Mini-Chamber 1
with Jennifer Hayghe, piano
Saturday, October 19, 2024
7:30 – 9:00 PM
Boulder Adventist Church
Jennifer Hayghe, piano
Artist-in-Residence
in collaboration with members of the
Boulder Chamber Orchestra
Program
Frank Bridge (1879–1941)
Miniatures for Piano Trio, H. 87–89 (1908)
III. Allegretto
IV. Romance
V. Intermezzo
VII. Valse Russe
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
D’un matin de printemps (1917–18)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97 “Archduke” (1811)
I. Allegro moderato
II. Scherzo. Allego
III. Andante cantabile ma però con moto
IV. Allegro moderato
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jennifer Hayghe
Artist-in-Residence
Jennifer Hayghe has performed in solo recitals and made orchestral appearances throughout the world, including the United States, Europe and Asia. Hayghe received her bachelors, masters degrees and doctorate degree in piano performance from The Juilliard School, where she was the last student of the legendary artist-teacher Adele Marcus. Hayghe won every award possible for a Juilliard pianist to receive, including the William Petschek Debut Award, resulting in her New York City recital debut at Alice Tully Hall.
PROGRAM NOTES
Frank Bridge (1879–1941)
Miniatures for Piano Trio, H. 87–89 (1908)
[Frank] Bridge (1879-1941) composed three sets of three miniatures for piano trio during the first two decades of the 20th Century. Because these works were written for one of his violin students and her sister who studied the cello, these works have been written-off as ‘student works.’ But, as Professor Renz Opolis wrote in his article on the Miniatures in The Chamber Music Journal
"There is a difference between works written for students and student works and it can be said with certainty that the Miniatures are not the latter and they ought not to be dismissed as inconsequential student works suitable for neither amateur nor professional. To the contrary, any one of these tonally diverse and brilliantly written cameos would serve as a superb encore for a professional piano trio while amateurs will spend many a happy hour with these delightful works."
When Frank Bridge’s chamber music first appeared, it was a revelation to amateurs as well as professional players. Interestingly, the revival in interest in Bridge’s music which took place during the last part of the 20th Century has concerned itself exclusively with his more ‘radical’ works, dating from 1924 onwards. Ironically, these works did nothing to create or further enhance the firm reputation he had established with both professionals and amateurs. Rather, it was works just like the Miniatures which contributed to his success.
The three miniatures presented here are from his first set composed in 1909. The opening miniature Minuet, charms by virtue of its child-like simplicity and lovely melody. There is something very catchy about the Gavotte which follows. This is not a Rococo dance but what must, in the first decade of the 20th century, have sounded very bright and new. There is even an updated kind of musette for a middle section. The third and closing miniature, Allegretto, is also very pert and modern, with a wonderful sparkling ending.
Program Notes by Edition Silvertrust.
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
D’un matin de printemps (1917–18)
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was born in Paris to musical parents, and her older sister Nadia also went on to become a noted composer. In spite of Boulanger's musical ability becoming clear from an early age, she suffered from chronic ill health which rendered her unable to study at music college. Instead relying on private tuition, she nevertheless became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913 (aged twenty), an accolade which brought her a great deal of attention from the international press. As a result, she was able to sign a contract with the publishing house Ricordi that offered her an annual income in return for the right of first refusal on publication of her compositions. After her brief residence at the Villa Medici in Rome was cut short by the outbreak of World War I, she founded the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National, an organization which offered material and moral support to musicians fighting in the war. She died of intestinal tuberculosis aged twenty-five before she was able to finish her opera La princesse Maleine (a fairy tale with war as its central theme), but her choice of text for this and her choral compositions (Psalms xxiv, cxxix and cxxx, and the prayer for peace, Vieille prière bouddhique) reflect both her social consciousness and what Annegret Fauser describes as her “fervent but open-minded Catholicism".
Her principal biographer Léonie Rosentiel situates Boulanger's composition “squarely within the French tradition” of impressionism, and Debussy's influence on her is clearly audible in the lush modal harmonies and shimmering textures of D'un matin de printemps. This was composed between 1917 and 1918, and is consequently one of Boulanger's last works; this was the last piece Boulanger wrote in her own hand, and Rosentiel writes of the frailty of her script betraying the impact of Boulanger's illness. Nevertheless, the increasing independence of her compositional voice is particularly manifest in her use of bitonality (more than one key at once), which greatly influenced Parisian composer Arthur Honegger. Furthermore, Boulanger was studying with Gabriel Fauré by this time, and he was reportedly deeply impressed by her originality and freshness. In 1927, the asteroid 1181 Lilith was named in her honour.
D'un matin de printemps is an a ternary (A-B-A) form, with the A section characterised by a sprightly, dotted violin melody, which is appropriate to its title (“on a spring morning”). It skips around the root note E before flourishing up an octave. This melody is strikingly similar in shape and rhythm to that of its companion piece D'un soir triste (“on a solemn night”), but the way in which Boulanger sets their harmony, tempi, and articulations so radically differently renders the latter “morbid” and the former “animated, agitated, and slightly ironic”, writes Rosentiel. This “agitation” not only derives from the highly rhythmic texture, but Boulanger's harmonic treatment. The melody opens in the phrygian mode (all of the white notes on a piano from E to the next E), but after just one iteration it is transposed up a third to the same collection of intervals rooted on G# onto which the piano's previously clashing close semitones seemingly (and springishly!) blossom into more consonant thirds. After yet another iteration the same melody is transposed up yet another third to B. While tertiary modulation and the reharmonisation of a repeated melody are idiosyncratic impressionist techniques, the way in which Boulanger outlines not a modal but a tonal triad of E major in this harmonic motion demonstrates how she had a wealth of techniques of musical organisation at her fingertips.
The B section arrives after a transitional section through which the violin plays a hushedly trilled B (constituting a dominant pedal) over the piano's mysterious triplet melody in octaves. The B section melody has a more stable, sweeping crotchet rhythm, but is marked “ardent”, and its high tessitura builds through rising quavers to a passionate climax before the return of the A section melody.
Radically, this return is not on the “home” root of E, but E flat. Its return is accompanied by a dramatic statement of bitonality in the piano: an A flat-B flat clash in the left hand followed by an A-B clash in the right. This is a mixing of the two modes of the A and B sections: a coming-together of the broad-scale harmonic tensions of the structure. When the meoldy is finally heard again on E, it an octave higher than the opening, and reached by a string of semitone-clashing quavers in the piano. Its character is transformed by its mysterious re-setting. The reharmonising of an existing melody is yet another impressionist technique, and the final return of the melody in its original harmonisation and texture reveals all of the familiar A-section material heard previously to have been transitional. It is as if Boulanger is conveying the growth, change, and transience of spring before celebrating it in an extended and rhapsodic passage of rich harmonic ambiguity which builds to the closing, brilliantly high violin ascent offset by the piano's flourishing both-white-and-black-key glissando to the end.
Program Notes by George K. Haggett
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97 “Archduke” (1811)
Beethoven’s last piano trio, completed in 1811, is a monumental work dedicated to his longtime friend, patron, and only composition student, the Archduke Rudolph (1788-1831), youngest son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. Laid out in the conventional pattern of sonata-form first movement, scherzo and trio, lyrical slow movement and rondo finale, its extraordinary length allowed Beethoven to think musically at a symphonic scale in the traditionally more compact genre of chamber music. It also permitted him the scope to engage in a sumptuous play of instrumental sonorities, writing the violin part unusually low, the cello line uncharacteristically high, and allowing the piano unfettered access to the sparkling upper reaches of the keyboard.
The work opens with a serene and relaxed piano melody based structurally around the B-flat major chord, a melody both noble and tender. This melody’s further elaboration by all three instruments reveals distinctively Beethovenian touches of dissonance in the harmony that add a countercurrent of ‘grittiness’ to the placid surface emotion being evoked. In contrast to the triadic first theme, the second theme is a prancing little pattern of repeated notes that soon mellows into a liquid flow of scale figures traded between instruments and the exposition ends with a flourish of fanfares and cadencing trills.
The development section, where drama and conflict is expected, is remarkably calm and lyrical, meditating at length over the opening motive of the movement before becoming obsessed with the second theme’s scale figures in an ear-catching texture of piano trills and pizzicato strings. The recapitulation arrives unobtrusively out of a soft blur of pianissimo trills. Indeed, understatement appears to motivate the entire movement and it is only at the end of the coda that all instruments join forces to glorify the opening theme with a triumphant burst of jubilation.
By contrast, Beethoven is not about to let the following scherzo pass by unnoticed and digs deep into his bag of mischief in structuring this more-than-quirky movement. Its scherzo theme is a rhythmicized scale rising up over the space of an octave, answered by a similar scale descending the same distance. What could be simpler? But then, like a cat that has caught a mouse and lets it go a short distance before catching it again, Beethoven toys with this scale, letting it venture out in small steps but always pulling it back home.
His dark humour is let off the leash, however, in the trio section, which begins with a slow fugato creeping up the chromatic scale like a swamp creature crawling out of a lagoon to scare the local population. Good thing the swamp creature brought his dancing shoes, though, for the rollicking Austrian ländler tune that soon breaks out on shore. It’s quite a musical menagerie, this scherzo, but by means of convincing transitions and juxtapositions Beethoven manages to make all three musical motives seem like neighbours celebrating together in the same village square.
Ingenious as the scherzo is, the real gem of this trio is the Andante cantabile variations movement that follows. Its elegiac hymn-like theme is humbly offered up by the piano, richly harmonized in the low register before being received into the warm embrace of the strings. The magic begins right away in the first variation with an evocation of star-gazing wonder on a clear summer’s night as the piano paints twinkling points of light over a wide range of the keyboard. Each variation that follows becomes more animated until finally the theme is recalled in its original setting and lovingly remembered in a rhapsodic duo between violin and cello over gently pulsing triplets in the piano.
The rondo finale, that immediately follows without a break, sends us home with a spring in our step. This movement’s upbeat refrain theme, with its bouncy and buoyant stride bass accompaniment, has a cane-twirling, walk-in-the-park breeziness about it that almost suggests French café culture, but the muscular punchy episodes that sandwich its recurring appearances remind us that we are here firmly on German soil. In the end, the movement’s lighthearted devil-may-care mood turns to sheer giddiness with a tarantella-like race to the finish line.
Program Notes by Donald G. Gíslason