t really know the status of what we hear. It’s part of something that’s very slow, but also accelerated.” The many vivid contrasts in the Piano Trio, as well as its unpredictable juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar elements, seem to unfold naturally as a result of this evolutionary process. Bold, sweeping, propulsive gestures alternate with subdued passages that verge on stasis. Densely packed clusters of notes blossom magically into graceful melodic arabesques and slithering chromatic scales. Delbavie’s music is by turns tautly rhythmicized and metrically fluid, almost rhapsodic.


JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)
Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34

Brahms’s F Minor Piano Quintet has been described as a happy marriage of Beethovenian drama and Schubertian lyricism. The accolade surely would have delighted Brahms, for he was a passionate admirer and keen student of both composers. Beethoven’s characteristically dynamic energy is reflected in Brahms’s protean themes and the visceral vitality generated by his rhythms. Likewise, the Piano Quintet’s rich store of melodies and subtle harmonic shadings recall Schubert’s mastery of song and tonal chiaroscuro.

In its original form, as a string quintet (now lost) composed in 1862, Brahms’s Op. 34 owed an unmistakable debt to Schubert’s great C Major String Quintet. (Both works were scored for two violins, viola, and two cellos.) Among Brahms’s artistic confidants, the pianist Clara Schumann unhesitatingly pronounced the first version a masterpiece, while the violinist Joseph Joachim criticized it as lacking in “charm.” Brahms subsequently recast the quintet as a Sonata for Two Pianos (known as Op. 34b). When Clara argued that the new piece was “so full of ideas” that only a full orchestra could do it justice, Brahms responded by reworking it once again, this time as a quintet for piano and strings. In this guise, as the musicologist Donald Francis Tovey observed, “the rhythmic incisiveness of the piano is happily combined with the singing powers of the bowed instruments.”

Despite its difficult gestation, the Piano Quintet ranks among Brahms’s most powerful and fully realized conceptions. The expansive melody that opens the Allegro non troppo, played in unison by the piano, first violin, and cello, is almost immediately compressed into 16th-note passagework of mounting urgency and intensity. The first theme returns in the strings, louder and more majestic than before, above a cascade of falling arpeggios in the piano. A second subject of a milder and more lyrical character is introduced, only to be swept up in an undercurrent of ominously rumbling triplets. Henceforth, elements of these two basic ideas are combined, taken apart, and reassembled with astonishing ingenuity as the movement works toward a thunderous climax.

The gently swaying rhythms of the Andante, which Clara Schumann described as “one long melody from start to finish,” signal an abrupt change of pace. Although the Quintet’s inner movements share the tonality of C minor, the tautly wound Scherzo is definitely the darker of the two. Its tense, demonic quality is only slightly tempered by the C major radiance of the central trio section. High drama returns in the Finale, which alternates between languid, mysterious reverie and outbursts of almost savage vehemence. In the end, Brahms’s instincts were proven right. As the conductor Hermann Levi told him, “Anyone who did not know the earlier forms of string quintet and piano sonata would not believe that it was not originally thought out and designed for the present combination of instruments… You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty … a masterpiece of chamber music.”

—Harry Haskell
A former music critic and editor, Harry Haskell is the author of The Early Music Revival:
A History, The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism, and Boss-Busters
and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its “Star.”

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation