About the Artists:

Trio Solisti has recently been called "the most exciting piano trio in America" by The New Yorker. They are known for their vivacious playing of a wide variety of styles and also for their commitment to new music, garnering pieces written expressly for them as a group and as individuals by Paul Moravec, Philip Glass, and Kevin Puts, then dazzling audiences with these works' world premiers. Trio Solisti's latest CD is titled Café Music, after the Schoenfield composition that we will hear this evening and also includes the Piazzolla, Gershwin, and Turina works included in tonight's performance.

Program:

Trio No. 2 in B minor, Op. 76		Joaquin Turina	1882-1949
Lento - Allegro molto moderato Molto vivace Lento - Andante mosso - Allegretto Previous performance on our series: Amadeus Trio, 2004
Café Music		Paul Schoenfield	1947 -
Allegro Andante moderato - Rubato Presto First performance in this series
Songs from Porgy and Bess		George Gershwin	1898-1937
First performance in this series
Intermission
Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas)		Astor Piazzolla	1921-1992
Otonpo Proteño (Fall) Inviemo Proteño (Winter) Primavera Proteño (Spring) Verano Proteño (Summer) First performance in this series
Le Grand Tango (arr. Kutnowski)		Astor Piazzolla	1921-1992
First performance in this series

About the Music:

Joaquin Turina (1882-1949) was a Spanish composer of Italian descent, whose family wished him to study medicine. He began his medical studies to please them, but soon thereafter, gave up anything not having to do with music, thus beginning his composition career. Turina embarked on piano and composition lessons and by 1897 was known in Seville as a master of each. He lived and wrote in Madrid, then Paris, where he became a student at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent D'Indy and influenced by the music of Claude Debussy. Most important socially and professionally, however was his friendship with fellow Spaniard Manuel de Falla, who advised Turina to look for musical material in the popular music of Spain. Upon Turina's graduation from the Schola in 1913, he had great success in Paris and Madrid, beginning his rise to prominence as one of Spain's highest regarded composers. His second piano trio in b minor (op. 76) was composed in 1933 and opens with a dramatic, lyrical, romantic melody. The second movement is brief but agitated, with quick, short bowings in the strings offset by glowing block chords in the piano. Turina opens the third and final movement with the cello in its high register, joined in dramatic melody by the violin. After an interlude in which the piano plays block chords commented on by the strings' pizzicato, the movement proceeds in a lovely romantic vein, including a delightful folklike melody that arises in the middle of the movement.

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Paul Schoenfield (b.1947) is a Detroit native, who has shown in his compositional oeuvre a particular affinity for chamber music with piano. His music demands extreme technical ability on the performers' parts, with contrapunctal textures and changing metres. He has commented that his music is "not the kind of music to relax to, but the kind that makes people sweat; not only the performer, but the audience." Indeed, this café music is highly caffeinated; each player has much to express in the first movement Allegro, especially in the violin's jazzy jubilations and the piano's ragtime flavor. Movement two, Andante moderato - Rubato, gives respite, with its melancholy melodies and a slower, but still jazz-inflected tempo and rhythms. The Presto final movement showcases each of the instrument's melodic abilities with the cello taking a more dominant role and all three instruments exerting an incredible amount of musical energy to close this heart-pounding piece.

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George Gershwin called Porgy and Bess a "folk opera." The composer had had a life-long interest in African-American experiences, was attracted to ragtime when he was a young piano player, had used blued techniques in his songs as early as 1920, and become publicly known as a "jazz" composer from the time of Rhapsody in Blue (1924). These elements are all at play within his magnum opus. Upon reading DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy in 1926, Gershwin immediately contacted the author to propose a collaboration; nine years later in 1935, the opera, (with a libretto by Heyward), came to fruition. Music historican Richard Crawford notes that Gershwin was doubted by the establishment in its creation: "[his] credentials and prior experience casued some contemporaries to doubt that he was technically equipped to write a fully-fledged opera." Moreover, the fact that the show's original location was on Broadway instead of in an opera house contributed more fuel to the fire of doubt concerning the opera's clout. The songs from the opera have an immense popularity and enjoy a life of their own, indeed this evening's performance of "Bess, You is My Woman Now," "There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon for New York," "Summertime" and "It Ain't Necessarily So" demonstrate their effective translation to a trio context.

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Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was an Argentine composer, bandleader and bandoneón (button accordion) player. He emigrated to New York in 1924, but later lived back in Buenos Aires and Paris, studying in the latter with the preeminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. During his lifetime, his type of tango (called tango nuevo), which integrated fugues, chromaticism, elements of jazz, and dissonance, was resisted at home but appreciated abroad, particularly in France and the USA. However, by the 1980s, his home country of Argentina believed him to be the "savior" of tango. By the time of his death in 1992, he had composed over 750 works.

In 1965, Piazzolla committed to writing incidental music for a play by Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz which was to be recorded but then mimed by musicians during the actual performance. On returning from travels from Brazil, Piazzolla realized that he had not yet fulfilled his obligation; the music was yet unwritten and the recording session was the very next day. Thus, amazingly, he wrote the Buenos Aires Summer (Verano Porteño) overnight! The other seasons were written later, in 1969-70, and the four pieces were treated independently by the composer, although he did perform them with his quintet as a suite on occasion. Originally scored for violin (viola), piano, electric guitar, double bass and bandoneón, Trio Solisti plays an arrangement by the composer's sideman, José Bragato and Maria Brachmann. Four Buenos Aires Seasons (Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas) is one of Piazzolla's best-known works and will, not surprisingly, make one think of Vivaldi's Four Seasons through its title. In fact, there are traces of the Italian composer's melodies, most obviously at the close of Invienro porteño (winter).

La Grande Tango was composed during the early 1980s at Piazzolla's summer home, Chalet El Casco. When Piazzolla wasn't writing music, he was fishing for sharks, which he held no guilt over, since he believed them to be bad creatures. In Azzi and Colleri's biography on Piazzolla, which its title from this piece, the authors discuss the work in a chapter called "Sharks and Concertos." They describe Le Grand Tango as in ternary form, with all of the composer's hallmarks of "tight construction, melodic inspiration, [and] rhythmic complexity." No lightweight in Piazzolla's oeuvre, Le Grand Tango is considered by the authors to be "just about the most exciting music Piazzolla ever wrote, a masterpiece." The work is for cello and piano and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom Piazzolla sent the score, but the cellist did not look at the music for several years; the wait for the composer to hear it played by him was eight years long, ending in 1990. However, Rostropovich became "astounded" by the composer's talent and more recently, Yo-Yo Ma has described Le Grand Tango as one of his favorite pieces. Trio Solisti plays the work in an arrangement by the composer Martin Kutnowski.