Program for the May 1, 2022 Concert: Premieres and a Historical Reflection



"Demetrius Spaneas:"Smile of the Great Spirit



Smile of the Great Spirit" is a translation of the Abenaki word 'Winnipesaukee' and is a musical portrait" of Sa day on the lake of the same name in New Hampshire. I was there on vacation when commissioned to write a piece, and I couldn't think of a better subject. The piece begins at dawn and moves throughout the day, portraying the sun, the scintillating water, the mountains overlooking the valley and the clouds above. There are also moments of a storm--one of those fast-moving storms that you experience there in the summer--and just as quickly as it came, it dissipates and the glorious sun shines through, creating myriad colors and reflections on the water and in the air. After that, the piece settles down into the evening with the onset of dusk and nightfall as if a .background for the ubiquitous .sounds of nature as the sun disappears


Demetrius Spaneas



Elliott Miles McKinley- The Memory Garden



The Memory Garden is dedicated to my extended family, the Finegolds, and the Essex Chamber Music Players. This represents my third work for the ECMP to go along with 50+ Times Three from 2012 and Of Memories and Love: Summer 1978 from 2014. This new work, as the title suggests, revolves around memory and ideas are presented in fragments and shards at the start that eventually form a complete picture toward the end. While not dedicated to my brother Jory, who passed away suddenly in August 2019, it is hard for me not to imprint my own feelings about this loss, and my confusion about this loss, into the music. The work completes a triptych of instrumental trios, starting with “The Shadow Dancer” in 2018 and “The Dream Angel” in 2019.

Elliott Miles McKinley


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Shostakovich: Piano Trio #2, in E minor, Op. 67



Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio is incontrovertibly a masterpiece of the chamber music repertoire. It's a threnody for the victims of violence, oppression and war (How apt today!) and yet it rages defiantly against their condition evincing their stubborn determination to survive horrors through forced humor. (His First Piano Trio, Op. 8, while a harbinger of the composer he would become, is a student work.) Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1906 and came of age during the upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. A prolific composer in all genres, he was at times praised and promoted by the Soviet authorities and other times threatened and persecuted for not hewing sufficiently to the official artistic diktats. His uneasy survival was accomplished by couching his non-conformist, acerbic ideas in music that appeared to adhere to the mandated social realism. With the demise of Stalinism, he led a freer life artistically, although suffering ill health. He died in Moscow in 1975. Shostakovich wrote the Second Piano Trio in 1943 and 1944 and its overall tone was in no small measure a reaction to the evidence of the Holocaust and other atrocities committed by the Nazis which the Soviet armies were uncovering as they advanced westward. While he was working on the trio, Shostakovich's close friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who was Jewish, died and Shostakovich made it a sort of tombeau to his memory, dedicating the work to him. Shostakovich's close friend and colleague, the Polish-Jewish-Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg was instrumental in furthering his appreciation of Jewish folk music. In his controversial Testimony, Solomon Volkov quotes Shostakovich as saying, “It’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality...is close to my ideas of what music should be.” Shostakovich knowingly took a great risk permeating this work with Jewish themes given the rampant anti-antisemitism of the Stalinist Soviet regime. The eerie high harmonics on the cello that open the first movement lead to a melancholy fugue followed by the second movement's frantic, sardonic gaiety. The third movement is a soulful dirge leading into the fourth movement's initially grimly cheerful freylekhs that transforms itself into a cri de cœur fading into nothingness. Silence. An emotional journey is over


David Derow


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PROGRAM NOTES
FOR THE FALL 2022 CONCERT (specific date TBD)



Israel Kremen - Kaleidoscope



"Kaleidoscope" is a set of 25 Preludes and Fugues for Piano and for Humankind" (2005), written in memory of inspirational masterpieces by J.S. Bach, Paul Hindemith, Dimitri Shostakovich and Rodion Shchedrin. The work uses folk (not popular!) tunes, folk melodies and folk dances of many different nationalities--Bulgarian, Jewish, Russian, Chinese, etc.--as thematic material many Preludes and Fugues, as well as traditional dance rhythms, such as Polka, Minuet, Gavotte, Mazurka. There is also an instance of a Double Motet, a 13th century musical genre. In certain pieces the audience is asked to participate in the performance, by clapping a rhythm, whistling the tune, etc. This performance is the Massachusetts premiere of the composition. It is also available on 2 CDs (2011). . Prelude in C Major opens the whole composition I named "Kaleidoscope" with a simple and joyful Polka. In the fugue, the use of tonality deviates from the traditional tonic/dominant approach. After the initial introduction of the theme in C Major, "the answer" shifts to D-flat Major, this odd juxtaposition continuing throughout the whole piece. Prelude in A Major is written as a Mazurka, using traditional functional harmony. The 4-voice Fugue is based on a 12-tone theme, uses an intricate rhythmic pattern of 13/8 (3/8+3/8+3/8+4/8), and ends with a "mother of all strettas," followed by unexpectedly simple two final diatonic chords: a dominant resolving to the tonic. Prelude in B Major is dedicated to all four masters. It starts in the left hand, with the quotation of the theme from Paul Hindemith's "Fugue", followed by 4 notes - DSCH - representing Dmitri Shostakovich, while the right hand is playing 6 notes - SHCHED - representing Rodion Shchedrin, with 4 notes - BACH - representing Bach finally appearing in bar 7. The Prelude also ends with a quotation of the theme from Hindemith's "Fugue", mirroring the beginning. The 3-voice Fugue's subject starts attacca (without any pause) with 4 notes - BACH - representing Bach, plus 9 other non-repeated notes. It is a Scherzo; the composer hopes that the piece will, in fact, make the audience smile. This Fugue also ends with 4 notes - BACH - in the left hand. IsraeI Kremen


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