Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Trio in B-flat Major, K.502:  Mozart (1756-1791) learned to play the keyboard at age 3, started composing at age 5, and learned the violin at age 6 on a tour during which he and his child-prodigy sister performed all over Europe.  He was “history’s first important professional ‘freelance’ musician” [David Dubal].  “There was literally nothing in music he could not do better than anybody else” [Harold Schonberg].  Mozart composed this work at age 30, in the fall of 1786, shortly after the failure of his opera “The Marriage of Figaro” and probably during the illness that claimed the life of a son before he was one month old.  This trio is “a piano concerto in miniature,” in that it reflects “the sophistication of Mozart’s finest piano concertos, with richly ornamented, heartfelt slow movements and buoyant, emotionally complex outer movements” [James Reed].  The profound second movement offers “some of Mozart’s most lyrically introspective music” [Jason Heilman].  Julian Rushton believes that this piano trio is “perhaps Mozart’s masterpiece in this medium.”      

Aram Khachaturian, Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano:  Born in Georgia to an Armenian family, Khachaturian (1903-1978) became one of the most famous composers in the Soviet Union.  He attended and eventually taught composition at the Moscow Conservatory.  Armenian folk music informs nearly all of his works, “often imitating the rhapsodic and improvisatory style of the ancient Armenian troubadours” [David Dubal].  Notwithstanding the cultural terrorism which Stalin inflicted on all Soviet composers, Khachaturian and his music reflected “straightforward cheerfulness” [John Burrows].  He composed this trio in 1932, while he was still studying at the Moscow Conservatory, making the clarinet and the violin melodic partners in the work.  It “displays Khachaturian’s trademark use of cross-rhythm, folk songs, and harmonies that could be thorny at some times or bittersweet at others” [Patsy Morita].  Prokofiev admired this work and ensured that it was performed and published in Paris soon after its composition.

Bright Sheng, Tibetan Dance for Violin, Clarinet and Piano:  Bright Sheng was born in Shanghai, China in 1955.  After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, he received his undergraduate degree at Shanghai Conservatory.  After moving to the United States in 1982, he earned his master’s degree at Queens College and his doctorate at Columbia University.  His work as a composer, conductor and pianist has been widely praised, and his compositions performed throughout the world.  Today, he serves as the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan.  His Tibetan Dance of 2000 was commissioned by Michigan State University for the Verdehr Trio.  In the words of the composer, “The first two movements of the work are in reminiscence; as if one is hearing songs from a distant memory. The work is anchored on the last movement, when the music gradually becomes real. Here, the music is based on a Tibetan folk dance motive from Qinghai, a Chinese province bordered with Tibet, where I lived during my teenage years.”

Maurice Ravel, Sonata No. 1 in A Minor for Violin and Piano, M.12:  Maurice Ravel was a French Romantic composer who lived from 1875 to 1937.  In addition to chamber music, he composed orchestral music, ballets, operas and vocal works, as well as a large number of virtuosic pieces for piano.  Ravel probably intended this one-movement work to be the first movement of a longer violin-piano sonata.  Composed at age 22, he was not satisfied with the work and never finished it.  It was first published and performed in 1975, as part of the centennial observation of his birth.  Like many early Ravel works, it shows the influence of Gabriel Fauré and César Franck.  Although Ravel might not have been happy with this work, James Reel has said that “it is a beguiling piece that surely would have entered the standard repertory” had Ravel returned to and revised it after his own style matured.    

Paul Schoenfield, Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano:  Schoenfield (b. 1947) is an American composer and pianist, as well as a student of mathematics and the Talmud.  A faculty colleague of Brightmusic Co-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 his Holocaust remembrance work “Ghetto Songs” to the lightness of “Café Music,” which Brightmusic performed in January 2012.  Schoenfield composed this trio in 1990 at the request of clarinetist David Shifrin, who performed with Brightmusic in September 2010 and May 2013.  The work combines classical chamber music with “celebratory Hassidic gatherings and festivities” [Neil W. Levin].  Movement 1 reflects one of the best-known dances in Eastern European Jewry.  The composer characterized Movement 2 as “bizarre and somewhat diabolical.”  Movement 3 refers to “mystical, deeply spiritual Hassidic melos in general” [Levin]. And Movement 4 is a Russian Cossack dance often adapted for Jewish wedding celebrations.  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.”