In March we return to Sanders and to spring. Our program features works by Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn from the heart of the Romantic tradition, and the premiere of the gift from our BCMS Commissioning Club—Harold Meltzer’s first Piano Quartet!
Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major, D.581 (1817) is not heard as often as the great ones by Mozart and Beethoven, or his own two great Piano Trios. It exists in two versions. We will hear the later, new and improved! It is the soul of elegance and grace, devoid of the drama of the Beethovens, and the extended Olympian virtuosity of the Mozart. It has all the sweetness and intimacy of a Romantic miniature, but with many of the witty surprises of Haydn as it fully inhabits the four traditional movements from the Classical Style: Sonata, Three-part song, Minuet and Trio, and Rondo.
Harold Meltzer’s first Piano Quartet (2016) is BCMS’s contribution to the continuation of our Art in our time. Harold Meltzer’s music is widely appreciated and has been heard recently on series throughout the states and often in our own community with BMOP and recently at the Longy School. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and from the Lydian String Quartet to name a few. In the course of writing the piece he experienced the loss of a great friend and mentor. To honor the memory of composer Steven Stucky, Meltzer says:
“Late in the writing of the piece I began to think about how I could memorialize him in music. He would not have liked a dirge, and I wanted the relevant music to be about him rather than my feelings about him. One of his breakout pieces was an orchestral work called Dreamwaltzes, a piece that looks back fondly to the nineteenth century waltz tradition. So I composed a bit of waltz music and embedded it in the work; it sounds like suddenly a music box has opened. In my own backward look to the nineteenth century I overshot: Dreamwaltzes conjures Brahms and Strauss, while mine is the briefest of references, without quotation, to mid-period Beethoven.”
Our program concludes with Mendelssohn’s birthday present to his sister, Fanny, Piano Trio in C minor Op. 66 (1845). It is his second piano trio, each of them in a minor key. C minor is associated with the dark secretive world that forces its way to the light. Mendelssohn was known to have been a splendid visual artist who included drawings in his letters, and who was said to retain and communicate many of his musical ideas in visual imagery. Over its four movements—from its dark opening in octaves (like his Overture to Fingal’s Cave) through its slow movement song, scurrying Scherzo-like third movement, to its last movement’s laughing opening and conclusion with triumphant songs of praise, Piano Trio in C minor lifts our spirits in gratitude and wonder!
Enjoy!
