Tuesday, August 12
A Recital by Augustin Hadelich violin and
Orion Weiss piano

Charles Ives

Violin Sonata No. 4, op. 63, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting”

Though Charles Ives is known today as a musical iconoclast, he received his formal musical training at one of the most tradition-bound institutions in the country. It was while a composition student at Yale University working under the direction of the German-trained Horatio Parker that Ives learned much of the European craft of nineteenth-century composition. But it wasn’t long before his peculiar bent for quotation and fragmentation and his spirited Yankee individualism began to supplant the formal conventions Parker had tried to instill in him.

Ives inherited his predilection for musical experimentation from his father, an Army bandmaster during the Civil War and something of a musical eccentric himself. The elder Ives had taught his son harmony and counterpoint. But once he was at Yale, Ives started synthesizing the diverse aspects of his own musical experiences: Protestant hymnody (from his years as a professional church organist), music hall songs, popular song, art music, and an abundant curiosity that pushed him to explore new ways of melding these various strands into an individualistic musical style.

Then Ives embarked on a successful career in insurance, relegating composition to his spare time. But the financial freedom Ives enjoyed gave him the musical independence to write whatever he wanted to without reference to current fashions or trends. That liberating autonomy produced a corpus of extraordinarily innovative works that continue to color the American musical landscape long after Ives’s death in 1954.

Among Ives’s numerous chamber works are four violin sonatas that share an unusual degree of stylistic and formal consistency. Each is in three movements, alternating fast and slow tempos, either by adhering to the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern of a Classical sonata or by inverting it. And each is deeply grounded in the nineteenth-century Protestant hymnody and Gospel song traditions that Ives returned to so frequently in his works.

All four of the violin sonatas were completed in the second decade of the twentieth century. In them, the nostalgic recollections of parlor song and Revivalist hymnody reflect the trend, especially apparent during World War I, towards musical evocations of a more peaceful past.

Ives based the first movement of the modestly proportioned Fourth Sonata on an actual memory, not a fictional scenario. He recalled that at one particular camp meeting, during the Children’s Day, an organist’s postlude practice was interrupted by boys who started singing a march-like hymn complete with boisterously wrong notes. Ives’s father then encouraged the young composer to accompany the lusty singing in an entirely different key. The second movement is based on the hymn Jesus Loves Me, which is accompanied by music reflecting the outdoor sounds of nature on a summer day, “the west wind in the pines and oaks, the running brook.” The third movement then returns to the boys’ marching, this time to the tune of Shall We Gather at the River.

— © Luke Howard

Stephen Hartke

Netsuke

American composer Stephen Hartke owns the “postmodern” label proudly. The influences on his music range widely, from Stravinsky to Bebop. In 2011 he composed six short duets for violin and piano, inspired by six netsuke (Japanese miniature sculptures) from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In his duets Hartke responds not only to the symbolic narratives of each netsuke, but to their visual appearance as well.

“Tengu” is a hawk-like goblin, a shape-shifter who lures hypocrites to their doom. Mercurial piano figurations ripple behind punching violin chords before the instruments trade roles and ultimately vanish into silence. The next movement, “Tadamori,” depicts a midnight scuffle between a samurai and a poor servant he has mistaken for a thief. The layered instrumentation in this movement illustrates a similar narrative, but there is a gentler second half in which the violin slides microtonally over sparse piano motives.

“Tanuki” is also a shape-shifter, shown in this netsuke playing the shamisen—a plucked string instrument somewhat similar to a banjo. With percussive strikes and intricate composite rhythms, the interplay between the instruments directly invokes the sounds of Japanese theater. The fearsome-looking “Baku” of the fourth duet is a shy creature who protects sleepers from nightmares. Harsh scraping on the violin strings contrasts with gentle piano arpeggios in a kind of uneasy lullaby.

In the fifth netsuke, a rich man is hijacked by demons who cart him down to hell. A measured piano ostinato in the lower register gradually accelerates to catch up with the violin’s darting attempts at escape. But the violin motives are finally trapped and dragged unwillingly to the underworld. In the final movement the piano’s granitic chords form the background of a serene mountain landscape against which the violin delineates diaphanous outlines and shimmering contours through the mist. — © Luke Howard

Daniel Bernard Roumain

Filter

In less than five minutes, any perception that a violinist cannot shred just as hard as a rock guitarist is shattered by Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Filter. A Haitian-American composer and violinist who has worked with musicians from Marin Alsop to Philip Glass to Lady Gaga, Roumain erases the lines between musical genres with this show stopping work, a cross between Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata and The Devil Went Down to Georgia. First written in 1992 and then incorporated into his 2002 Voodoo Violin Concerto and revised in 2017 for violinist Rachel Barton Pine, Filter is Roumain’s most popular piece for violin, and is performed by virtuosos worldwide.

Making use of wild vibrato, glissandos, and other extended techniques, Filter can be performed by acoustic or electric violin and with or without the addition of electronic processing. A blues-inflected intro leads into blazing fiddling that Augustin Hadelich calls “an adrenaline rush, both fun and dangerous.” The title comes from the unique effect akin to electronic filtering that is created by sliding the bow across the strings—toward the bridge, sul ponticello, the tone becomes glassy, emphasizing harmonic overtones; toward the fingerboard, sul tasto, the violin whispers.

With the notation “freely, Hendrix-like” atop the score, Filter is both breathless and breathtaking—Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet by way of Woodstock and Berghain.

— © David Hoyt

Samuel Barber

Excursion in G-flat major, op. 20, no. 3

By the early 1940s, Samuel Barber was one of the most performed American composers, his popular Adagio for Strings a very recent success. Barber was also an accomplished baritone and pianist, and the singing quality of his melodic writing, which turns up throughout his oeuvre, is on special display in the third of his four excursions for piano. Barber described the set as “‘Excursions’ in small Classical forms [translated] into regional American idioms”; he identified the third of these as having “derived from a style known as ‘Calypso,’ a jazz-folk form from the island of Trinidad, lyric and languorous.” In his biography of Barber, Howard Pollack has demonstrated that this theme-and-variations movement, with its “singsong melodies and complex polyrhythms,” points far more to calypso music, which was popular at the time, than to the cowboy song Streets of Laredo, a dubious connection that was attached to the piece in the 1950s. There is also a suggestion of steel drums, Pollack notes, in the “splashy clusters of notes.” The variations build to an assertive statement of the melody before a final return to the opening calmness.

— © Matthew Mugmon

John Adams

Road Movies

There was a period when John Adams was so focused on orchestral works and opera that he studiously avoided chamber composition. The delicacy and intimacy of the chamber genre didn’t suit his musical language at the time. But after composing his second grand opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, in 1991, Adams completely reassessed his musical language. He wrote a Chamber Symphony the following year, and began to dip his toes into chamber works more frequently.

Road Movies, written in 1995 for violin and piano, is one of the legacies of this renewed interest in chamber composition. Adams notes that the title is “total whimsy,” probably suggested by the Swing rhythms of the piano “groove.” But he adds that many of his works are inspired by movement through space, crossing a landscape. In that regard, the first movement is, in the composer’s words, “a relaxed drive down a not unfamiliar road.” Over an easygoing groove in the piano, the violin riffs on motives that, like roadside objects on a road trip, approach and pass with little drama. For the second movement, Adams imagined a solitary figure on the porch of a desert cabin who reflects pensively on a simple melody. For this movement the violinist tunes the G string a step lower, adding to the “sagging” quality. The finale, though, “is for four-wheel drives only.” A virtuosic argument between piano and violin, it takes its title from a MIDI sequencer’s ability to adjust swung rhythms with alarming exactitude. Adams notes that “40% provides a giddy, bouncy ride, somewhere between an Ives ragtime and a long rideout by the Goodman Orchestra, circa 1939.”

— © Luke Howard

Aaron Copland

Nocturne | Ukulele Serenade | Hoe Down, from Rodeo

Aaron Copland’s compositions of the 1920s are often overshadowed by the celebrated ballets of the 1930s and 1940s such as Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring. But while his earlier works are often more abstract, thorny, and boldly dissonant than his more well-known compositions, they are just as engaging.

Copland composed his Two Pieces for Violin and Piano in 1926 for a concert in Paris by the violinist Samuel Dushkin; Copland was one of Nadia Boulanger’s first American students in that city, and the concert was an opportunity to showcase American composers abroad. The Nocturne from this pair of pieces begins with a gentle, rocking piano accompaniment based on a short descending pattern underneath a languid violin melody that also centers on descending motion, all appropriate to the suggestion of nighttime relaxation. Piano and violin lazily exchange material, and a brief middle section maintains the languorous feeling before the opening material returns, this time with an emphasis on the higher registers in the violin. A brief cadenza of sorts for the violin gets a response from the piano before the quiet close.

The Ukelele Serenade is decidedly more outgoing. It makes use of quarter tones (notes halfway between the semitones that are usually the smallest intervals in Western music) in the fiddle-like violin part, an effect Copland linked to the Blues. The piece is meant to suggest the sound of the ukelele in chords for both instruments. The piece alternates, sometimes abruptly, between festive and anticipatory moods. Copland carried over some of the folklike flavor of the Ukelele Serenade all the way to his ballet Rodeo, one of his most popular works.

Rodeo, choreographed by Agnes de Mille, had its premiere in 1942 and followed Billy the Kid as a ballet about the Old West. One of Rodeo’s most recognizable pieces—in addition to another nocturne, the “Corral Nocturne”—is the famous “Hoe-Down.” The term refers specifically to a folk dance in duple meter, but also suggests the party or gathering at which such a dance might take place. The music of this segment of the ballet is a clear demonstration of Copland’s populist style, with its straightforward melodies and harmonies—though not without its piquant dissonances here and there.

Copland’s “Hoe-Down” music has been heard in a number of contexts beyond the ballet. While the Ukelele Serenade is a bit too disjointed for such a mainstream context, the version of the “Hoe-Down” for violin and piano can serve as a reminder of the roots of Copland’s more widely known music in his earlier works.

— © Matthew Mugmon

Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he appears extensively on the world’s foremost concert stages. Highlights of the 2024–25 season have included returns to the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Vienna Philharmonic, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Cleveland Orchestra. As artist-in-residence, he performs with the Dresden Philharmonic throughout the season. He performed solo violin recitals in London, Barcelona, Gothenburg, Tallinn, and Abu Dhabi. In the summer of 2025, he will perform extensively in Asia. Hadelich’s most recent album American Road Trip, a journey through the landscape of American music with pianist Orion Weiss, was released in August 2024. Augustin Hadelich, a dual American-German citizen born in Italy to German parents, rose to fame when he won the gold medal at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Further distinctions followed, including an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2009), the U.K.’s Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship (2011), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter (2017). In 2018 he was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. Hadelich holds an artist diploma from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Joel Smirnoff, and in 2021 he was appointed to the violin faculty at Yale School of Music. He plays a 1744 violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, known as ‘Leduc, ex Szeryng,’ on loan from the Tarisio Trust.

A sought-after soloist and chamber music collaborator, Orion Weiss is an internationally acclaimed pianist. He has performed with all the major orchestras of North America, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic. In 2024 Weiss released Arc III, the final album in his Arc recital trilogy (First Hand Records). Known for his affinity for chamber music, Weiss performs at venues and festivals around the United States with such artists as violinists Augustin Hadelich, William Hagen, and James Ehnes; pianists Michael Brown and Shai Wosner; cellist Julie Albers; and the Ariel, Parker, and Pacifica Quartets. A native of Ohio, Weiss attended the Cleveland Institute of Music and made his Cleveland Orchestra debut performing Liszt’s First Piano Concerto in 1999. The next month, with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, Weiss stepped in to replace André Watts for a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and was immediately invited to return later that year. Weiss’s awards include the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year, Gilmore Young Artist Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and more. His teachers have included Paul Schenly, Jerome Lowenthal, and Sergei Babayan. In 2004 he graduated from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Emanuel Ax. Learn more at www.orionweiss.com.