Greater London Council
QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL
Director : John Denison, C.B.E.
WILFRID VAN WYCK
present
BEAUX
ARTS
TRIO
Thursday, 13th January, 1972 at 7.45 p.m.
PROGRAMME AND NOTES lOp
BEAUX ARTS TRIO
Menahem Pressler, Piano lsidore Cohen, Violin
Bernard Greenhouse, 'CeHo
Freshness of approach, oneness of ensemble playing, superb
musicianship and tremendous zest characterise the performances of
the BEAUX ARTS TRIO of NEW YORK. The Trio has been hailed on
three continents, and has played well over 2,000 engagements
throughout North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Charles Munch said that 'they are worthy successors to the last
great trio- Thibaud, Casals and Cortot' and this praise has been
echoed again and again. For nine successive seasons, the Beaux
Arts Trio has performed at the famous Berkshire Music Festival in
America, and for seven seasons at Hunter College in New York. The
group is also a great favourite at European Festivals including
Edinburgh, Lisbon, the Holland Festival, Dubrovnik, Ettlingen in
Germany and the Israel Festival. In April 1969, the Trio added
another Festival, Osaka, and another country, Japan.
Since their first European tour, the Trio has returned every season,
and standing ovations in Berlin, Paris, London, Lisbon and numerous
other musical centres have been the order of the day. The summer of
1971 brought appearances at the Harrogate, Lucerne and Montreux
Festivals, as well as concerts in Mulhouse and Menton, and during
the 1970/71 regular season, the Trio fulfilled 28 public concerts in
Europe in two three-week periods. Engagements in the United
Kingdom during 1971 /72 include concerts in Oxford, Edinburgh,
Stirling, St. Andrews, Lavenham, Birmingham, and the group will
return to this country in November 1972. ·
The Beaux Arts Trio has recorded most of the piano trio repertoire
for Philips, and in 1964 won the 'Grand Prix du Disque' for recordings
of trios of Mendelssohn and Dvorak. In 1970, the group was
awarded the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis for its recording of the
complete Piano Trios of Dvorak.
BEAUX ARTS TRIO
. :; ,_
Programme Notes
by
JEREMY NOBLE
Author's Copyright
Trio in D major, Op.70, No. 1
Allegro vivace e con brio
Largo assai ed espressivo
Presto
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
{1770-1827)
Beethoven's piano trios (like Haydn's) are less well known to present-day
audiences than his string quartets, yet they offer a different, and complementary,
view of his genius. Within the sphere of his chamber music they stand to the
quartets rather as the piano concertos stand to the symphonies among the works
for larger forces. The piano was Beethoven's own instrument, and the music he
wrote for it tends to have an open-handed, extravert, at times almost improvisatory
quality that we do not find elsewhere. Indeed this is probably the main reason why
Beethoven eventually abandoned the piano : with the increasing interiorisation of
his music it stood for elements of style in which he was no longer interested.
But if there are no piano trios to set beside the late quartets, the earlier periods
are well represented. The Op.1 set are quite worthy to be compared with the Op.18
quartets, and the two trios of Op.70 and the "Archduke", Op.97, rank with the
finest and most typical works of the middle period. The Op.70 trios were composed
in 1808, just after the astonishingly productive five years that had seen the composition
of the third to sixth symphonies, Fidelio, the G major piano concerto and
the violin concerto, the Rasumovsky quartets and the Waldstein and Appassionata
sonatas- a period that established Beethoven, still only in his mid-thirties, as a
completely mature composer and the greatest of his age.
With the slackening of this spate, each work became more consciously the
exploration of a specific new area of the imagination. Op.70, No.1, is known
traditionally as the Geister trio because of its spectral slow movement, but this title
does us a disservice if it distracts attention from the work as a whole. The most
remarkable thing about the trio is in fact its very close integration, both thematic and
tonal, of all three movements. Though one hesitates to. over-emphasise the importance
of this, it would hardly be too much to say that the germ of all the main
themes is contained within the brisk unison gesture that opens the work. The
flowing phrase that answers this, first on the cello and then on the violin, is a free
inversion of it, and a three -note figure that is brought into great prominence in the
toughly contrapuntal development section becomes in its turn the germ from which
the brilliant finale's main theme unfolds. The slow movement too starts with a
phrase on the strings (down a fourth, up a sixth) that outlines the work's opening
idea- though the exceptionally slow tempo and the shift to the minor key may disguise
the resemblance at first hearing .
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In both first and last movements the so-called 'second subject' is little more
than a cadence-figure, melodically related to the main theme, and this economy in
the matter of thematic material is carried through on to the plane of tonality.
Beethoven chooses for his middle movement- the ghostly largo already mentioned-
nothing more remote than the minor version of his home key of D ; he is
prepared to achieve his contrasts by other, more profound, means.
Yet in spite of all the emphasis on economy and integration, the work leaves
no impression of crabbedness, but on the contrary of a masterly continuity of flow
and a wide range of everchanging texture. The pianist, in particular, plays a variety
of roles: sometimes his two hands contribute individual contrapuntal lines that
combine with the strings in a quartet-like texture, but in the slow movement
Beethoven gives him shuddering tremolandi and trailing strands of melody that
evoke the orchestra, not to say the opera-house. The trio is dedicated to Countess
Marie Erdody, a patron of whom Beethoven thought particularly highly ; it is
chamber music for connoisseurs.
Trio for violin, cello and piano
Andante moderato
TSIAJ: Presto
Moderato con moto
CHARLES IVES
(1874-1954)
lt is ironic that Ives, who was deeply rooted in the puritan and often xeno phobic
culture of his native New England and shared many of its conservative
prejudices, should have been hailed since his death as a path -breaking radical, not
only in the United States but in Europe too. Yet one can see how it happened. For
Ives, both the polished academic language used by most American composers of
his generation and also the current 'new music' from Europe-Debussy, Strauss,
Scriabin-were equally irrelevant to his own very personal and local vision. He
rejected them much as an intelligent and sensitive backwoodsman might reject the
manners and diction of polite society-and with much the same mixture of gain and
loss.
Unlike Debussy, who was engaged in a similar attempt to purge his music of
everything stale and second hand, Ives did not have the advantage of being brought
up in a rich musical culture which could provide a secure basis for his own explora tions
and experiments. Thrown back on the stony ground of his own New England
heritage he forged from it, by sheer force of imagination, an individual language
which is sometimes clumsy and eccentric and occasionally intelligible only to the
ear of faith. But more often the intensity of Ives's vision- a deeply nostalgic one
of an America that was already passing during the first fifteen years of this century
when most of his music was written- communicates itself through the very
awkwardness with which he treats his ideas, whether borrowed (hymn -tunes,
popular songs) or original.
This is the case with the present Trio- a musical evocation of Ives's university,
Yale, to which he was deeply attached. The original manuscript bears two alternative
titles. The first reads (in Ives's dog- Latin) 'Trio Yalensia et Americana', which
is dismissed as 'fancy names'-a typical lvesian dig at the academicism he so
detested. The other, 'real' title is 'Yankee Jaws at Mr (or Eli) Yale's School for nice
bad boys! !' (Ives's exclamation marks).
Yale at the turn of the century, the Yale of Dink Stover, was a place of rough
living and high thinking, more akin perhaps to Tom Brown's Rugby than to contemporary
Oxford or Cambridge. That, at any rate, is how it emerges in Ives's impression.
The first movement. he tells us, 'recalled a rather short but serious talk, to
those on the Yale fence, by an old professor of Philosophy.' We may surmise from
the upward striving of the melodic lines and the intense rhythmic clashes that the
professor was an Emersonian transcendentalist after Ives's own heart. Structurally
the piece is ingenious: first a statement by the cello and the upper range of the
piano, then a comparable one by the violin and the piano's lower register, after
which the two are put together and played simultaneously, and rounded off with a
quiet, almost off-hand cadence.
The acronym that heads the second movement-TSIAJ-stands, according to
Ives, for 'the scherzo is a joke'. We might have guessed as much from its helterskelter
agglomeration of popular songs, some at least of which will still be familiar
to an English audience today. After the students' boisterous 'games and antics on a
holiday afternoon' the final movement returns to more serious matters. lt is based, at
least partly, on memories of a Sunday service on campus, and ends with the tune of
'Rock of Ages' sung quietly by cello and violin in turn to the piano's softly dissonant
accompaniment. Mere description hardly does justice to the lyrical power of this
piece, in which deep sentiment is conveyed with absolute honesty.
INTERVAL
A warning gong will be sounded for five minutes before the end of the interval
Trio in F minor, Op.65
Allegro ma non troppo
Allegro grazioso
Pocoadagio
Finale: Allegro con brio
ANTONIN DVORAK
{1841-1904)
This trio, composed in 1883, when Dvorak was at a difficult crossroads in his
career, belies the popular image of him as a sweet singer of native woodnotes wild.
There are the inflections of Moravian folksong to be heard throughout the work, and
its rhythms too, especially in the second and last movements, but they are impreg nated
with an intensity of passion that is entirely personal and can hardly be compared
with anything else in Dvorak's music apart from the almost contemporary
D minor symphony.
Yet Dvorak, even when he is, as here, at his most Brahmsian, is constitution ally
incapable of being sparing with his melodies ; the first subject-group alone of
the opening Allegro propounds at least three distinct ones in its headlong career. Of
these, the very first, in hushed, questioning octaves on the strings, is destined to
recur in different guises. lt ushers in the recapitulation in an over-confident fortissimo
that soon collapses, and it closes the first movement with its question still
unanswered, indeed intensified by new minor-ish inflections. Only at the very end
of the whole work, when it appears at last in a hard-won F major, does it turn from
questioning to assertion.
Apart from the drama implicit in these transformations of the opening idea, the
work is laid out on more or less orthodox lines. The lyrical second subject in D flat is
first stated by the callo and then taken up by the violin, but the development con cerns
itself entirely with the first subject group, producing a brief lyrical episode by
transforming a theme first heard as a fierce challenge into a dreamy melody at half
its original speed: one of the most characteristic things about this work is the
Protean readiness of themes to change their characters according to their situations.
The dance-like second movement is more an intermezzo than a scherzo. lt is in
C sharp (= D flat) minor, with a trio in the major whose smooth lines and softly
syncopated accompaniment form a complete contrast with the staccato elegance of
the main section. For the slow movement (poco adagio) Dvorak moves to A flat,
the relative major of his main key, but the characteristic minor-ish inflections make
themselves heard almost at once. Again it is the cello which has the first statement
of the tender main theme; a quicker-moving one is brought in by the violin, and yet
another two are introduced in the course of the middle section in G sharp (= A flat)
minor and its relative major B (= C flat). A gentle coda draws these multifarious
threads together.
The finale is a dashing sonata -rondo in Dvorak's favourite furiant rhythm, with
its characteristic across-the-bar accents. Its contrasting second subject is a more
leisurely flowing waltz tune. Towards the end of its eventful course the music veers
at last towards the major version of the home key, but this is securely clinched only
when the opening theme of the whole work reappears, as we have seen above,
translated into this triumphant tonality and rhythm.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: During a recent test in the Hall , a note played 'mezzoforte' on the horn measured approximately
65 decibels [db(A)] of sound. A single 'uncovered ' cough gave the same reading . A handkerchief placed over the mouth
when coughing assists in obtaining a 'pianissimo '.
NO SMOKING IN THE AUDITOR IUM OR TAKING OF PHOTOGRAPHS.
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stand or s11 in any of the gangways intersecting the seating, or to sit in any of the other gangways.
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