Tuesday August 25, 2009

National Repertory Orchestra, Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra
Gerhardt Zimmermann, conductor
Olivier Messiaen: Forgotten Offerings 11:06
Ottorino Respighi: The Pines of Rome 22:39 (7/23/08)
Also, Charley anticipates the Moab Music Festival in September.
Antonin Dvořák: “Andantino, con variazioni” (2nd movement) from Piano Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op.23
Marija Stroke, piano; Adela Peña, violin; Leslie Tomkins, viola; Tanya Tomkins, cello
Moab Music Festival (9/2/2000) 10:04
Felix Mendelssohn: “Molto allegro agitato” (1st movement) from Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op.49
Paul Hersh, piano; Cenovia Cummins, violin; Dorothy Lawson, cello
Moab Music Festival (9/12/97) 9:30

A program note for idly curious:
Mendelssohn's two piano trios were a long time in coming. Sometime before his eleventh birthday, he wrote a piano trio, but it has never been discovered. From Paris in 1832, he wrote to his sister Fanny of his intention to write ``a couple of good trios.'' And again, from a letter to Ferdinand Hiller in 1838: ``A very important kind of piano music of which I am especially fond--trios, quartets, and other pieces with accompaniment--is quite forgotten now....With that in mind, I recently wrote the violin sonata and one for cello, and I am thinking next of writing a couple of trios.''
A year after this remark, during the summer of 1839, he finished the D minor Trio. It was wildly successful. Robert Schumann called it ``the master trio of the age, as were the B flat and D major trios of Beethoven and the E flat trio of Schubert in their times.''
In his book on chamber music, Melvin Berger describes the first movement as ``a glorious outpouring of melody,'' in which two themes, both first heard in the cello part, ``express ardor and nobility in equal measure.'' The second movement is a kind of Song Without Words with additional strings. Berger calls the Scherzo as ``a movement of delicacy, charm, and elfin grace.'' Unlike many scherzos, this one has no trio section. In the Finale, two themes with a characteristic rhythm are contrasted with a song-like theme for the cello.