Crossing Borders

Thursday, June 13 | 7:00 p.m.

Kirk in the Hills
Sponsored by Marguerite Munson Lentz & David Lentz

Artists | Andrew Litton, Alvin Waddles, Katharina Kang Litton, Paul Watkins, Marion Hayden, David Taylor,Trio Gaia

Program Notes | © Ty Bouque 2024

In keeping with our festival theme of “that which connects,” doors are exactly what we’re thinking through tonight. The operative word is borders: What does it mean
for music to cast itself towards thresholds, limits, demarcations, lines in the sand,
any divide separating this from that or there from here? Each work on this program locates a perceived hard boundary—national lines, physical thresholds, intellectual limits, generic divisions—and makes it thin, slippery and permeable like bubble-film. These pieces are snapshots of transition states in a chemical reaction: we meet them in the halfway place.

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Franz Joseph Haydn’s move to London in 1791 was a long time coming. Beginning in the early 1780’s, the boy-soprano-turned-composer found a rabid fanbase in urban England, but his financial contract to Hungary’s Prince Nikolaus I prevented him from reaping the social fruits of that celebrity. It was only Nikolaus’ death in 1790, coupled with a standing (not to mention well-padded) invitation from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon, that permitted him to finally make the trek. On New Year’s Day of 1791, Haydn crossed the English Channel from Calais to Dover; it was the first time the 58-year-old had ever seen the ocean.

At this point in the 18th century, London was a cosmopolitan hot spot. Bolstered
by Parisians fleeing the Revolution, the perfect storm of talent, population, and cultural investment in new music generated the most robust professional music scene in Europe: London was drowning in virtuosos, and there was a substantial and appreciative audience. Haydn suddenly found himself honorary composer-in- residence of a city eager to push the physical limitations of their instruments, and his music had to adapt to match the moment.

Though written shortly after his return to Hungary in 1793, the Piano Trio in A Major bears all the evidence of the professional changes undergone in those first two London years. The plot-twist callback to development material at the close of the first movement, the extreme filigree of ornamental detail that decorates the melodies of the second, and the deployment of sudden dynamic shifts (facilitated by the introduction of the pianoforte into European musical life only a few years earlier) for drama in the third all demonstrate a composer whose ideas of performer limitations have recently undergone drastic extension. As far as the listener goes, he is still pleasing his new patron, Prince Anton: the dedication to the Princess makes that much obvious, and the work does nothing to break the mold for the listener. But the borders of technical dexterity and imagination to which Haydn’s early work was beholden have now fallen away, and he is offering both trust and physical challenge to his players and blurring another line—between chamber music and concerto—along the way.

Johannes Brahms’ threshold is the most vulnerable and poetic of the night. Premiered in a private performance with the composer at the piano in September of 1894, the Opus 120 was his very last instrumental work, and only two more vocal works precede his death in the spring of 1897. A lifetime of labor at the chamber medium ends here: this is, in many ways, the death of Brahms as we’ve come to know him.

The circumstances of commission are equally remarkable. In 1891, Brahms announced himself publicly retired, feeling he had no more to say in music. It took the playing of clarinet virtuoso Richard Mühlfeld to drag the melancholic master out of his slump and convince him to take the pen back up. The last eleven opuses are dominated by the instrument, and in their few years of shared work, Brahms wrote for Mühlfeld some of the instrument’s most beloved music. (His Clarinet Quintet from the same period can be heard in our concert on June 18 .) 

These last two sonatas are unlike anything else in music. Brahms is no longer the effusive Romantic he was in his youth; this is late-life writing, devastatingly reserved, that knows how much can be done with how little. The structural relationships between melody and form are the most slippery and idiosyncratic of his career: no hard borders, no sudden changes, all passing as water over rocks. Here, in all these places where musical ideas exit one state towards another, we can hear the poeticism of death’s threshold. There is no sense of failure or of loss in this music, but rather of quietude, of being at peace with final change. The sonatas have the eloquence of a last will and testament, written in steady hand before the final doorway.

In tonight’s performance, the Opus 120 also calls our attention to translation, itself an act of border-crossing that leaves traces of both hemispheres on the object. Brahms himself, shortly after the premiere, arranged the pair of sonatas for viola at Joachim’s behest (and not totally willingly: letters reveal his initial hesitation to do so). A clarinet sonata transformed into a viola sonata is no simple feat. Idiosyncratic instrumental writing requires accounting for the limitations of mechanism: the demands of breath, for instance, differentiate the clarinet from a viola, as do its keys, which make note- changes far easier across extended range. Where the clarinet slithers, liquid and elusive, the viola must start each phrase with a bow-stroke, lending the transcriptions a more rarified and often far more metric quality than the original. But the warmth and woody resonance of that low C string adds a quivering vibration almost like tears, and though the musical material breathes with the capacity of lungs, it here speaks with the infinite delicacy of the hand.

Tonight we’ll hear a viola that still remembers, far in the distance, the clarinet that it once was. A border was crossed, but softly, tenderly, and not without carrying something of the original over with it.

As for Claude Bolling, the borderline is right there in the title: Suite for Cello and
 Jazz Trio. Bolling, trained first as a jazz pianist and later as a film composer, made
 his international name in 1975 with a parallel formula, the Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, written for and recorded alongside Jean-Pierre Rampal. The Columbia record skyrocketed Bolling to a household name and spent ten years on the Billboard Classical Top 40, earning the duo a Grammy nomination along the way and Bolling a whole slew of commissions for blue-chip stars. Tonight’s work, completed in 1984, was written for Yo-Yo Ma.

When anything is crossing over—like we saw in Brahms’ clarinet-to-viola transformation—it’s important to think about fidelity. (It’s no accident that the first album cover for Bolling’s suite featured a cartoon flute and piano smoking side- by-side in bed; the exchange of identity is a fundamentally sensual and intimate act. One is giving of one’s body to the other.) What has made Bolling so popular to listeners on both sides of the exchange is that nothing is misused or appropriated: the suites have the uncanny ability to not just simulate jazz but actualize it without compromising the structural integrity of classical chamber music. It is that rare kind of hybrid in which two presences are not halved, and therefore less, by sharing space, but rather more authentically themselves for their proximity to the Other.

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Tonight, in different ways, all three works trace out a liminality of imagination. They situate themselves willingly at borderlines, imagining hybridity, extension, and threshold as the very foundations of their truth. What binds this program is a willingness to think beyond a social delineation towards something utopian, something unknown and invisible in the between. © Ty Bouque 2024