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RECITAL 1999--PROGRAM NOTES
Jo Kondo: Walk
Philippe Gaubert: Sonata for flute and piano
Joseph Haydn: Trio in D for piano, flute and cello H. XV:16
- Intermission -
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Assobio a Játo (The Jet Whistle)
Bernard Rands: Memo 4 for solo flute
Erwin Schulhoff: Sonata
The career of the Tokyo composer and teacher Jo Kondo has included visiting appointments in Canada, Britain, and at the Hartt School of Music of the University of Harford, where he was Composer in Residence in 1986. Kondo's compositional style was influenced early on by John Cage, with whom he shares an affinity for calmness and long silences, though not for chance operations and indeterminacy. Walk has an unchanging tempo of 96 beats per minute--which corresponds precisely to a moderate walking pace. The score has no dynamic indications and no expression marks. No notes are played legato. Kondo writes, "Each sound must have its own identity and life. What I am doing in my compositions is to create a web of intertonal relationships, while trying to safeguard the possibility of aurally perceiving the individual entity and life of every single tone." The resulting music is characterized by crystalline clarity, tonal ambiguity, and a certain sly wit.
A musical polymath of a sort seldom encountered nowadays, Philippe Gaubert was equally successful as flutist, teacher, conductor, and composer. In the 1920s, during his tenure as professor at the Paris Conservatory, Gaubert restored to the flute repertoire the works of such composers as Bach, Mozart, Gluck, and Handel, which for most of the previous century had been neglected in favor of the sentimental and virtuosic effusions of composers now forgotten. A man of tireless energy, Gaubert conducted a vast quantity of music, which gave him an intimate knowledge of European compositional development between the wars. As a composer, he was not an innovator, but had assimilated many of the innovations of Franck, Ravel and Debussy. In this, his first flute sonata, Gaubert's many meticulously notated manipulations of tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and tone color give the music, despite its classical form, a feeling of improvisational freedom and spontaneity.
During Haydn's long creative career he brought the string quartet and the symphony from their modest beginnings to fully developed Classical maturity. The piano trio, originally a solo for keyboard with optional accompaniment of violin and cello, likewise flourished under Haydn's care: he gradually increased the importance of the "accompanying" voices, leading toward the full independence of the instruments in the trios of Beethoven, Weber and Schubert. In the D-major flute trio the cello doubles the bass line of the piano in the manner of a Baroque continuo, and the independence of the flute is limited--but already both are tonally indispensable.
Haydn's greatest contribution to Classical style--his mastery of thematic development--is here displayed to brilliant effect. The opening Allegro has an extended development section; a sudden silence early on serves notice that Haydn's unpretentious tunes--and the engaged listener--are in for some surprises. In the high-spirited finale the freshness of Haydn's wit is so infectious, the tossing-about of his musical building-blocks so entertaining, that one is scarcely aware of the technical mastery that lies behind it all.
The Jet Whistle is dedicated to the American musicologist and flutist Carlton Sprague Smith and his wife Elizabeth, a cellist. Smith and his ever-inquisitive friend Villa-Lobos were experimenting one day with various Native American and modern flutes, when Smith demonstrated the shrieking sound produced when air is blown directly and forcefully into the flute. Whenever composers or admiring commentators write about the deployment of such "extended techniques" they are careful to say in the next sentence that the sounds thus produced are of course not included for mere novelty, but rather are integral to the progress of the piece. The unembarrassed Villa-Lobos, however, tacks on his novelty at the very end of a three-movement piece--and very effectively, at that. The piece is otherwise concerned with the more conventional aims of tuneful, atmospheric, and virtuosic dialogue between the two instruments.
--Fenwick Smith
Memo 4 was commissioned by Ekkehart Trenkner for Judith Pierce, to whom it is dedicated, and who gave its first performance at the Summer Music Festival in Narrowsburg, New York, in August, 1997. It is one of a series of works for solo performer (#1 for Contrabass, #2 for Trombone, #3 for Harp, #5 for Piano and #6 for Alto Saxophone) in which contemporary virtuosity and instrumental capacity are engaged in a new expressivity.
First, this is manifest in the breadth of the form of Memo 4--a duration of some twelve minutes in which an often complex musical argument is carried by the essentially monodic instrument. This duration alone demands of the performer unusual stamina in an interpretation which maintains a coherent succession and juxtaposition of detail while simultaneously expressing the broad sweep of the work.
Second, the technical demands on the player are considerable as a result of a wide spectrum of tempi, fast alternation of register sometimes suggesting a polyphonic texture, extreme range of dynamics, and an exploration of areas of sound production (pitch to noise) through playing techniques which have become part of the repertoire of the contemporary flute. These latter are never used as momentary exotic effects, but are an integral part of the musical discourse.
--Bernard Rands
Recent years have seen an ongoing revival of music by the many composers whose lives were disrupted--or ended--by the Holocaust. The career of the Czechoslovakian Erwin Schulhoff, who died in the Wülzberg Concentration Camp, flourished in approximate parallel to that of Gaubert, but reflects the very different influences of his particular cultural background. These influences included his early education in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne, collaboration with the leading visual artists of the late Weimar Republic, and later studies with Reger and Debussy (a heterodox pair if there ever was one!). A virtuoso pianist, Schulhoff gave many recitals championing the music of his contemporaries; from the early 1920s he was active also as a jazz pianist.
In his succinct, joyful Flute Sonata Schulhoff's melodic invention is marked as much by impulsive outbursts as by long singing lines. The Aria is colored by a Slavic melancholy, while in the faster movements, cross-rhythms, motor rhythms, hemiolas and other delights abound, lending the music a characteristically Czech rhythmic zest.
--Fenwick Smith
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