Our 2024 Concerts
Friday 27 September at 7.30pm
THIS CONCERT is supported by a generous donation from AN ANONYMOUS DONOR
PAAVALI JUMPPANEN, Piano
DAVID GRIFFITHS, Clarinet | HARRY BENNETTS, Violin
DONALD ARMSTRONG Violin | WILMA SMITH, Violin
CHRISTOPHER MOORE, Viola | GILLIAN ANSELL, Viola
TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE, Cello
SVETLANA BOGOSAVLJEVIC, Cello
Weber | Clarinet Quintet in B-flat Major, Op. 34
Beethoven | Piano Sonata No.23 in F Minor, Op. 57, ‘Appassionata’
Interval
Schoenberg | Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4
PROGRAMME NOTES
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) | Clarinet Quintet in B-flat major Op.34
I Allegro
II Fantasia. Adagio
III Menuetto
IV Rondo. Allegro
The first work of our festival opens with quiet chords from the strings, settling us down before the clarinet arrives with a pianissimo phrase rising slowly and smoothly then taking off to become the centre of attention in a rollicking introductory movement.
Weber, a gifted pianist, guitarist and composer, worked in his youth for his family's small travelling theatre company. During years in Munich—from 1811—he became entranced by the playing of the German clarinet virtuoso Heinrich Baermann (1784-1847) who had started playing in the court orchestra of Munich at the age of 14. The two men became friends, touring and performing together, and the combination of their talents produced some of the greatest works written for the clarinet. During his career, Baermann worked with woodwind instrument makers in Munich to develop a clarinet with 10 keys. This innovation opened up wider technical possibilities for the instrument, especially for smooth and fast chromatic runs. Weber began composing the quintet in 1811 and it was completed in 1815.
Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827) | Piano sonata No.23 Op.57 in F minor ‘Appassionata’
I Allegro assai
II Andante con moto
III Allegro ma non troppo - Presto
Written between 1804 and 1805, in the most fertile period of Beethoven’s composing life, this sonata was dedicated to his close friend Count Franz von Brunswick. Written while he was coming to terms with his debilitating deafness, the ‘Appassionata’ reflects Beethoven’s reaction to the turbulence of the time: his distress and rage as Napoleon occupied Vienna and his finding moments of calm and tranquility amid the outrage he felt. His music became bolder, more innovative and powerful.
In 1803 Beethoven had been given a piano made by the Parisian firm Érard Frères. This instrument had an extended range—five and a half octaves—which he used at the very beginning of this sonata, going down to the lowest possible note, the bottom F.
The name of this sonata was given by the publisher Crantz, not by the composer.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) | Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) Op.4
This early work of Schoenberg’s was composed in a fin-de-siècle Vienna divided by an argument centred on the contrast between Brahms (whose aesthetic was of pure ‘absolute’ music) and Wagner (whose music relied on extra-musical sources).
Schoenberg was inspired by reading a book of poems—Weib und Welt (Woman and World)—published in 1896 by the modernist poet Richard Dehmel. He found ‘a new tone in the lyrical mood’ to convey the journey of a woman and a man—from fear through transcendence to acceptance.
Schoenberg was a largely self-taught musician who spent most of his life teaching. He produced music of wide diversity—both tonal and atonal—provoking fanatical dedication from some of his peers while being reviled by conservative detractors. A well-known triskaidekaphobe, Schoenberg fled Germany in 1933 and died in Los Angeles on 13 July 1951.
Saturday 28 September at 2.00pm
THIS CONCERT is supported by a generous donation from the DEANE ENDOWMENT TRUST
in memory of the late Juliet & Gerald Hensley
PAAVALI JUMPPANEN, Piano
DAVID GRIFFITHS, Clarinet | HARRY BENNETTS, Violin
DONALD ARMSTRONG Violin | WILMA SMITH, Violin
CHRISTOPHER MOORE, Viola | GILLIAN ANSELL, Viola
TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE, Cello
SVETLANA BOGOSAVLJEVIC, Cello
Bartók | Contrasts, Sz. 111, BB 116
Bacewicz | Piano Quintet No. 1
Interval
Brahms | Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115
PROGRAMME NOTES
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) | Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, SZ.111
I Verbunkos (Recruiting dance)
II Pihenő (Relaxation)
III Sebes (Fast dance)
This trio is the result of an extraordinary collaboration between Benny Goodman, the Chicago-born son of Russian emigrants, and two Hungarians, Béla Bartók and Joseph Szigeti, who fled to the US at the beginning of World War II.
Goodman was a classically trained clarinetist and band leader who became known as the ‘King of Swing’. Contrasts, based on Hungarian and Romanian folk dances, is one of several works Goodman commissioned; others were from Malcolm Arnold, Poulenc, Copland and Bernstein. Bartók, who trained as a pianist and composer at the Budapest Academy of Music, and Szigeti, a leading violin virtuoso, became firm friends after spending time together in a sanatorium in 1913. Bartók wrote Contrasts shortly before he moved to the US. He dedicated the work to Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigeti and the premiere occurred in Carnegie Hall on 20 April 1940.
Contrasts is Bartók’s only chamber music score with a wind instrument. In his string quartets he usually treated the strings as a homogenous group, blending instruments of similar tonal quality. This was not possible with a reedy clarinet, so instead he sought to find novel ways of contrasting the instruments, giving the work its name.
Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) | Piano Quintet No.1
I Moderato molto espressivo
II Presto
III Grave
IV Con passione
Born in Łódź to a musical family, Grazyna Bacewicz was a prolific composer, pianist and violin virtuoso; less well known than her Polish compatriots—the neo-romanticist Szymanowski and the modernist Lutoslawski—but highly regarded as one who helped make the music of her country known to the world. Her father was her first teacher and she played chamber music at home with two older brothers, both of whom also became significant musicians and teachers.
Following studies at the Music Conservatory in Łódź, Bacewicz moved to Warsaw in 1924, then studied composition in Paris with the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and violin with Carl Flesch. Returning to Poland she was appointed Leader of the Polish Radio Orchestra in 1936 and toured Europe with the orchestra, sometimes as soloist. Bacewicz described caring ‘mainly about form’ in her music, highlighting her focus on creating works with established ‘rules of construction’. She was not, however, averse to experimentation.
Bacewicz’s first string quintet—a work of exceptionally strong expression—was written in 1952. The movements vary widely in character, with the Presto (in the rhythm of an Oberek, her favorite Polish folk dance) especially memorable.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) | Clarinet Quintet in B minor Op.115
I Allegro
II Adagio
III Andantino
IV Con moto
The composition of this autumnal work by Brahms was inspired by the playing of Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907), principal clarinet of the Meiningen Orchestra, at that time one of the finest court orchestras in Europe. Brahms’ close friend Hans von Bülow directed the orchestra and invited Brahms to hear the premiere of the composer’s second piano concerto. Brahms was so enthused by Mühlfeld's virtuosity that, despite having decided to retire from composing, he got to work on the Trio for piano, cello and clarinet Op.114 and this Quintet.
In 1894 he added two clarinet sonatas to the repertoire for Mühlfeld, ‘the best wind player I know’. Mühlfeld had joined the orchestra as a violinist aged 17, taught himself the clarinet and was appointed principal at age 20, in 1876.
While the Quintet has a melancholy feeling overall, wandering from major to minor, there are many glorious rhapsodies, a vast palette of colour and texture and a florid Romani-like section in the second movement that relieves sadness.
Saturday 28 September at 7.30pm
THIS CONCERT is supported by a generous donation from PETER & MARY BIGGS
PAAVALI JUMPPANEN, Piano
DAVID GRIFFITHS, Clarinet | HARRY BENNETTS, Violin
DONALD ARMSTRONG Violin | WILMA SMITH, Violin
CHRISTOPHER MOORE, Viola
TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE, Cello
SVETLANA BOGOSAVLJEVIC, Cell
Sibelius | Malinconia, Op. 20
Adès | Alchymia
Interval
Schubert | Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 99
PROGRAMME NOTES
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) | Malinconia Op. 20
From 1899 to 1900, a typhus epidemic swept through Southern Finland. On 13 February 1900, Kirsti, Sibelius’s 15-month-old daughter, died. Malinconia is the composer’s single-movement lament for his child.
The cello begins this sad work alone with a long uphill climb to which the piano responds with flourishing arpeggios, suggesting arms waving helplessly. Sometimes united in a deeply emotional song, sometimes playing cadenzas alone, the instruments express deep grief, until the end when they are united in a harmonious, emotional song that brings love and comfort.
When Sibelius died, the United Nations was in session and its president was New Zealander Sir Leslie Munro. In his eulogy he said: ‘Sibelius belonged to the whole world. He enriched the life of the entire human race with his music.’
Thomas Adès (1971-) | Alchymia
I A Sea Change (...those are pearls...)
ii The Woods so Wild
III Lachrymae
IV Divisions on a lute song: Wedekind’s Round
Alchymia is the Latin word for alchemy—the power to change or create things in a way which seems mysterious and magical. Thomas Adès is a British pianist, conductor and composer of operas, orchestral, vocal and instrumental works.
This quintet for basset clarinet and strings had its premiere in 2021. In each of the four movements Adès takes something simple—three Elizabethan tunes: Ariel's song from The Tempest by William Shakespeare; a song by William Byrd; a work for lute or other stringed instrument by John Dowland; and a cheeky street song composed by Alban Berg for his 1935 opera Lulu—and turns them into something ‘rich and strange’.
[A basset clarinet is a type of clarinet with additional keys to enable the playing of lower notes than the usual soprano clarinet.]
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) | Piano Trio B-flat Op.99
I Allegro moderato
II Andante un poco mosso
III Scherzo. Allegro - Trio
IV Rondo. Allegro vivace - Presto
During his short life, appreciation of Schubert’s music was confined to a small circle of friends—mainly artists and students—who would gather in the home of Ignaz Edler von Sonnleithner, a Viennese lawyer, writer and educator and the Founder of the ‘Society of Music Friends of the Austrian Imperial State’.
Schubert was deeply affected by Beethoven’s death in 1827, having held the older composer in high esteem, and was a torchbearer in the funeral procession. Feeling himself not to have achieved the reputation of Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn, he had a creative surge in the last year of his life, composing a torrent of masterpieces including this and one other piano trio, three piano sonatas, the string quintet and a draft for a 10th symphony.
Schubert worked on this trio in tandem with his song cycle Die Winterreise, the former a much lighter project, full of song and dance, than the latter.
Sunday 29 September at 2.00pm
THIS CONCERT IS Supported by a generous donation from the TURNOVSKY ENDOWMENT TRUST
PAAVALI JUMPPANEN, Piano
DAVID GRIFFITHS, Clarinet | HARRY BENNETTS, Violin
DONALD ARMSTRONG Violin | WILMA SMITH, Violin
CHRISTOPHER MOORE, Viola | GILLIAN ANSELL, Viola
TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE, Cello
SVETLANA BOGOSAVLJEVIC, Cello
Jenny McLeod | Clouds, for piano trio
Mozart | Trio for clarinet, viola and piano, ‘Kegelstatt Trio’, K498
Kuusisto | Play II for violin, viola, cello and piano, Op. 16
Interval
Dohnányi | String Sextet in B-flat Major, W080
Jenny McLeod (1941-2022) | Clouds
Scudding
High above
The dark beneath
Misty within
Storm with raindrops
This work was commissioned by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand and was first performed in 2021. As was her custom, Jenny McLeod offered a poem rather than a programme note.
not so much
white fluffy puffy
as here there
high bright low
wild, raggedy
dense, dark, hymnic
calmo, agitato
with a bit of cirro-
cumulo-nimbo-stratus
thrown in
more like
McLeody sort of clouds …
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) | Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano K498
I Andante
II Menuetto
III Rondo: Allegretto
The first performance of this trio, written in 1786, took place in Vienna at the home of Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, an eminent scientist whose children were friends of Mozart. Jacquin’s daughter Franziska (a promising pupil of the composer) played the forte-piano, Mozart, the viola and his friend Anton Stadler, the clarinet. Mozart loved all three instruments and the Trio—the first ever written for this combination—reflects the technical capabilities of each one in a musical conversation between equals.
Stadler was a fellow Mason and virtuoso player of both the clarinet and the basset clarinet, for whom Mozart also wrote his Clarinet Quintet K581 and Concerto K622. “Never would I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating the human voice as deceptively as it is imitated by you,” the composer wrote to his friend.
Jaakko Kuusisto (1974-2022) | Play II Op.16
Jaakko Kuusisto was one of Finland's most versatile and most recorded musicians. A violinist, composer, conductor and orchestral arranger, he came from a renowned musical family and studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and at Indiana University. After an early career as a violinist, including as the concertmaster of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Kuusisto turned his attention more to composing—operas, films scores, stage music and chamber music—and conducting. Outside music he was active in politics including in Finland’s Green League. In 2017, the President of the Republic of Finland awarded Kuusisto the Pro Finlandia medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland.
The piano is the main force behind this exuberant work: ever present, sometimes driving the music, at other times more subdued and supportive.
Ernő Dohnányi, 1877-1960 | String Sextet in B-flat major W080
I Allegro ma tranquillo
II Scherzo: Allegro vivace
III Adagio quasi andante
IV Finale: Animato
Aged 17, Dohnányi submitted this Sextet as part of the entrance examination for the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest. He was accepted and studied piano with István Thomán, a student of Liszt, and composition with Hans von Koessler, a devotee of Brahms. Those two composers would be important influences on Dohnányi.
He revised this Sextet several times between 1893 and 1899. While he became a loyal promoter of the music of his two fellow Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, Dohnányi did not draw on the folk music of his homeland as they did. He left Hungary in 1949 and settled in the US where he continued his career as a teacher of piano and composition at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.
The good-natured finale of this work is a joyful way to end our Festival.
Programme Notes compiled by Marion Townend.
Artists & Programme subject to change