Daniel Saidenberg Faculty RecitalSeries

Misha Amory, ViolaThomas Sauer, PianoHsin-Yun Huang, Viola

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The Juilliard Schoolpresents

Misha Amory, ViolaThomas Sauer, PianoHsin-Yun Huang, Viola

Part of the Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital Series

Friday, October 18, 2019, 7:30pmPaul Hall

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY Adagio (1905)(1882-1967)FRANK BRIDGE Pensiero (1908)(1879-1941)

PAUL HINDEMITH “Thema con Variationen” from Sonata, (1895-1963) Op.31, No. 4 (1922)ARTHUR BLISS “Furiant” from Viola Sonata (1934)(1891-1975)

BRUCE ADOLPHE Dreamsong (1989)(b.1955)GEORGE BENJAMIN Viola, Viola (1998)(b.1960)

Intermission

Program continues

Major funding for establishing Paul Recital Hall and for continuing access to its series of public programs has been granted by the Bay Foundation and the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation in memory of Josephine Bay Paul.

Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium.

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The Viola in the 20th Century By Misha Amory

ELLIOTT CARTER Elegy (1943)(1908-2012)IGOR STRAVINSKY Elegy (1944)(1882-1971)

GYÖRGY KURTÁG Jelek (1965)(b.1926) Agitato Giusto Lento Vivo Adagio RisolutoDMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH “Adagio” from Viola Sonata (1975)(1906-75)

Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, including an intermission

The 20th century was transformative for the viola as a solo instrument. During these 100 years, the viola changed in the public perception from a poor relative of the violin into an expressive powerhouse with its own profile. In 1900 the viola in a solo role was a curiosity, a character actor summed up in a few restrictive words: dark, melancholy, intimate. By 2000, the instrument had been reimagined. Champions emerged over the 20th century—Lionel Tertis, William Primrose, Nobuko Imai, Kim Kashkashian, Paul Neubauer, and Tabea Zimmermann as noted soloists; Walter Trampler, Samuel Rhodes, Michael Tree, and Martha Katz carving out new expressive territory in the chamber music sphere; and great teachers such as Karen Tuttle, Heidi Castleman, and Thomas Riebl transforming the ways we think about the instrument. Hundreds of solo works for the viola were commissioned and written, plunging it into every conceivable context, where it wailed, gasped, chortled, plucked, and stabbed its way to a new identity.

This concert is a very limited tribute to the viola’s 20th century. As a “survey” it is extremely poor: there is no music composed by a woman; no music composed by an Asian, African, or South American; and no music from outside the European tradition, broadly interpreted. My idea is to offer glimpses, or snapshots, of music being written for the viola at five junctures during the 1900s. Each glimpse is “stereoscopic,” consisting of two works written close together in time that mirror each other, contradict each other, or otherwise cast each other in relief. For me, the most important thing is that each work on the program be vivid, have something striking and expressive to say, and display the viola in a particular light. One or two works were originally conceived for the violin or cello but alternatively published for the viola and too good to leave out.

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Zoltán Kodály’s Adagio (1905) is a lovely early work, prayerful and heartfelt. Originally conceived for violin but also published for the viola and cello, it plays well to the viola’s natural warmth and inwardness, while demanding a huge range—nearly four octaves—from the performer.

Paired with the Kodály work is the brief Pensiero (1908) of Frank Bridge. Commissioned by his famous viola contemporary, Lionel Tertis, this piece shares the color palette of Kodály’s work, but not its oratory: Instead of Kodály’s soaring, complete arcs of eloquence, Bridge offers inchoate, stammering beginnings, half-submerged ideas. The “pensiero,” or “thought,” is so intensely emotional at its source that it can’t be spoken in graceful, well-rounded sentences, but must remain fragmented, stuck in the process of becoming speech.

Jumping ahead a couple of decades, the next pair of works is firmly rooted in the Machine Age: the Theme and Variations from Paul Hindemith’s Solo Sonata, Op. 31, No. 4 (1922), and the Furiant movement from Arthur Bliss’ Viola Sonata (1934). Hindemith was one of many composers smitten (and perhaps disturbed) by the power of machines and their unstoppable, mesmeric drive—a musical trend famously embodied by Arthur Honegger’s orchestral piece Pacific 231. A viola soloist writing for himself, Hindemith unhesitatingly repurposed his supposedly shy, lyrical instrument to convey his visions of machinelike energy. The theme and variations takes a bold idea, stated in octaves, and puts it through a set of variations of increasing athleticism and energy; at times one can almost hear pistons churning and conveyor belts humming. Despite a brief, more songful oasis in the middle of the movement, the clear message of the music is forward-hurtling, exciting momentum.

Zoltán Kodály Born: December 16, 1882, in Kecskemét, Hungary Died: March 6, 1967, in Budapest

Frank Bridge Born: February 26, 1879, in Brighton, U.K. Died: January 10, 1941, in Eastbourne, U.K.

Paul Hindemith Born: November 16, 1895, in Hanau, Germany Died: December 28, 1963, in Frankfurt

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The Viola in the 20th Century (continued)

The Bliss sonata, another British work commissioned by Tertis, shares this love of fast progress. “Furiant” would seem an odd choice for this movement’s title, as it has none of the gaiety of the Czech form, resembling rather a dark Tarantella, bent ultimately on a disastrous end. Despite its occasional melodious episodes, the music is predominantly mechanistic, with clanks and bumps aplenty. In its apocalyptic coda, amidst the fateful boom of low octave C-naturals in the piano, one hears clear echoes of another “machine-age” viola work of Hindemith’s, the well-known perpetual motion from his Op. 25, No. 1 Sonata.

Next come two works from the end of the century: Dreamsong (1989) by Bruce Adolphe (Pre-College ’71; BM ’75, MM ’76, composition) and Viola, Viola (1998) by George Benjamin. Beyond certain similarities in their harmonic language—an atonal setting that nevertheless recalls tonal chords and gestures, often frankly Romantic—the two works contrast utterly in their concept and character. Dreams and memory are important subjects for Adolphe, and he has explored them extensively in his compositions. In Dreamsong, one has the impression of a restless night, a state of sliding in and out of uneasy sleep, having a succession of dreams that address the same problem, with no two being quite alike. The material, in its examining and reexamining, has an often obsessive quality; from time to time the music breaks out of its lyrical vein with a swift, desperate passage, before once more subsiding to its former state. The viola part is the troubled protagonist, the piano part is the room’s oppressive walls, the tangled sheets, the buzzing in one’s head.

Benjamin’s Viola, Viola is another story: the two viola parts are tightly entwined, a rapid, frenetic double helix of activity. Information is tossed back and forth at high speed, code is received, replicated and sent back. In the center of the piece, the two parts take turns delivering soloistic, intensely wailing orations. But ultimately this piece is not about a psychological state or a personal exploration, like Adolphe’s; it is rather a depiction of textures and energy levels, a forensic exploration of the possible range of sound and color that two violas can produce.

Arthur Bliss Born: August 2, 1891, in London Died: March 27, 1975, in London

Bruce Adolphe Born: May 31, 1955, in New York City

George Benjamin Born: January 31, 1960, in London

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Following this are two well-known short works, Elliott Carter’s Elegy (1943) and Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy (1944). This, for me, is an especially interesting juxtaposition of works that bear the same title, were written almost in the same year, yet deliver such different impressions. Carter’s work glows; the lines are long, arced, evoking far-reaching vistas and gleaming sunsets. The music is almost too sensual to be elegiac: Here is no bitterness, no sense of loss, but rather a hazy afterglow, a reflective looking-back on what has come before.

Next to Carter’s Elegy, Stravinsky’s work has an almost monastic severity about it: a set of heavily accented sighs, ornamented in a neo-Baroque manner, set over a somber eighth-note tread. Contrasting with this is a central passage where a fugue unfolds, moving consciously through a series of learned techniques: subject and answer, augmentation, inversion, increasing in intensity, peaking, and finally subsiding back to the opening music. The viola is muted throughout, evoking the gray scene of a funeral procession, with hooded, anonymous figures moving through the gloom.

Finally, there are two works from the ’60s and ’70s that are diametrically opposed to each other. György Kurtág’s Jelek (1965), or “Signs,” is a terse set of six short movements for solo viola. Kurtág has often been described as the natural heir of Anton Webern—a composer able to express volumes in very brief stretches of music, “a novel in a sigh.” This relatively early work finds Kurtág still partly in thrall to the dodecaphony of the earlier composer, and, less obviously, in sonic debt to Bartók, whose shadow must have loomed over all mid-century Hungarian musicians. But at the same time this is already full-fledged Kurtág, a master of flutters, snarling, buzzing, whispers and shocking attacks. The six tableaux, some of them only seconds long, vary enormously in their character and sound-worlds: The first is all extremes, the second almost jocular, the third is a shadow world, the fourth a plucked banjo that has gone out of control, the fifth a few arcs of reflective thought, and the sixth an abrasive leave-taking, slamming the door behind it.

Elliott Carter Born: December 11, 1908, in New York City Died: November 5, 2012, in New York City

Igor Stravinsky Born: June 17, 1882, in Lomonosov, Russia Died: April 6, 1971, in New York City

György Kurtág Born: February 19, 1926, in Lugoj, Romania

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The Viola in the 20th Century (continued)

Far, very far, from this world is the final movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata (1975). Shostakovich, in his late works, moved more and more into music of bare, sparse textures and meditative spaciousness. (His last string quartet, from 1974, consists of six slow movements, to be played without pause.) The Viola Sonata is the last piece he completed, and its last movement, in its patient pacing and gradual unfolding, has extraordinary expressive power. It overtly pays homage to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, whose rhythms and accompanimental figures are everywhere, and it shares the reflective, sorrowful state of the Beethoven work. Shostakovich opens his movement with a series of falling fourths that seems to depict a sacred moment, the giving of some kind of blessing. At the same time, one has the feeling that this high priest has his own painful confession to make as he looks back on his life; and the music owes much of its power to this doubleness, a single figure who is reliving memories of suffering and granting spiritual relief at the same time. The music reaches three intense climaxes, the last of which is an extended and terrifying peroration, where the Beethoven idea is powerfully intoned low down on the piano while other forces thrash and flail overhead. Finally, the music evaporates, its energy spent, and a resigned coda, accepting but unutterably sad, brings the movement to a close.

Dmitri Shostakovich Born: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg Died: August 9, 1975, in Moscow

Misha Amory

Soloist, chamber musician, and teacher Misha Amory (MM '92, viola) is a founding member of the Brentano String Quartet, which has concertized on five continents for more than two decades, has recorded extensively, and serves as ensemble in residence at the Yale School of Music. Amory is also a member of the viola faculty at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music, and has given master classes at numerous other schools and festivals. A winner of the Naumburg Viola Award, Amory attended Yale and Juilliard and was a student of Heidi Castleman, Caroline Levine, and Samuel Rhodes. His latest recording, on the Bridge label, features the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J.S. Bach, with his wife, Hsin-Yun Huang.

About the Artists

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Thomas Sauer

Pianist Thomas Sauer earned his BM from the Curtis Institute of Music and his MM from Mannes College of Music. He has taught at Vassar since 1998. Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, the chamber music societies of Lincoln Center and Philadelphia, Wigmore Hall (London), Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Bargemusic (Brooklyn), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), Da Camera (Houston), and Princeton University. Festival appearances include Marlboro, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Northwest, and Taos, as well as Lake District Summer Music (England), Agassiz (Canada), Festival des Consonances (France), and Esbjerg International Chamber Music Festival (Denmark). Sauer’s varied discography includes recordings of Beethoven and Haydn piano sonatas for MSR Classics; with Colin Carr, the complete cello and piano works of Mendelssohn on Cello Classics and complete Beethoven on MSR Classics; a disc of Hindemith sonatas with Misha Amory for Musical Heritage Society; music of Britten and Schnittke with cellist Wilhelmina Smith on Arabesque; music of Ross Lee Finney with violinist Miranda Cuckson on Centaur Records; and music of James Matheson for Yarlung Records.

Hsin-Yun Huang

Violist Hsin-Yun Huang (MM ’94, viola) has forged a career performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Recent performances include concerts with Musicians From Marlboro at Weill Recital Hall and Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and appearances as soloist under the batons of David Robertson, Osmo Vänskä, Xian Zhang, and Max Valdés in Beijing, Taipei, and Bogota. She was the first solo violist to be presented in the National Performance Center of the Arts in Beijing. She has commissioned compositions from Steven Mackey, Shih-Hui Chen, and Poul Ruders. Her 2012 Bridge Records recording, Viola Viola, won accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Her latest Bridge recording features the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J.S. Bach, with her husband, Misha Amory. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993 she won the top prize in the ARD International Competition in Munich and was awarded the Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. A native of Taiwan and an alumna of Young Concert Artists, Huang received degrees from the Yehudi Menuhin School, Curtis Institute of Music, and Juilliard; she is on the faculties of Juilliard and Curtis.

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