MOZART IN LOVE

ANGELA PARK, Pianist

Friday, October 17, 8 pm

Grace Church on-the Hill, 300 Lonsdale Road

Mozart's tender musical love-letter and two great Romantic masterpieces

ELGAR Serenade

MOZART Piano Concerto K 271

TCHAIKOVSKY Souvenir de Florence

Pianist Angela Park has established herself as one of Canada's leading young musicians. Equally accomplished in both solo and chamber music experience, Angela's versatility has led to continued success in performances across Canada, as well as in parts of the United States, Europe, and Mexico.

Born in London, Ontario, Angela began her musical studies at the age of three. With the guidance of James Anagnoson, she went on to become the youngest Gold Medal winner of the Western Ontario Conservatory of Music, as well as consistent recipient of numerous awards and prizes at the Ontario Provincial Festivals, Canadian National Music Festival, and the Canadian Music Competitions.

In recent years, Angela has achieved further success at the international level, winning the grand prize at the 2001 Grace Welsh Prize for Piano in Chicago, and fifth prize at the 2003 World Piano Competition in Cincinnati. In 2006 Angela was the only Canadian representative and recipient of a prize at the Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary. Most recently, she obtained a medal at the 2007 Maria Canals International Competition in Barcelona.

Angela has performed as soloist with Orchestra London Canada, Sinfonia Toronto, Canadian Sinfonietta, the UWO Symphony Orchestra, and the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of conductors such as Raffi Armenian and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Solo and chamber music appearances include performances for the Steinway Society of Chicago, University of Illinois of Chicago, Montreal Debut Series, Glenn Gould Studio's OnStage and Music Around Us, University of Toronto Faculty and New Music Series, and numerous others. Her live performances have been recorded and broadcast on CBC National Radio and on National Public Radio in the United States.

Angela has had the privilege of collaborating with internationally distinguished artists, including violist Rivka Golani, violinists Scott St. John and Erika Raum, and the string members of the Gryphon Trio. She is a founding member of Made In Canada, an award-winning ensemble that received the CBC Galaxie Rising Stars Award in 2006, and was recently included in Chatelaine's 2008 anniversary list of "80 amazing Canadian women to watch".

Angela’s musical and academic education includes violin performance at the national level for ten years and studies in Biology at the University of Western Ontario. After studying with William Aide at the University of Toronto, Angela earned her Master of Music Degree in Performance with highest honours in 2003. In 2004 Angela received an Ontario Arts Council Chalmers Professional Development Grant, allowing for private studies in New York with Jacob Lateiner. Angela is currently pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in Performance from the Université de Montréal, under the guidance of Paul Stewart.

 

PROGRAM NOTES

 

Serenade for Strings in E Minor, Op.20 by Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
 

Great composers are best known for their large scale creations. Often years of writing smaller works (sometimes with an eye to their commercial value) and laboring in noncreative jobs (both musical and otherwise) precede that elusive fame. To Sir Edward Elgar’s regret, he would become best known for the first of his Pomp and Circumstance marches. Yet he also penned such profound, mature masterpieces as the Enigma Variations (one of conductor Arturo Toscanini’s signature pieces), the serene Violin Concerto, and the eloquent Cello Concerto.
 
Before all of that compositional output, Elgar conducted amateur music societies and wrote pieces that were not too difficult for part time musicians. The genesis of the Serenade for Strings was probably a set of Three Pieces for Strings that Elgar completed for the Worcester Musical Union in 1888. Four years later (in 1892) Elgar reinvented the basic material as the Serenade. This was the most complex, ambitious score that he had turned out at that time. Strangely, the premiere occurred in Antwerp, Belgium in 1896. Elgar belatedly conducted the London premiere in 1905. (That was considerably after the public acclaim for the Enigma Variations.) In many ways a precursor of Elgar’s stately Introduction and Allegro, the Serenade for Strings remained one of the composer’s favorite works. At his last recording session in 1933, the Serenade was one of the scores he conducted. (Elgar became the first composer to leave an authoritative recorded archive of his own interpretations of his scores. His recording of the Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin and the London Symphony Orchestra still remains the touchstone version of that score.)
 
The heart of the richly textured Serenade is the second movement Larghetto. A noble melody seems to unfold with spacious, unforced ebb and flow in this gem of orchestral string writing. The movement has often been compared to the Nimrod section of the Enigma Variations. Framing this serene outpouring is a beautifully sculpted Allegro piacevole – a lively theme followed by a wistful secondary subject – and pastoral Allegretto which concludes with a reprise of the work’s opening motif.

 

Piano Concerto No. 9 E-Flat Major, K. 271 ("Jenamy") Composed in 1777

by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756  Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791

As is also the case with the numbering of Mozart's symphonies, those of his piano concertos have no authority with the composer and were a later 19th-century invention. The number 9 for the Concerto in E-flat obscures the fact that his first seven concertos were arrangements of piano sonatas by C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, and lesser lights, possibly an assignment given to the pre-teen composer by his father, Leopold. The Concerto in D major, K. 175, is Mozart's first independent piano concerto, which he wrote at age 17. Three more followed in early 1776 (K. 238, 242, 246), before he wrote his "Ninth" in Salzburg in January 1777, the month of his 21st birthday. It has long been recognized as his first great piano concerto, and an effort that Mozart would not surpass until he moved to Vienna some four years later.

Countless beloved pieces of so-called classical music have a nickname, often one not given by the composer. Mozart would have no idea what the "Jupiter" Symphony is, Beethoven the "Emperor" Concerto or "Moonlight" Sonata, or Schubert the "Unfinished" Symphony. The names sometimes come from savvy publishers who know they can improve sales, or from impresarios, critics, or performers. The case of the Concerto we hear today is particularly interesting, and only recently explained. Little is known of the genesis or first performance of the E-flat Concerto. Twentieth-century accounts usually stated that Mozart composed it for a French keyboard virtuoso named Mademoiselle Jeunehomme, who visited Salzburg in the winter of 1777. Nothing else was known, not even the woman's first name.

Last year, the Viennese musicologist Michael Lorenz, a specialist in the music of Mozart's and Schubert's time and a brilliant archival detective, figured out the mystery. The nickname was coined by the French scholars Théodore de Wyzewa and Georges de Saint-Foix in their classic early-20th-century study of the composer. As Lorenz explains, "Since one of their favorite names for Mozart was 'jeune homme' (young man), they presented this person as 'Mademoiselle Jeunehomme.'"

In a September 1778 letter Mozart wrote to his father, he referred to three recent concertos, "one for the jenomy [K. 271], litzau [K. 246], and one in B-flat [K. 238]" that he was selling to a publisher. Leopold later called the first pianist "Madame genomai." (Spellings were often variable and phonetic at the time.) Lorenz has identified her as Victoire Jenamy, born in Strasbourg in 1749 and married to a rich merchant, Joseph Jenamy, in 1768. Victoire was the daughter of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Jean Georges Noverre (1727-1810), who was a good friend of Mozart's. He had choreographed a 1772 Milan production of Mozart's opera Lucio Silla and later commissioned the ballet Les Petits Riens for Paris. Although we still know little about Victoire Jenamy—she does not appear to have been a professional musician, though clearly Mozart admired her playing—Mozart's first great piano concerto can now rightly be called by its proper name: "Jenamy."

When Mozart performed his own concertos, he would usually improvise cadenzas—the flashy solo sections that occur near the end of some movements—and therefore had no need to write them down. But because the Concerto we hear today was written for someone else, Mozart felt called upon to provide them. He apparently retained affection for the piece as he was still playing it years later in Vienna; it may have been the first of his concertos to be published. (The lack of distinguishing numbers or keys often makes it difficult to know exactly which of so many possible works are referred to in letters, reviews, advertisements, and programs—which usually just called a piece "new.")

The Concerto uses a modest orchestra of two oboes, two horns, and strings. The manuscript specifies harpsichord, still in common use at the time even as the piano was replacing it; nonetheless Mozart probably performed it most often on the piano. The opening of the piece is particularly noteworthy for the immediate presence of the keyboard in answer to a short orchestral fanfare. Not until Beethoven's last two piano concertos would the soloist make such an early appearance. Equally unexpected is that within the breathless final movement rondo Mozart inserts a minuet section, which momentarily slows the pace. (Lorenz speculates that this unusual feature might have been "an allusion to Noverre the dancer.") Even at such a young age Mozart was breaking with traditions at the same time as he sought to perpetuate them.

 

 

Souvenir de Florence by Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky 1840-1893

As early as June 1887, Tchaikovsky had started on a string sextet for the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society (which had requested a work the preceding October), but he gave it up after a few days. He was not to return to the medium until the early months of 1890 when, while living in Florence and deeply involved with his opera The Queen of Spades, he wrote down the melody that was to become the main theme of the slow movement. This fact alone-and no further programmatic connotation-motivated the title of the finished composition, Souvenir de Florence.

Souvenir de Florence is one of Tchaikovsky’s last multi-movement instrumental works (only the Sixth Symphony followed) and the last in which he retained the traditional patterns of abstract symphonic form. He worked out a splendidly detailed sonata-form exposition for the first movement, in which the transition grows out of a three-note figure that appears in the main theme and then continues under the surprisingly shy entrance of the second theme in the first violin. Although formal structure was always something of a struggle for Tchaikovsky, this exposition clearly demonstrates the hard-won mastery he had earned over the years.

The slow movement is among the most purely personal passages in Tchaikovsky’s output, and the one place in the score where his love of melodic lines laid out as duets comes to full flower. The third movement takes a melody that suggests a Slavonic folk song and puts it through its paces, alternating two different versions with varied textures and accompaniments.

For the finale, Tchaikovsky offered another sonata-form movement based on a dancing theme of Slavonic imprint varied with two sections of vigorous contrapuntal development. In writing for the mostly German membership of the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, Tchaikovsky knew that he would be expected to offer some display of his ability at counterpoint in the Bach tradition, and he obliged with these two passages, the second of which becomes an imitative, fugue-like passage leading to a wildly sonorous close.

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