CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Joshua Bell
Jeremy Denk

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Joshua Bell, Violin
Jeremy Denk, Piano

TARTINI Devil's Trill Sonata
PROKOFIEV Violin Sonata No. 1
DVOŘÁK Four Romantic Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 75
GRIEG Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 45

Encores:
FAURÉ Après un rêve, Op. 7, No. 1
PROKOFIEV March from The Love for Three Oranges

Sponsored by DeWitt Stern Group, Inc.

Program Notes:

By Steven Ledbetter

GIUSEPPE TARTINI Sonata for Violin and Continuo in G Minor, “Devil’s Trill”
Born April 18, 1692, in Istria (now in Slovenia); died April 26, 1770, in Padua.

In 1798, the French violinist Jean-Baptiste Cartier published a treatise on violin playing entitled L’Art du violon; it is an anthology of works by 57 different composers of the preceding two centuries. Many of the pieces in Cartier’s volume were reprints from older Italian publications, but one, at least, was a first edition: Tartini’s Sonata in G Minor known as “Devil’s Trill.” Tartini himself had died in 1770, but his remarkable challenge to the virtuosity of generations of violinists was already known, at least by reputation. Since its appearance in Cartier’s volume, it has become a work much-loved by virtuosos of the instrument for its intrinsic musical qualities as well as the challenge of its technical difficulties. But its notoriety no doubt stems in large part from the story attached to the last movement.

The story was printed in Lalande’s Voyage d’un François en Italie (1765–66) and purported to come straight from the composer’s mouth, claiming that in 1713, he made a pact with the devil, who played for him a sonata “so wonderful and beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fancy.” When he awoke from the dream, he tried to recapture the music he had heard the devil play, though he was aware that his attempt was far below it in quality.

It is most unlikely that the sonata could have arisen as early as 1713 (when the composer was just 21 years old), if only because it remained unknown for so long without contemporary references. More likely it was composed about the middle of the century. In any case, Leopold Mozart quotes a passage from the work in his treatise on violin playing (1756), so the work was familiar to leading violinists and teachers outside of Italy by mid-century.

The “devil’s” music may appear in the last movement, but the rest of the sonata requires an extraordinary performer as well. The opening movement is lyrical and flowing in character with frequent double stops in the violin part making for a rich texture, almost that of a trio sonata. The second movement’s perpetuo moto calls for cross-string bowings and other advanced techniques. The finale bears the title Sogni dell’autore (“The Composer’s Dreams”). It consists of a sequence of Andante followed by Allegro assai (twice repeated), in which the slow music evidently depicts the dream and the faster music the “devil’s trill” in double and triple stops, growing in intensity throughout. However the composer came by these ideas, the result has been a “diabolical” challenge to violinists for more than two centuries.

Sergei Prokofiev Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80
Born April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Ukraine; died March 5, 1953, in Moscow.

Composed between 1938 and 1946 for David Oistrakh, Prokofiev’s F-Minor Sonata was first performed in 1946 in Moscow.

In the late 1930s, Prokofiev was busy producing large‑scale dramatic and concert works that came in response to the official requirement that music serve the state by educating and elevating the proletariat while remaining accessible to the majority at the same time. His musical style became much simpler and more direct, more overtly lyrical than it had been during his early days as an enfant terrible (though even then the essential strain of lyricism in his make‑up had often been evident). He had turned out his classic film score for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, followed by a specifically Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko, based on Kateyev’s civil war story, “I Am the Son of the Working People.” This in turn he followed with a delightful comic opera, Betrothal in a Monastery, based on Sheridan’s The Duenna.

Yet already at the beginning of work on these large compositions in 1938, Prokofiev had sketched a violin sonata, marking his return to abstract chamber music after a gap of nearly 15 years. He worked at it in fits and starts over a period of eight years—years of all-out war during which Russia bore the brunt of the losses on all fronts. This surely helps explain Prokofiev’s description of the First Sonata as “much more serious than the second,” which was adapted from his Flute Sonata, Op. 94, at Oistrakh’s urging. As with all of his music at this time, the composer sought to avoid political entanglements—which could be dangerous to life and limb—from accusations of “formalism” that might be brought on if the work was deemed inaccessible.

The First Violin Sonata was in part inspired by a Handel violin sonata in D major, which Prokofiev had encountered in 1938, and in part by the artistry of his friend and chess opponent, David Oistrakh. It was indubitably a darker work than his two violin concertos, no doubt reflecting the period of its composition. One would be hard put to find much influence of Handel in the challenging dissonant harmonies, especially in the first two movements, though the basic layout of four movements in a slow-fast-slow-fast pattern was very common in the Baroque era. As Prokofiev himself declared, “The first movement, Andante assai, is of grim character and serves as an extended introduction to the Allegro, which is in sonata form.” For a great part of the movement, the dark mood is enhanced by the fact that the violin rarely moves out of its lowest octave, and the piano part, too, hovers at the bottom end of its range. But for the closing part of the Andante, the piano plays a series of bell-like chords, against which the violin, muted, skitters icily up and down the scale of F minor. This music will return at the close of the last movement.

The range expands in the second movement, Allegro brusco, which is indeed “brusque” in character; the main theme is driven and weighty, but there is a broader secondary theme marked “eroico” (“heroic”). The third movement, Andante, is the emotional center of the piece, an extended bit of “night music,” with the violin at first echoing a shimmering figure suggesting wind moving through the leaves of the trees, then taking off on its own songful course, ranging from the bottom of its range to the starry heights.

The finale, Allegrissimo, is, in the composers’s words, “impetuous and written in complex time.” At the beginning the measures change freely between 5, 7, and 8 eighth-notes per bar. The music drives forward at a vigorous clip in the driving eighth-note rhythms, with one period of a more relaxed “poco più tranquillo” in a regular meter before the impetuous music returns. Finally the skittery, icy violin music from the end of the opening Andante returns to close the sonata.

On the face of things, he seems to have pleased the official powers, since in June 1947 he was awarded the Stalin Prize for a number of his recent works. But that did not protect him much from the criticism of his music—along with that of Shostakovich and Khachaturian—in the infamous Zhdanov denunciation of 1948, when the Communist leadership decided to attack the most famous Soviet composers, simply as an object lesson in obedience.

David Oistrakh gave the first performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 1 in F Minor and continued to champion the sonata for the rest of his life, making it a centerpiece of his American debut in 1955.


ANTONÍN DVOØÁK Four Romantic Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 75
Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, Bohemia; died May 1, 1904, in Prague.

Composed during January 20 to 25, 1887, Four Romantic Pieces, Op. 75, was first performed on March 30, 1887, in Prague.

In January 1887, Dvoøák happened to hear two violins playing duets. The performers were a young chemistry student, Josef Kruis, who lodged with Dvoøák’s mother-in-law, and his teacher, Jan Pelikán. Thinking to surprise them with a work in which he could join them, the composer quickly turned out a trio for two violins and viola (Dvoøák’s own instrument). But when he presented the Terzetto, Op. 74, to the pair, it turned out that he had misjudged the young musician’s ability; the work was too difficult for him to play. So he immediately began sketches for some simple bagatelles for two violins and viola that would make easier demands on the youth. While sketching them, he wrote to his publisher Simrock with the surprising news: “I am writing small bagatelles for two violins and viola. I enjoy the work as much as when I write a big symphony—but what do you say to this? They are intended mainly for amateurs, but didn’t Beethoven and Schumann sometimes express themselves with quite modest means, and how?”

But even before polishing the sketches of this friendly gift, he recast them for solo violin and piano as the Four Romantic Pieces. Little need be said about the four pieces, which are as open and loveable as Dvoøák himself, brimming with melody, hinting sometimes at Czech dance, too.



EDVARD GRIEG Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 45 Born June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway; died there on September 4, 1907.

Composed in 1886 and 1887, Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata was first performed on December 11, 1887, in Leipzig, with Adolph Brodsky, violin, and the composer at the piano.

Grieg left only a small body of chamber music. As a miniaturist whose greatest gifts lay in the creation of melodies and fresh harmonizations, he found the classical and architectural orientation of chamber music difficult to approach. His first two violin sonatas (composed when he was in his early 20s) enjoy a fertile melodic invention that, to a considerable degree, overcomes the limitations of his formal sense. By his mid-30s, Grieg was aware of the difficulties he faced, and he paid particular attention, when composing his own string quartet, to what he described as “breadth, soaring flight, and, above all, resonance for the instruments for which it is written.” The chief technical achievement of the quartet is a strong sense of motivic cohesion. This element remained important in his later chamber works, particularly the last, his third violin sonata, composed in 1886–87. In the summer of 1887, he played it for his friend Frants Beyer, but he was not yet satisfied with it. Working with a young violinist, Johan Halvorsen, so that he could hear the effect of both violin and piano together, Grieg worked out the weaknesses of the piece, then showed it to Halvorsen’s teacher, the great Adolph Brodsky, reporting to Beyer from Leipzig, “Tonight I experienced a joy that is seldom granted to an artist.” Brodsky played the sonata “absolutely incomparably” and expressed great enthusiasm for it. The two musicians gave the public premiere in Leipzig on December 11, 1877.

The outer movements are quite bold in their treatment of sonata structure, and the first movement is marked by a thematic concentration that Grieg never achieved elsewhere. The slow movement, cast in a modified ABA pattern, opens with a gently lyrical melody of folk song cast, its bright key of E major lifting it to a different world. This contrasts most effectively with the middle section, a vigorous Allegro molto tune that foreshadows Puck from the composer’s 10th volume of Lyrical Pieces for the piano. The finale sets up a rhythmic dance-like pattern that builds to a lively conclusion of considerable power and virtuosity.
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Copyright © 2008 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.

Joshua Bell, Violin
Joshua Bell’s 2007–08 season follows a seminal year highlighted by receiving the coveted Avery Fisher Prize and being appointed to Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music faculty as senior lecturer. In concerts and on recordings, his bold, charismatic artistry continues to bring a fresh voice to the most venerable masterpieces as well to new works like John Corigliano’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra “The Red Violin.”

After summer performances at Tanglewood, the Verbier Festival, and Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Bell’s season includes concerts with the BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall; a European tour with Kurt Masur conducting the Orchestre National de France; and appearances with the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago symphonies, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, and the Tonhalle-Orchester. In October, he premiered a new work by Jay Greenberg with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Bell concluded 2007 with the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve Gala at Lincoln Center broadcast on PBS. A recital tour with Jeremy Denk takes the pair to Europe and the US, with appearances at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. Mr. Bell will also tour Europe as guest soloist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

For over two decades, Bell has been captivating audiences with his poetic musicality. He came to national attention at age 14 in his orchestral debut with Riccardo Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra. A Carnegie Hall debut, the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and a recording contract further confirmed his presence in the music world.

Mr. Bell has recorded more than 30 CDs since first signing at age 18 with London/Decca.
He joined the Sony Classical label in 1996, resulting in a richly varied catalogue of recordings. Recently released recordings include The Essential Joshua Bell and Voice of the Violin, which continues to soar on the heels of Romance of the Violin, which Billboard named the 2004 classical CD of the year and for which Mr. Bell was named classical artist of the year. He received a Mercury Prize and Grammy Award for the Maw Violin Concerto. He has collaborated with numerous artists and on film scores including the Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Red Violin.

Bell received his first violin at age four and by age 12 was serious about the instrument, thanks to the inspiration of renowned violinist and pedagogue Josef Gingold.

In 1989, Joshua received an artist diploma from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has been named an “Indiana Living Legend,” received the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award, and in 2005 was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Joshua serves on the artist committee of the Kennedy Center Honors. He plays a 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius.

Jeremy Denk, Piano
Pianist Jeremy Denk earned early recognition through the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, launching his career as a recitalist, concert soloist, and chamber musician. He played his New York City recital debut at Alice Tully Hall in April 1997, after winning The Juilliard School’s Piano Debut Award, and since then has played frequent recitals in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

One of his continuing artistic collaborations is with violinist Joshua Bell; they have toured extensively, performing together at Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the Library of Congress, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Verbier Festival, and many other venues.

Playing concertos from his extensive repertoire, Mr. Denk has appeared with leading orchestras at home and abroad, including The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, Dallas Symphony, and the Philharmonia of London, among others. He gives debut performances with the Saint Louis, Houston, and San Francisco symphonies this season, as well as with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with which he also makes his Carnegie Hall concerto debut.

The pianist reports on some of his touring, practicing, and otherwise unrelated experiences in a web log called “Think Denk” (jeremydenk.net/blog). Many arts blogs link to his, and it is listed on Top Ten Sources for Classical Music. Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, commented, “Who needs music critics when you have performers who can write like that?”

Mr. Denk enjoys inventive programming ideas. To celebrate the Charles Ives centennial, Mr. Denk paired Ives’s “Concord” Sonata with a motley assortment including Beethoven’s final sonata, Bach chorales, American rags, and Stephen Foster ballads. In a representative recent season, Denk concentrated on icons of the standard repertoire: a survey of the Bach Partitas, some all-Beethoven programs, a couple of Mozart concertos, and much of Schubert’s chamber music in festival performances. But his repertoire ranges from these composers to Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, and Witold Lutoslawski, and he has participated in many world premieres: works by, among others, Ned Rorem, Leon Kirchner, Jake Heggie, Kevin Puts, Mark O’Connor, and Libby Larsen.

With an enthusiastic commitment to chamber music, Jeremy Denk has collaborated with several leading string quartets, among them the Borromeo, Brentano, Colorado, Shanghai, and Vermeer, and has appeared regularly at prestigious chamber music festivals: Santa Fe, Spoleto, Seattle, and many others. He has spent many summers at the Marlboro Music School and Festival, and has participated in national tours with “Musicians from Marlboro.”

Mr. Denk is a member of the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He enjoys cooking, reading, coffee-making, and many other non-music activities, but they tend to take time away from practicing.