Program Notes
About the Author
Keith Horner currently provides program notes for presenters throughout North America. After taking a music degree at the University of Cambridge, Keith started his writing career as a freelance music critic with The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and as a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (leading to an MA (Cantab.). His interest in communicating with audiences was honed over four decades as a music broadcaster and Executive Producer for BBC Radio 3 and CBC Radio 2, based in London, then Toronto. Keith remains active as an independent recording producer, with well over 100 CDs and LPs to his credit, several Juno awards, and the Special Prize at the Prix Italia for a documentary production with composer Christos Hatzis.
2025-2026 Season
Ehnes Quartet - September 30, 2025
Program Notes
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born in Hamburg, Germany, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, November 4, 1847
Quartet No. 6, in F minor, Op. 80 (1847)
The F minor Quartet by Felix Mendelssohn opens and closes with anything but a smile. Intense and urgent, its agitated tremolo opening is punctuated only by the suspended agonies of the first violin, often poignantly poised high above the other three strings. The F minor Quartet is ‘late period’ Mendelssohn. Highly subjective music, it strains at the constraints of the medium of the string quartet itself.
In May 1847, Mendelssohn was devastated to hear of the death of his 41-year-old sister Fanny, a sister with whom he had maintained a close and productive creative relationship since childhood. She collapsed while rehearsing her brother’s music. Mendelssohn became so distraught that he was unable to attend her funeral. His wife Cécile arranged for him to take the waters at Baden-Baden. His insomnia continued. “I force myself to be industrious, in the hope that later on I may feel like working and enjoying it,” he wrote in July to his younger sister Rebecca. By September, the F minor Quartet was complete.
Structurally, Mendelssohn looks back to the classical sonata form of Beethoven in his middle-period. In each of the four movements, his attention is focused on emotion and passion, underpinned by a recurring thematic use of the notes of the F minor home key. By the end of the opening movement, after an increasingly intense coda, the anger and inner fury of the music has not abated. The second movement, a sardonic, angry scherzo, remains in the dark key of F minor. Its biting harmonies are prescient of the scherzos of Mahler. Economy of means is again a hallmark in the slow movement and little respite is offered. The restlessness of the opening movement returns in the finale. Again, Mendelssohn works with fragments and motifs rather than full-blown melodies. The anguish and drive continue relentlessly to the end.
On October 3, just weeks after completing the quartet, Mendelssohn wrote: “Now I must gradually begin to put my life and my work together again, with the awareness that Fanny is no longer here; and it leaves such a bitter taste that I still cannot see my way clearly or find any peace.” He died one month later, on November 4, 1847, at age 38.
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, July 3, 1854; died in Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, August 12, 1928
Quartet No. 2 Listy důvěrné (Intimate Letters) JW VII/13 (1928)
In 1917, while on holiday at a spa in Moravia, the 63-year-old Czech composer Leoš Janáček met Kamila Stösslová, a 26-year-old married woman. Their chance encounter sparked one of the most unusual and creatively charged relationships in music history. Over the next 11 years, until his death, Janáček wrote her around 700 fervent letters. What she inspired was nothing less than extraordinary: four operas, the Sinfonietta, Glagolitic Mass, two piano concertos, The Diary of One Who Disappeared, and the string quartet played tonight — Listy důvěrné (Intimate Letters).
The love was unreciprocated but enduring. Janáček, unhappily married, channelled his longing into a complex, idealised devotion. “All my works, all my operas contain one passion,” he wrote. His letters are unselfconscious and intimate, starting with polite requests for a meeting and ending with dreams of marriage and children. Stösslová, married to an antiques dealer, tolerated the attention with equanimity, neither encouraging nor rejecting him outright. She was with him, along with her husband and two sons, in 1928 when Janáček caught the pneumonia that was to lead to his death.
The String Quartet No. 2 is Janáček’s clearest, most impassioned musical declaration. “I have begun to write something beautiful,” he told her. “Our life will be contained in it. It will be called Love Letters . . . In this work I shall be alone with you.” The title changed to Intimate Letters, but the tone remained intensely personal. Janáček’s original idea of featuring the dark-toned and poetically named Baroque viola d'amore as a symbol of his love was dropped. The quartet, nevertheless, features a particularly expressive viola part, a symbol of Janáček’s yearning.
Each of its four movements – his ‘letters’ – reflects a different facet of the relationship. The first describes his love on first encountering Stösslová through two sharply contrasting themes. The second opens with a tender viola solo recalling their first meeting. The third, the emotional heart of the work, portrays the fervour and intensity of their love and Janacek’s dream of a shared child – “a vision which would resemble your image, transparent, as if in the mist.” The final movement navigates the many turbulent, contradictory emotions the composer wrestled with.
“I want [this] to be a great love – a great composition,” Janáček wrote after the première of what would be his final completed work. “I listened to their playing today – did I write that? Those cries of joy. But what a strange thing, also cries of terror after a lullaby. Exaltation, a warm declaration of love, imploring, untamed longing . . . Oh, it’s a work as if carved out of living flesh. I think that I won’t write a more profound and a truer one.”
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born in Bonn, Germany, baptised December 17, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1 (First Razumovsky) (1806)
With the three ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, Beethoven effectively ends the tradition of writing string quartets for Vienna’s early 19th century cultivated amateurs. His earlier Op. 18 quartets had suited this market. But Beethoven – both consolidator and innovator – quickly outgrew its constraints, demanding far more from his performers. With the three Razumovsky quartets, composed mainly between April and November 1806, the classical quartet, comfortably established as a congenial exchange of thoughts and pleasantries between four friends, now begins to speak loudly and argumentatively in public. Think of the beginning of the first Razumovsky and the end of the last one, the Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman argues: "There's not much conversation in evidence on either page. A better term might be ‘determined ensemble shouting’."
And shout they did. Even the Schuppanzigh Quartet, Vienna’s leading professionals and Beethoven’s early champions, reportedly burst out laughing when they first saw the F major Razumovsky. Beethoven held their cheerful, chubby leader, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, in esteem, calling him ‘My Lord Falstaff,’ but still snapped: “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?” Compromise was no longer part of Beethoven’s vocabulary.
The opening movement, Beethoven’s longest quartet movement to date, strains at the leash of classical form. With its grandeur and drive likened to the Eroica, and its serenity to the Violin Concerto, it stands among the most expansive structures of his middle period – symphonic in scope, ambitious in reach. The second movement is a scherzo like no other: a constantly developing structure around a rhythmic kernel, longer and closer to sonata form than the usual scherzo-trio-scherzo pattern. It foreshadows the expansive scherzos of Mahler.
Adagio molto e mesto – ‘very slow and mournful’ – is Beethoven’s unorthodox heading for the slow movement, whose two expansive themes unfold entirely in the minor key. A sketchbook note adds a cryptic clue to its mood: “A weeping willow or acacia tree on my brother’s grave.” The movement dissolves into a brief, ethereal violin cadenza. Consolation comes in the finale, a large-scale movement introduced by the cello with a folk-like Thème russe. Beethoven took it from a collection of Russian folk songs he owned – a likely nod to Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna and dedicatee of the set. The theme, transformed into the major and echoing earlier material in the work, brings unity and resolution to this bold, boundary-breaking quartet.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio
October 21, 2025
Program
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-91)
Piano Trio in E, K. 542 (1788)
Allegro
Andante grazioso
Allegro
BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-84)
Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855, rev. 1857, 1880)
Moderato assai
Allegro, ma non agitato
Finale: Presto
PYOTR IL'YICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-2)
Pezzo elegiaco: Moderato assai – Allegro giusto
Tema con variazioni: Andante con moto – Variazione finale e Coda
Program Notes
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, Austria, December 5, 1791
Piano Trio in E, K. 542 (1788)
Mozart was just eight when his earliest piano trios (K. 10–15) were published in London in 1764 as Six Sonatas for Harpsichord, with the accompaniment of Violin or Flute and Cello ad libitum. He then paused for nearly two decades. When he returned to the genre in late 1780s Vienna, he was writing for a city he called “true clavierland” – a place where the fortepiano had become central to domestic music-making. The older harpsichord still lingered in some homes, but the piano was where the future lay. Mozart was unsure how to label these new works. He titled the first, from 1776, Divertimento; the second was headed Sonata, though he entered it in his catalogue as Terzett, the term he came to prefer.
Mozart’s mature trios are ambitious, three-movement works that carry the imprint of the piano concerto in their keyboard writing. He composed most of them to play himself at public concerts, in the same years he was dazzling Viennese audiences with his virtuosic piano concertos. K. 542 was completed on June 22, 1788, during the same creative surge that produced his final three symphonies. The opening Allegro is generally mellow and restrained, spiced from time to time with a piquant shift in the harmony.
In the slow movement, it’s not the graceful theme that reveals Mozart’s touch, but the way it unfolds and transforms – an example of art concealing art. The final Rondo unleashes playful, concerto-like interplay between piano and violin. The overall mood is buoyant and clear-eyed, though a distinctively Mozartian ambiguity keeps the listener guessing.
BEDŘICH SMETANA
Born in Litomyšl, Bohemia, March 2, 1824; died in Prague, May 12, 1884
Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855, rev. 1857, 1880)
Tragedy runs deep in Smetana’s chamber music. After marrying his childhood sweetheart Kateřina Kolářová in 1849, he endured the deaths of three of their four daughters, followed closely by Kateřina’s death from tuberculosis. When he composed his first string quartet, From My Life, he was already completely deaf. The work, intensely autobiographical, reflects on his life to the point of his deafness. His second quartet, completed in 1883 as syphilis ravaged his body and mind, continues the story. “The new quartet takes up where the first one ended, after the catastrophe,” he wrote. “It is a presentation of the whirl of music in a man who has lost the power of hearing.” Smetana died a year later, impoverished and institutionalised.
Smetana’s Piano Trio of 1855 is the earliest of his autobiographical chamber works and already suffused with grief. All three movements are in the minor key, and the music is emotionally raw. “The loss of my eldest daughter, an extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to compose my piano trio,” he wrote in his diary. Bedřiška, just four years old, was precociously talented, capable of speaking German at two, singing in tune by three, and playing piano by four. The trio is a powerful outpouring of sorrow, more unified and emotionally direct than anything he had written before.
The first movement begins with a grief-stricken violin melody on the G-string – a chromatic, descending line that recurs throughout, embodying anguish and loss. A second theme, introduced by the cello, adds a softer melancholy. The development section is restless and complex, its chromatic counterpoint steeped in sorrow. The second movement, a polka-like scherzo, captures the fleeting joy of childhood play. But shadows fall across the music as the opening theme returns, darkening the dance. In between, two contrasting trios offer flashes of light, glimpses of a life that might have been. The finale, drawn from an earlier G minor sonata, is feverish and dramatic. It swings between elegy and funeral march, major and minor. In the closing bars, Smetana insists on the major key, offering a glimmer of hard-won hope in the face of overwhelming grief.
PYOTR IL’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia, April 25/May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, Russia, October 25/November 6, 1893
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-2)
“There is no tonal blend,” Tchaikovsky insisted when his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, urged him to write a piano trio. “Indeed, the piano cannot blend with the rest.” Yet the idea took root. A year later, grief gave him a reason to try. “I have conceived the idea of testing myself in this sort of music which so far I have not touched,” he wrote. “I have already written the beginning of a trio. Whether I shall finish it, whether it will come out successfully, I do not know.” The Trio in A minor was premièred on March 11/23, 1882, the first anniversary of the death of Nikolai Rubinstein, pianist, composer, teacher and Tchaikovsky’s closest mentor – at once his fiercest critic and staunchest advocate. The Piano Trio, with its monumental piano writing, was dedicated “to the memory of a dear friend.”
Structure and scale are bold. Rather than adopt the classical model of three or four movements, Tchaikovsky opts for just two – inviting comparison with Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op. 111. Both have a sonata-form first movement followed by an extended set of variations. But where Beethoven aspires to transcendence, Tchaikovsky faces his sorrow head on. The opening theme of the Pezzo elegiaco presents a feeling of infinite melancholy and this continues through the intensity of its development. Often, the dense textures of the music are piano driven. This, however, only heightens the wonderfully plangent dialogue between the strings, gently supported by the keyboard. This is music of extraordinary tenderness and emotional exposure. In it we hear – as Stravinsky once put it – Tchaikovsky letting himself go. Its baring of the emotions throws fresh light on the reprise of the opening material and the mournful coda that is stretched out of the opening theme.
The second movement – sometimes dubbed Tchaikovsky’s ‘Enigma Variations’ – is more relaxed in tone and far more varied in mood. Though Tchaikovsky avoids explicit identification, each of its eleven variations appears to recall an episode in Rubinstein’s life. “The variations,” he wrote to his brother in October 1882, “are only memories. One is a memory of a trip to an amusement park out of town [maybe No. 5] and another of a ball we both attended [likely No. 6], and so on.” The episodes range from an exuberant waltz to a Chopin-like mazurka (a nod to Rubinstein’s pianism) and a formal fugue (perhaps honouring his founding of the Moscow Conservatoire). The tone celebrates a life, rather than mourning a loss – until the Variazione finale e Coda, where the theme resurfaces as the second subject of a full sonata-form finale. The funereal final pages recall the Pezzo elegiaco, now as a parting farewell.
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio stands at a turning point in Russian chamber music. It was the first major Russian work in the genre to match the scale, ambition, and emotional depth of the great European tradition. It opened the door for a wave of Russian composers – including Arensky, Taneyev, and later Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich – to explore chamber music as a serious, expressive medium. It helped legitimise the piano trio as a genre in Russian music and established a model for personal, elegiac chamber expression that would resonate throughout the Russian tradition.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Michelle Cann
November 11, 2025
(COSE pre-concert program notes follow)
Program
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)
From Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118 (1892):
Intermezzo in A minor: Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato
Intermezzo in A major: Andante teneramente
Ballade in G minor: Allegro energico
Romanze in F major: Andante
CLARA SCHUMANN, née WIECK (1819-96)
Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (1853)
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)
Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879)
No. 1 in B minor: Agitato
No. 2 in G minor: Molto passionato, ma non troppo Allegro
INTERMISSION
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-56)
Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14 (Grande Sonate) (1836, rev.1853)
Allegro
Scherzo: Molto commodo
Quasi Variazioni: Andantino de Clara Wieck
Prestissimo possible
Program Notes
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Four pieces from Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118 (1892)
Brahms started his career with a hat-trick of large-scale piano sonatas, Opp. 1, 2 and 5. The third was completed in October 1853 under the appreciative, but considered encouragement of Robert and Clara Schumann. Schumann perceptively described the sonatas as “symphonies in disguise” – a prescient remark, as the F minor would be Brahms’s last in the form. From then on, his large-scale ideas turned orchestral, while his piano writing evolved through variation form (on themes by Schumann, Handel and Paganini), eventually, toward the inward, more intimately drawn forms of the intermezzo, capriccio, romanze, and ballade.
The music of his four late collections of short, intimate piano pieces (Opp. 116 to 119) speaks the language of the end of an era rather than its beginning. Their construction reflects a lifetime of study and practical application of the entire available literature of Western classical music. Although Brahms is in reflective mood, in these 20 late ‘miniatures’, as he referred to them, the discipline behind them is rigorous.
The passionate first Intermezzo, in A minor, is tonally restless to the point of making it unstable and without a home key until its closing bars. Once established, in preparation for the following piece, the tonality immediately turns to the major. The A major Intermezzo is then a piece of gentle beauty and moments of aching poignancy. Like all the late piano pieces, its structure – externally at least – follows a simple ABA pattern. Internally, the music is intricately interrelated. “Your piano pieces . . . are not only reflections on the past,” Brahms’s friend, the Bach biographer Philipp Spitta, perceptively wrote to the composer, “but also prophetic of the future. I believe I understand you correctly in venturing the opinion that you wanted to hint at something of the sort with the intermezzos.”
The G minor Ballade is robust and incisive in its outer sections, maybe casting a glance backwards to the youthful vigour of Brahms’s earlier keyboard music. The F major Romanze is serenely introspective, a sort of distantly remembered song without words that constantly develops and evolves out of itself.
CLARA SCHUMANN, née WIECK
Born in Leipzig, September 13, 1819; died in Frankfurt, May 20, 1896
Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (1853)
“I began to fantasise on the theme and was so carried away that I had to try and work it out on paper,” wrote Clara Schumann in a diary entry May 15, 1853. Clara, one of the 19th century’s great pianists, with a career, a large family and living with an already mentally fragile husband, had no time for composition for five years. “I now want to write variations on a theme of Robert’s out of Bunte Blätter, for his birthday,” she continued. “I was quite carried away by it and am grateful that I still have some creative power left.”
Just months after the birth of their seventh child, Eugenie, both Schumanns were honoured with a ‘Schumann Week’ in Leipzig. Clara received invitations to perform in England. Then, in early May 1853, she gave acclaimed performances at the Lower Rhine Music Festival – where a long running partnership with violinist Joseph Joachim began. Back in Düsseldorf, she spent the next few weeks crafting a birthday gift for Robert: seven variations on the fourth piece from his Bunte Blätter, Op. 99 (1841).
Its wistful, pensive, at times even melancholy theme clearly threads through all seven variations – from the skittish impetuosity of No. 2 to the storming octave étude of No. 5. No. 4 buries the theme between the hands, creating a third-hand illusion, while No. 6, written as a canon, recalls the Bach counterpoint Robert and Clara studied together as newlyweds. Hints of foreboding are gently eased by the consoling warmth of the major key in No. 3, and again as No. 7 glides into the major before closing in quiet reverence, chorale-like, with a subdued flourish.
“To my beloved husband on the 8th of June 1853, this humble, renewed essay by his old Clara,” she inscribed on the gift copy – adorned with borders, tied with ribbon. It was Robert’s 43rd birthday. It would be their last together.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 (1879)
The two Op. 79 Rhapsodies, written during the productive summer of 1879, mark Brahms’s final works for solo piano before the introspective miniatures of his late years. The manuscript of the B minor Rhapsody shows that he first titled it Capriccio – a label that, even with some imagination, sits oddly with the music’s fiery passion, or with the equally agitated G minor Rhapsody, whose troubled undercurrents give it an unsettled edge.
When Brahms proposed changing the title to Rhapsody, the dedicatee – amateur pianist, friend, and briefly former pupil Elisabet von Herzogenberg – gave a response that seems to echo the composer’s own doubts. “You know, I am always most partial to the non-committal word Klavierstücke (Piano Piece),” she wrote. “But probably that won’t do. In which case the name Rhapsodien is the best, I expect, although the clearly defined form of both pieces seems at variance with one’s conception of a rhapsody.”
She was right. The B minor Rhapsody’s stormy grandeur and consoling central episode follow a clear ABA plan, while the G minor Rhapsody, more compact and tightly argued, uses a taut sonata form, weaving moments of inward brooding over a dark, ominous bass. Rhapsodic in spirit, perhaps – but architecturally, pure Brahms.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born in Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810; died in Endenich, nr Bonn, July 29, 1856
Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14 (Grande Sonate) (1836, rev.1853)
Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F minor is steeped in biography. In 1836, Robert and the young Clara Wieck were deeply in love, but her father, Friedrich Wieck (Schumann’s piano teacher), forcibly separated them. In March Schumann wrote: “[Wieck] is carrying on like a madman and forbids Clara and me to have contact under pain of death.” Schumann was devastated, and during that bleak summer – what he called his “darkest period” – he poured his longing into a large-scale five-movement sonata, later revised into what we know as Op. 14. At its emotional core lies a theme by Clara herself – an Andantino melody, now lost in her own output, but preserved in Schumann’s variations movement. This theme, with its subdued falling motif over a slow drumbeat, permeates the entire sonata, becoming a private cipher of love and separation.
The work went through three versions. The first, completed in June 1836, was a five-movement Sonata, with two scherzos. The published version later that year, now retitled Concert sans orchestra (Concerto without orchestra), dropped the scherzos and introduced a new finale. Seventeen years later, in 1853, Schumann made another sweeping revision. He restored the second scherzo, thoroughly reworked passages and textures of the opening movement, re-notated and adjusted the finale, and issued the four-movement Grande Sonate that will be played today.
The first movement, Allegro, opens stormily, with an angry statement of the Clara motif of a falling fifth in left-hand octaves. As the theme evolves, its restless, constantly developing gestures repeatedly circle back to the Clara motif, as if memory interrupts passion. Structurally unorthodox but nevertheless compelling, the development – traditionally centrally positioned – is here tautly contained within the opening section and its varied recapitulation, culminating in a powerful, still angry coda. The restored Scherzo in D-flat major follows, alternately vigorous and lyrical, but highly original in concept. Clara’s motif reappears somewhat in disguise in its opening phrase and later transformed into playful dance rhythms. Its trio is, strikingly, in D major and the transition back to D-flat is seamlessly handled.
The third movement, cryptically titled Quasi variazioni, presents four variations on an Andantino by Clara Wieck. Schumann leaves the theme virtually untouched, caressed rather than transformed, each variation shading its mood with tender resignation. The movement has an improvisatory feeling, perhaps because Schumann builds variations on different phrases of the theme in a non-linear manner. The finale, a fiery Prestissimo possibile, follows a similar structural trajectory to that of the opening movement, now with the motif resurfacing in fleeting glimpses amid cascading passagework and urgent rhythms. Technically, a formidable challenge with its breathless flow of triplets and exhilarating dialogue between the hands, the movement drives toward a forceful resolution bringing release with the concluding shift to F major.
For Schumann, the sonata was inseparable from Clara. In 1838, he confessed to her: “I wrote a concerto for you – one sole cry of the heart for you in which your theme assumed so many guises.” The ‘concerto’ was his ironic title for the earlier version of the sonata, but the sentiment still holds – Op. 14 is a passionate document born of love under siege. It has long remained little performed – its first public outing was by the young Brahms in 1862, six years after Schumann’s death.
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
COSE pre-concert: Fierbois
Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, oboe
Madeline Hildebrand, piano
Program
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
The Lark Ascending (1914/20)
DAVID BRAID (b. 1975)
The Bird Fancyer´s New Delight (2023)
Clock-Caged Canary
Canary PTSD
Woodlark Dogfight
Trosil’s Wing
Country Linnett
CHARLES KOECHLIN (1867-1950)
Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 (1916)
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivo
JOCELYN MORLOCK (1969-2023), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Halcyon (2003)
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Born in Down Ampney, England, October 12, 1872; died in London, August 26, 1958
The Lark Ascending: Romance for violin and orchestra (1914, rev. 1920)
The beloved piece, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, arranged for oboe and piano by Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, captures the spirit of a song lark at dawn, a metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit. The opening cadenza evokes a sense of quiet questioning, gentle wonder, and deep tranquillity. Moments of stillness give way to flurries of motion, then rise again into soaring, lyrical heights. Let the stillness in your own soul meet the music . . . and listen as the lark ascends.
DAVID BRAID
Born in Hamilton, ON, March 25, 1975
The Bird Fancyer´s New Delight (2023)
Clock-Caged Canary
Canary PTSD
Woodlark Dogfight
Trosil’s Wing
Country Linnett
The original manuscript, The Bird Fancyer's Delight (c. 1715) by the English composer, John Walsh, contains bird motifs, transcribed, extemporised, and reimagined in the year, 2023, to produce The Bird Fancyer's New Delight by Canadian composer, David Braid.
CHARLES KOECHLIN
Born in Paris, November 27, 1867; died in Le Canadel, Var, December 31, 1950
Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 (1916)
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro vivo
Composed between 1911 and 1916, Koechlin’s four-movement Oboe Sonata, Op. 58 blends Impressionistic colour, Romantic lyricism, and early Modernist nuance. The first movement subtitled "The Earth, Work in the Fields,” evokes a quiet majesty, suggesting the slow unfolding of nature, ripening crops, or the sun itself, vast and eternal, rising over the land. In contrast, the second movement, a Scherzo subtitled A Dance of Fauns in the Forest, is light and playful, capturing the mischievous spirit of mythical woodland creatures in a shimmering, elusive dance.
-- Program notes by Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
JOCELYN MORLOCK
Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, December 14, 1969; died in Vancouver, March 27, 2023
Halcyon, (2003), arr. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs
Halcyon: a bird, otherwise known as the kingfisher, believed to calm storms during the time of its incubation. According to legend, Alcyon's husband Ceyx is downed at sea, with his last thought being of her and that, if he doesn't live, he may return to her after death. When his body floats back to her, out of grief she throws herself into the sea, but as she does, she is turned into a bird. In her sorrow, she flies over her husband and enfolds him with her wings. The gods take pity on them and turn both into kingfishers. During the two weeks around the Winter Solstice in which the kingfishers nest and incubate their young, the weather is unusually placid, hence the term "Halcyon Days".
-- Jocelyn Morlock
What Makes It Great? The Four Seasons
December 7, 2025
Program
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons)
Spring
Summer
Program Notes
LE QUATTRO STAGIONI (THE FOUR SEASONS) (1716-17)
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Born in Venice, March 4, 1678; died in Vienna, July 27/28, 1741
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons open a set of twelve concertos published in 1725 as Op. 8, under the evocative title Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest between Harmony and Invention). In these four concertos, Vivaldi explores the balance between the rational structure of music and the imaginative world of sound painting. He is thought to have written the accompanying sonnets himself. When the music was published, he printed lines from each poem directly into the score, linking them precisely to the music.
Each concerto follows a structure Vivaldi helped to standardise: that of two fast outer movements, framing a slower middle movement. The fast movements include recurring ritornelli (literally ‘little returns’) where the full orchestra returns regularly with familiar material. In between these passages are episodes featuring the soloist. In Spring, these episodes evoke birdsong, murmuring brooks, breezes, a sudden thunderstorm – and then the return of calm.
The middle movements usually capture a single mood. Yet even here, Vivaldi creates vivid soundscapes. In Spring, the slow movement layers rustling leaves (rocking violin figures), the quiet song of a sleeping goatherd, and – most memorably – a barking dog, where the violas growl molto forte e strappato: very loud and rough.
Three centuries on, Vivaldi’s imagery still leaps off the page. In Summer, a shepherd trembles (halting violins) beneath buzzing insects and distant thunder (gritty tremolos near the bridge). In Autumn, the hunt is on: horn-like calls, barking dogs, gunfire, and fleeing prey fill the solo violin line. From the bright F major key of la caccia, Vivaldi turns to the darker, more desolate key of F minor for Winter. Now we shiver against the icy wind (frosty string notes clash together) and stamp our feet (accented notes).
Vivaldi’s sense of humanity’s place in Nature feels strikingly modern. The Four Seasons go far beyond musical picture-painting. Like Romantic programme music, they aim – in Beethoven’s words – to be “more an expression of feeling than painting.”
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Gryphon Trio with the Nordic Voices
January 27, 2026
Program
ANDREW BALFOUR (b. 1967)
Omaa Biindig / Her Inne (Here, Inside) (2025-26)
NORBERT PALEJ (b. 1977)
DAL (The Distance) for 6 voices and piano trio (2025)
BOHDANA FROLYAK (b. 1968)
Will Sing Life Again (2025)
Intermission
JEFFREY RYAN (b. 1962)
Scar Tissue (2018)
Program Notes
ANDREW BALFOUR
Born in Fisher River Cree Nation, 1967
Omaa Biindig / Her Inne (Here, Inside) (2025/6), to an Ojibway and Norwegian text
Jorda – Earth (Norwegian) – Her Inne – Here, Inside (Norwegian) – Ningaabii'anong – The West (Ojibway) – Giiwedianong – The North (Ojibway) – Waabanong – The East (Ojibway) – Zhaawanong – The South (Ojibway) – Omaa Biindig – Here, Inside (Ojibway)
Andrew Balfour is a Cree composer, conductor, singer and sound-designer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. With a background as a choral singer, he founded the vocal ensemble Dead of Winter(formerly Camerata Nova) in 1996 and serves as its Artistic Director. His output ranges across choral, instrumental, electro-acoustic, and orchestral works – including major projects that draw on Indigenous languages, stories, and worldviews. Through his music, Balfour seeks to reconcile his Cree heritage with a deep love of Western choral and early-music traditions. “I was a ‘60s scooper,” he says. “I was taken away from my blood when I was about six months old – so I’ve spent most of my life trying to reconnect with my Indigenous roots and language and culture and medicine. And I do that through music. So, it’s been a very healing and therapeutic journey.”
Omaa Biindig (‘Here, Within’) was initially written as the opening composition in the larger, multimedia Echo: Memories of the World project, created by several artists and produced by the Gryphon Trio in partnership with Chamber Factory last Spring. This concert-length journey through time and memory represented “an emotionally charged experience that delves into the ways history has been erased, manipulated, and attacked, while simultaneously celebrating visionary artists who have defied suppression and breathed life into enduring works of profound significance.”
Balfour’s beautifully resonating Omaa Biindig / Her Inne draws its title and spiritual core from an Ojibway text, with Norwegian translation in tonight’s newly revised version. Looking simultaneously back to his own Western choral past and to harmonies and textures from our own times, Balfour creates a highly expressive, motet-length meditation, shaping sound around breath, resonance, and the physicality of language itself. The work, he says, “travels through the directions of North, South, East and West, as well as Water and Earth – before reminding us of the direction we so often forget, here, inside ourselves.”
NORBERT PALEJ
Born in Krakow, Poland in 1977
DAL (The Distance) for 6 voices and piano trio (2025) (World Première)
Canadian-Polish composer Norbert Palej is a Professor of Composition at the University of Toronto and artistic director of the annual New Music Festival, which includes tonight’s concert. His music is performed widely in North America and Europe by ensembles such as the Penderecki String Quartet, Sinfonia Varsovia, Dame Evelyn Glennie, and the Warsaw National Philharmonic. An active concert pianist and conductor, past guest composer at music festivals in China, Thailand, Brazil, and a visiting lecturer at the Jerusalem Academy for Music and Dance, Palej is a recipient of awards from the Japan Society in Boston, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Robbins Family Prize in Music Composition, the Benjamin Britten Memorial Fellowship among many others.
Norbert Palej writes: “Dal is the Polish word for ‘distance’ – a poetic, resonant term that evokes not only physical remoteness but also mystery, longing, and the unknowable veiled in mist. The cycle consists of five songs set to poetry by three writers whose work has shaped my imagination since childhood: Tadeusz Miciński (1873–1918), represented by three texts; Juliusz Słowacki (1809–49); and Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907). These poets share an existential mysticism that lies at the heart of the cycle.
The selected texts contemplate death, the fear of death, existential anxiety, and the supernatural. Miciński’s writing carries a pronounced occult dimension; he was murdered in Czeryków (present-day Belarus) in 1918 during the upheavals of the Russian Civil War. His work bears strong affinities with that of Słowacki, who was born in Krzemieniec (now in Ukraine), spent much of his life in exile, and died in Paris at the age of 39. Wyspiański – an extraordinary polymath (poet, dramatist, painter, designer, and visionary architect) – lived almost entirely in my home city of Kraków, where he died of syphilis at age 38.
Though they lived in different eras, all three poets belonged to the cultural expanse of a pre-war, multiethnic Poland and its borderlands. The music reflects this heritage by drawing subtly on elements of Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Jewish, and Roma folklore – the latter resonating with the esoteric and occult colours often present in Miciński’s poetry.”
Rather than illustrating the poems’ intense emotions directly, the musical language deliberately resists them. This form of expressive negation – where difficult feelings are refracted through dark humour, irony, or a cabaret-like inflection – is deeply characteristic of Slavic cultural responses to tragedy and the unspeakable. In Dal, this approach sharpens the work’s central aim: to confront darkness not through lament, but through transformation.
The cycle is written for, and dedicated to, Nordic Voices and the Gryphon Trio.
BOHDANA FROLYAK
Born in Vydyniv, Ukraine SSR, May 5, 1968
Will Sing Life Again (2025) (Canadian première)
Leading contemporary Ukrainian composer and educator Bohdana Frolyak studied piano and composition at the Lviv Conservatory and remains a professor of composition there. She writes across orchestral, chamber, vocal, and choral media, receiving the state Borys Lyatoshynsky and Shevchenko Prizes. In recent years Frolyak’s international profile has risen sharply: her orchestral work Let there be light was given its world première at the 2023 BBC Proms in London and was recently performed by the New York Philharmonic.
Written in war-torn Lviv, Will Sing Life Again gives powerful voice to her country’s resilience through music. Frolyak wrote this setting of poetry by Viktoria Amelina to a commission by Nordic Voices with support from Arts and Culture Norway. The première took place with the Gryphon Trio at the Risør Chamber Music Festival, June 28, 2025. The Festival’s program booklet gives the background:
“Around 7:30 pm on June 27, 2023, Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina was sitting in a pizza restaurant with colleagues from Colombia. Four days later, on July 1, she died at the age of 37, leaving behind her husband, Sasha, and son Andriy, 12. She did not survive the rocket attack on the civilian population of Kramatorsk, which killed 12 others.”
“One of the most important methods of ‘winning’ a war is to remove a country’s cultural history. This is true in all wars by invasion. If you remove a people and their history, there is no identity left to protect or fight for. Roads, bridges and houses can be rebuilt. If you burn books and pictures, erase stories, and kill the artists who create and tell them, you have lost much of what gives life meaning beyond our most basic needs. That is why it is very important for this festival to support this year’s commissioned work.”
In Amelina’s A poem about a crow the crow emerges as a powerful symbol of mourning and endurance, carrying the weight of collective memory and loss. Through imagery that evokes women’s voices, grief, and resilience, the poem suggests that even amid devastation, remembrance itself becomes an act of renewal. The poem’s stark imagery resonates deeply with wartime suffering and with the essential role of the storyteller and witness. Widely shared both as a work of poetry and as a memorial, A Poem about a Crow has come to honour Amelina’s courage, empathy, and singular literary voice during one of the darkest chapters in Ukraine’s history.
JEFFREY RYAN
Born in Toronto, ON, February 24, 1962
Scar Tissue (2018)
Vancouver-based Jeffrey Ryan takes inspiration from the world around him – nature, science, literature, visual art, even the stock market – and creates music running the gamut from orchestral and chamber works to opera, art song, and choral music. With awards and recognition including multiple JUNO nominations, his music has been commissioned, performed and recorded by orchestras, ensembles and soloists worldwide, including his award-winning portrait CD Fugitive Colours with the Vancouver Symphony and the Gryphon Trio. Jeffrey was Music Toronto’s Composer Advisor for over 25 years. The collaborative work Scar Tissue was premièred by Nordic Voices and the Gryphon Trio in Ottawa, in February 2019.
Jeffrey Ryan writes: “Every scar – whether physical, emotional, geological, environmental, or cultural – is the end of a three-stage journey. When the body is wounded, it responds with a series of biological processes. Yet, when the healing is complete, it is not returned to its original state. No matter the cause, the resulting scar represents a third state, a ‘new normal’, which allows the body to continue while carrying with it the memory of the past wound.
Scar Tissue, for six voices and piano trio, takes the listener from unity through disruption to healing. Michael Redhill’s concise and evocative poetry unfolds in two parallel processes. Its nine movements are a mirrored mathematical pattern of lines and syllables, while Redhill’s own words are increasingly interwoven with lines from other poets, artfully blending emotion and science to reflect the universality and interconnectedness of this journey.
The music has a similar trajectory, beginning with the entire ensemble moving together (“This is who I am, this body”), then gradually separating into various combinations as growth (“Change is the nursery of music, joy, life and eternity”) leads to disturbance, wound, and a central movement of chaos (“A breach opens. In becomes out”). The debris begins to clear in a moment of fragmentary beauty for voices alone (“How we all swiftly, swiftly unwrap our lives”). A “lost arpeggio” and “singing mouths” announce the biological processes of recovery, summoning relicts of musics past. An unlikely lullaby (“Phosphatidylinostol is…like a music that plays under everything”) leads to the final movement of recombination which embraces the ‘new normal’ with a dancing celebration of life (“Eros comes nowhere near this bliss”).
We all carry scars, for in life we have all been wounded in some way. Scar Tissue evokes that process through words and music, celebrating the body and its capacity to heal.”
Scar Tissue was commissioned by the Gryphon Trio in collaboration with Glenn Prestwich and the Sounds of Science Commissioning Club, with additional support from Joyce Miller and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Leonkoro Quartet
March 5, 2026
Program
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
String Quartet in D, Op. 20 No. 4 (Hob.III:34) (1772)
Allegro di molto
Un poco adagio e affettuoso
Menuetto: Allegretto alla Zingarese
Finale: Presto e scherzando
HENRIËTTE BOSMANS (1895-1952)
String Quartet (1927)
Allegro molto moderato
Lento
Allegro molto
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (Death and the Maiden) (1824)
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzo - Allegro molto
Presto
Program Notes
JOSEPH HAYDN
Born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, March 31, 1732; died in Vienna, May 31, 1809
String Quartet in D, Op. 20 No. 4 (Hob.III:34) (1772)
Widely circulated both officially and unofficially, Haydn’s Op. 20 set of six quartets helped establish the string quartet as a serious and expressive medium. Mozart admired the collection. Beethoven copied its contents by hand to study their craft. A century later, Brahms owned the autograph manuscripts – and later donated them to the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where they remain today.
Haydn’s Op. 20 quartets are not just pleasing entertainments. Their music is designed to move and stir the emotions. Each quartet is a tightly constructed work that collectively helped redefine the expressive potential of the string quartet. The first two movements of the D major quartet have an intensity and urgency that is new to the medium. The brisk opening movement is skilfully and economically built upon the modest unison opening motif, which becomes a springboard for the unexpected throughout. The slow movement is a set of four variations on a quiet, meditative theme in the minor key – which is where each variation remains in Haydn’s only set of variations cast throughout entirely in the minor. The minuet has a Romani flavour (alla Zingarese), with the cross-rhythm teasing that Haydn no doubt heard first-hand at Eszterháza, the country palace where he and the Esterházy court spent the long summer months. The mood is picked up in the ebullient finale, which is one of Haydn’s wittiest and most exuberant – “musical laughter with a hint of bluegrass,” as one quartet, well known in past years to the Jane Mallet, liked to put it.
HENRIËTTE BOSMANS
Born in Amsterdam, Holland on December 5, 1895; died in Amsterdam on July 2, 1952
String Quartet (1927)
Henriëtte Bosmans should be far better known. She was one of the most accomplished Dutch musicians of her generation – and history cut her off mid-sentence. Born in Amsterdam into a formidable musical family – her father principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, her mother a long-serving piano professor – Bosmans emerged in the 1920s as a first-rank pianist. She appeared repeatedly with the Concertgebouw, working with such conductors as Monteux, Mengelberg, and Ansermet, and built a wide repertory that ranged from Mozart to Debussy.
As a composer, her path was harder. Early resistance to women composers was followed by something worse: in Nazi-occupied Holland she was classified as a “Jewish case.” She refused to register with the Kultuurkamer. In 1942, all public performances of her music – and of her own playing – were banned. She survived by giving clandestine house concerts. Bosmans’s music evolved from lyrical late-Romanticism toward a lean, colour-conscious language influenced by Debussy and Ravel. After the war, ill and exhausted, she turned largely to song, producing some of her most intense work. Official recognition came in 1951 with a royal honour – too late. She died the following year, her career silenced twice: first by persecution, then by an early death.
Bosmans’s short String Quartet was composed in 1927, the year in which she began advanced studies with Willem Pijper, one of the more progressive Dutch composers of the day. With its dedication to Pijper, the quartet leaves behind the rich late-Romantic style of Bosmans’s early works. The opening movement begins with a hushed, questioning two-bar pentatonic theme from the viola. This is answered by the quartet with its inversion, pianissimo and in unison, together generating the material from which the monothematic movement is built – and, indeed, from which the entire quartet is largely derived. The mood is generally subdued, even misterioso as the cello introduces another, now quicker variant on the theme. Bosmans continues to develop the material, moving through many changes of metre and restless shifts of tonality, while building to a fortissimo climax. The movement ends quietly with a backwards glance to the opening statement, securely anchored in its D minor modality.
The central slow movement is reflective and slow moving, its long lyrical lines, primarily on violin and cello frequently anchored by double-stopped drone-like chords. (The cello was a favoured instrument for which Bosmans wrote many works, though her father died when she was only months old). The texture is transparent and clear, reminiscent of late Debussy or Ravel. Propelled by a driving rhythmic figure, the finale vigorously and contrapuntally works a variant of the opening theme either side of a central lamenting, sighing section whose expressivity is kept in check by the forward-moving rhythmic figure. Bosman’s short, structurally innovative quartet drives to a forceful conclusion.
Footnote: As the Allied soldiers arrived in the Netherlands in 1945, Henriëtte Bosmans wrote a song titled Daar komen de Canadezen ("Here come the Canadians"). Listen Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aomY11oEwko&list=RDaomY11oEwko&start_radio=1
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born in Vienna, Austria, January 31, 1797; died in Vienna, November 19, 1828
String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (Death and the Maiden) (1824)
The image of Death as a companion whose hand gently yet inexorably approaches, caresses, and finally claims a young woman reaches back to mediaeval times. Schubert encountered it in Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), a poem by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), which he set as a song in 1817. Its haunting piano accompaniment is built on an insistent long–short–short rhythm, an ominous tread that becomes a rhythmic death motif, heard only beneath the voice of Death itself. Seven years later, that same figure became the emotional heartbeat of the slow movement of a new string quartet. More than that, its presence permeates the entire work, lending the quartet a unity of purpose and design that is unmatched.
Yet the quartet is not, in any narrow sense, “about” Death. It speaks just as urgently about life – as, in its own way, does Matthias Claudius’s poem with lines sung by the Maiden that Schubert does not include in the quartet. The opening movement is almost without theme: fierce triplets drive the music forward, coaxing melodies into being, but not the long, lyrical lines usually associated with Schubert. The scale is orchestral, the sonorities dark and forceful, the ideas set in stark confrontation. The quiet, bittersweet close of the slow movement gives way to the Scherzo’s driving syncopations in a tightly constructed movement rooted in an unlikely source – a G-sharp minor keyboard dance (D. 790), now infused with the death rhythm to strengthen the quartet’s cyclical unity. The finale returns to ideas from the opening movement, its saltarello-like drive propelling the music with relentless energy. The minor key prevails not only through the slow movement’s five variations, but across the entire work.
Louis Lortie
March 17, 2026
Program
GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924)
Ballade in F-sharp, Op. 19 (1879)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Ballade, L. 70 (c1890/1903)
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-97)
Four Ballades, Op. 10 (1854)
Andante - Allegro - Andante
Andante - Allegro non troppo - Molto staccato e leggiero - Andante
Intermezzo. Allegro
Andante con moto
INTERMISSION
FRANZ LISZT (1811-86)
Ballade d’Ukraine (Dumka) from Glanes de Woronince, S. 249 (1847-8)
Ballade No.2, in B minor, S. 171 (1853)
Ballade No.1, in D-flat: Le chant du croise, S. 170 (1845-8)
Program Notes
GABRIEL FAURÉ
Born in Pamiers, Ariège, France, May 12, 1845; died in Paris, France, November 4, 1924
Ballade in F-sharp, Op. 19 (1879)
At nine, Gabriel Fauré made the three-day journey from south-west France to Paris with his father to attend the newly opened École Niedermeyer, founded for the formal training of organists and choirmasters. For eleven years he was immersed in plainsong and the early musical modes, polyphonic music, counterpoint and fugue. This rigorous grounding coloured everything he later wrote. It may also explain why his music avoids the Teutonic rhetoric of Wagner and his followers, where emotion surges forward in an overpowering sweep.
At the heart of Fauré’s individuality lies a daring harmonic inventiveness. His music flows with an apparent ease that – paradoxically – could only arise from intense concentration and clarity of thought. He once remarked that the act of composing was “like a sticking door that I have to open.” Behind the door of his only Ballade lies a subtle transformation of the spacious, unhurried cantilena with which the piece begins. All that follows grows from this opening idea, and the three main sections share a striking consistency of mood.
Fauré unfolds his material with a sense of fantasy, often creating textures that feel like a multi-layered conversation within a conversation. The Ballade’s refinements – among the most intimate and polished in his output – are heard to advantage in the solo version. At the suggestion of Liszt, who admired the piece but admitted he “ran out of fingers” while sight-reading it, Fauré later produced a lightly scored version with orchestra in 1880.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born in St Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918
Ballade, L. 70 (c1890/1903)
After two years in Rome at the Villa Medici as a recipient of the Prix de Rome, the 25-year-old Debussy returned to Paris in 1887 to a precarious existence in which money was scarce. Piano pupils and small publishing successes offered some relief, and the Ballade slave – as it was first titled on publication in 1890 – belongs to a group of short piano works dating from this distinctly bohemian period. When Debussy revised and republished the eight-minute piece in 1903, he quietly dropped the descriptive adjective, pointing to an unease with labels that might constrain how his music was heard.
Yet in the Ballade a faintly Russian atmosphere still lingers. It is felt in the repetitive, folk-like theme on which the entire piece is built. A decade earlier, Debussy had encountered Russian music at source during two periods in Moscow as a music tutor in the household of Tchaikovsky’s patron, Nadezhda von Meck. Debussy does not develop themes here in any conventional sense. Instead, ideas are reshaped, refracted, and gently transformed, with harmonic colour carrying much of the expressive weight. Cadences are softened or sidestepped, the pulse remains fluid, pointing towards a more distinctive piano language that Debussy would soon make his own.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Four Ballades, Op. 10 (1854)
“Why does your brand sae drop wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward?” ask the opening lines of an old Scottish ballad that Brahms cherished. The poem unfolds as a grim exchange in which a mother presses her son to explain the blood dripping from his clothes, only for the truth of patricide to emerge. By drawing openly on this grisly tale for the first of his Op. 10 Ballades, the normally reticent Brahms unusually reveals his source. The opening eight bars follow the metre of the ballad with striking fidelity, and the tense dialogue between mother and son is mirrored in the music’s constant questioning and answering. The son’s replies soon become entwined with an ominous three-note ‘Fate’ motif, unmistakably recalling Beethoven, before the Ballade reaches its bleak climax with the naming of the true victim – the son’s father.
Whether Brahms turned to a specific text for the remaining three Ballades is unknown, but the musical links between them are strong, making Op. 10 the first true Ballade cycle. The second, with its gently rocking, lullaby-like motion, struck Robert Schumann as “richly suggestive to the imagination, containing magical sounds.” The scherzo-like Third Ballade is the most purely pianistic of the set and the least tied to any poetic source. The fourth recalls the world of Schumann’s piano music, which Brahms so admired. Shortly afterwards, Brahms wrote of his happiness with the four pieces, noting that they reminded him “so strongly of the twilight hours spent with Clara [Schumann].”
FRANZ LISZT
Born in Raiding / Doborján, Hungary (today Austria), October 22, 1811; died in Bayreuth, Germany, July 31, 1886
Ballade d’Ukraine (Dumka) from Glanes de Woronince, S. 249 (1847-8)
Ballade No.2, in B minor, S. 171 (1853)
Ballade No.1, in D-flat: Le chant du croise, S. 170 (1845-8)
From late 1839 to September 1847, Franz Liszt lived an almost unbroken life on the road, transforming keyboard virtuosity into public spectacle. Like Paganini a generation earlier, he reshaped expectations of what a single performer could command on stage. Audiences across Europe responded with an adoration that bordered on hysteria, later dubbed ‘Lisztomania’, while critics struggled to reconcile his technical supremacy with an increasingly serious artistic aim.
For eight years Liszt toured at an intensity unmatched by any pianist before or since, moving relentlessly between the major cities and provincial centres of Europe. One year alone could include repeated visits to England, Germany, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, threaded together by exhausting journeys made largely by coach and carriage – and, where possible, by the still-new railway. The practical demands were immense: constant travel, rehearsal, social obligations, benefit concerts, and a public appetite that rarely allowed pause. Composition was repeatedly deferred, confined to brief respites between engagements.
These years coincided with upheaval in his private life. His long relationship with Marie d’Agoult, with whom he had three children, ended in 1844. In February 1847, while on a tour stop in Kiev, Liszt met Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Their ensuing months together at her estate in Woronińce marked a decisive turning point. Concert-weary and now encouraged to compose, Liszt gave his final public performance that September, closing the chapter on his life as a travelling virtuoso.
Liszt composed Glanes de Woronińce (Gleanings of Woronińce) in 1847 while staying at the Ukrainian estate of Princess Carolyne. Here, he was able to hear and absorb local music at close quarters, including at a large gathering given in his honour on his 36th birthday on October 22, when a group of Roma musicians were invited to play for him. After this or a similar circumstance, Liszt wrote or improvised the three pieces in the suite, which he later dedicated to the Princess. The title signals intent – not ethnography, but cultivated “gleanings” shaped by memory and imagination. Of the three pieces, the first is the most substantial and revealing.
The Ballade d’Ukraine unfolds as a keyboard ballade – a narrative form driven less by formal design than by storytelling. Liszt begins in a hushed, veiled sound world, frequently employing the damper (‘soft’) pedal, from which a dumka emerges. The dumka, a Ukrainian and Slavic song-type, typically alternates introspection with bursts of animation. Liszt mirrors this psychology with inward, modal-tinged phrases giving way to surging episodes that feel improvised, even volatile, before retreating again into the shade. Liszt treats the remembered folk material freely, stretching melody, intensifying rhythm, and using pianistic colour to suggest a voice shaped by speech rather than virtuoso display. The result feels spoken, not declaimed – narrative rather than rhetoric, and travel into memory, with a newly inward gaze.
The title Ballade immediately invites comparison with Chopin. While the personal relationship of the two composer-pianists could be awkward, there is much evidence of mutual respect. Chopin’s four Ballades had already established the genre as a vehicle for extended musical storytelling – lyrical, dramatic, and structurally flexible. Liszt follows this path, but in his own way: broader in scale, more overtly rhetorical, and more openly theatrical.
The Second Ballade, S. 170 (1853) takes the musical form furthest and is the darker and more inward of the two. In it, Liszt experiments with sonata form, writing on an epic scale, the music ebbing and flowing as it seeks to reconcile contrasting extremes. The narrative impulse is as much psychological as heroic, with stark contrasts and sudden harmonic shifts. Almost a century ago, English writer Sacheverell Sitwell made clear the differences between Liszt’s B minor Ballade and those of Chopin: “It is less passionate and more full-blooded, concerned, as it were, less with personal suffering [as in Chopin] than with great happenings on an epic scale, barbarian invasions, cities in flames – tragedies of public, more than private, import.
The earlier First Ballade, S. 171 (c1845-8) carries an additional title – Le chant du croisé – often translated as ‘The Song of the Crusader.’ This subtitle was almost certainly a publisher’s marketing addition, intended to steer listeners toward a quasi-mediaeval narrative. Even without it, the music projects a clear sense of epic journey. A noble, processional opening gives way to episodes of mounting urgency, lyrical reflection, and eventual affirmation. Liszt builds the piece through transformation rather than classical development, allowing ideas to evolve like characters in a tale.
Together, the two Ballades show Liszt absorbing Chopin’s legacy while pushing the form toward a more symphonic, narrative piano style – music that tells its story through transformation, tension, and release.