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tSclaude debuSSY (1862–1918)

Première rhapsodie (1909–1910)

alekSandr Scriabin (1871–1915)Selected Preludes Opus 11 Number 23 in F Major Opus 16 Number 1 in B Major Opus 16 Number 2 in g-sharp minor Opus 16 Number 4 in e-flat minor

Nocturne for the Left Hand in D-flat Major, op. 9, no. 2 (1894)

olivier meSSiaen (1908–1992)Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds) from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940)

igor StravinSkY (1882–1971)Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1919) Sempre piano e molto tranquillo (quarter note = 52) Eighth note = 168 Eighth note = 160

FranciS Poulenc (1899–1963) Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, FP 184 (1962) Allegro tristamente: Allegretto – Très calme – Tempo allegretto Romanza: Très calme Allegro con fuoco: Très animé

INTERMISSION

robert Schumann (1810–1856)Three Romances for Clarinet and Piano, op. 94 (1849) Nicht schnell Einfach, innig Nicht schnell

alban berg (1885–1935)Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5 (1913) Mässig Sehr langsam Sehr rasch Langsam

carl maria von Weber (1786–1826)Grand Duo Concertante in E-flat Major, op. 48 (1815–1816) Allegro con fuoco Andante con moto Rondo: Allegro

Anthony McGill, clarinet; Gloria Chien, piano

July 22sunday, July 22, 10:30 a.m., stent Family Hall, menlo school

Program overvieWClarinetist Anthony McGill, an audience favorite since the inaugural season in 2003, and pianist Gloria Chien, alumna-cum-Director of the Chamber Music Institute, inaugurate the 2012 Carte Blanche series. Their program explores the element of Romantic longing—verlangen—inherent in the warm, nostalgic sound of the clarinet and subsequently in the clarinet repertoire. The instrument’s round, mellifluous tone ideally suits the colorful harmonic language of French composers Debussy, Messiaen, and Poulenc; its depth and mystery equally befit the dramatic weight of Schumann and Berg. The program ends with one of the most virtuosic works in the clarinet repertoire, Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo.

SPECIAL THANKS

Music@Menlo dedicates this performance to Joan and Allan Fisch with gratitude for their generous support.

carte blanche concert i:

Anthony McGill and Gloria Chien: Sehnsucht/Verlangen

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claude debuSSY (Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, Paris)

Première rhapsodie

Composed: 1909–1910

premiered: January 16, 1911, in Paris, with Prosper Mimart as clarinet-ist

Dedication: Prosper Mimart

other works from this period: Hommage à Haydn (1909); Masques et bergamasques (1910); Khamma (1910–1912); Ibéria (1910)

approximate duration: 8 minutes

By 1907, despite his iconoclastic views, his unprecedented musical style, and the scandals surrounding his personal life (he abandoned his first wife in 1904 for another woman—Paris was deliciously outraged), it could no longer be denied by those in bureaucratic power that Claude Debussy, the author of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, the Noc-turnes, and the hotly debated Pelléas et Mélisande, had established a significant reputation as a leading French composer. As a sort of back-handed recognition in lieu of the official establishment’s imprimatur of a faculty position at the Paris Conservatoire, he was invited by Gabriel Fauré, then the school’s Director, to help judge the competitions for prizes in wind instrument performance in 1907. Apparently Fauré was pleased with Debussy’s participation, since he invited him to become a regular competition judge in February 1909. In December 1909 and January 1910, Debussy wrote two short works for the 1910 clari-net competitions—his Première rhapsodie, intended as the principal examination piece, and Petite pièce for sight-reading. Prosper Mimart, Professor of Clarinet at the Conservatoire and the dedicatee of the score, premiered the Première rhapsodie (Debussy never composed a “deuxième rhapsodie”) on January 16, 1911, at a Paris concert of the Société Musicale Indépendente.

As is true of virtually all of Debussy’s compositions, the Première rhapsodie does not follow a traditional form but is rather a seemingly free but actually tightly controlled elaboration of several thematic motives wrapped in the luminous harmonies and sonorities of his Impressionistic musical language. The work is in several continuous sections that become more animated and virtuosic as they progress.

alekSandr Scriabin (Born December 25, 1871, Moscow; died April 14, 1915, Moscow)

selected preludes (arr. for clarinet and piano); nocturne for the Left Hand, op. 9, no. 2

Composed: 1894–1895 (preludes arranged for clarinet and piano in 1986)

other works from this period: Piano Sonata no. 2 in g-sharp minor, op. 19 (1892–1897); Piano Sonata no. 3 in f-sharp minor, op. 23 (1897–1898)

approximate duration: 12 minutes

Scriabin found the aphoristic form of the prelude congenial throughout his career, and he entrusted to it some eighty-five of his most succinct musical thoughts, from the Twenty-Four preludes, op. 11, composed between 1888 and 1896, which were inspired by and modeled on Cho-pin’s opus 28 (Scriabin slept with scores of Chopin’s music under his pillow as a youth), to the dense, nearly atonal Five Preludes, op. 74,

the last music he wrote before his sudden death from blood poison-ing in 1915 at the age of forty-three. The Prelude in F Major, op. 11, no. 23 (1895), flowing and limpid, is a wide-ranging pastorale. The first of the Opus 16 Five Preludes (B major) of 1894–1895 drapes a dreamy melody upon a cushion of almost Impressionistic harmonies. The Pre-lude in g-sharp minor, op. 16, no. 2, begins in a hesitant manner but accumulates considerable dramatic tension as it unfolds. The e-flat minor Prelude, op. 16, no. 4, is a tiny but heartfelt threnody. These arrangements for clarinet and piano are by Willard Elliot (1926–2000), composer, arranger, and Principal Bassoonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for thirty-two years.

The nocturne in D-flat Major for Piano, Left Hand, op. 9, no. 2, composed in 1894 while Scriabin was recovering from a broken collar bone on his right side and could only play the piano with his left hand, is marked by a strong sense of melody, a richness of figuration, a clarity of form, and a traditional (but considerably extended) harmonic palette grown from his study of Chopin’s music.

olivier meSSiaen (Born December 10, 1908, Avignon; died April 28, 1992, Paris)

Abîme des oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Composed: 1940

other works from this period: Rondeau, I/24 (1943); Chant des dépor-tés, I/60 (1945)

approximate duration: 9 minutes

When World War II erupted across Europe in 1939, Messiaen, then organist at Trinity Cathedral, a teacher at the École Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum, and a composer of rapidly grow-ing reputation, was called up for service but deemed unfit for military duty because of his poor eyesight. He was instead first assigned as a furniture mover at Sarreguemines and then as a hospital attendant at Sarralbe before ending up with a medical unit in Verdun. Here he met Henri Akoka, a clarinetist with the Strasbourg Radio Orchestra, and Étienne Pasquier, cellist in an internationally renowned string trio with his brothers, violinist Jean and violist Pierre. Inspired by the dawn birdsongs that marked the end of his night watch at Verdun, Messiaen composed the Abyss of the Birds for solo clarinet, but even before Akoka could try it out, the Germans invaded France in May 1940 and all three musicians were captured the following month and sent to a pris-oner-of-war camp—Stalag VIIIA—at Görlitz, Silesia (now in Poland). At Stalag VIIIA, they met the violinist Jean Le Boulaire, who had graduated from the Paris Conservatoire but spent much of his life in military service (and who would become a successful actor under the name Jean Lanier after the war). It was for this unlikely ensemble that Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time during his internment, incorporating the solo clarinet movement he had written for Akoka.

Messiaen’s introduction to the score of the Quartet for the End of Time bespeaks the work’s interpenetration of cosmology, religion, and music as it reflects his visionary universe: “I saw a mighty angel descend from heaven, clad in mist; and a rainbow was upon his head. He set his right foot on the sea, his left foot on the earth, and standing thus on sea and earth, he lifted his hand to heaven and swore by Him who liveth for ever and ever, saying: There shall be time no longer; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be finished.”

Messiaen noted of the third movement, for solo clarinet, Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds): “The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant outpourings of song! There

Program Notes: Anthony McGill and Gloria Chien: Sehnsucht/Verlangen

*Bolded terms are defined in the glossary, which begins on page 107.

is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the birdsongs (desire of the eternal light).”

igor StravinSkY (Born June 5/17, 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg; died April 6, 1971, New York)

three pieces for solo Clarinet

Composed: 1919

First performance: November 8, 1919, in Lausanne by Edmondo Allegra

other works from this period: Suite from L’histoire du soldat (1818–1819); Pulcinella (1919–1920); Suite from The Firebird (1910)

approximate duration: 5 minutes

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Stravinsky settled full-time in Switzerland, near Lausanne, where he remained until moving back to France in 1920. With the strictures of performance imposed by the war, Stravinsky turned from the opulent ballets that had established his rep-utation in Paris during the preceding years and collaborated with the Swiss novelist and poet Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz on a vest-pocket the-atrical entertainment for instrumental ensemble, narrator, and dancers based on a traditional Russian story titled The Soldier’s Tale. The costs of the venture were underwritten by the Winterthur industrialist and talented amateur clarinetist Werner Reinhart, and the work was given a successful premiere at the Théâtre Municipal in Lausanne on Sep-tember 28, 1918. Reinhart continued his support of Stravinsky’s work the following year by funding a series of concerts of his recent cham-ber music (including a suite from The Soldier’s Tale arranged for violin, clarinet, and piano), which were given in Lausanne, Zurich, and Geneva. In appreciation, Stravinsky composed for the Lausanne program a set of Three Pieces for Clarinet, Reinhart’s instrument, and dedicated the score to him; Zurich clarinetist Edmondo Allegra played the premiere.

Stravinsky told the English music critic Edwin Evans that the Three Pieces for Clarinet were inspired by “Characteristic Blues” by Sidney Bechet, the famous New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophon-ist who played with many of the leading early jazz artists and died in France in 1959. The opening number, slow, meditative, and pitched in the clarinet’s lowest register, was probably intended to be a blues, but its nearest musical kin seems rather to be the bardic, Slavic folk music–inspired bassoon solo that opens The Rite of Spring. The second movement, written without bar-lines, uses mercurial arpeggios sweep-ing across the instrument’s entire compass to frame a quiet central section. The closing piece is a Stravinskian tango.

FranciS Poulenc (Born January 7, 1899, Paris; died January 30, 1963, Paris)

sonata for Clarinet and piano

Composed: 1962

Dedication: Arthur Honegger

First performance: April 10, 1963, in New York, by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein

other works from this period: Trois mouvements perpétuels (1962); Novelette sur un thème de Manuel de Falla (1959); Élégie for Horn (1957)

approximate duration: 13 minutes

Of Poulenc’s thirteen chamber works for various instrumental com-binations, only three are exclusively for strings. The Clarinet Sonata, Poulenc’s last work except for the Sonata for Oboe and Piano, was com-posed in the summer of 1962 for Benny Goodman and is dedicated

to the memory of Arthur Honegger; Goodman and Leonard Bernstein gave the premiere in New York on April 10, 1963, ten weeks after the composer’s death from a heart attack in Paris on January 30th. Keith W. Daniel noted that this composition and the sonatas for flute (1957) and oboe (1962) “rank among Poulenc’s most profound, accomplished works: they retain the early tunefulness, but the impertinent edge is replaced by serenity and self-confidence, deepened by the addition of a religious undertone.” Rather than the sonata structure often heard in the first movement of such works, the Clarinet Sonata opens with a three-part form in which a central section, at once benedictory and slightly exotic, is surrounded by a beginning and ending paragraph in quicker tempo. The second movement, marked “very sweetly and with melancholy,” is almost hymnal in its lyricism and quiet intensity. The finale is based on the progeny of a French music hall tune that is treated with good humor and sympathy rather than as a parody.

robert Schumann (Born June 8, 1810, Saxony; died July 29, 1856, Endenich)

three romances for Clarinet and piano, op. 94

Composed: 1849

other works from this period: Adagio and Allegro, op. 70 (1849); Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 97, Rhenish (1850); Trio no. 1 in d minor, op. 63 (1847)

approximate duration: 12 minutes

On May 3, 1849, insurrection broke out in Dresden. Richard Wagner was one of the leaders of the rebellion, but Schumann, though he admired Wagner the musician, was not about to join with Wagner the politician. Schumann fled to the country with his wife, Clara, and their oldest daughter. Such turmoil was difficult for Schumann, who not only suffered repeated bouts of melancholia during that time but was also grieving over the recent deaths of his brother Karl and his friend and champion Felix Mendelssohn. The rebellion was soon quelled, and Schumann was able to return to Dresden. He found the town full of Prussian soldiers (“Oh, shame! After shooting harmless citizens, now they demand food and drink,” he complained) but was quickly able to resume composing. His inspiration, temporarily checked by events, started to flow once again, and the closing months of 1849 were among his most productive. In addition to many piano works and choral com-positions, he finished large parts of the Scenes from Goethe’s Faust as well as the lovely Romances for Clarinet and Piano.

Schumann throughout his life had a superb ability to write beauti-ful melodies. This characteristic demonstrated itself in his earliest piano works and was confirmed by his many settings of German Romantic poems for voice, including the nine sets of Romanzen und Balladen he wrote for chorus. In the same vein of expressive lyricism, he com-posed Three Romances for Clarinet and Piano in December 1849. The romances, each of which is disposed in the simple, three-part form that he so favored for his smaller works, are imbued with the twilit tender-ness and bittersweet nostalgia that mark the best of Schumann’s music.

alban berg (Born February 9, 1885, Vienna; died December 24, 1935, Vienna)

Four pieces for Clarinet and piano, op. 5

Composed: 1913

First performance: October 17, 1919, in Vienna

other works from this period: Piano Sonata, op. 1 (1907–1908); Four Songs, op. 2 (1909–1910)

approximate duration: 8 minutes

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Berg served his musical apprenticeship under Arnold Schoenberg from 1904 to 1910, and he mooted a large symphonic score, perhaps even something with voices, as his first major work after finishing his stud-ies. His sketches had not gotten any farther than a few ideas for an opening movement, however, before he turned to making succinct set-tings for voice and orchestra of five aphoristic poems by his friend Peter Altenberg, which were directly influenced by Schoenberg’s Opus 11 and Opus 19 piano pieces (1908 and 1911) and Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 (1910), seminal creations in both their atonal harmonic language and their miniature scale. Schoenberg included two of the Altenberg Lieder, op. 4, in the concert of new music that he presented in Vienna on March 31, 1913, and Berg followed them with an instru-mental sequel, the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5, which he completed in June.

Though the short durations of the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano do not allow for the unfolding of any conventional formal pat-terns, the movements are unified by repeated references to a few melodic and harmonic interval cells, a technique that Schoenberg was to evolve into his system of serialism a decade later. The writing here is virtuosic not in the traditional sense but in the control and the range of techniques—from warmly expressive legato to flutter-tongue growls, echo tones, trills, and extreme registers—demanded of the clarinetist. Except for brief dramatic outbursts in the first and last movements, the Four Pieces are whisper-soft throughout, hardly more than echoes of a dream of music.

carl maria von Weber (Born November 19, 1786, Eutin; died June 5, 1826, London)

grand Duo Concertante in e-flat major, op. 48

Composed: 1815–1816

First performance: February 10, 1817, in Dresden, by Johann Simon Hermstedt and the composer

other works from this period: Music for König Yngurd (1817); Over-ture and marches for Turandot (1818)

approximate duration: 22 minutes

During a visit to Prague late in 1814, Weber met the clarinetist Johann Simon Hermstedt, whose brilliant playing had inspired four concertos and several chamber works from Louis Spohr. The virtuoso asked the visitor to compose a concerto for his instrument, and Weber went to work on the piece immediately, but he ended up with a duo for piano and clarinet rather than a full concerto. He finished the Grand Duo Con-certante in Berlin the following November and performed it twice with Hermstedt when they met in Dresden in February 1817. Of the musical nature of the Grand Duo Concertante, Weber’s biographer John War-rack wrote, “This is not a sonata for clarinet with piano accompaniment but a full-scale concert work for two virtuosos.” The opening move-ment, Allegro con fuoco (Fast, with fire), is a large sonata form with a pleasing balance of themes and an ingenious development section. The Andante begins and ends with a somber melody in c minor whose poignant lyricism is indebted to Weber’s experience as an opera com-poser; the movement’s middle portion is marked by a certain chromatic peregrination. The Grand Duo closes with an expansive and delightfully showy rondo.

—Richard Rodda

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Following the August 11 performance of Concert Program VIII, please join Artistic Directors

David Finckel and Wu Han and Music@Menlo’s community of musicians and aspiring young artists for a dinner celebration

of Music@Menlo’s tenth-anniversary season!

Arrillaga Family Recreation Center701 Laurel Street, Menlo Park

Dinner tickets are $50

Reserve online at www.musicatmenlo.org or by calling 650-331-0202.

august 11, 20128:30 p.m.

104.9 FMReturns to the South Bay & Peninsula on

We’re excited to be back!