Tickets will be available at the door.

Austin Chamber Music Center continues to do what we do best: re-contextualize and enliven chamber music for a crowd who wants more(!) from their typical classical music concert experience.

In SHOWTUNES, Dr. Michelle Schumann brings together multiple chamber music masterworks that have been featured prominently on the Silver Screen as well as on Broadway. Together with the Carpe Diem String Quartet and Schumann at the piano, ACMC will perform Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (featured in eight films including the recent box-office smash There Will Be Blood), Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings from the String Quartet No. 1 (also featured in eight films including the iconic Platoon), Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 (featured in three films, but more importantly, re-adapted throughout the Broadway Musical Kismet), and finally, Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat, Opus 100 (featured in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and the cult Vampire fetish film The Hunger.)

Synchronism Saturday, February 12, 7:30pm at First Unitarian Church, Tickets: $25

Fratres for Violin and Piano | Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

String Quartet Opus 11 | Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Molto adagio “Adagio for Strings”

String Quartet No. 2 in D Major | Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro
Notturno
Finale: Andante-vivace

INTERMISSION

Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major, Opus Posth. 100 | Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzo
Allegro moderato

CARPE DIEM STRING QUARTET
Charles Wetherbee, violin • John Ewing, violin
Korine Fujiwara, viola • Kristen Ostling, cello
with
Michelle Schumann, piano

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

Fratres for Violin and Piano

Fratres (“brethren”), written in 1977 by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), is one of the first compositions to explore the technique of tintinnabuli, which he developed during a period of profound personal, artistic, and spiritual crisis that began in the late 1960s. Musically, tintinnabuli evolved from a thorough-going study of plainchant and early polyphony, which he undertook in order to “learn to walk again as a composer.” Spiritually, it reflects his re-engagement with the mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tintinnabuli shares with minimalism an emphasis on simplicity of idea and transparency of process. As Pärt explains it:

Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers—in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.… Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements— with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials—with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.

The basis for tintinnabulation is a two-part texture, in which a melodic voice moves primarily by step around a central pitch, while the tintinnabuli voice sounds the notes of the tonic triad. The relationship between the voices is predetermined according to a scheme that is specific to each individual work. Most of Pärt’s early tintinnabuli compositions are predominantly consonant. In this work, however, while the underlying triad is consonant, dissonance is created by presence of an augmented second in the harmonic minor scale on which the melodic line is based.

In the original version of Fratres, first performed by the Estonian early music ensemble Hortus musicus, no particular instrumentation was specified. The work now exists in numerous arrangements scored for a variety of ensembles with the musical substance remaining essentially unchanged. The exception to this is the arrangement for solo violin and piano, commissioned for the 1980 Salzburg Festival and performed there by Gidon and Elena (Bashkirova) Kremer. In this version, which Pärt dedicated to Kremer and Bashkirova, the original harmonic material, found mainly in the piano part, is intact, while the violin plays a series of virtuosic variations above it. The challenge for the violinist is to negotiate the virtuosic writing without disturbing the essential serenity of the work.

- Brenda Dalen

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

Adagio from String Quartet No. 1

American composer Samuel Barber was something of a child prodigy. He began composing at the age of 7 and, having learnt piano, organ and voice, gained a place at the Curtis Institute of Music at just 14. Barber began composing seriously in his late teenage years writing a flurry of successful compositions, launching him into the spotlight of the classical music community. Many of his compositions were commissioned or premiered by such famous artists as Vladimir Horowitz, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

The Adagio for Strings, written in 1938, is one of the staples of the string orchestra repertoire. Originally conceived as the third movement of his String Quartet, written in 1936, Barber re-scored it for string orchestra, and two years later it received its première with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. The work begins with a feeling of poignant melancholy and suppressed anguish, which slowly develops into an intense outpouring of emotion. As soon as it reaches it most passionate moment this emotion is reigned in, and the calm and collected sadness of the beginning returns, drawing the work to close.

This is one of the most moving pieces of music written in the Twentieth century and has earned itself a place in popular culture. It has appeared on several television and film soundtracks, most notable Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Oscar-nominated 2001 film Amélie. The piece was played at the funerals of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prince Rainier of Monaco and was performed in a ceremony at the World Trade Center to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks. It has even been remixed as a electro dance anthem by DJ Tiësto.

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

String Quartet No. 2

Moguchaya Kuchka, “The Mighty Handful”, “The Five”, (or “The Mighty Clique” as they were called by their detractors), shared a vision and a mission: to produce a Russian music based on the Russian experience and identity, and rid Russian music of pale, stale imitations of Italian opera, German formalism, traditionalism and Leider. Of the five that took on this mission, only one, M. Balakirev (1837-1910), was a professional musician. Two were military men, N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a naval officer, C. Cui (1835-1918) was a fortification expert, and the fourth, Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), was a civil servant. The problem of maintaining creative activity under the burden of career demands was most acute in the case of the fifth member of this group, Borodin. He was principally a professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, as well as a research chemist who made contributions in the field of catalysts and precipitates.

Borodin wrote in a letter, “As a composer seeking to remain anonymous I am shy of confessing my musical activity. This is intelligible enough. For others it is their chief business, the occupation and aim of life. For me it is a relaxation, a pastime, which distracts me from my principal business, my professorship. I love my profession and my science. I love the Academy and my pupils, male and female, because to direct the work of young people, one must be close to them.”

Besides the demands of his scientific and teaching professions, Borodin championed the cause of equal education for women, and women’s rights. Thus, he was constantly in demand as a speaker, and called upon frequently to attend meetings for the feminist cause. Dmitri Shostakovich, who saw Borodin as a very gifted composer and rated his works highly, said bitterly that the feminists should have raised an monument to Borodin. “He would get one of those monuments too, because he plunged headlong into women’s education and spent more and more time as he grew older on philanthropy, primarily for women’s causes, and these butchered him as a composer…..Borodin’s apartment was a madhouse…..he always had a bunch of sick relatives living with him, or just poor people, or visitors who took sick and even went mad…..That’s how a Russian composer lives and works. Naturally there was always someone sleeping in every room, on every couch, and on the floor. He didn’t want to disturb them with the piano. Rimsky-Korsakov would ask: ‘Did you transpose that section?’ ‘Yes. From the piano to the desk.’ And then people wonder why Russian composers write so little.”

Despite this Borodin managed to write music that lives in the operatic, orchestral, and chamber music repertory. The String Quartet No. 2 is one of the most beloved works in the entire quartet literature, and, unlike his other works, was composed in only two months during a summer holiday. It has been suggested that it was written as a special anniversary present for his wife.

The Quartet’s popularity is undoubtedly due to its warm amorous lyricism and beautiful melodies. Concerning the melody in the second movement, Borodin explained that he “attempted to conjure up an impression of a light hearted evening spent in one of the suburban pleasure gardens of St. Petersburg.” The melody is probably most familiar to American audiences as being the basis for the song Baubles, Bangles and Beads from the musical Kismet. The third movement, Notturno, was also used in Kismet as the song, And This Is My Beloved. This movement is even more popular in the string orchestra transcription, and that arrangement has far outnumbered recordings of the complete Quartet.

-Joseph Way

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 100, D. 929

Schubert lived his entire life in the shadow of Beethoven. His career was cut tragically short by illness, but in the last two years of his life, the most fertile time of his artistic career, he tackled the big instrumental forms in which Beethoven had excelled. His final masterpieces included the song cycle Winterreise, the string quintet, the octet, the last string quartets, the three magnificent last piano sonatas, the “Great” C Major Symphony, and the two piano trios. Prior to the composition of the piano trios in B-Flat Major and E- Flat Major, Schubert had written only one movement in the medium. The E-flat, one of the great masterpieces of the piano trio literature, forms a bridge between the trios of Beethoven and Brahms.

The Allegro is in sonata form, its exposition establishing, as Janet Bedell describes it, “a dynamic opposition between dramatic intensity and gentle lyricism.” The opening theme, played by all three instruments in octaves “summons up Beethoven’s spirit immediately.” The second theme, “softly pattering,” and “slightly conspiratorial” is introduced in the piano’s upper register. A third “subdued” and “undulating” melody, introduced by the cello, becomes the principal subject of the development section.

Schubert based the Andante, the emotional center of the trio, on the Swedish song “Se solen sjunker,” (The sun is going down). The gist of the song text is that “time is running out, hope has fled, the opportunity for love has been lost” (Hefling). The movement, a rondo (A B A’ B’ A”), opens with “a tragic, resolute march” with “undertones of a funeral procession” (Bedell). The cello introduces the first mournful theme, which is repeated in the piano. The first violin introduces the second theme over arpeggios in the piano. Unexpectedly, however, the “music veers into a savage climax of pain and anguish—the kind of startling outbursts we hear in several of Schubert’s late masterpieces.” Although the calm theme returns, Schubert “wrenches it harmonically toward an even more violent climax that disintegrates its melodic shape” (Bedell).

A relief after two intense movements, the Scherzo is a canon in which various tunes are stated by one instrument and echoed by another a measure later. The light and delicate main theme stands in sharp contrast to the heavy stomping dance of the trio.
The finale, also in sonata form, opens with a perky theme, leading into a second soft, exotic theme that, as Nathan Barber hears it, “seems to imitate a cimbalon—an ancient dulcimer of Hungarian origin.” Schubert dwells on the first theme at great length in the exposition. In the development section he recalls the haunting Swedish theme from the second movement, now played by the cello over the strumming strings of the violin. As it nears the end of its nearly 45 minute duration, Op. 100 can be said to illustrate what some have called the “heavenly length” of Schubert’s compositions.

-John Noelle Moore