Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

 “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it.  Should I expect to be the one?”   --Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-1896), Piano Trio in G minor, Op 17

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the German composer and pianist better known as the wife of composer Robert Schumann.  Clara was the daughter of a respected piano teacher.  Her career in music was virtually assured by her talent and a strict father’s highly-rigorous training in piano, voice, violin, and composition.  She made her debut as a pianist at the age of 9.   Her first works were published when she was 12 and her only piano concerto at 16.  She would be one of the most celebrated pianists of her time.  Robert, a former student of her father’s and nine years Clara’s senior, proposed marriage to her when she was 18, but due to the strenuous objection of her father, the couple did not marry until Clara’s 21st birthday.  They are generally thought to have had one of the happiest marriages in classical music.   They had eight children, and while Robert composed, Clara raised their brood and earned most of family’s income through concertizing and teaching.  Robert expressed sorrow that Clara’s domestic and professional duties left her little time for composition.  

By 1854, Robert was suffering from mental illness.  After a suicide attempt he was institutionalized near Bonn, where he would die two years later.  Clara’s life was one of hardship and grief.  At age 37 she became a widow and sole supporter of a large family, putting an end to her composing, and she would bury four of her children, two of whom left young ones to her care.  Out of necessity, she would continue a demanding concert schedule until 1891.  

Clara’s Opus 17, the only piano trio she would write, was composed in 1846 and is considered by many to be her masterpiece. Music critic James Keller wrote, “The Piano Trio is unquestionably one of her finest achievements, rich in inspiration, classically disciplined in structure, imaginative in its details, and a model of how to successfully balance the participating instruments.”  Chamber Music: A  Listener’s Guide, p. 414.

Paul Schoenfeld (b. 1947), Café Music

One of the most popular contemporary composers, Paul Schoenfeld draws inspiration from popular, folk and classical music forms, often with strong Hassidic influences.  The Michigan native earned a Bachelor of Arts from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Doctor of Music Arts from the University of Arizona.  Formerly a touring and collaborative pianist, Schoenfeld is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan.  He is a scholar of the Talmud and of mathematics.  Schoenfeld is the recipient of multiple awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his song cycle Camp Songs.  Among his many works are a piano concerto and multiple other concertos for various combinations, trios, an opera, a song cycle, sonatas, and a film score.  Distinguished music commentator Klaus George Roy summed it up: “Paul Schoenfeld writes the kind of inclusive and welcoming music that gives eclecticism a good name.”

Commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Café Music was inspired by Schoenfeld’s sit-in one evening as pianist of a house trio that performed in a Minneapolis restaurant.  What started as “café music” quickly found its way into the concert hall and is one of the composer’s best-loved works.  The breathless first movement and the frenetic third flank a sultry second movement.  Schoenfeld says his music, “is not the kind of music for relaxation, but the kind that makes people sweat; not only the performers, but the audience.“

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904), Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90

Much of the music of Antonín Dvořák incorporated the folk music of his native Bohemia.  In 1874, he entered a manuscript in the Austrian State Prize for Compositions.  Favorably impressed, Johannes Brahms, who was serving as a member of the jury, arranged for Dvořák to send his compositions to his own publisher, Simrock, a move that made him the most internationally-recognized Czech composer.  Dvořák served as professor at the Prague Conservatory and a few years later became director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York.  After three years in the United States, during which he would compose several works, including his cello concerto and his 9^th symphony, “From the New World,” Dvořák returned to Bohemia, where he remained until his death some ten years later.   

One of his most often-performed chamber works, the Piano Trio No. 4, “Dumky,” was written in 1891.  It was a dramatic departure from the standard form for a piano trio. Dumky were folk songs with alternating melancholic and brighter passages.  Dvořák would use this form in other compositions as well, but the Trio No. 4 is his best-known example.  The first three movements proceed without break, giving the work the impression of a four-movement piece with a long first movement.  Music critic Daniel Felsenfeld described the work as “emotionally complicated, being an uninhibited Bohemian lament, more like a six-movement dark fantasia . . . brooding and yet somehow . . . a little lighthearted.” 

-Program Notes by Sara Grossman