This concert gathers a wide-ranging set of pieces. We begin and end in the French Romantic world with two composers with whom you may be less familiar: Ernest Chausson and Vincent d’Indy. In the middle we have a set of vocal duets for violin and voice by the Hungarian composer György Kurtág, and a 4-movement work for solo viola and ensemble by Kenji Bunch, celebrating the instrument’s very special voice.
Ernest Chausson was born into an upper-class Parisian family. His father had become wealthy as a building contractor involved in the rebuilding of Paris beginning in 1850. His social position allowed him an insider’s access to the art scene, and he became a regular in the Paris salons. To please his father, he studied law and served briefly as a barrister before making the leap to studying music at the Paris Conservatory in 1879. His teachers there included Jules Massenet and César Franck.
In 1886 Chausson became secretary of the Société nationale de musique. This organization had been formed in 1871 near the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Its purpose was to provide a forum for French music at a time when the popular repertoire heavily favored German composers. Gabriel Faure noted, “The truth is that before 1870 I would never have dreamt of composing a sonata or a quartet. At that period there was no chance of a composer getting a hearing with works like that. I was given the incentive when Saint-Saëns founded the Société nationale de musique in 1871 with the primary aim of putting on works by young composers.”
Ernest Chausson finished the Chanson Perpétuelle on December 17, 1898, creating two versions. The first was for the ensemble you hear tonight and the second for soprano with full orchestra. The work was premiered a month later, and just six months after that, Chausson was dead at age 44 as a result of a bicycle accident. This was the last piece he completed. The text is from poet Charles Cros.
Kafka Fragments by György Kurtág is a work consisting of settings of 40 text fragments from Franz Kafka’s diaries, manuscripts, letters, and sketches that Kurtág collected over many years. Kafka had instructed his friend Max Brod that these materials should be destroyed after his passing in 1924. Brod, instead, collected it all and saw to it that it was published over the next 10 years.
György Kurtág was born in Romania in 1926. His first formal piano and composition lessons began at age 14. In 1946 he moved to Budapest, and became a Hungarian citizen in 1948. In Budapest he entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and met the woman who was to become his wife and life-long piano duo partner, Márta Kinsker.
Following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Kurtág traveled to Paris, where he remained in exile for a about a year. The experience was completely transformative. He had come from a Communist country that tightly controlled state aesthetic policies, however, in Paris he was guided into the world of Western avant-garde by composers Olivier Messien and Darius Milhaud. Kurtág was in a state of deep crisis when he arrived in Paris. He said, “I realized to the point of despair that nothing I had believed to constitute the world was true.” He was guided out of these depths by the art psychologist Marianne Stein, to whom he dedicated Kafka Fragments.
During his time in Paris Kurtág rediscovered Kafka, and was also introduced to the music of Anton Webern. Webern’s approach of extreme condensation of musical elements had a profound impact on Kurtág. A wonderful description comes from music journalist Tom Service, who explains that Kurtág’s style “involves reducing music to the level of the fragment, the moment, with individual pieces or movements lasting mere seconds, or a minute, perhaps two.”
Kurtág worked incredibly slowly, exercising a Cartesian process of questioning and redoing until arriving at his desired expression. The seeds of Kafka Fragments were planted in the late 50’s but did not come to fruition until 1986. Tonight, we offer an excerpted section of the hour-long work selected by the performers.
Kenji Bunch’s The Viola Burns Longer is a glorious celebration of the viola. He writes:
The Viola Burns Longer (2024) is a suite of four short vignettes for solo viola with piano and string quartet. Reclaiming the familiar punchline of a well-worn viola joke (whatʼs the difference between the violin and viola…?), this work envisions the viola as a mythical creature of great beauty and supernatural power, capable of self-immolation and regeneration. The four movements use different aspects of fire as points of departure to explore disparate sound worlds that demonstrate the broad range and expressive capabilities the magical instrument possesses when in the hands of a highly skilled conjurer. These aspects of fire are:
I. Glow: a melody rises out of a blur of slowly expanding harmonies.
II. Flicker: sharp bursts of activity pop out of a texture of plucked, off-kilter rhythms.
III. Smolder: a blues-tinged ballad evoking a smoky nightclub after hours.
IV. Blaze: a raging sprint to the finish!
This work was commissioned by The Colorado College Summer Music Festival for its 40th anniversary season. It was written for and dedicated to violist Toby Appel, my great mentor and friend, who premiered the work.
We end the program with music of Paul Marie Théodo Vincent d‘Indy, a contemporary and good friend of Ernest Chausson. Vincent was born in 1851 to a family descended from royalty. He was raised by his tyrannical grandmother, who hammered moral and intellectual discipline into him. She also imparted a great love of culture and saw that he received a fine musical education from the best teachers. By age 16, much to his family’s chagrin, he had decided on a career in music. After a voluntary tour of duty in the Franco-Prussian War, he began his musical life in earnest, entering the Paris Conservatory in 1871. In addition to his work as a composer, he sought practical experience through work as an opera prompter, percussionist, and chorus master.
Like Chausson, d’Indy was active in the Société nationale de musique, succeededing in works by non-French composers to be showcased as well. In 1894, feeling disappointed by what he considered a lack of rigor in the curriculum of the Paris Conservatory, d’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris with two colleagues. However, as a competing school, it never attained the level of the Conservatory. By 1904 d’Indy was both the director of Schola Cantorum and serving on the Conservatory faculty.
In 1905, d’Indy’s first wife died. Without her steadying influence he became extremely worried about current trends in music; he doubled down on his distaste for new musical approaches and became more dogmatic in his teaching. In 1920 he remarried to a much younger woman. D’Indy’s biographer, Robert Orledge, observed that this change “brought a true creative rebirth, witnessed in the serene Mediterranean-inspired compositions of his final decade.”
In his late years d’Indy’s style became simpler. The Quintet in g minor opus 81 is concise and less rigidly constructed than many works that preceded it. D’Indy often used irregular meters and here uses 5/4 as the basis for his scherzo. The slow movement is reminiscent of gentle folk songs, while the lively Finale draws the piece to satisfying conclusion.