CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Trio con Brio Copenhagen

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Trio con Brio Copenhagen
·· Soo-Jin Hong, Violin
·· Soo-Kyung Hong, Cello
·· Jens Elvekjaer, Piano

HAYDN Piano Trio in C Major, Hob. XV:27
RAVEL Piano Trio

BENT SØRENSEN Phantasmagoria (NY Premiere)
BRAHMS Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award (KLRITA).

Encore:
DVOŘÁK ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Allegro from Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 90, "Dumky"

Program Notes:

By Harry Haskell

JOSEPH HAYDN Piano Trio in C Major, Hob. XV: 27
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau-on-the-Leitha, Lower Austria; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna.

Composed in 1796, Haydn’s Piano Trio in C Major was published the following year. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 3, 1975, with the Stuttgart Piano Trio: Rainer Kussmaul, violin; Peter Hahn, cello; and Monika Leonhard, piano.

Energized by the second of his two extended visits to London, Europe’s most cosmopolitan musical capital, Haydn was inspired to compose no fewer than 15 piano trios in the mid-1790s. All duly appeared under the imprint of his publisher, Longman and Broderip (which also brought out the first British edition of the celebrated Op. 76 string quartets), and became instant bestsellers. Even Haydn, prolific as he was, could scarcely keep up with the public’s insatiable demand for piano trios and other “domestic” music.

Yet there is little in the C-Major Trio to suggest that it was written with amateur performers in mind. The piano part, in particular, bristles with fiendishly difficult passagework and tricky hand crossings. Apparently, such technical tours de force as 16th-note triplet octaves in the right hand (listen for them near the end of the first movement) were child’s play for the pianist Therese Jensen, to whom an admiring Haydn dedicated this and two other late piano trios. On an 18th-century fortepiano, with its light action and transparent sound, these fireworks can take one’s breath away. Their effect on a modern concert grand is no less dazzling.

The three movements of the C-Major Trio—fast, slow, faster—abound in the rich harmonies, varied instrumental textures, and unpredictable twists and turns that characterize Haydn at the peak of his powers. The opening Allegro bounces nimbly along by leaps and bounds, with many a surprising harmonic excursion along the way. In the Andante, the violin’s searching arpeggios in A minor contrast with the major-key radiance of the outer sections. The Finale, a bracing presto in the home key of C major, is notable for the quick-witted repartee that makes Haydn’s chamber music so satisfying for performers and listeners alike.


MAURICE RAVEL Piano Trio
Born March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Pyrénées-Atlantiques; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

Composed in the summer of 1914, Ravel’s Piano Trio was first performed at the Salle Gaveau in Paris on January 28, 1915. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 30, 1927, with the Compinsky Trio: Manuel Compinsky, violin; Alexander Compinsky, cello; and Sara Compinsky, piano.

Ravel produced his lone contribution to the piano-trio genre in a burst of white-hot inspiration. “I have never worked with more insane, more heroic intensity,” he wrote to a friend in the late summer of 1914. To another he confided that he was “working with the assurance and clarity of a madman.” As Europe’s armies mobilized for war, Ravel holed up in seclusion at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, his beloved hideaway on the Basque coast. There, composing at what for him was a feverish pace, he accomplished “five months’ worth of work” in five exhilarating weeks.

In light of its contracted genesis, the Trio’s vibrant intensity is not surprising. But the character of the music is more elegiac than heroic. The Trio opens with a billowing, Basque-flavored melody that glides wistfully above the piano’s gently rocking bass. An asymmetrical eighth-note pulse—three plus two plus three beats—conveys a sense of restless instability that carries over into the frenzied, scherzo-like second movement. (The latter’s title, Pantoum, refers obscurely to a Malayan verse form that French artists discovered in the late 19th century.) Next comes a majestic passacaglia, its tender eight-bar theme rising from the piano’s lowest register. After a series of elegantly simple variations, the music falls back into the murky deep. But the tranquil mood is shattered by a scintillating finale, whose shifting meters and pyrotechnical acrobatics test the virtuosity of all three players.

Ravel put the finishing touches on the Trio at the end of that fateful August, then hurried to Bayonne to enlist in the French army, only to be rejected when examiners ruled that he was four pounds underweight. Swallowing his disappointment, he volunteered for service as a hospital orderly instead. In his next work, three limpidly beautiful songs for unaccompanied chorus modeled on the Renaissance chanson, both the madness of war and the manic urgency of the Trio seem far away.

BENT SØRENSEN Phantasmagoria (NY Premiere)
Born 1958 in Borup, Denmark.

Composed in 2007, Phantasmagoria was first performed by Trio Con Brio on August 12 of this year in Roskilde. Tonight’s performance marks the Carnegie Hall premiere of this work.

The Danish composer Bent Sørensen stepped onto the international stage in the mid-1980s with a series of instrumental chamber works remarkable for their almost Webernian delicacy of timbre and their hauntingly elusive evocations of an indefinable past. His Norwegian colleague Arne Nordheim observed that Sørensen’s music “reminds me of something I’ve never heard,” a reaction shared by many other listeners. Over the past 15 years, Sørensen has branched out into larger-scale orchestral and vocal works, one of which received the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize. The Royal Danish Theater’s 2003 production of Under the Sky, to a libretto by the Danish playwright Peter Asmussen, marked his first foray into opera. One suspects that it will not be his last, for even Sørensen’s most “abstract” instrumental music reveals a strong dramatic streak.

Phantasmagoria is the latest in a lengthy catalogue of works bearing such poetic titles as Angel’s Music (for string quartet), Seven Longings (for solo mezzo soprano), The Echoing Garden (a cantata for soloists, choir, and orchestra), Birds and Bells (a trombone concerto), Dying Gardens (a violin concerto), and The Deserted Churchyards (for small instrumental ensemble). Commenting on his orchestral piece Shadowland, Sørensen has written that the title refers both “to a blurred ‘landscape’ of shadows, where small shadows are formed behind other shadows, and where the outlines are constantly disintegrating” and to “the fanciful and unreal landscapes I felt in the music while I was writing it.” Such statements have prompted some critics to categorize Sørensen as a tone poet in the romantic tradition. Others, beguiled by the quiet, shimmering surfaces of his music and the pervasive images of decay and disintegration, have likened the 49-year-old composer to Georges Seurat and his fellow pointillist painters.

Despite its advanced vocabulary, Sørensen’s music is anything but arcane or inaccessible. His own descriptions of his music are invariably cast in nontechnical language. The composer notes that the first of Phantasmagoria’s five movements “ends in a dark shadow of an aria from my opera Under the Sky. All five movements are full of shadows of all kinds. Shadows of fragments and traces of movements appear in other movements. Music, voices, instruments appear behind each other as a play of shadows.” The first title that occurred to him was Shadow Play, Sørensen recalls, “but a shadow play can be more physical—the shadow can come alive behind the shadows. Phantasmagoria is a shadow play in darkness, where contours of persons and music, voices and instruments, create adventures behind each other.”

Phantasmagoria was commissioned by the Danish Franz Schubert Society and dedicated to Trio con Brio.


JOHANNES BRAHMS Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Originally composed in 1853, Brahms’s Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8, was first performed on October 13, 1855, in Danzig. Brahms later revised the score in 1889. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on February 10, 1928, with the Compinsky Trio: Manuel Compinsky, violin: Alexander Compinsky, cello; and Sara Compinsky, piano.

Paradoxically, the “first” of Brahms’s three trios for piano, violin, and cello is also the last. Notwithstanding its early opus number, the B-Major Trio dates, in its most familiar form, from the last decade of the composer’s life. A notoriously harsh self-critic, Brahms had never been satisfied with the original version of Op. 8, deeming it “wild” and inferior to his later trios in C major and C minor. When his friend and publisher, Fritz Simrock, shrewdly acquired the rights to the B-Major Trio and nine other early works from a competing firm in 1888, Brahms jumped at the chance to revisit the piece he had written 35 years earlier, as an up-and-coming 20-year-old.

Brahms was not content simply to tinker with the Trio, however. Instead, he virtually recomposed it. In reducing the length of the score by nearly a third, he left only one movement—the scintillating Scherzo—substantially unaltered. Of the other three movements he preserved chiefly the principal themes, while tightening and recasting the musical argument throughout. The revised work “will not be as dreary as before,” he wrote to Clara Schumann, “but will it be better?” Brahms’s question soon answered itself. The new B-Major Trio would take its place alongside the Third Violin Sonata of 1888, the Second String Quartet of 1890, and the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet of 1891 as one of his most exquisitely crafted and deeply felt masterpieces.

A soaring melody, relayed from piano to cello to violin, sets a mood of expansive lyricism in the opening Allegro con brio. Restless syncopations and athletic rhythms soon disturb the peace, injecting a note of urgency that is ultimately dispelled in the tranquil, luminous coda. The sizzling energy of the B-minor Scherzo is briefly interrupted by a tenderly lilting waltz in the relative major key. The Adagio, with its hushed, sustained chords in the piano and the strings spinning their simple, two-part counterpoint, seems to breathe the air of another world. In the final Allegro, also in B minor, Brahms sets rippling triplets against propulsive dotted rhythms, driving the movement toward an exhilarating conclusion.

Trio con Brio Copenhagen
·· Soo-Jin Hong, Violin
·· Soo-Kyung Hong, Cello
·· Jens Elvekjaer, Piano
Trio con Brio Copenhagen—the Korean sisters Soo-Jin Hong and Soo-Kyung Hong, and the Danish pianist Jens Elvekjaer—was the recipient of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award in 2005. This biennial award, one of the most coveted in the world of chamber music, honors in perpetuity the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio by encouraging and enhancing the career of an extraordinarily accomplished “rising” piano trio. The prize carries with it appearances (including tonight’s) on 20 major concert series across the US; Trio con Brio Copenhagen was chosen by members of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio as well as the eminent musicians Claude Frank (pianist), Michael Tree (violist of the Guarneri Quartet), and Peter Wiley (former cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio).

Founded in Vienna in 1999, the trio first drew attention with a sensational performance that took the highest prize at Germany’s prestigious ARD-Munich Competition in 2002. Since then, they won first prize in several more competitions: Italy’s Premio Vittorio Gui (Florence), Norway’s Trondheim Chamber Music Competition, and the Danish Radio Competition. They also won the “Allianz Prize” for Best Ensemble in Germany’s Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and second prize in the Vienna Haydn Competition and the Premio Trio di Trieste (Italy, 2002). Critics have praised the trio for their “sparkling joie de vivre” and “magic dialogue.” Trio con Brio Copenhagen belongs unquestionably to the upper echelons of young chamber ensembles performing today.

Trio con Brio Copenhagen’s busy schedule includes major concert halls in Europe, US, and Asia, such as Tivoli Concert Hall (Copenhagen), the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Carnegie Hall (New York City), the Berlin Konzert¬haus, the Mozart-Saal (Vienna), Herkulessaal (Munich), Beethoven-Haus (Bonn), the Musikhalle (Hamburg), the Mozarteum (Salzburg), the Seoul and Sejong Arts Centers (Korea), Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo), Teatro Olimpico (Vicenza, Italy), the Båstad Chamber Music Festival (Sweden), and the Bergen and Trondheim Chamber Music festivals (Norway).

Trio con Brio Copenhagen performed all the Beethoven piano trios in a cycle of three concerts at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen with great success. The trio was Ensemble-in-Residence in Copenhagen’s Rundetaarn (Round Tower), with five sold-out concerts broadcast on the European Broadcasting Union and Danish Radio. The trio has also broadcast on the BBC, Korean Broadcasting Systems, Norwegian Radio, Swedish Radio, Radiotelevisione Italiana, and on the major German networks (ARD, NDR, Hessischer Rundfunk and Radio Berlin).

Trio con Brio Copenhagen is frequently featured as the soloists in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with orchestras such as the Copenhagen Philharmonic, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra / DR, the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra, the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, the Odense Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre Syrinx (France), and the Prime Philharmonic Orchestra (Korea).