Haydn/Schoenberg
Chamber Series Continues!
Treasure Hunt
Sunday, November 1, 2009 4:00 pm
Single Ticket & Subscriptions Available!
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 On November 1, 2009, Emmanuel Music, led by Acting Artistic Director John Harbison and Associate Conductor Michael Beattie, presents its second chamber concert in a season featuring the music of Franz Joseph Haydn and Arnold Schoenberg. This concert, titled Treasure Hunt, features a group of valuable pieces barely known even to fans of the two composers – Haydn’s rarely heard Trio in Ab and String Quartet in D minor, and Schoenberg’s unfinished “tone-poem” Ein Stelldichein and his 1933 Berlin Songs. Schoenberg’s String Trio is actually the only “standard work” on the program.
The two Haydn pieces come from the heart of his mature chamber music enterprise. Haydn’s prominence and his indispensability in the string quartet medium, is long established. The trios are also essential Haydn. More unpredictable, varied, and speculative than his other music, many of them coming after all of the symphonies and quartets, the trios reveal Haydn unbounded, often literally making it up as he goes along, writing music for a few friends in a small room.
After Schoenberg arrived in Boston in 1934, his health problems, with difficult adjustment to our climate and his frequent trips to New York where he did part of this teaching, reduced his first year’s compositional output to canon-writing (in more common parlance, rounds). We present these little buried treasures in performance arrangements:
A lively puzzle canon with unusual entrance intervals – at the fifth, seventh, and eleventh -
Dedicated to Schoenberg’s friend, Dr. David Bach for his sixtieth birthday. Text by Schoenberg: “Whoever wants to run with the world must have time, otherwise he runs too fast. Whoever wishes to fight with the hero will experience sorrow, otherwise he weighs too little. Whoever equates importance with money must surely ask around, otherwise he pays too much.”
Schoenberg used this four-voice ‘infinite’ canon to humorously turn down an invitation from Dr. Rudolph Ganz to join the staff of a Chicago conservatory. Schoenberg’s text: “It is so stupid, so unfortunate, that I can’t come to join you in Chicago, if only money was not so important in life. If money wasn’t necessary I’d surely come right away!”
Program:
Schoenberg: Canons (Boston 1934) -
Haydn: Trio in Ab major No. 27, Hov. XV: 14
Schoenberg: Ein Stelldichein Schoenberg: Three Songs, Berlin 1933 Schoenberg: String Trio, Op. 45 (1946) Haydn: String Quartet in D minor, No. 35 (Op. 42) Hob. III:43
Featured Musicians:
Pamela Dellal, mezzo-soprano
Gabriella Diaz, violin
Margaret Dyer, viola
Brett Hodgdon, piano
Peggy Pearson, oboe
Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello
Tickets available: click here!
  
Emmanuel Music programs are supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Boston Cultural Council. |
