Artist Bio & Program Notes for November 15, 2009
Guest Artist
Ilya Kaler, violin
Described by London’s Gramophone as a “magician, bewitching our ears,” Ilya Kaler is one of the most outstanding personalities of the violin today. His recordings of the Paganini Caprices have been deemed by American Record Guide to be “in a class by themselves” combining “the perfection, passion, and phrase sculpting of Michael Rabin with the energy, excitement, and immediacy of Jascha Heifetz.” Other highly acclaimed recordings include sonatas by Schumann and Brahms, concertos by Paganini, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Schumann, Dvorak, Glazunov, as well as the Taneyev Suite and Bach sonatas and partitas. The Washington Post lauds him as “a consummate musician, in total control at all times, with a peerless mastery of his violin.”
Ilya Kaler was born in Moscow, Russia into a family of musicians. Major teachers at the Moscow Central Music School and the Moscow Conservatory include Zinaida Gilels, Leonid Kogan and Victor Tretyakov. Ilya Kaler later continued his studies under the guidance of Abram Stern. Mr. Kaler has earned rave reviews for solo appearances with distinguished orchestras throughout the world, which include the Leningrad, Moscow and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestras, Montreal Symphony, Danish and Berlin Radio Orchestras, Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Seattle Symphony, New Japan Philharmonic and Moscow and Zurich Chamber Orchestras, among others. His solo recitals have taken him throughout the former Soviet Union, United States, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, South Africa and Israel.
An active chamber musician, Mr. Kaler has appeared at many major music festivals throughout the US and Europe with many of the most prominent musicians of our time. One of the most sought-after teachers in the world, Ilya Kaler has served as a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, IN and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. He is currently Professor of Violin at DePaul University School of Music in Chicago.
Ilya Kaler has many awards to his credit and is the only violinist to have won Gold Medals at the Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Paganini Competitions. Ilya will be playing on the famed “Sennhauser” Guarneri del Gesu of 1735 on generous loan through the efforts of The Stradivari Society of Chicago.
Program Notes
By Francis Lynch
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Variations on a Theme of Haydn, Op. 56a
The son of a double-bass player, Johannes Brahms displayed such musical talent at an early age that his teacher, Eduard Marxsen, proclaimed him Mendelssohn’s successor when he learned of that composer’s death in 1847. An uncompromising man who never hesitated to speak his mind, his bluntness cost him many friends and once forced him to leave Denmark after remarking of the Thorwaldsen Museum that it was a pity it was not in Berlin. By the age of 40, Brahms had established himself as an important composer of brilliant piano music, fine chamber works, and several orchestral/choral works including the magnificent German Requiem. But he had not yet written a full scale work for orchestra alone, and though he had begun work on his first symphony, he was still not ready to tackle that project in earnest. When the Haydn scholar C.F. Pohl showed him a set of six “field partitas” (suites scored for an outdoor military ensemble) attributed to Haydn, Brahms found himself attracted to the second movement of the last suite, a setting of an old Austrian folk hymn called the Chorale of St. Antoni, scored for oboes, horns, and low brass. Modern scholars are now fairly certain that the suites were not written by Haydn but most likely by one of his students, Ignaz Pleyel; but that does not detract from the merit of the tune or the brilliant ways in which Brahms develops his variations from it (and retitling the work “Variations on a Theme attributed to Haydn” seems a bit silly at this point). In any case, the Haydn Variations became Brahms’s final preparatory essay for his first symphony. The work was first performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on June 2, 1873, with the composer conducting. It begins with an opening statement of the St. Antoni theme, exactly as in the original suite, followed by eight variations (three of which are in a minor key) and a magnificent passacaglia finale in which a repeated bass phrase is continuously enhanced until it becomes a triumphant declaration by the whole orchestra. The work ends gloriously with a final majestic restatement of the St. Antoni theme.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op. 77
Following the success of his second symphony, written in the Austrian Alps in the summer of 1877, Brahms returned to the village of Pörtschach the following summer to work on a violin concerto. Although he consulted with his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, Brahms had his own ideas about violin virtuosity and about how a violin concerto should be written. The resulting concerto thus shared the fate of two other great violin concertos (also written in D major, a very comfortable key for the violin because of the tuning of its strings) written by Beethoven and Tchaikovksy: it was pronounced “unplayable” by many contemporary violinists—and all three concertos have now become part of the standard repertoire for concert violinists. In each case, the composer had his own, rather abstract ideas about how a soloist might display his skill rather than an actual experience of playing the instrument, and it has taken time for violinists to come up with an approach to playing some of their constructs. In any case, Joachim was allowed to write the cadenza in the first movement and had no difficulty performing the premiere of the work on January 1, 1879, in Leipzig (where it followed a performance of the Beethoven concerto by Joachim on the first half of the program). Brahms had originally conceived the concerto with four movements but was dissatisfied with the two middle movements and replaced them with a single adagio. The great Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman described the work as “a concerto for violin against orchestra—and the violin wins.” The brilliant finale is gypsy music of the kind Brahms loved and celebrated in his Hungarian Dances, and brings the concerto to a spectacular finish.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90
After the success of his second symphony, it would be another six years before Brahms returned to that form; but the years between were filled with some of his greatest orchestral works, including the violin concerto, the second piano concerto, and the Academic Festival and Tragic overtures. While most of the work on the third symphony was done in Wiesbaden in the summer of 1883, some scholars have speculated that two of its movements may have originated earlier as part of some incidental music that Brahms was writing for Goethe’s Faust but never completed. A three-note motif (F, A-flat, F) opens the work and appears in all four movements; it signifies the composer’s personal motto, frei aber froh (free but happy), which he had coined in answer to that of his friend Joseph Joachim: frei aber einsam (free but lonely). The symphony was premiered on December 2, 1883, by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic. Probably the least performed of Brahms’s four symphonies, the work is unique in that all four movements end quietly, lending an introspective quality to the work and perhaps making it difficult to waken audience enthusiasm at the conclusion. Nonetheless, it was enormously popular in its first performances. Soon after the Viennese premiere, Joachim conducted three performances in Berlin, all to great acclaim. When Hans von Bülow conducted the symphony in Meiningen, it was so well-received that he had to repeat the entire work on the same program.