Concordia Chamber Players
Michelle Djokic, Artistic Director
Works of Pärt, Milhaud & Messiaen
Sunday June 17 at 4pm
Miller Chapel
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ
Igor Begelman, clarinet
Jesse Mills, violin
Michelle Djokic, cello
Rieko Aizawa, piano
We are pleased to present Concordia Chamber Players in another wonderful program of chamber music. Concordia has been a staple of The Festival since its inception. The members of Concordia Chamber Players enjoy active careers as soloists and chamber musicians at the major chamber music festivals such as Tanglewood, Marlboro, and the Lincoln Center Festival; and have performed with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.
Program
Fratres by Arvo Pärt
Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, Op. 157b by Darius Milhaud
- Ouverture
- Divertissement
- Jeu
- Introduction et final
Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen
- Liturgy of crystal
- Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time
- Abyss of birds
- Interlude
- Praise to the eternity of Jesus
- Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets
- Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time
- Praise to the immortality of Jesus
Program Notes
Fratres by Arvo Pärt
Born in Paide, Estonia in 1935 and living in the old Soviet Union, Arvo Pärt had little access to what was happening in contemporary Western music but, despite such isolation, the early 1960s in Estonia saw many new methods of composition being brought into use and Arvo Pärt was at the fore-front; his Nekrolog of 1960 was the first Estonian composition to employ serial technique. He continued with serialism through to the mid 60s in pieces such as the 1st and 2nd Symphonies and Perpetuum Mobile, but ultimately tired of its rigours and moved on to experiment, in works such as Collage on B-A-C-H, with collage techniques.
Official judgement of Arvo Pärt's music veered between extremes, with certain works being praised while others, for example the Credo of 1968, were banned. This would prove to be the last of his collage pieces and after its composition, Arvo Pärt chose to enter the first of several periods of contemplative silence, also using the time to study French and Franco-Flemish choral part music from the 14th to 16th centuries - Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin. At the very beginning of the '70's, he wrote a few transitional compositions in the spirit of early European polyphony, the 3rd Symphony of 1971 being an example: "a joyous piece of music" but not yet "the end of my despair and search."
Arvo Pärt turned again to self-imposed silence, during which time he delved back through the medievalism of his 3rd Symphony and through plainchant to the very dawn of musical invention. He re-emerged in 1976 after a transformation so radical as to make his previous music almost unrecognisable as that of same composer. The technique he invented, or discovered, and to which he has remained loyal, practically without exception, he calls tintinnabuli (from the Latin, little bells), which he describes thus: "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements - with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials - with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation."
-From article on musicolog.com by Doug Maskew, 1997
Suite for Violin, Clarinet & Piano, Op. 157b by Darius Milhaud
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the musical oeuvre of Darius Milhaud is its sheer breadth: he composed for just about every imaginable combination of Western instruments and his sometimes transgressive attitudes toward musical tradition and stylistic boundaries produce works in which feigned Baroque elegance might be juxtaposed with crass jazz send-ups. In this regard, Milhaud's Suite for violin, clarinet, and piano stands as a prime example.
Relying, somewhat ironically, on the concept of the traditional instrumental suite, with its multiple movements of contrasting topics or moods, Milhaud elaborates on several distinct musical ideas and draws on his wide-ranging stylistic interests along the way. The first movement, bearing the title "Ouverture," immediately establishes a piquant Latin feel (reflecting, as do other of his pieces, the influence of Milhaud's two years' residence in Brazil several years earlier).... The second movement, "Divertissement," utilizes intricate and playful imitative textures, as well as Milhaud's signature polytonal techniques.... In the spirit of its title, "Jeu" (French for play), the third movement is a boisterous folk dance based on a hearty and relentless rhythm.... The fourth movement, "Introduction et final," begins with a somber introductory passage held in check by the intermittent tolling of a repeated octave in the lowest register of the piano.... The lucidity and regularity of this last section, of course, is occasionally thrown slightly off kilter with odd harmonic swerves and the kind of so-called "wrong-note" polytonal writing for which Milhaud is famous, finally culminating in a kind of jazzy cowboy tune that brings the movement and the suite to a close.
-From review by Jeremy Grimshaw, Rovi
Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen
There was thick frost on the windows and 20 inches of snow outside as the 500 prisoners of war took their seats behind the German camp guards. With the crush of bodies, the temperature inside Barrack 27 rose to just above freezing, a small victory over the pitiless Silesian winter. Stretchers had been laid on the floor bearing patients from the hospital block; prisoners from the quarantined section, too, had been allowed to attend the concert on Jan. 15, 1941.
Only their instruments distinguished the men on stage. Dressed in Czechoslovakian army jackets covered in pockets and wearing oversize wooden clogs, the four French POWs took their seats: Etienne Pasquier on cello, Jean le Boulaire on violin, Algerian Jewish clarinetist Henri Akoka and, at an upright piano with keys that had a habit of getting stuck, the composer Olivier Messiaen. Concerts were not unusual in Stalag VIII-A, near Görlitz, Germany, but this was the first performance of a work written inside the camp. For months, Messiaen had been composing, under armed guard and on paper supplied by a senior German officer, a "Quartet for the End of Time."
What he offered his fellow prisoners that night was a work of transcending beauty with moments of archangel-like severity. An act of faith and a compositional tour-de-force that encompasses medieval modes and Indian rhythmic cycles, birdsong transcriptions and bold orchestrations, the "Quartet for the End of Time" is a masterwork of 20th-century chamber music.
-From "A POW's Awe-Inspiring Act of Faith" by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2011
