Béla Bartók 1881-1945
Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano
1. Verbunkos
2. Piheno
3. Sebes

The public at large has never taken to Béla Bartók. For that matter conductors and performers once found it easier to ignore his discordant, rhythmically barbaric and intense music. His work was steeped in the obscure idiom of the Hungarian countryside and, in fact, he is today revered as a musical researcher who unearthed and brought to publication some 6,000 Hungarian folk songs. While he lived his idiosyncratic music was largely rejected but soon after his death his accomplishments came to be appreciated and within five years of his passing most of his work had been recorded and Bartók cycles were being performed all over the world. In 1937 however, the embattled composer found himself politically as well as musically isolated. Due to his outspoken opposition to fascism his music was banned in both Germany and Italy. In order to provide money for the frail and aging composer, legendary clarinetist Benny Goodman and violin virtuoso Joseph Szigeti contacted Bartók in 1938 and commissioned a piece for violin and clarinet with piano accompaniment. The composer responded immediately and completed a two movement Rhapsody that same year. By 1940 his political stance made it necessary for him to leave his homeland and he traveled to New York to be with the two virtuosos for the recording of the piece. At this time he made the decision to add a middle movement and named his work “Contrasts”.

The opening movement is named after an 18th century Hungarian recruiting dance in which an officer parades about in order to entice young men to enlist. Utilizing the characteristic rhythmic patterns of Hungarian folk music, Bartók succeeds in exploiting the full technical resources of all three instruments before ending the movement with a clarinet cadenza.

Piheno, or relaxation is an eerily dreamy movement that makes effective use of what Bartók called his “night music” - the whispered nocturnal flutterings and trills heard in country fields, forests, and along mountain streams.

The Sebes, or fast dance, opens in a manner reminiscent of Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, with the violinist instructed to begin with a mis-tuned violin (the bottom string raised a half step and the top string lowered the same interval). The ominous beginning soon gives way to a mood of robust gaiety. A slower middle section is based on the irregular rhythms of Bulgarian folk music. The final section features a return to the high spirits of the opening and showcases a violin cadenza and some fascinating and humorous chirping sounds on all three instruments.

Maurice Ravel 1875-1937
Piano Trio in A minor
1. Modéré
2. Pantoum: Assez vif
3. Passacaille: Tres large
4. Finale: Animé

It would be hard to imagine a composer who drew from a more eclectic pool of inspirational sources than Maurice Ravel. His music reflected the Spanish culture and traditions of Basque France, the classicism and clarity of the 18th century Viennese school, the nationalism of the Russian Five, and the impressionism of Debussy. In addition, the careful listener can detect the strains of Far Eastern exoticism and the easy spontaneity of American jazz. He was a master at using music to evoke the satiric, the fantastic, and the impressionistic. But first and foremost he was a perfectionist. He once wrote “Conscience compels us to turn ourselves into good craftsmen. My objective is technical perfection”. And it must be said that an extraordinary technical skill shone through whatever musical vein he chose to work in. There was a price to pay however. As he neared the perfection he sought late in his career, he mourned the loss of the artless strength of his early work. When George Gershwin asked to study under him, Ravel told the young composer “You might lose that great melodic spontaneity”.
Ravel was not quite forty when tonight’s piece was completed and in it he was able to combine the strength and vigor of youth with the technical mastery of maturity to produce a masterpiece of form in which no detail is superfluous. It was a difficult work for him to bring to fruition. The imminence of the First World War so distressed him that as the piece neared completion he wrote, “I think that at any moment I shall go mad or lose my mind...I have never worked so hard.”

The first movement begins in a cool, detached mood with the piano stating the opening theme, which rhythmically derives from a Baroque folk dance. The tune is then taken up by the strings and subjected to a number of inventive variations. Following this there is a similar but slightly slower second theme that is initiated by the violin. The haunting, ethereal beauty of the movement is briefly interrupted by moments of intense, feverish passion but the prevailing mood is one of almost melancholy tranquility. It ends on a beautifully hushed note.

The second movement is really a scherzo and opens in a nervous, brittle manner. The sharp, highly rhythmic motifs gradually build to a climax before the movement ends abruptly.

The Passacaille begins with a somber theme played in the bass register of the piano. This melody is intricately worked and re-worked in a series of ten subtle variations, the first seven of which relentlessly escalate in terms of pitch and density. Upon reaching its apex the music begins to descend and by movement’s end Ravel has once again returned to solo piano.

The Finale is one of the composer’s greatest movements and its jazzy, uneven rhythms show Ravel’s complete understanding of the American jazz idiom. He pulls out all the stops and treats the listener to a dazzling display of sonic effects before soaring to a triumphant and powerful conclusion.

Olivier Messiaen 1908-1992
Quartet for the End of Time

The Quartet for the End of Time is not just the most important work composed by Olivier Messiaen; it must stand as one of the most significant works to come out of the experience of World War Two. Messiaen wrote it while he was imprisoned in a German POW camp and its unusual scoring is due to the fact that among his fellow prisoners were a clarinetist, a violinist, and a cellist. It was composed to help him survive the horrors of camp life and “premiered” to an audience of 5,000 inmates. While Messiaen’s music could be intellectual and difficult, his great quartet is accessible on a first hearing and makes it evident that his first rule of composition was that melody is the musical element to which all others must remain subservient. It is, in fact, his melodic and lyrical gifts which give him an appeal often missing in his contemporaries. As one critic notes his work is like “sweet water in the desert of post-war musical systems and ‘isms’” Another musician wrote of him: “One has only to hear his music beside that of any of the standard eclectic modernists to know that he is a great composer. His music vibrates - theirs doesn’t”.

Olivier Messiaen was born into a literary household in Avignon in 1908. His father was a noted translator of Shakespeare and his mother was a poet of note. Young Olivier was a musical prodigy who taught himself the piano and was composing before his eighth birthday. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919 and stayed until 1930, studying under such musicians as Marcel Dupre and Paul Dukas. His career as a student was spectacular and he was awarded five premier prix while there. He excelled as an organist and upon graduation he obtained the important post of organist at the Trinite in Paris - a position he would hold for many years. He was also an influential teacher who left his mark on a whole generation of French musicians. While firmly grounded in traditional techniques and influenced by the music of Debussy and Dukas, he made a private study of plainsong, Hindu rhythms, and bird song; all of which can be found in various of his compositions. But the overriding inspiration for many of his most important works is his profound religious belief, his deep, mystical attachment to the Catholic Church. One of his musical tenets, in fact, was that all his work should be at the service of the dogmas of Catholic theology. Tonight’s piece is a monumental work in eight movements and is filled with religious fervor and ecstasy. It finds its inspiration not in the brutality of camp life but rather in “the silences of adoration, its marvelous visions of peace”. Messiaen described his music as “a theological rainbow” and some may find such overt religiosity off-putting. Be that as it may, all can certainly enjoy the colors of the rainbow. The quartet is based on a quotation from the Revelation of St. John and happily for us the composer left his own detailed notes which follow.
1. Liturgy of crystal - Between the morning hours of three and four, the awakening of the birds; a thrush or a nightingale soloist improvises, amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills that lose themselves high in the trees. Transpose this to the religious plane: you will have the harmonious silence of heaven. The piano provides a rhythmic ostinato based on unequal augmentations and diminutions - the clarinet unfolds a bird song.
2. Vocalize, for the Angel who announces the end of time - The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing a mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recitativo of the violin and cello.
3. Abyss of the birds - Clarinet solo. 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 is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird songs (desire of the eternal light).
4. Interlude - Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.
5. Praise to the Eternity of Jesus - Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word. Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
6. Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets - Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values and augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns. Music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or ice like frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the piece.
7. Cluster of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time - Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelops him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, of wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows.
8. Praise to the Immortality of Jesus - Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus - to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the Son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.
- And I repeat anew: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject!

Wed.
October 29, 2008 7:30
Antares
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
November 19, 2008 7:30
Quattro Mani
Music for two pianos
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
March 11, 2009 7:30
Belcea String Quartet
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
April 22, 2009 7:30
Brentano String Quartet
Indianapolis Central Library
Clowes Auditorium
40 East St. Clair St

Sat.
June 6, 2009 7:30
Guarneri String Quartet
Christel DeHaan
Fine Arts Center
University of Indianapolis
1400 East Hanna Avenue