Page 164 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD AND BENJAMIN PESETSKY
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Notturno in E-flat Major, Op. 148, D. 897
This piece will make you cry.
This gorgeous aubade, rising above a summer of gorgeous pieces, for piano, violin, and cello, is the epitome of mid- night stillness. It is the dream of everything that is Schubert and Vienna and the dusky pastel of an imaginary world
that should have lasted forever. Rachmaninoff’s Barcarolle learned a lot from it and its pulled Viennese waltz rhythms. Here the Viennese countryside smiles down in the moon- light on all the graces of the Biedermeier era: simplicity, security, and Gemütlichkeit.
This piece should be the theme of Tippet Rise: when the theme returns in triumph, accompanied by frenzied arpeggios on the piano; or afterwards, when the trio subsides into an awed reverie while the stately theme glides by on the piano; or maybe the pizzicato moment when the strings pluck like Pachelbel’s Canon behind the piano theme; or the expansive return of the moon immediately afterwards. I don’t know—at any point in its transcendent procession, this piece is one of the great exultations anywhere.
If you had thought of this theme and how to frame it in its entwined tableau vivant, its frozen Friedrich aurora, you would know that at some point in history the world would discover that genuine greatness had walked silently through it, and you would sleep soundly, despite all your frustrations, misgivings, false starts, and merely mortal pains. If the world had ever discovered this music, it would be the stuff of sneaker commercials and elevators—but maybe it can’t be heard by an industrial world, because it is too pastoral to be taken up by machines.
At the end the piano trills over the renewed revelations of the theme, as it modulates out of the forest into the night sky—the moon in all her splendor!—and subsides into the stillness, with the piano’s breeze, frozen in the sublime clarity only possible in moonlight, making one final waft around the comfortable E-flat branch of the high suspend- ed strings, one witty yet seraphic gute Nacht at the end of a celestial spectacle.
— Peter Halstead
ARNO BABADJANIAN (1921–1983) Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor
Arno Babadjanian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1921 and was a much-admired pianist and composer during
the Soviet era. (His name also appears in English as “Babajanian” or “Babadzhanyan,” among other variants.)
He studied at the Yerevan Conservatory before moving on
to Moscow, then returned to Yerevan where he taught piano and continued to compose and perform. He wrote the Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor in 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, and premiered it in Moscow alongside David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, luminaries of the violin and cello, respectively.
From the 1940s to the early 1950s, artistic expression was severely limited in the Soviet Union. In 1948, Dmitri Shostakovich was denounced for a second time, alongside Sergei Prokofiev and the leading Armenian composer of the day, Aram Khachaturian. Any music deemed “formalist,”
or without a social purpose in line with Soviet goals, was forbidden. The most restrictive ideology, called beskonfliktnost (“conflictless-ness”) by its later critics, proclaimed Soviet society to be so advanced that “bad” and “good” were no longer operative concepts: there was only “good” and “best.”
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The Music at Tippet Rise