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SUN, MAY 8 | 3 PM

THE JAZZ EFFECT CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

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PROGRAM

Wu Han, pianoZhu Wang, pianoOrion String Quartet Daniel Phillips, violin Todd Phillips, violin Steven Tenenbom, viola Timothy Eddy, cello

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)Sonata for Violin and Piano (1923-27)

Allegretto Blues: Moderato Perpetuum mobile: Allegro

D. Phillips, Wu Han

WYNTON MARSALIS (b. 1961)Selections from At the Octoroon Balls for String Quartet (CMS Co-Commission) (1995)

Many Gone Hellbound Highball Blue Light on the Bayou Rampart Street Row House Rag

D. Phillips, T. Phillips, Tenenbom, Eddy

INTERMISSION

DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)La création du monde for Piano Quintet, Op. 81 (1923)

Prelude Fugue Romance Scherzo Final

Wang, T. Phillips, D. Phillips, Tenenbom, Eddy

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)Rhapsody in Blue for Piano, Four Hands (arr. Henry Levine) (1924)Wang, Wu Han

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WU HANPianist Wu Han, recipient of Musical America’s Musician of the Year Award, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, enjoys a multi-faceted musical life that encompasses performing, recording, and artistic direction at the highest levels. Currently co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society and Music@Menlo, Silicon Valley’s innovative chamber music festival, she also serves as artistic advisor for Wolf Trap’s Chamber Music in The Barns series and for Palm Beach’s Society of the Four Arts. Her recent concert activities have taken her from New York’s Lincoln Center stages to the most important concert halls in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In addition to countless performances of virtually the entire chamber repertoire, her recent concerto performances include appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, and the Aspen Festival Orchestra.

She is the founder and artistic director of ArtistLed, classical music’s first artist-directed, internet-based recording label (1997) which has released her performances of the staples of the cello-piano duo repertoire with cellist David Finckel. Her more than 80 releases on ArtistLed, CMS Live and Music@Menlo Live include masterworks of the chamber repertoire with numerous distinguished musicians, the latest being Schubert’s Winterreise with baritone Nikolay Borchev. During the past season, Wu Han designed and produced more than 200 digital media projects, including concerts and innovative educational programs, which have sustained the art of chamber music in dozens of communities across the United States. At CMS, she was instrumental in transforming the CMS Two Program into today’s Bowers Program, which admits, through rigorous and highly competitive auditions, stellar young musicians to the CMS roster for a term of three seasons.

Passionately dedicated to education for musicians of all ages and experience, she directs the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo, which immerses some 40 young musicians every summer in the multi-faceted fabric of the festival.

ARTISTS

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Wu Han was privileged to serve on multiple occasions as a faculty member of Isaac Stern’s Chamber Music Encounters in Israel, New York, and Japan. A recipient of the prestigious Andrew Wolf Award, she was mentored by an elite selection of some of the greatest pianists of our time, including Lilian Kallir, Rudolf Serkin, and Menahem Pressler. Married to cellist David Finckel since 1985, Wu Han divides her time between concert touring and residences in New York City and Westchester County.

ZHU WANGPraised by The New York Times as “a superb pianist, a thoughtful, sensitive performer” and Fou Ts’ong as “an incredible talent with a natural feeling of harmony and imagination,” pianist Zhu Wang’s engaging performances exhibit a remarkable depth of musicianship and poise. Winner of 2020 Young Concert Artists International Audition, he was awarded the Stern Young Artist Development Award, which is supported by the Linda and Isaac

Stern Foundation. Wang showcases his artistry as both a passionate soloist and dedicated chamber musician.

Wang’s upcoming season includes solo recital debuts at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Kenndey Center, world premiere performances of Nina Shekhar’s work for solo piano, Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra, and appearances with violinist Randall Goosby in San Francisco Symphony Recital Series, 92nd Street Y, and Merkin Hall.

Wang has performed across the U.S. and internationally at prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Kammermusiksaal of Berliner Philharmonie, Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, and Shanghai Concert Hall. Since his orchestral debut at age 14 with the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, where he performed Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21, he has soloed with Salzburg Chamber Soloists, Zermatt Music Festival Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Brunensis Virtuosi Orchestra, San Juan Symphony, and Xiamen Philharmonic.

As an avid chamber musician and new music advocate, Wang has world premiered Timo Andres’ Moving Etudes (2017). He has performed in festivals such as Kneisel Hall, Four Seasons Chamber Music Workshop, Lake Como

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International Piano Academy, Shanghai International Piano Festival, Perlman Music Program, and Music Academy of the West, where he won the solo piano competition.

A native of Hunan, China, Wang began learning piano at the age of 5 where he trained at Music Middle School Affiliated to Shanghai Conservatory of Music with Zhe Tang, and Fou Ts’ong. He continued his study at the Juilliard School for his Bachelor of Music degree where he received the Gina Bachauer and Mieczyslaw Munz Scholarships. Wang is currently pursuing his artist diploma at Curtis Institute of Music, under the guidance of Robert McDonald. Wang gratefully acknowledges the support from Bagby Foundation for the Musical Arts.

ORION STRING QUARTETThe Orion String Quartet is one of the leading chamber music ensembles on the classical music scene today. Admired for their diverse programming that juxtaposes masterworks of the quartet literature with key works of the 20th and

21st centuries, the Orion provides a singularly rich dimension to its music-making. The members of the Orion String Quartet—violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips (brothers who share the first violin chair), violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—have worked closely with such illustrious musicians as Pablo Casals, Sir András Schiff, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Peter Serkin, members of the ensemble TASHI, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the Budapest, Végh, Galimir, and Guarneri String Quartets. The Orion String Quartet are season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.In the summer of 2019, the Orion String Quartet returned to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to perform three programs that included music by Schubert, Mozart, and Kreisler. This season, the quartet appears with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two programs in Alice Tully Hall. The quartet also performs with Chamber Music Pittsburgh, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Met Live Arts’ celebration of the Guarneri Quartet.

During the quartet’s 30th anniversary season, the group celebrated at principal chamber music series throughout North America. They played the complete string quartets of Beethoven in a series of six concerts at the Mannes School of Music, where

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they held the position of quartet-in-residence for 27 years. At CMS they performed an all-Haydn program and presented a contemporary music concert of works written for the group, including the world premiere of Sebastian Currier’s Etudes and Lullabies (a commission by CMS), David Dzubay’s String Quartet No. 1, “Astral,” and Brett Dean’s Quartet No. 2 for Strings and Soprano, “And once I played Ophelia,” in which Tony Arnold joined the Orion as vocal soloist.

The Orion String Quartet has given stimulus to the development and expansion of the string quartet repertoire through commissions from composers Chick Corea, David Del Tredici, Alexander Goehr, Thierry Lancino, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Marc Neikrug, Lowell Liebermann, Peter Lieberson, and Wynton Marsalis. For its 25th anniversary, the Orion collaborated with choreographer Bill T. Jones and the Arnie Zane Dance Company in a two-week project that featured music by Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Ravel, and Beethoven. WQXR’s The Greene Space produced a live broadcast of the collaboration, including the performance and a discussion between members of the quartet and Mr. Jones. Heard frequently on NPR’s Performance Today, the Orion has also appeared on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center, A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts, and on ABC television’s Good Morning America.

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Formed in 1987, the quartet takes its name from the Orion constellation as a metaphor for the personality each musician brings to the group in its collective pursuit of the highest musical ideals.

RICH KLEINFELDT, hostRich Kleinfeldt is a professional musician, broadcaster, teacher, and lecturer. He is a founding member of the Washington Saxophone Quartet, which has been together since 1976, and performs as a soloist and chamber musician. Kleinfeldt is currently the host of the nationally syndicated radio program Center Stage from Wolf Trap, for which this

evening’s concert is being recorded, and he announces for Classical WETA 90.9 FM. He is a former international broadcaster for the Voice of America and the Maestro Classical Music Channel of the WorldSpace Satellite Network. Kleinfeldt has been teaching at Episcopal High School since 2008 and maintains a studio in his home. A graduate of Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and Catholic University in Washington, D.C., Kleinfeldt performed with the United States Army Band until 1983 as saxophone soloist and master of ceremonies. He has been the onstage host for Chamber Music at The Barns since the series’ inception.

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Sonata for Violin and PianoMaurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France. Died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

Composed 1923-27.Premiered on May 30, 1927, in Paris, by violinist George Enescu and the composer as pianist. First CMS performance on April 25, 1980, by violinist Ani Kavafian and pianist John Browning.Duration: 18 minutes

In 1921, seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of Paris life, Maurice Ravel moved to the nearby town of Montfort L’Amaury and bought a small house, an eccentric bungalow that his friend Manuel Rosenthal said was “like a slice of Camembert cheese that wouldn’t be nicely cut.” It was not far from the city, and he would regularly travel there to go to performances and events. Often, he would visit jazz clubs and concerts in the company of his companion, the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. According to Rosenthal, Ravel once asked her to marry him, but she turned him down, feeling they were incompatible, and they remained close friends for the rest of his life. She inspired him to compose a violin sonata, a project he had previously avoided, and between 1923 and 1927 he slowly worked away at it. By the time

Sonata in G was finally finished and he had dedicated it to Jourdan-Morhange, she had developed serious arthritis, and so its 1927 premiere was instead given by the Romanian violinist and composer George Enescu.

The piece is best known for its second movement, a miniature titled “Blues” where the violinist strums and slides up and down the instrument and the piano taps out a walking bass. Ravel, like many of his fellow Parisian composers at the time, was convinced that jazz and blues represented the future of music. When he took the Violin Sonata on tour in 1927, he went as far as to suggest that the people he met in America didn’t take jazz “seriously enough.”

This sonata also represented a careful exploration of timbral contrast. Ravel had strong views on violin sonatas, seeing the violin and piano as “instruments which are in my opinion essentially incompatible. Far from balancing their contrasts, the sonata reveals their incompatibility.” The second movement certainly seems geared toward this end. The two instruments exist in their own worlds, both imitating other instruments in order to create a convincing blues number, and never quite aligning in their efforts. But the contrast is

PROGRAM NOTES

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clearest when the instruments play the same music, like in the first movement where violin and piano chirp out the same playful, repeated-note figures (perhaps an echo of similar figures found in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, or in this concert, a foreshadowing) to radically different effect. The final perpetual motion toccata is a brilliant tour de force for the violinist in the manner of Ravel’s other virtuoso creations like Tzigane. The piano provides support and occasional interruption, further foregrounding the composer’s view that these instruments do best when serving different roles.

Selections from At the Octoroon Balls for String Quartet Wynton Marsalis Born October 18, 1961, in New Orleans.

Composed in 1995; co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Premiered on May 7, 1995, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center by the Orion String Quartet. Duration: 25 minutes

Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter, composer, and director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, was born in 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has spoken about how the life and music of that city are important to him, and the ways in which New Orleans embodies “the American Creole contradictions and compromises—cultural, social, and political.”

He explored these complexities deliberately in his first string quartet, At the Octoroon Balls, written in 1995 for the Orion Quartet.

He found inspiration in the Quadroon Balls, 19th century parties held in New Orleans that developed a mythic reputation for being illicit events where free Black women would find white life partners. The historian Emily Clark has set the story straight to some extent—especially when they were first reported on in the 1810s and ‘20s, these were largely sober affairs where “cotillions and waltzes were danced.” Later accounts point to the balls being a bit rowdier, but most of these descriptions were tinged with the fantastical descriptions of the events that had spread around the country. Marsalis’s piece opens a window on these “contradictions and compromises,” providing a broad portrait of how he sees his hometown—but from the perspective of a different generation, hence “Octoroon.”

This was among the first of many pieces that Marsalis has since written for classical ensembles, and he saw it as an opportunity to experiment with the capabilities of the string quartet. In many places, the violin writing is inspired by works of Aaron Copland, like Hoe-Down from Rodeo, that are full of bright, open sonorities and rapid string crossings. The quartet also involves extended techniques that the composer developed in collaboration with the original

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performers. There are features borrowed from jazz and blues, but Marsalis was quite clear that “it’s not jazz, though it uses elements of jazz; it’s also not Classical music. It’s really supposed to be American music.”

Each of the short pieces contained in the quartet “evoked people, places, and events in the Crescent City.” In “Many Gone,” we hear variations on “Many Thousand Gone,” a song that was sung by enslaved men and women escaping the South during the Civil War. The music moves into a blues passage, then what Marsalis describes as a “field holler,” and it ends with a further twist of genre that he saw as an important surprise. As a whole, the movement aims to evoke how “out of tragedy comes a tremendous opportunity for heroism.”

“Hellbound Highball” transforms the quartet into a runaway train. “It’s hell bound, so you’re trying to get off, but you’re not going to get off. The final stop, they play a little blues train flag,” which, according to Marsalis, tells us “well, it’s too late now, you’re dropped off where you’re going to go and the train is going to go back to pick more people up.”

The final numbers are short, evocative moments. In “Blue Light on the Bayou” we hear shimmering night music that brings us to a breathless standstill, and then the final rag describes the “Row Houses” on Rampart Street, where some of the

later Quadroon Balls supposedly took place. Marsalis does not try to be too literal in the musical representations of places and events that he brings into the concert hall: “We musicians have a ceremonial role: you come, and you get dressed up, and you want to be taken away from your everyday concerns, and transported into another world. But you always want that world to be an idyllic version of your world, you don’t want that world to be something you don’t recognize, because then it would be very difficult to enjoy it.”

La Création du monde for Piano Quintet, Op. 81bDarius Milhaud Born September 4, 1892, in Aix-en-Provence. Died June 22, 1974, in Geneva. Composed in 1923; arranged for piano quintet in 1923. Ballet premiered on October 25, 1923, in Paris by the Swedish Ballet; piano quintet arrangement premiered in 1927 at the Baden-Baden Festival by the Kolisch Quartet and the composer. First CMS performance on April 18, 1993, by pianist André Previn, violinists Ani Kavafian and Julie Rosenfeld, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist Gary Hoffman.Duration: 16 minutes

The most striking thing about the start of Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde for Piano Quintet is perhaps not the swirling scales of the upper

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strings or the melancholy, sustained version of this figure that the piano cries out with. It is the ostinato in the cello, a low alternation of a two-pitch bass line. The upper of these notes, an F-sharp, clashes intensely with everything the other instruments are doing, creating a dissonant energy that sets a tone for the whole work.

The Fugue that follows is based on a rhythmic subject, which builds melodic complexity in the manner of an improvised solo and features a distinctive, swung turn that cues in the next entry. This subject reveals the F-sharp of the opening to have been a blues note, a chromatic neighbor tone that is lower or higher than we might expect and creates a meaningful and expressive dissonance. The Fugue moves seamlessly into a Romance, a slow number, with piano solos, that sounds like something we might hear in a late-night jazz club. The Scherzo is in fact a ragtime, complete with a double bass imitation in the cello, syncopated violin parts, and mechanized, boisterous interjections from the piano. The Final combines much of what came before, inverting the very opening of the piece to remove the tension from the cello’s ostinato, jumping to a swung, chromatic descent in a quicker tempo, and exploring some explosive writing for the viola.

Many European composers started hearing jazz performed in major cities in the late teens and early twenties.

Milhaud was fascinated by this music but felt that he wasn’t getting the full picture. He travelled to New York in 1922 and spent most of his trip getting to know and listening to musicians in clubs in Harlem. The experience made him “firm in my belief that jazz will constitute the basis of the future schools of American and European music… in it there is a certain warmth, an enthusiasm, a dissonant quality, a vitality of rhythm, which is not foreign to the newer musical tendencies of Paris.”

Awaiting Milhaud on his return home to Paris was a commission from the Ballet Suédois for a ballet score. Blaise Cendrars wrote a libretto for La Création du Monde, based on a creation myth recorded in his own 1921 anthology of African oral literature. The painter Fernand Léger designed over-the-top scenery and costumes that fit in with the extreme exoticism of Africa that pervaded artistic circles in Paris at the time—costumes that, unfortunately, proved nearly impossible to dance in. For the composer, it was at last an opportunity to “use those elements of jazz to which I had devoted so much study. I adopted the same orchestra as used in Harlem, 17 solo instruments, and I made wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling.”

The score was the most enduring part of this production and is regularly performed in the form of an orchestral suite (Op. 81a) and the composer’s own

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arrangement for piano and strings (Op. 81b). The music is, of course, not jazz—it is formally organized so as to express that “classical feeling” throughout. But through his time in New York, Milhaud picked up on a number of subtleties in jazz style, particularly in the use of dissonance, that many of his Paris contemporaries who were writing similar music seem to have missed. These details come through in La Création du Monde. They are what make it one of the more successful appropriations of elements of jazz and blues into the classical concert setting from this period, and why Leonard Bernstein saw the piece “not as a flirtation but as a real love affair with jazz.”

Rhapsody in Blue for Piano, Four Hands George GershwinBorn September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York. Died July 11, 1937, in Hollywood, California. Arranged for Piano, Four Hands by Henry Levine.Composed in 1924; arranged in 1934. Premiered on February 12, 1924, in New York, conducted by Paul Whiteman, with the composer as piano soloist. Duration: 18 minutes

The fluttering trill at the outset of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, followed by a quick scale and then a wailing, air raid siren of a

clarinet glissando, is one of the most unmistakable openings in the concert literature. It reminds anyone who has heard it before of all that follows—the energetic jazz scherzos and toccatas; the cocktail piano cadenzas; the climactic love song. It’s hard not to miss that slide a little bit when hearing one of the many versions of the piece that don’t feature an orchestra. But, as the musicologist Ryan Bañagale shows in Arranging Gershwin, this iconic jazz concerto is a work that has always lived in a constant state of transcription, translation, and reinvention.

Gershwin wrote it to perform with Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra on a well-publicized, 1924 concert at the Aeolian Theatre called “An experiment in modern music.” The event was advertised as serving “educational” purposes. According to a patronizing pre-concert talk and notice, the idea of the performance was to smooth out the differences between popular and concert music: a “stepping stone which will make it very simple for the masses to understand, and therefore, enjoy symphony and opera.” To this end, the concert was organized in pairings of “old and new”: for example, a simply scored form of a song and then a form that included more improvised sections and jazz harmonies. Much of the concert was apparently a bit of a bore for the audience. But the second-to-last number, Gershwin’s novel idea for a concerto for piano and big band, which combined the

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virtuosity of a soloist dueling it out with an orchestra with the appeal and accessibility of popular songs, woke people up. (Though one wonders the impact that the final number, a “Pomp and Circumstance” march by Edward Elgar, had on that energy.)

Critical reviews of this concert were mostly directed at the Rhapsody and mixed in their praise. A common critique was that Gershwin’s individual sections were well crafted, but that those sections and the transitions between them did not add up to a sensible, through-composed concert work. In short, many saw it as evidence of what people like the British musicologist Hans Keller loved about

Gershwin: that he was principally a “major master of minor forms.” Others, like the jazz dancer and writer Roger Pryor Dodge, saw Gershwin’s work and Whiteman’s project in general as part of a strain of pseudo-jazz, which pandered to the audience and obscured the more authentic, improvised music that could be heard from Black bands and jazz performers at the time. But even Dodge had to acknowledge his surprise that “the scorn [he] felt for Gershwin” wasn’t necessarily shared by band leaders like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, who by 1925 were performing Rhapsody in Blue arrangements that made clear the musicians had a lot of respect for and interest in Gershwin’s tunes.

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The Rhapsody was quickly published in the two-piano version Gershwin had originally written and in the big-band orchestration completed for Whiteman’s concert by Ferde Grofé. When the composer recorded the piece a few years later, he had to make cuts to fit the piece well to 78 rpm disks, and the concerto was performed with these cuts for many years. The somewhat soupy, 1942 orchestral arrangement was the most frequently heard rendition for much of the 20th century, but there have been many other transformative performances, shortenings, augmentations, and translations. In

1962, Duke Ellington and his band released his only recorded version of the piece, an efficient, dissonant, sensitive rendition arranged by Billy Strayhorn. Notably, in Ellington’s version, as in the present rendering by Henry Levine for piano four-hands, the opening slide is tastefully absent. These cycles of interpretation and translation have helped to lend this piece a quality of something shared; a resource for artists from many styles of music to draw on and re-work according to their needs and those of their audiences.

—Program notes by Nicky Swett

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