Now that Spring is officially here, we can look forward to the next Market Square Concerts program which features Trio Gaia, performing a delightfully eclectic program ranging from Robert Schumann’s fiery Piano Trio No. 1 and Debussy’s youthful Piano Trio, to Reena Esmail’s ethereal “Saans” (Breath), written as a wedding gift for a close friend, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Four Folk Songs inspired by melodic motifs and rhythms of her mother’s homeland, Peru.
Formed at the New England Conservatory in Boston in 2018, Trio Gaia has already won prizes at several competitions and performed across New England to the South, to the Great Lakes as well as Osaka, Japan; Trieste, Italy; and Panama City, Panama.
Their appearance with Market Square Concerts will be held at Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey at 7:30pm on Wednesday, March 26th. For tickets, visit the MSC website.
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What can be more “American” than a composer who grew up in Berkeley CA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, whose father was a “nice Jewish boy from the Bronx” who met his wife in Peru while working with the Peace Corps – and who is herself Peruvian-Chinese – who embraces all these different and disparate elements as she was growing up to become one of the leading composers of her generation. "I think [my] music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am."
In this brief video, Ms. Frank talks about “the future of classical music.”
Her “Four Folk Songs” were composed for piano trio in 2012. This performance is with the Neave Trio at Skidmore College’s Mostly Modern Festival in June 2023, with violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov, and pianist Eri Nakamura.
I. Canto para La María Angola (Song for the Maria Angola) / II. Children's Dance: @3:05 / III. Serenata: @5:22 / IV. Chavín de Huantar: @10:22
Since the composer provides her own program note, who am I to ignore that?
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Four
Folk Songs
for violin, cello and piano, loosely draws inspiration from the
melodic motifs and rhythms of my mother's homeland, Perú. As an
American-born Latina, so much of my understanding of this small yet
culturally rich Andean nation has been necessarily fashioned from
within my private imagination from the time I was a young child.
Frequent trips to Perú in my adulthood, always done with my mother,
leave me with a sense of belonging to something larger than myself as
I connect private musings with the actual existing reality.
Seeing
the María Angola church in its highland setting after reading myths
about it, for instance, makes Perú's connection to colonial Spain
that much more real; and this provide the inspiration for the first
movement of Four
Folk Songs:
Canto
para La María Angola (Song for the María Angola).
The universality of children playing in the streets, albeit with
Peruvian toys such as wooden llamas and shakers, is portrayed in the
second movement, Children's
Dance.
The third movement, Serenata,
is inspired by the ubiquitous guitar/charango-vocalist duo one sees
in most pubs and eating houses; and the last movement harkens to
Perú's pre-Inca past in imagining the sounds of an isolated,
warlike yet artistically creative culture, Chavín
de Huantar.
– Gabriel Lena Frank
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If you have time, I recommend this longer interview produced by the Detroit Symphony in relation to her being their Composer-in-Residence in which she gives more detailed information about her life, her background, her influences and which uses, as examples, works composed for or performed by the Detroit Symphony.
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How often do you get to hear a work performed by the person for whom the piece was a wedding present? This is the first performance in the USA by pianist Suzana Bartal, the dedicatee, in Los Angeles (Feb 2020) with violinist Vijay Gupta and cellist Peter Myers. The work was inspired by the line, “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
 |
| Reena Esmail |
Once
again, the composer has supplied her own program notes:
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In recent years, I’ve realized how deeply inspired I am to write music by the very people I write it for. I’ve always found the story of the Franck Violin Sonata as incredibly moving and romantic as the music itself: Franck wrote the sonata for Ysaye and his wife as a wedding present, and they premiered it at the wedding, sight reading through the score. It is one of my favorite pieces of all time, and the love and intention with which it was written resonates so deeply through the music.
As I was finishing my Clarinet Concerto for Albany Symphony in April, I was also planning my trip to Paris for one of my closest friends, Suzana Bartal‘s wedding. As the two women in our year of the Yale DMA program, we supported each other unconditionally through some of the toughest moments of our lives, celebrated our accomplishments with each other, and developed a deep and lasting friendship. As I wrote my last commission of the season, I saw that the slow movement of my Clarinet Concerto could actually be turned into a piano trio as a wedding gift to Suzana and her husband Eric. Suzana is a world class concert pianist, and one of her chamber music specialties is playing piano trios.
Our story ended up a little differently from Cesar Frank’s: as I was at Suzana and Eric’s wedding, this trio, in an amazing coincidence, was actually being premiered in Los Angeles on the same day. Even though it was performed a world away, it made me so happy that was premiered by and for some of my dearest friends in Los Angeles.
A beautiful addendum to this story: two years later, Suzana played this trio for the first time in the United States at a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center, in Beverly Hills, CA, with cellist Peter Myers and violinist Vijay Gupta. And the next day Vijay and I got married. I love that this one piece has played a central role in both of our weddings.
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Born in 1983, the only one in her family to be born in the United States, she grew up in Los Angeles.
With degrees from Juilliard & Yale, she also studied Hindustani music: her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.
In addition to numerous choral works (she’s composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale) and orchestral works from the Seattle and Albany Symphonies (among other), there is also, as of 2019, a four-movement Piano Trio with a new string quartet scheduled to be premiered in 2026.
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As a composer, I’m always fascinated to hear where a famous composer “comes from,” and by that I mean how that familiar style evolved into the unmistakable voice of the mature composer.
Even hearing Mozart’s earliest works, you realize the seeds of the mature Mozart’s style. But, say, in Wagner, is his early Symphony in C Major something you would expect from the composer who would later write Tristan und Isolde written about 25 years later?
One thing you can say about Claude Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major is that if you play it unannounced for your music-loving friends (what, when I was a student in the dark ages when we only had phonographs and LP records, we called “drop-the-needle”), chances are no one will guess who wrote it. If you’re familiar with “Clair de lune” or La Mer, it lacks the hallmarks of what we think of as Debussy’s style. But even bold and innovative composers come from somewhere, some place where they learn their trade, to put it efficiently if not very aesthetically.
This is Debussy the Teen-ager, a recording of his G Major Piano Trio with members of the Berlin Philharmonic recorded in 2017. There are four movements:
I. Andantino con moto allegro / II. Scherzo: Moderato con allegro: @9:25 / III. Andante espressivo: @12:44 / IV. Finale: Appassionato: @16:34 -- Violinist, Noah Bendix-Balgley, 1st Concertmaster Berlin Philharmonic; cellist, Bruno Delepelaire, 1st Principal Cello Berlin Philharmonic; pianist, Yannick Rafalimanana
First of all, Debussy was admitted to the Paris Conservatory’s piano department at the age of 10. He went from being regarded as “a charming child… much can be expected of him” to, the next year, “desperately careless.” Winning 4th prize (“2nd Runner-Up”) for his performance of Chopin’s F Minor Piano Concerto, then advanced incrementally to 2nd prize two years later but after failing to register for any prize the following two years, in 1879 he was declared “ineligible” to continue in the piano program, though he remained a conservatory student studying harmony, solfege (as a pianist, he was also considered “an excellent sight-reader”), and only later branching into composition.
Then along came something unexpected and full of those “what-if” connections classical music is full of. In 1880, Claude Debussy the pianist was hired to be the “house pianist” for a wealthy Russian widow traveling through Europe with her daughters. She needed someone to give them piano lessons and to accompany her elder daughter who was a singer. Also, the mother enjoyed playing piano duets – piano, four-hands, two on a bench.
Her name was Nadezhda von Meck. You may have heard of her…
In the beautiful resort-town of Fiesole, overlooking Florence, Mme von Meck added a violinist and a cellist to create an in-house, private piano trio to play for her and her guests. In the photograph (below) taken two summers later, Debussy, then 20, is seated on the floor. They were expected to perform every evening, and much of their repertoire consisted of Beethoven and Schubert trios.
The widow of a wealthy Russian railroad tycoon, she is best known because of her friendship and support for Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. In 1877, Mme. von Meck began commissioning short works from him to be played at her private salon evenings and this quickly turned into a considerable (and significant) “underwriting” of Tchaikovsky’s talent so he could devote him to composing at a time when his fragile creative ego needed not just the financial support. If you consider a minor government minister had to support his family on 300-400 rubles a year, the annual stipend she gave Tchaikovsky of 6,000 rubles was quite a fortune!
The one stipulation she made was that they never meet. As a result, their frequent letters constitute a valuable document of Tchaikovsky’s creative output and personal views. Then, suddenly, in 1890, she broke off their relationship, confessing bankruptcy, though this might have been too overstated (her son, certainly, was complaining about the expense that would deplete his inheritance).
Meanwhile, during the summers between 1880 and 1882, she employed Claude Debussy as a “house pianist” who traveled with her through Switzerland and France, then later joined her at her Moscow home. He himself never met Tchaikovsky but he, no doubt, heard a great deal about him and probably played a good deal of his music as Mme von Meck liked to hear her favorite music frequently and she was quite imperious about the way she handled her servants (as she viewed her musical employees) as well as her family and friends. During his time in Moscow, Debussy arranged three pieces from Swan Lake for piano duet which no doubt got a good deal of mileage that summer.
She had, however, sent Tchaikovsky a short piano piece that Debussy had composed for her that first summer, a Bohemian Dance. Tchaikovsky was not enthusiastic: "It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity".
What else Debussy may have composed for her, we don’t know. Many of these manuscripts may have disappeared into family archives, the typical boxes in the attic somewhere, yet to be unearthed.
In fact the trio’s manuscript only came to light in 1982, after having been considered “lost,” found by accident among the papers of Maurice Dumesnil, one of Debussy’s piano students and a member of the Conservatoire’s Class of 1905 (whenever he may have studied with Debussy). In 1915, he began playing in a piano trio so perhaps, somehow, Debussy gave him his copy of this early trio of his. Anyhow, when Dumesnil moved to America and married a singer and composer (she herself studied at Nadia Boulanger’s Fontainbleau). After her death in 1975, their collected papers took up one linear foot of shelf-space in the archives at a University of Michigan library where this on-line “finding aid” makes no mention of Debussy’s score.
It was apparently composed in September and October of 1880. The assumption is Debussy composed it so he could play it for Mme von Meck: after all, he was her house-pianist and just beginning to express an interest in becoming a composer. Considering she’d sent Tchaikovsky that little dance of his, did The Master’s reaction imply she shouldn’t waste his time sending him a larger work like a four-movement piano trio? What was her reaction or those of her friends who might have heard it? Did they hear it? Or did their lack of enthusiasm for it make Debussy put it aside and presumably forget about it?
Clearly an early work in more ways than one, it’s often dismissed under the umbrella “juvenalia.” François Lesure, who catalogued Debussy’s music chronologically and published it in 1977, refers to it as L.3 and describes the manuscript as “lost.” While the score was found in a “linear foot of collected papers” deposited in a Michigan library in 1975, if it wasn’t “discovered” until 1982, apparently Lesure hadn’t found any paper-trail regarding its whereabouts. So, now that it’s been found, now what? Record and perform it, of course!
Two critics reviewed different recordings: Harold Schonberg, wrote about an incomplete 1984 recording, that “It is sweet, sentimental, and sugared; it verges on the salon." And Charlotte Gardner wrote in 2012 for the BBC: "Debussy's teenage Piano Trio doesn't often get to see the light of day, mostly because it reveals him very much still in feet-finding mode. Still, it's an enjoyable listen…” Of the performers, she added, “They're an effortless partnership, making much of the work's smoochy, romantic leanings, the high beauty of many of its passages, and its light, clear textures.”
While it may not be a lost masterpiece (as one often hopes when such things miraculously reappear), it has its own value in letting us know where the Debussy we do know came from. Does it sound like Debussy? Are there fingerprints we might hear? Not really – they might be things he picked up imitating other composers who influenced his contemporaries like Chausson (who wrote his own Trio in 1881 at the start of his career) or Chabrier (he had not yet reached his own maturity in 1880), music that is not generally known to American audiences, these days (even Massenet is unfamiliar to most of us today aside from a few works, though he and Saint-Saens were the leading composers of their day in France). (Do I hear a taste of Puccini in that opening theme? Unlikely – Puccini’s first opera wasn’t premiered until 1884!) The opening of Debussy’s scherzo reminds me of some of the popular dance-parodies he wrote in his some of his later piano pieces, like the Children’s Corner or the Preludes for Piano. Whether he borrowed anything directly from this youthful (or shall we just call it “immature”) work isn’t the point, the element of parody could be enough of a common denominator.
Whatever critics think about the piece or how you react to it (listening to it in hindsight compared to the works you’re already familiar with), it’s important to remember that even great composers were young once.
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The last work on Trio Gaia’s program is Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op.63. Here’s their performance recorded with their previous pianist. There are four movements,
I. Mit Energie und Leidenschaft (With energy and passion) / II. Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch (Lively but not too fast):@ 9:50 / III. Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung (Slow, with more intimate feeling): @14:58 / IV. Mit Feuer (With fire): @21:02
Here are Trio Gaia with violinist Grant Houston; cellist Yi-Mei Templeman; and pianist Andrew Barnwell.
If you attend concerts of chamber music regularly and have heard any works by Robert Schumann, one of the leading 19th Century Romanticists, you’re probably familiar with the “Year of Chamber Music,” 1842, when he composed in quick succession all three of his string quartets and both the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet (a repertoire staple), all written between early-June and late-October. But in December, he wrote a Piano Trio in A Minor which, however, didn’t satisfy him and he set it aside. Later, after writing two piano trios that did satisfy him, he took material from this earlier trio and turned it into a trio for clarinet, cello, and piano (not technically a “piano trio”) but because the publishers produced a “version with violin,” it occasionally shows up on “piano trio” performances.
As the string quartets grew out of a period of “study” in which both he and Clara studied the classic quartets of Beethoven and Mozart following a period of “deep melancholy” while Clara was away on a concert tour and Robert’s health was too precarious to deal with the stress of merely being Mr. Clara Schumann. Another period of poor health, when he complained to his doctor of bouts ranging from “insomnia, general weakness, auditory disturbances, tremors, and chills in the feet, to a whole range of phobias.”
Meanwhile, Clara was composing her G Minor Piano Trio, what would become her largest work (except for her Piano Concerto, written in her early-teens, she wrote mostly piano pieces and songs; this was her only full-scale multi-movement sonata-form composition of her maturity), begun a few months after the birth of her fourth child, Emil. While she was working on it, the family took a summer vacation to a North Sea island where, instead of rest and relaxation, Schumann was bored and Clara suffered a miscarriage but still managed to complete her trio by her birthday in September, 1846.
Some months later, Robert wrote in his diary (both he and Clara kept separate diaries), “Thoughts about a piano trio.” Further entries described the process of getting a new work started and in a matter of 13 days he had completely sketched the complete D Minor Piano Trio published the following year as his Op.63. It was ready for a house performance for Clara’s birthday in 1847 – a year after she had finished her own piano trio which had, only recently, just been published. Presumably, he’d been inspired by her trio to begin writing his own – and not just the D Minor: he began the 2nd Trio, the F Major, in August which he completed in late-October – but instead, Clara looked at her own trio and, by comparison, found it “effeminate and sentimental.” It’s quite likely Robert was completely unaware of Clara’s disappointment – she had her own creative insecurities, not to mention being a composer contending with raising children, concertizing, and looking after an often challenging and demanding husband who was, increasingly, ill.
From here, it would be easy to examine the output of Robert Schumann’s productive year, how their 1845 study of counterpoint, writing many exercises together, mostly for a curious hybrid instrument, the pedal-piano (a combination piano with an organ-like pedal board) helped focus Robert’s creative process. Before, he would work almost exclusively at the keyboard, but now he found himself able to compose away from it, relying on his ear, for one, and his intellectual awareness of counterpoint. He was surprised how he could now take a motive in one of his themes and incorporate it into the inner parts of the harmony and especially in the bass line. Counterpoint is more than the writing of fugues: it also turns something that could be a melody accompanied by chords into a more organically controlled multi-voiced texture often with completely independent and melodically integrated instrumental lines. The D Minor Piano Trio is the first new work of his using this new approach.
He admitted – considering his health – that this was “a time of gloomy moods” which is clearly reflected in the turbulent first movement, marked “with energy and passion,” more emotional (and Romantic) than a more abstract “Allegro con moto.” While the substantial first movement is full of restlessness and agitation and the second movement scherzo is by contrast lively and sunny, it is the slow third movement that is the tragic heart of the piece: music filled with a world-weariness in the piano’s slowly resolving harmonic suspensions (I can still hear a beloved college professor describing such music as “yearning, churning, burning…”). Though the movement ends with an unresolved harmonic vagueness, the finale – “with fiery passion” – may focus more on the “burning” side of the equation, it is less complicated and easier to comprehend emotionally, boiling up to a decidedly emphatic conclusion.
Alas for Clara that her husband should have written just such a piece after her own gentle trio which made no pretense to the barnstorming emotionalism her husband was capable of – not to mention their future friend Brahms who was yet to show up on their doorstep until seven years later. Curiously, while a lot of Robert’s psychological issues may have stemmed from his wife being a more famous musician who captivated Europe – he was terrified when she suggested an American tour! – Clara had to deal with her own issues, not the least of which was she could never escape the fact her husband was a “better” composer. What if – indeed – Clara had had the kinds of opportunities Robert (or any man) would’ve had to produce symphonies and operas, the time to dedicate to composing, even to delegate some of the responsibilities of being a housewife and mother?
While the next few years became another productive span of time for Robert, there came the inevitable decline (just as it followed the first years of their marriage with its Year of Songs, the Year of Symphonies, and the Year of Chamber Music): Schumann’s later diagnosis of being “bi-polar” was not initially called “manic-depression” for nothing, intense bouts of manic creativity followed by long periods of creative stasis and depression.
Curiously, it was this D Minor Piano Trio that first showed a crack in the outwardly happy relationship of this incredible husband-and-wife team: it was after a November 1850 performance of it that Robert blamed the audience’s cool reception on her playing (and telling her her accompaniment of the soprano on the same program was “terrible” didn’t help). His mental decline is well documented – from his enthusiasm for the parlor game of “table rapping,” communing with ghosts which so embarrassed her, to his auditory hallucinations which terrified him, all led, despite the happy interlude with meeting Brahms in 1853, to his attempted suicide in February, 1854, throwing himself off a bridge into the Rhine. He was immediately taken off to a sanatorium (an insane asylum, in those days) and they never saw each other again until two days before he died (officially of pneumonia) at the age of 46 in 1856, only nine years after writing this turbulent piano trio.
- Dick Strawser
