Welcome to BCMS Season 42 and the full return of our series to Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. We mark this return with two favorites from the standard literature as well as one made possible in 2021 by our BCMS Commissioning Club. This month also marks the release of our second CD, in a series of three, comprised of works made possible by the generosity of the club over the past decade.
Our program opens with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, No. 3 published in 1795. While we often prefer opening our series with a work by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) as a tribute to the affectionately named “Father of Chamber Music,” in this case we are opening with a work about which Haydn expressed reservations before it was published as to its quality and potential public acceptance. Even then he was thought by Beethoven and others to be wrong. In hindsight the C minor trio has proven to be one of the most predictive of how inspiring, imaginative, and even iconoclastic Beethoven’s music would be. Who else might have chosen to start works in the key of C minor for multiple parts in unisons and octaves as he begins this trio? (See also his String Trio Op.9, No. 3, Third Piano Concerto, Op. 37, and Fifth Symphony, Op. 67!)
The premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano at Jordan Hall in October 2021, just after the pandemic began to recede, left everyone surprised by how tuneful and genuinely satisfying new work of our time could be. Although Liebermann is one of the most prolific and widely recorded composers today, as well as a celebrated pianist, his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano marks a first for him for this combination. It will be recorded live in this concert for future release in our series of commissions on CD and available via video-on-demand along with the rest of this season’s opener.
Our program concludes with the first of two works by Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) programmed in observance of his anniversaries later this year and early next. His Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 15 (1876–1879) survived the destruction and re-write of its Finale in 1883 to become and remain one of the staples of our literature. The quartet includes a lively Scherzo and Trio, placed second of four movements instead of third as in works following a more traditional Classical design. This second movement is also unusual in how its elements move in contradictory motion: the rhythm moves fast, but the harmonic changes (played in pizzicato) move at half speed, i.e., in hemiola. One of the distinctive glories of Faure’s chamber music is in his frequent writing in unisons and octaves among the strings against the harmony in the piano to create a single unified solo line, a color made of all colors. This kind of collective solo or unison writing appears as well beyond his chamber music: in his choral Requiem, Op. 48 which concludes with a movement titled In Paradisum.
The making of one out of many is the primary aspiration of all chamber music creation and performance. As such, could the opening of Beethoven’s sublime Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, which begins with all three instruments playing the first six bars together in unison octaves, be regarded as that aspirational state from which we come, and to which we strive to return?
Enjoy!
MT
