PROGRAM

EIGHTY-FIFTH SEASON

Symphony Center Presents

Tuesday, November 1, 2016, at 8:00

Chamber Music Series

HILARY HAHN ViolinROBERT LEVIN Piano

J.S. BachSonata No. 6 in G Major for Violin and Keyboard, BWV 1019AllegroLargoAllegroAdagioAllegro

HILARY HAHNROBERT LEVIN

MozartViolin Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 481Molto allegroAdagioAllegretto

HILARY HAHNROBERT LEVIN

INTERMISSION

García AbrilPartita No. 4 for Violin (Art)

HILARY HAHN

TürkTräume for Solo Piano

ROBERT LEVIN

SchubertRondo in B Minor for Violin and Piano, D. 895

HILARY HAHNROBERT LEVIN

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COMMENTS by Luke Howard

Johann Sebastian BachBorn March 21, 1685; Eisenach, GermanyDied July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany

Sonata No. 6 in G Major for Violin and Keyboard, BWV 1019

COMPOSED1717–23

J.S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccom-panied violin are, along with his cello suites, some of the most inno-vative, sophisticated, and polyphonically rich

works for solo strings, universally hailed as masterpieces of the late baroque era. Although Bach’s Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (BWV 1014–19) are not quite as well known today as their unaccompanied counterparts, they are no less inventive or rewarding. These accom-panied sonatas represent a significant develop-ment away from the textures of the baroque trio sonata (which was typically scored for two violins and continuo) and foreshadow the classical model of the violin sonata that was the standard for Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.

The manuscripts for these six sonatas were lost, but it seems probable that they were composed while Bach worked as Kapellmeister for the court in Cöthen between 1717 and 1723. Bach then revived the works for the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig during the last years of his life.

As late as 1774, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel still regarded these sonatas as some of the best works his father had produced, and sources of pleasure even fifty years after their composition when tastes and musical styles had changed noticeably. But C.P.E. Bach still referred to them as “trios,” suggesting that he perceived vestiges of trio sonata texture in them. The three-part counterpoint of a baroque

trio sonata is indeed maintained in some of these violin sonatas, with the right hand of the harpsichord taking one of the treble lines and the left hand providing the bass line. It’s clear from the earliest sources, though, that Bach considered the keyboard’s role to be “concertato,” not “continuo,” meaning it participates actively in the polyphonic interplay and does not merely provide accompaniment.

The Sixth Sonata, which underwent more extensive revisions than the others, also is the most innovative. Two earlier versions incor-porated different movements based on other keyboard and vocal works by Bach. In its final five-movement form, it departs more substan-tially from trio-sonata traditions by beginning with an Allegro and including a movement for solo keyboard.

The opening Allegro in G major presents two themes simultaneously, the violin line moving rapidly over a slower arpeggiated theme in the right hand on the keyboard. For the remainder of the movement, the two instruments embark on an exploration of contrapuntal ingenuity based on these thematic materials. By contrast, the succeeding E minor Largo highlights the violin’s sustaining melodic lyricism. The third movement, for solo keyboard, demonstrates a lightness of polyphonic texture that belies the implied seriousness of its minor key. The ensuing Adagio in B minor exhibits a more learned style of three-part counterpoint that, in true Bach fashion, still manages to sound organic and unstudied. The sonata then returns to the home key for a lively contrapuntal dance that shares some traits (including its position as a concluding movement) with the gigue.

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Wolfgang MozartBorn January 27, 1756; Salzburg, AustriaDied December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria

Violin Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 481

COMPOSED1785

While a precocious youth, Mozart composed sixteen violin sonatas. They were not terribly profound works, as they followed the standard patterns and procedures of the time for

keyboard sonatas with (sometimes optional) vio-lin accompaniment. It would be another decade before Mozart resumed writing violin sonatas, and during his mature years, he produced an additional twenty or so works.

One of his last works in the genre is the Violin Sonata in E-flat major, K. 481, completed in December 1785, only a few days before he fin-ished a piano concerto (K. 482) in the same key. By this time, Mozart had clearly moved beyond his juvenile style and was now writing sonatas in which both instruments share equally the musical materials and development. Yet when the work was first published, it was described as a “sonata for fortepiano, or harpsichord, with violin accom-paniment.” This curious throwback description may have been motivated by the observation that in each movement, it is the piano that presents the main ideas first. The violin writing in general also is less demanding than in some of Mozart’s earlier sonatas. But after those initial thematic state-ments, the interplay between piano and violin in this work becomes much more even and balanced.

The piano introduces the main theme of the first movement (Molto allegro), with the violin participating more fully after the modulation to B-flat for the second and third themes. Despite this profusion of thematic material, though, the development is based on a new motif, a four-note

idea in the violin that would later be recycled in the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. After the traditional recapitulation of themes, this motif returns in the movement’s coda, adding a new kind of symmetry to standard sonata-allegro form.

At the opening of the A-flat major Adagio, the violin’s double stops are distinctly accompa-nimental as the piano presents the main theme. The key center and modality then shift repeatedly and ingeniously, taking the music into distant harmonic realms. On occasion the violin and piano parts are briefly notated in different key signatures simultaneously. Later, the pianist’s left and right hands are momentarily distinguished by different key signatures during a transitional passage. The central statement of the main theme in A major is as harmonically distant from the sonata’s home key as possible, before a retransi-tion returns the movement’s key center to tonic center for an embellished reprise of the main themes. Even in the closing measures, Mozart moves suddenly from A-flat to E major and back, re-creating the distant harmonic excursions of the work’s central passage and effecting a formal balance at the same time.

The last movement opens with a naïve theme on the piano and violin, presented in octaves. Traditionally, a classical variation movement would steadily increase the rhythmic and dra-matic intensity through successive variations, but here Mozart allows the variations to unfold in a more relaxed fashion, not really enlivening the movement rhythmically until the fifth variation. For the sixth and final variation, the theme is transformed into a 6/8 dance with echoes of a hunt, paralleling the “hunting” rondo of this sonata’s chronological companion, the Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 482.

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Antón García AbrilBorn May 19, 1933; Teruel, Spain

Partita No. 4 for Solo Violin (Art)

COMPOSED2015

Spanish composer Antón García Abril studied at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música in Madrid in the early 1950s, and later at the Accademia Nazionale

di Santa Cecilia in Rome. After returning to Spain, he accepted a faculty position at the Madrid conservatory, where he served for three decades as head of the composition department until his retirement in 2003. García Abril was especially prolific during this time as a composer of soundtracks for Spanish film and television. He cites Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, and Messiaen as favorite composers and influences.

It was García Abril’s artistic and flexible treat-ment of melody that originally brought his music to the attention of Hilary Hahn. She had recorded his Third Sigh for Violin and Piano on a 2013 album of commissioned encores from contempo-rary composers. In that work (and the companion Second Sigh for Solo Violin, not included on the recording), Hahn discerned García Abril’s pro-clivity for polyphonic counterpoint in his writing for the violin. Composing polyphonic music for an instrument best suited to single melodic lines is, Hahn observes, “a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors game” in which the polyphony has to be mostly implied. She wasn’t seeing much of it in con-temporary violin music. But it was the kind of technique and texture that earlier masters like Bach had explored extensively, most notably in his sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.

Hahn asked García Abril to compose a parallel set of larger polyphonic works for solo violin. She

did not receive a firm reply until he surprised her after a concert in Spain with a complete set of the first drafts of six unaccompanied partitas.

García Abril prepared for the compositional process by listening intently and repeatedly to several of Hahn’s recordings, learning not only the repertory she plays but also the instrument’s possibilities and Hahn’s interpretive range. He concentrated on deepening his familiarity with Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas, and the solo violin sonatas of Eugène Ysaÿe. And he worked on no other projects during this time, maintain-ing a singular dedication to this musical double portrait of Hahn and her instrument. “It was only then . . .” he recalled, “that I took my first step toward the Six Partitas for Solo Violin.”

Each of the six single-movement partitas is based on a characteristic that García Abril identified in Hahn’s musical personality, arranged according to an acrostic formed from her first name:

HeartImmensityLoveArtReflexiveYou

Within each of the partitas, though, there is a dramatic arc—“flowing, abstract, impressionistic, and very expressive,” Hahn adds—that moves through contrasts of emotion and technique.

In the Partita no. 4, García Abril took inspira-tion from Hahn’s playing as much as her musical and personal character. Subtitling the work Art, the composer explained in the partita’s dedi-cation to Hahn, “Your performances are truly works of art.”

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Hans Peter TürkBorn March 27, 1940; Sibiu, Romania

Träume for Solo Piano

COMPOSED2012

Born and educated in the Transylvania region of central Romania, Hans Peter Türk has spent most of his career in this area. From the time of his first childhood lessons

on piano and cello, Türk felt the impulse to become a composer and studied music educa-tion as well as composition at the Academia de Muzică Gheorghe Dima in Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second-largest city. After graduation, he stayed on as a lecturer at the academy and also earned a doctorate in musicology. In 1979, Türk was awarded the George Enescu Prize in composition. Because of his refusal to join the national communist party, he was denied any kind of leadership position at the academy. He was finally appointed as professor in 1989. In addition to orchestral and chamber works, Türk is known for his choral and liturgical music, including a series of award-winning motets and passion settings.

It was at the academy that Türk first met pianist Robert Levin, whose abilities as a gifted improviser are widely known, and Türk submitted a tune on which Levin improvised. Captivated by the tune itself, Levin asked Türk

if he would write a piano work for him, but the composer declined, feeling unworthy of the commission. He had not written for piano before, and as his own wife, Gerda, was a piano professor at the academy, he felt that if he were to compose a piano work in the future, it should be for her instead.

Levin stayed in contact with Gerda Türk, and when she became seriously ill, his messages to her were a great comfort. After her death, Levin suggested again to the composer the idea of a new piano work, one that could represent “a kind of spiritual dialogue, a flexible discourse” among the three of them.

Completing the work in 2012, Türk borrowed the title Träume (Dreams) from his late wife’s notebooks, where she recorded her dreams during her final illness. “The piece is meant to be played as freely as possible,” Türk wrote to Levin, “appealing at the end to your unsurpassed mastery of improvisation. Some of the prescribed tones and rhythms lend themselves to improvi-sation, creating the impression of bells chiming, as such were the contents of Gerda’s last dream.” Levin performed the premiere of Träume in 2014.

This quasi-improvisatory work opens with a gentle lullaby section before it veers into a wild, grief-stricken frenzy, a tumultuous hive of devastating anguish. At its conclusion, the music moves toward quietude, with the tolling bells of Gerda’s final dream pronouncing a benediction.

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Franz SchubertBorn January 31, 1797; Vienna, AustriaDied November 19, 1828; Vienna, Austria

Rondo in B Minor, D. 895

COMPOSED1826

Franz Schubert was reared in an extraordi-narily musical family. His father, a schoolmaster, was a talented amateur musician in his own right. Instructing his

children in string performance, he played cello in the family string quartet, with Franz’s older brothers, Ferdinand and Ignaz, on violins, and young Franz on the viola. But as part of his formal musical training, Franz played violin in the Stadtkonvikt (Vienna’s city seminary) every evening. Violin was his first instru-ment, and his later writing for it, especially in chamber music, manifests the confidence of a first-hand practitioner.

In Sir Jack Westrup’s analysis of Schubert’s chamber works, he observes that for Schubert, “chamber music was not simply a form of self-expression. It was something to be played.” This pragmatism by no means implies that Schubert’s chamber works are artless or casual, but they generally do avoid the relentless gravity found in compositions like Beethoven’s late quartets, with which they are roughly con-temporary. Still, their proportions are decidedly romantic, and in addition to being unfailingly adroit and beautifully crafted, Schubert’s cham-ber music tends also to be more forgiving to the amateur listener.

Like Mozart, Schubert had composed some violin sonatas in his youth, and then wrote nothing for solo violin for nearly a decade. But in 1826, he composed the Rondo in B minor (D. 895) for Violin and Piano for the Czech

violinist Josef Slavík, who performed it in Vienna in 1827. Artaria published the work the follow-ing year; it was one of only three of Schubert’s chamber works to be published during his lifetime. Along with the better-known C major fantasy (D. 934), it is the only mature music Schubert wrote for solo violin and piano.

The rondo opens with a slow (Andante) introduction, characterized by fanfare-like dotted rhythms. A more lyrical theme follows, played over supple, arpeggiated harmonies, but the accompaniment never quite leaves the dotted rhythms behind and the fanfare returns, eventu-ally distilling into a B/C-sharp motif that leads directly into the main theme of the rondo itself.

But once the rondo begins, Schubert’s main focus centers on the two contrasting episodes, not the Hungarian-flavored rondo theme itself. As with Beethoven, the more predictable elements of a form held less interest for Schubert than the exploratory passages; in this work, he sometimes seems reluctant to leave behind the freedom of the extended episodes for the restate-ments of the main theme. The first episode, a march principally in D major (though with numerous harmonic adventures), ends with a recollection of the slow introduction. The second episode is a jaunty dance in G major that leads to one final restatement of the main theme before the work concludes with a coda in triumphant B major.

©2016 Luke Howard

An associate professor of music at Brigham Young University, Luke Howard is a program annotator for the Aspen Music Festival and School, the 92nd Street Y, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.