On Monday, February 7 the Trinity Chamber Players welcome back pianist Peter Basquin, who will help us explore works for piano and strings by two musical prodigies: Wolfgang Mozart and Amy Beach. We will also read another terrrific Handel concerto grosso, Opus 6 No. 7 in Bb Major.
For many musical prodigies (and other composers and performers whose only sin is that they are young), the norm seems to be for parents to parade them before public early and often, while pushing their progeny to scale ever greater musical heights. In fact, I’ve heard if you look up “stage parent” in the OED, Leopold Mozart is listed first, just before Mamma Rose.
American composer Amy Beach was the anti-prodigy, at least in regard to her parents’ behavior. Born Amy Cheney in 1867 in New Hampshire, she showed great musical aptitude at a very young age, but her parents encouraged her by not allowing her to play piano until she was four years old, and thereafter by withholding piano privileges as punishment. It seems to have worked. The family moved to Boston when Amy was eight years old, but even then her parents were determined not to exploit her talent while she took private music lessons and studied the scores of the great composers. Her first works were published when she was sixteen, and she received enthusiastic praise when she finally began performing in public.
After she married, Amy cut back her performance schedule. She continued composing at the urging of her husband, and the Piano Quintet was premiered in 1908 with Amy at the piano. After the deaths of her husband and her mother within the three succeeding years, Amy traveled to Germany to study, returning to Boston prior to the First World War and rejuvenating her career as a concert pianist. She moved to New York City in 1930, after which she was invited to play at the White House on two occasions and she continued to perform and to compose in an unapologetically romantic style.
Mozart, that uber-prodigy, wrote his Second Piano Quartet in Eb Major, K493 after receiving and then losing a commission for three piano quartets in 1875 from the music publisher Franz Hoffmeister. If you were here when Peter last played with us, you heard the first of these quartets in G minor, which Hoffmeister decreed too difficult. Fearing a set of three would not sell well, he released Mozart from the commission contract.
In truth, a piano quartet was an odd duck for that time (or perhaps Mozart was punished for including a viola?) when Vienna was overrun with piano trios in which the violin and cello basically accompanied the piano. Mozart’s quartet broke new ground in that it treated the piano and string parts pretty much as equals (okay, the piano has more notes - but he has two hands, for Pete’s sake!) In 1786, Mozart wrote this second piano quartet even though he no longer had the commission. It was finished a month after he completed his successful opera The Marriage of Figaro; I suppose he wrote it because he was flush with money for a while and the quartet was just too darned good to keep to himself.
The Handel concerto grosso is the second we'll play in this set of twelve most inventive and agreeable works. I particularly like this one for the sheer audacity of the fugue subject that follows a short, slow introduction; it begins with three bars of one repeated note (a bar of two half-notes, then a bar of four quarter-notes, followed by a bar of eight eighth-notes) before becoming a proper fugue subject. It shows a playful irreverence and Handel’s willingness to toy with his audience.
Monday’s is a great collection of notes, so make a note to come hear and/or play some of them!
Let’s Play!
Jim
For many musical prodigies (and other composers and performers whose only sin is that they are young), the norm seems to be for parents to parade them before public early and often, while pushing their progeny to scale ever greater musical heights. In fact, I’ve heard if you look up “stage parent” in the OED, Leopold Mozart is listed first, just before Mamma Rose.
American composer Amy Beach was the anti-prodigy, at least in regard to her parents’ behavior. Born Amy Cheney in 1867 in New Hampshire, she showed great musical aptitude at a very young age, but her parents encouraged her by not allowing her to play piano until she was four years old, and thereafter by withholding piano privileges as punishment. It seems to have worked. The family moved to Boston when Amy was eight years old, but even then her parents were determined not to exploit her talent while she took private music lessons and studied the scores of the great composers. Her first works were published when she was sixteen, and she received enthusiastic praise when she finally began performing in public.
After she married, Amy cut back her performance schedule. She continued composing at the urging of her husband, and the Piano Quintet was premiered in 1908 with Amy at the piano. After the deaths of her husband and her mother within the three succeeding years, Amy traveled to Germany to study, returning to Boston prior to the First World War and rejuvenating her career as a concert pianist. She moved to New York City in 1930, after which she was invited to play at the White House on two occasions and she continued to perform and to compose in an unapologetically romantic style.
Mozart, that uber-prodigy, wrote his Second Piano Quartet in Eb Major, K493 after receiving and then losing a commission for three piano quartets in 1875 from the music publisher Franz Hoffmeister. If you were here when Peter last played with us, you heard the first of these quartets in G minor, which Hoffmeister decreed too difficult. Fearing a set of three would not sell well, he released Mozart from the commission contract.
In truth, a piano quartet was an odd duck for that time (or perhaps Mozart was punished for including a viola?) when Vienna was overrun with piano trios in which the violin and cello basically accompanied the piano. Mozart’s quartet broke new ground in that it treated the piano and string parts pretty much as equals (okay, the piano has more notes - but he has two hands, for Pete’s sake!) In 1786, Mozart wrote this second piano quartet even though he no longer had the commission. It was finished a month after he completed his successful opera The Marriage of Figaro; I suppose he wrote it because he was flush with money for a while and the quartet was just too darned good to keep to himself.
The Handel concerto grosso is the second we'll play in this set of twelve most inventive and agreeable works. I particularly like this one for the sheer audacity of the fugue subject that follows a short, slow introduction; it begins with three bars of one repeated note (a bar of two half-notes, then a bar of four quarter-notes, followed by a bar of eight eighth-notes) before becoming a proper fugue subject. It shows a playful irreverence and Handel’s willingness to toy with his audience.
Monday’s is a great collection of notes, so make a note to come hear and/or play some of them!
Let’s Play!
Jim
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