Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Concert 1

Amy Beach (1867-1944), Summer Dreams, Op. 47 for Piano Four Hands:  Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist and the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music.  She is best known for her “Gaelic” Symphony, the first symphony composed and published by an American woman.  She was in every sense an American original: Beach was one of the first American composers to succeed without European training.  The New Hampshire native grew up in a musical family and was composing simple pieces by the age of four.  She studied harmony and counterpoint when she was 14—her only formal instruction in composition.  She made her concert debut at the age of 16.  In 1885 she married a Boston surgeon 24 years her senior.  She was then expected to live as a society matron and patron of the arts.  She was not allowed to teach, and her performances would be sharply curtailed, being allowed to appear in recital only twice a year with profits going to charity.  Dr. Beach also disapproved of her formal studies, so she was largely self-taught.  Her composition for piano four hands, “Summer Dreams,” is a work in six parts, each evoking a reminiscence of a bucolic summer evening: The Brownies, Robin Redbreast, Twilight, Katy-Dids, Elfin tarantelle and Good night.  – Sara Grossman  

Kevin Puts (b. 1972), Air for Cello and Piano:  American composer Kevin Puts is best known as winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his first opera, Silent Night.  Born in St. Louis and reared in Alma, Michigan, Puts attended the Eastman School of Music and Yale University.  He also studied at Tanglewood with William Bolcom and Bernard Rands.  He has been described as one of America’s most important composers.  He is composer-in-residence at the Fort Worth Symphony.  His cello concerto was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma.  Puts’ Air for Cello and Piano is part of a larger work, his Four Airs for flute, clarinet, violin and cello with piano accompaniment commissioned by Music from Angel Fire and composed in the summer of 2004.  Says the composer, “Each movement features only one instrument with piano accompaniment, the most substantial being the second Air for Cello and Piano,” which unfolds in a “linear melodic nature by virtue of its angular leaps and rhythms [before] eventually settling into rich piano harmonies.”
-- Sara Grossman 

David Baker (1931-2016), Sonata for Clarinet and Piano:  Extraordinarily accomplished composer, American jazz composer and trombonist David Nathaniel Baker, Jr., in 1968 founded the jazz studies program at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, one of the most respected jazz programs in the United States.  In 2000 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2007, a Living Jazz Legend by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  After the Indianapolis native earned a bachelor’s and master’s in music education from Indiana University in 1953, he hoped to make a career as a symphony musician, but he found that few orchestras would hire a Black musician.  According to his biographer, Monika Herzig, “He was told, ‘You’re probably the best one we’ve heard, but we can’t employ you because of your color.’” 

The three-movement Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, written in 1989, is one of some fifteen works he wrote that included the clarinet.  The piece has become a standard of the clarinet repertoire. The virtuosic work starts with an ascending chromatic scale by the clarinet and after a brief introduction, is joined by the piano.  Baker skillfully blends jazz and classical idioms in the first movement (“Blues”), followed by a rhapsodic second (“Loneliness”).  Jazz and Latin rhythms dominate the third movement, “Dance.”  – Sara Grossman

Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904), Quintet for Piano and String in A major, Op. 81:  Czech composer Antonin Dvořák was born near Prague and began the study of music from an early age.  After he began composing, his big break came when he made a submission to the Austrian State Price for Composition.  Johannes Brahms was the leading member of the jury and was favorably impressed.  Dvořák was awarded the prize in 1874 and again in 1876 and 1877.  In 1892, Dvořák moved to the United States and become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York.  While in America, he wrote his two most successful orchestral works:  his Symphony From the New World and his Cello Concerto.  He later moved to a community of Czech immigrants in Iowa, where he wrote his String Quartet in F major, later nicknamed the American Quartet.  He returned home to his beloved Bohemia in 1895.  He died in 1904 in Prague following a bout with the flu at age 62.       

The Piano Quintet, Op. 81, completed in the fall of 1887, is regarded as one of the finest piano quintets ever written. James Keller referred to it as “a model of how to balance the five participating instruments.”  The piece is replete with the hallmarks of Dvořák’s style:  melodic riches and energetic rhythms steeped in the folk music of his native Bohemia.  The lyrical first movement is followed by a dumka, a traditional Slavonic/Ukranian folk ballad.  The Scherzo with Bohemian flavor is followed by the good-humored fourth movement which contains a fugue that builds up to a secular chorale in the joyful end.  – Sara Grossman

Concert 2