Benjamin Park (b. 1987)

Benjamin Park (b. 1987) is a contemporary American composer.  The Boston native began the study of piano at an early age and played French horn in high school, while developing an interest in composition.  He graduated in 2010 from MIT with a dual degree in physics and music. There he played horn in the MIT Wind Ensemble.  He eventually chose a career in music, focusing on composition, as he pursued a doctorate at Boston’s New England Conservatory.  In his leisure time Park enjoys improv comedy, hiking, cooking/baking, reading and photography.  He currently lives with his wife, landscape designer Kira Sargent, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.   

Premiered at the Flatirons Chamber Music Festival in Boulder Colorado in 2018, Park’s “Green Flash,” written for clarinet and string quartet, is ten minutes of intriguing aural sensations.  The name refers to the optical phenomenon that can occur after sunset or just before sunrise in the right atmospheric conditions.  For a brief moment the upper rim of the sun can appear green due to refracted light.  The composer writes, “The music . . . marks this transition from golden hour to twilight as it progresses from pastoral F-centric material to a slightly darker C-sharp focus. Before the piece concludes, however, the music shifts once more, arriving in a twinkling E major.”  

Park’s rhapsodic “For Purple Mountains,” written in 2017, also for clarinet and string quartet, is another short, mesmerizing piece with hints of klezmer and brief strands of America the Beautiful woven through.  The energetic first part gently shifts gears to a more peaceful twilight section with sublime dissonances, when the mountains take on a purple cast. It abruptly transitions to a rhythmically-thrilling conclusion.  The work premiered with the mountains as a backdrop at the Boulder festival.  The composer says, “The title hints at the ‘Crossing the Divide’ theme of the Flatirons Chamber Music Festival [alluding to] this country’s stark political divide in mind…. One might think of the precarious common ground as a purple mountain—a mix between blue and red [idealogy] that is easier to see than it is to traverse.” 

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Austrian Franz Schubert was a phenomenally-prolific composer of the late Classical and Romantic periods.  In his short lifetime he completed around 1500 works, including seven symphonies, among them the first two movements of his 8th symphony (“Unfinished”).  He left behind scores of other incomplete works and sketches for a tenth symphony,   Although much of his music is sunny, his final years were marred by declining health.  He died of unknown causes at the age of 31 (Beethoven, his predecessor and idol, was just getting around to publishing his first symphony by that age).  At the time Schubert’s death was attributed to typhus, a common ailment in past centuries, but more recently, various causes have been suggested based on his symptoms and contemporary writings.  It is not likely that we will ever know for sure.  What is known is that his output was staggering for such a brief lifetime.  Master of the song cycle, he had a special affinity for the human voice and wrote over 630 lieder.  He was one of the most remarkable melodists in classical music, treating the voice as an instrument, and instruments as the human voice.

The fourth son of a school master, Schubert’s early life was steeped in music, but the family business was education.  His father ran a respected school and young Schubert was expected to join his father and brothers on the faculty.  While attending schooling for that occupation, he also studied music and continued to compose.  He eventually abandoned teaching to pursue his destiny in music.  Little of his music was published during his lifetime; however, his manuscripts circulated widely among his large and devoted circle of friends and admirers.  Although there is no hard evidence that he ever met his contemporary and fellow Viennese Beethoven, 27 years his senior, the older composer would have known who Schubert was.  It is said that during the master’s final illness, Beethoven was looking over a Schubert manuscript and remarked, “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert.“

Schubert’s six-movement octet, his largest scale chamber work, written in 1824 as an imitation of Beethoven’s popular septet, clocks in at around an hour of pure transcendence. Patterned after Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat major, the good-natured octet was commissioned by a clarinetist with instructions that it was to be “exactly like Beethoven’s septet.” Schubert look some liberties, adding a second violin and a more virtuosic role for the clarinet. A critic, shortly after its premiere, wrote that the themes “are worked out with individual originality, and Herr Schubert has proved himself . . . as a gallant and felicitous composer.” 

Program notes by Sara Grossman