Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Igor Stravinsky, Suite from L’histoire du solad (“The Soldier’s Tale”):  Many regard Stravinsky (1882-1971) as the greatest composer of the 20^th Century.  Like Tchaikovsky, he studied jurisprudence, but his first love was music.  His ballet score for “The Firebird,”  commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, launched his career.  At age 27, “everybody knew that an unusual composer had arrived” [Harold Schonberg].  Stravinsky lived in Switzerland during World War I and thereafter moved to Paris to collaborate with Diaghilev and other artists.  In 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of France, he moved to the United States, where he became a citizen and lived until his death.  Stravinsky said that “The Soldier’s Tale,” composed in 1918, “marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.”  In its original version, it was “a quirky musical-theatre work” [James Keller].  Its seven instruments, actor-dancers and a narrator told “a down-to-earth Faustian tale of a soldier who sells his soul to the devil” [Alex Ross].  The soldier gains wealth, regains his fiddle and wins the hand of a beautiful princes.  In the end, however, he loses both his fiddle and his soul.  In 1919, Stravinsky drew from the original score a five-movement concert suite, which Brightmusic will perform tonight.  It is “a curious little masterpiece” – “taut, pithy, ultra-condensed, and more than a little cynical” [Keller].  It features “lively, unpredictable rhythms” [BrianWise], and unmistakably reflects the influence of American jazz.  

Edward Elgar, Piano Quintet in A Minor, op. 84:  To outward appearances, Elgar (1857-1934) “was the very model of an Edwardian clubman” [Schonberg].  To himself, he was a man of the English countryside; a devout Catholic in a Protestant nation; and a man of modest academic and (until he became Sir Edward Elgar in 1904) modest social status, in a country where academic and social credentials counted for much.  Elgar was a self-taught composer whose career got off to a long, slow start.  His wife Caroline became his muse.  His serious works began shortly after his marriage; after her death in 1920 he composed very little.  He is best known for his public and ceremonial works, such as the Enigma Variations, The “Pomp and Circumstance” Marches, and one of his last works, his Cello Concerto.  But toward the end of his composing career, he wrote three important chamber works.  “Elgar was devastated by World War I.  Music became more and more difficult to compose” [David Dubal].  “The horrors of World War I deepened his melancholy outlook” [All Music Guide].  His work on the Piano Quintet began in 1918, when he and Caroline spent the summer in Sussex.  Completed in 1919, “it is big chamber music, with at times an almost orchestral sonority to it” [Gramophone magazine].  The first movement is dark and enigmatic; the second is tender, nostalgic and elegiac; and the third is lighter, sparkling and dance-like.  The Quintet bears the designation opus 84.  Elgar masterful Cello Concerto followed as opus 85.

Paul Schoenfield, Sparks of Glory:  Schoenfield (b. 1947) is an American composer and pianist, as well as a student of mathematics and the Talmud.  A faculty colleague of Brightmusic Artistic Directors Chad Burrow and Amy Cheng, Schoenfield serves as Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan.  He draws on many ethnic and folk music traditions to compose works for piano, orchestra, voice and chamber ensemble.  His music also spans a wide range of human experience, from the darkness of “Ghetto Songs” to the lightness of “Café Music” (which Brightmusic performed in January 2012), to the vivacity of his Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano (which we performed at our last concert).  Schoenfield composed this work on commission to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II.  “For this purpose, I could think of nothing more fitting than the accounts written by the Polish-Israeli journalist Moshe Prager,” Schoenfield said.  Prager titled his first collection of stories, published in 1952, “Sparks of Glory.”  In the introduction, Prager wrote: “Amid the black clouds which billow out of the Holocaust of European Jewry, there are many flying sparks and flashes of human elevation, precious gems of Jewish courage are strewn about, hidden from sight.  Who will go down and retrieve them?  The works inscribed on this scroll are all witnesses.  They were taken down directly from the heroes of the stories who themselves did not realize they were heroes....  If [the stories] make the soul tremble, it is because they are echoes of a terrible and lofty time.”  Despite the polished sophistication of his compositions, Schoenfield considers himself a folk musician who doesn’t “deserve the credit for writing music – only God deserves the credit.”