The Valley Concert Series will open its 24/25 season at Valley Presbyterian Church in Brookfield on Sunday, October 20, 2024 at 3pm with a performance by Trio Ondata featuring: Michael Ferri, violin; Miriam Liske-Doorandish, cello and Anthony Ratinov, piano. The trio is a New England-based classical music ensemble who began playing together during their graduate studies at the Yale School of Music. With an inquisitive approach defined by advocacy, dialogue, and thoughtful programming, Trio Ondata strives to use artistry to engage with broader social and cultural contexts, facilitating a connection with wide-ranging repertoire both old and new. A bold and exploratory young ensemble, Trio Ondata has always been drawn to the fringes of the classical repertoire by the belief that music is an ever-evolving, vital means of connection across time and place. The trio is dedicated to presenting music of the highest caliber from many eras, whether this means contemporary music by historically marginalized artists, obscure Haydn trios performed with Baroque bows, or underperformed works from composers who loom large in the canon. Unafraid of programming that weaves together sounds both familiar and challenging, above all Trio Ondata hopes to invite spaces of close listening in a busy and loud world..The concert is free and open to the public with a suggested donation of $20 gratefully accepted at the door.
About the Program
Trio Ondata Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Piano Trio in C major, XV:21 (c. 1792)
Adagio Pastorale - Vivace Assai
Andante Molto
Finale. Presto
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 22’
Allegro energico
Presto non assai
Andante grazioso
Allegro molto
-Intermission-
Gity Razaz A Prayer for the Abandoned (2015) 5’ Arno Babadjanian (1921-1983) Piano Trio in F-Sharp minor (1952) 25’
Largo - Allegro espressivo
Andante
Allegro vivace
Program Notes
Haydn's Trio in C Major, Hob. XV:21 was one of three published in London in 1795 during his celebrated second visit to that city where he was fêted as the greatest living composer in all of Europe. Haydn dedicated the trios Princesse Marie, the wife of Prince Nikolaus II of Esterházy, the illustrious Hungarian noble family that employed Kapellmeister Haydn for decades. Haydn, now in his early sixties, was at the height of his power as a composer producing some of his most magnificent works including his last symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and trios.
This trio is particularly warm, bright and exuberant and is unique among Haydn's trios for starting with a brief, slow introduction. Marked adagio pastorale, it finds all three players in unison softly "humming" a gently rocking tune that briefly hovers, then pauses, before bursting on the scene again, full speed, an octave higher, in a sparkling vivace romp. A frequently occurring lightly drumming drone in the lower voices reinforces the notion of a bucolic dance with the suggestion of bagpipes. Within the context of such light-hearted joie de vivre, Haydn's "developments" add some wonderful drama.
The gentle, slower middle movement starts with the violin who passes the melody to the right hand of the piano in a sweet dialogue just slightly tinged with melancholy, perhaps the tender, amorous sighs of lovers on retreat in the country. The finale restores the fresh and immediate al fresco vitality of the opening with another lively dance, this time spun out in one of Haydn's trademark rondos. With its driving presto tempo, trills, the dramatic flickering of passages in the minor mode and what sounds like the occasional call of horns, the music evokes the thrill of the hunt to complete this rustic triptych.
~ Kai Christiansen
Brahms Piano Trio in C Minor, Opus 101 Brahms wrote this trio–his last for violin, cello, and piano–during the summer of 1886, which he spent at Hofstetten on Lake Thun in Switzerland. From the windows of his room, Brahms could look out over the lake to the immense glaciers of the Bernese Oberland, and some have felt that the elemental power of that craggy vista made itself felt in the music Brahms composed there. Certainly, the Piano Trio in C Minor communicates tension from its opening instant. A description of an early performance of this trio, with Brahms at the piano, suggests the composer’s own intensity in this music: “A simple room, a small upright pianino, the three giants, and Clara Schumann turning over the leaves . . . I can see [Brahms] now looking eagerly with those penetrating, clear, grey-blue eyes, at Joachim and Hausmann for the start, then lifting both of his energetic little arms high up and descending ‘plump’ on that first C minor chord . . . as much as to say: ‘I mean THAT.’” For all its power, though, the Trio in C Minor is probably Brahms’ most concise work: despite being in four movements, it is almost the shortest of his twenty-four pieces of chamber music.
The opening of the Allegro energico explodes off the page, driving forward on the triplet rhythm that will propel much of the movement. A warmer second subject, marked cantando and scored for the strings in octaves, brings some relief, but this movement remains taut throughout: Brahms omits the exposition repeat and keeps both development and recapitulation quite short. The opening theme returns only in the closing moments and drives the movement to an unrelenting close. The Presto non assai, also in C minor, is more restrained. Brahms mutes the strings and marks the beginning semplice (“simple”); the music skims along fluidly in the piano, with the strings following and echoing. The middle section, with arpeggiated pizzicato chords riding above the staccato piano, is particularly effective.
Much has been made of the rhythmic complexity of the Andante grazioso. Brahms originally thought the movement should be set in the unusual meter 7/4 but later changed this to one measure of 3/4 followed by two measures of 2/4; the middle section, marked quasi animato, continues the rhythmic complexities, switching between 9/8 and 6/8. Brahms alternates sonorities throughout this movement, the melodic line flowing back and forth between the piano and the combined strings. The Allegro molto finale returns to the mood and the C-minor tonality of the first movement. There is nothing of the cheerful rondo-finale here (the movement is in modified sonata form): the flickering half-lights of the subdued opening quickly give way to the same craggy outbursts that marked the opening movement, and only in its final moments does Brahms relent and let the music break free to end in the tonic major. Rarely has C major sounded so Fierce.
~ Eric Bromberger
A Prayer for the Abandoned is a piano trio in three miniature movements that are played attacca. The first two movements end with a tremolo sul ponticello in the cello that signals the beginning of the next movement. Though in three parts, the overall structure of the piece traces a single dramatic arc: the first movement is essentially a large crescendo in intensity leading to a lyrical second movement that starts with an expressive and rich chord progression in the piano. In the final movement, the violin melody of the first movement comes back, this time developed and resolved. I wrote A Prayer for the Abandoned to honor and commemorate an old friend who lost his partner in a tragic accident.
~ Gity Razaz
Arno Babajanian: Piano Trio in F-sharpMinor Armenian composer Arno Babajanian wrote his Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor under the pressure inflicted upon all artists living in the Soviet Union following WWII. His peers Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian had been condemned by the government, and facing a total censorship of expression, each had turned to folk music as a way to sidestep accusations of formalism. Babadjanian’s folk connections were particularly direct; his father had been an accomplished folk musician, and at the Yerevan Conservatory his teachers instilled in him a sense of Armenian musical history, insisting that he study the folk traditions of his country. His later works were also influenced by the chromaticism of Prokofiev, the complex rhythms of Bartók, and the 12-tone system of Schoenberg.
Composed in 1952, one year before Stalin’s death, the Piano Trio in F# minor creates a narrative of a return to roots, a vulnerable nostalgia, and the feeling of digging your heels into the dirt as you look towards the future. The trio’s three passionate, virtuosic movements blend romanticism, folk ornamentation and irregular folk rhythms to rich and colorful effect. After a unison opening presenting the trio’s main theme (which subsequently appears in each movement), the allegro first movement unfolds in a tempestuous sonata form. The second movement - a departure into C major - is soulful and haunting, weaving together fragments of the outer movements. The final movement, Presto, features a rustic primary idea in asymmetrical meters, complimented by a second, more romantic theme that floats and then soars. Led decisively by the piano, the watershed moment close to the end shrugs off the earlier complexities of motivic development and returns home, singing the theme from the first movement in an impassioned outcry that does not ultimately resolve.