PERFORMERS

Magdalena Sas - cello (TCCC)
Guest Artists: Leslie Shank - violin, Satoko Hayami - piano, Jennifer Olson - soprano

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PROGRAM

"Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" from Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) - Olivier Messiaen

2 Songs for Piano Trio and Voice op.100 (1924) - Amy Beach
I. A Mirage
II. Stella Viatoris

Fiançailles pour rire  (1939) - Francis Poulenc

Cowboy Songs (1979) - Libby Larsen
I. Bucking Bronco
II. Lift Me Into Heaven Slowly
III. Billy the Kid

Piano Trio in D major (1986) - Jean Françaix
I
II Scherzando
III Andante
IV Allegrissimo

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NOTES ON THE MUSIC

Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus - Olivier Messiaen

According to Paul Griffiths, the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps has become, along with the inaugural performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, “one of the great stories of twentieth-century music.” Given before an audience of prisoners and guards in German-occupied Poland on a cold January day in 1941, the Quartet surely provided a gratifyingly liberating experience for its listeners, however transient it may have been. Messiaen recalled that his works have never “been heard with as much attention and understanding” as at this concert, claiming that the audience numbered in the thousands.

Messiaen pronounces a premise of eternity unequivocally in the preface to the fifth movement, Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus:

“Jesus is here considered as the Word. A long phrase for the cello, infinitely slow, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of this powerful and gentle Word, ‘which the years can never efface.’ Majestically, the melody unfolds in a kind of tender and supreme distance. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in God, and the Word was God.”

2 Songs for Piano Trio and Voice op.100 - Amy Beach

1. “A Mirage” - text by Bertha Oschner

   Now the mountaintop all purple
   Rises thro' a mist of silver,
   While the moon, a disc of cobwebs,
   Shining in the pallid heavens,
   Ghostlike thro' the evening shadows.

   Now the lofty eucalyptus
   Stretches forth its chalky branches
   Toward the lovely, lustred heavens,
   While the drowsy westwind sighing
   Sings the theme of lamentation.

2. “Stella Viatoris” - text by Jesse Hague Nettleton

   Dun grows the sky; 
   The cloudrack dark 
   In the west hangs low. 
   The wind moans by; 
   The bare trees ply their futile weaving Sad and slow; 

   But o'er the east 
   The grim clouds part 
   A fleece of white, 
   A space of blue 
   Aloft, afar, 
   There's a single star, 
   Like the kindness of 
   God Shining thro'. 

Amy Beach, born in 1867, was the first American female composer whose works were widely recognized and performed by major orchestras. A piano prodigy, she was highly acclaimed as a performer both in the USA and Europe. Throughout her career, she was committed to advancing the role of American women composers, becoming the first president of the Society of American Women Composers in 1925.

Fiançailles pour rire - Francis Poulenc

1. La dame d'André

2. Dans l'herbe

3. Il vole

4. Mon cadavre est doux comme un gant

5. Violon

6. Fleurs

“Francis Poulenc did not approve of female singers performing songs that addressed women as love objects; in his book, Diary of my Songs, he noted a particular objection to hearing a woman sing Fauré's lines, "J'aime ton front, j'aime ta bouche, ô ma rebelle, ô ma farouche" (were the beloved a man, he would be "mon rebel"). Because of that slight squeamishness in his character, he made a point of finding and setting texts that he felt were "truly feminine." It caused him no difficulty to do so when the poet was his dear friend, Louise de Vilmorin. During the early years of World War II, she and her husband, a Hungarian count, were marooned in their castle behind enemy lines and no communication was possible with them. Poulenc wrote that he decided to compose this cycle so as to have an excuse to think of her.

The poetry is slight, modest, elegant: nostalgia and reflection, rather than action or immediacy, are the important themes throughout the otherwise unrelated poems. The overall emotional atmosphere is bittersweet, which Poulenc delicately underscores. Of the six, "Dans l'herbe" is the most intense, building from the quiet futility of "I can do nothing more for him," to the anguished despair at "He was calling me." The strangest is number six, in which the alienated speaker describes herself as if she were in her own casket; not surprisingly, Poulenc's harmonic language here is highly chromatic, some of the melodies almost tortuously so. A virtuosic romp for both singer and pianist is "Il vole"; the text plays on the pun between "to steal" and "to flee" and the sparklingly contrapuntal accompaniment (tempo marking: relentlessly presto!) supports a wide-ranging vocal line which lifts off and trails away at last, like the flying, thieving lover it bemoans.”

— Virginia Sublett

Cowboy Songs - Libby Larsen

 I. Bucking Bronco

II. Lift Me Into Heaven Slowly

II. Billy the Kid

“The Cowboy Songs are three character songs. Two of the texts are drawn from cowboy/girl poetry, ‘Bucking Bronco’ with a text by Belle Starr and ‘Billy the Kid’ with an anonymous text. The third, ‘Lift me into Heaven Slowly’ is the retitled ‘Sufi Sam Christian’ of American poet Robert Creeley.

Composed in 1979 for fellow graduate student Jeannie Brindley Barnett, I thought that these 3 poems made a nice set, suggesting a narrative without specifying one, giving me the opportunity to begin working with American English as a source of musical syntax and shape.”
- Libby Larsen

Piano Trio in D major - Jean Françaix

I. 
II. Scherzando
III. Andante
IV. Allegrissimo

French composer and pianist Jean Françaix was known for his light neoclassical style full of  wit and vibrant interchanging musical lines. His compositional language was influenced by works of Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel, however remained distinct and unique in its transparency and humor. Françaix wrote numerous chamber works, as well as larger forms: concerti, operas, ballets, symphonies, etc.

Piano Trio in D major presents the essence of Françaix’s style, with conversational musical lines between all three instruments and rapid character and dynamic changes throughout all four movements.