The Messenger Project: Music as the Medium of Engagement
April 22 - May 3, 2008
Piano Quintet (1981)
John Harbison (b. 1938)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison has virtually made it a point not to write in one or another predominant style, e.g. twelve-tone, minimalist, serialist, et al. He has on occasion used all of these and more, but his style can be better understood as the need to satisfy his own curiosity as well as to find unique solutions to new works.
The reasons for this may lie in his upbringing: although both his parents were musical, the Harbison household was defined by a broader intellectualism. His father was a professor of history at Princeton University, his mother, a magazine writer. Young John wasted no time in pursuing all sorts of musical challenges, studying violin, viola, piano, voice and tuba in high school. Garnering a number of prizes while studying composition at Harvard University, he also won distinction for his poetry.
Harbison has progressed from gifted childhood enhanced by musically gifted parents, to a triumphant academic career (beginning with degrees from Harvard and Princeton), and then to an ever more impressive body of work. From major works such as his three symphonies and four string quartets, to operas (The Great Gatsby had its 1999 premiere at the Metropolitan Opera — and Harbison wrote his own libretto in the bargain!), Harbison has won critical acclaim and audience’s approbations the world over. Perhaps some of his success can be gleaned from these comments: “I try to hold on to the forces which carried me into music, the fascination of harmonic progressions, the directness of melody, the magic of sonorities. Since there is so much drudgery involved, copying and proofreading and organizing, it is essential to keep the first instincts alive.”
The Piano Quintet has a dual connection in its commission and composition: commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, an area associated with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Harbison began the work at Token Creek, Wisconsin, just a few miles from Sun Prairie, O’Keeffe’s birthplace. He finished the work in Rome, at the beginning of his residency at the American Academy. Harbison’s own words are the best guide to the work:
“Certain aims have governed my recent work, never more than in this piece: to give the medium what it requires; to strike a balance between he hermetic and the easily reachable, and to make clear the form of inherently complex emotions. In looking at the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, it struck me that the point of contact was this characteristically American search for clarity out of complex forces. In opening my piece I thought of the unfilled parts of her canvases, the open space, the pleasure of leaving something out.
“This opening strain dominates the first movement of the Quintet in spite of the bustle of the contrasting material. The amplitude of the discourse is sharply contrasted to the three concise character pieces which follow. The final Elegia, is, I trust, the only direct reference to the difficult circumstances under which the piece was composed, reflecting in its open-ended form the unresolved questions it poses at every turn.”
Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op. 117, No. 1 (1892)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
As the end of 1890 approached, Brahms announced that his retirement was about to commence. Indeed, the Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra, Op. 102 was behind him, and there would be no new works for orchestra. Brahms’ close friend, the surgeon Theodor Billroth said “he rejects the idea he is composing or will ever compose again.” The composer himself seemed to confirm this to his publisher Simrock, in submitting the manuscript of his String Quintet, Op. 111: “the time has come for you to say goodbye to any further compositions of mine.” But all music lovers — not to mention pianists— would be the poorer if Brahms had kept his word.
Brahms had begun his career, at least as far as published works are concerned, with large-scale sonatas: three of his first five publications are piano sonatas, the last of them, Op. 5, making a major statement indeed. After his long and careful evolution into the major chamber and orchestral forms, it might have seemed that shorter, self-contained works for solo piano held no interest for the emerging giant. In fact, the Op. 79 Rhapsodies marked his first such compositions in fifteen years, and after just a handful of this type of work, another long hiatus ensued.
But by 1892, Brahms not only returned to these more intimate forms (capriccios and fantasies also are included in some of these sets), but in them he poured some of his most inner feelings. In the Opp. 117, 118 and 119, he sent most of the pieces one manuscript at a time to his lifelong friend, Clara Schumann. She proclaimed them “an inexhaustible treasure house” and he indicated the depth of his revealed feelings by remarking that for these works “even one listener is too many.”
For the first of the three Op. 117 Intermezzi, Brahms was inspired by a translation of a Scottish ballad entitled “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament.” He included the first two lines above the music: “Balow, by babe, lie still and sleep! It grieves me sore to see thee weep.” Brahms ensures that we do not miss the fact that this is the most tender of lullabies, moving from E-flat major to the parallel minor mode, gently swaying in 6/8 meter for but 57 bars. The touching melody is nearly always hidden in the middle voices, a typically Brahmsian touch that adds a subtle challenge for even the most sensitive pianist.
“Messenger” Concerto for Violin and Chamber Ensemble
Ian Wilson (b. 1964)
Messenger is a large-scale reflection on the last part of my time spent living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in the late 1990s, which culminated in a tense dash for the Hungarian border with my family on the 3rd night of the illegal NATO bombing of the country in spring ’99.
The first movement was written some months before that when the threat of bombing was looming, just before my son was born, and it attempts to communicate the tension of that period with its nervous gestures and unsettled melodic line. I wrote the second movement some weeks after the birth of my son, and this part of the work, dedicated to him, evokes the kind of life I wanted and still want for him – essentially a happy and peaceful one, hence the feel of a lullaby throughout.
I wrote the final two movements in the comparative quiet of Northern Ireland, the third more energetic and determined in character, as we ourselves were then in trying to get on with our lives, and the final movement a little requiem for Belgrade, as I thought I might never see the cit again in the same condition I had left it. I had originally thought to finish after the third movement, but the work felt incomplete and too “classical” in that format, and so I added the static and funereal last movement as a more suitable conclusion to the work.
The concerto was written very much with Catherine Leonard’s playing in mind. At that point I had written a couple of chamber works for her and felt the time was right to compose something on a much larger scale for her. This version for chamber ensemble was commissioned with the generous help of Richard and Luci Janssen for Catherine Leonard and Camerata Pacifica.
- Ian Wilson, August 2006
