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After performing at the Edinburgh and Moritzburg festivals, the Sitkovetsky Trio is coming to Dubrovnik. By performing his 2nd Piano Trio, the Trio will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, but will also perform works by three female composers: Clara Schumann, Cecile Chaminade, and the Croatian premiere of the Iranian composer Mahdis Kashani. The Sitkovetsky Trio has established itself as an exceptional piano trio of today. Their thoughtful and committed approach has brought the ensemble critical acclaim and invitations to renowned concert halls around the world, including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Palais des Beaux Arts, Musée du Louvre, l’Auditori Barcelona, Wigmore Hall or Lincoln Center New York. Recently, the Sitkovetsky Trio received the Chamber Music Award from BBC Music Magazine. They were previously first prize-winners of the International Commerzbank Chamber Music Award and recipients of the NORDMETALL Chamber Music Award at the Mecklenburg- Vorpommern Festival, as well as the Philharmonia-Martin Chamber Music Award. They have been supported by the Hattori Foundation, the Musicians Benevolent Fund, the Fidelio Trust and the Swiss Global Artistic Foundation. Last season, the Sitkovetsky Trio received generous funding from the Initiative Musik as part of the Neustart Kultur programme launched by the German government.
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PROGRAMME:
Clara Schumann: Piano Trio in G minor op. 17
III. Andante
Cécile Louise Chaminade: Piano Trio No. 2 in A minor, op. 34
Allegro moderato
Lento
Allegro energico
Mahdis Golzar Kashani: To the Pointer Stars (Croatian premiere)
Dmitrij Šostakovič: Piano trio No. 2 e-Moll op. 67
Andante - Moderato
Allegro con brio
Largo
Allegretto - Adagio
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She published her first piece at the age of eleven and later became a famous pianist who supported her large family with music. For a long time, she was known as the wife of a respected composer, crucial in supporting his career, and her music remained in the shadow of his canonical works and intense family life. However, Clara Schumann’s (b. Wieck, Leipzig, 1819 – Frankfurt, 1896) music has recently been rediscovered. She played from a young age, and her father Friedrich was both her teacher and the teacher of Robert Schumann, whom she married in 1840 despite her father’s opposition. She wrote mostly for the piano, where she was able to demonstrate her deep knowledge of the instrument, but she also wrote songs, chamber music, choral works, and a piano concerto.
Clara and Robert Schumann studied the music of other composers together, dedicating themselves to one form at a time. She was the first in her family to write a piano trio, in 1846, and encouraged her husband to do so as well; he wrote his a year later (and another four years later), while Clara did not write any more trios. She started to write the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, when she had, as she wrote, ‘a little more’ time than usual: she was not on a concert tour because of her fourth out of a total of eight pregnancies (sadly, her son Emil only lived for sixteen months). The skillfully written Trio was highly regarded and remained in concert repertoires, and Brahms and Mendelssohn were particularly impressed by the final movement. This evening we will hear the third movement, Andante – a tender song, a moving romance with a contrasting, turbulent central part: a true example of Romantic music filled with longing.
She was the first French female composer to receive the French Legion of Honor, and a successful concert pianist and composer who had to fight for her musical education: Cécile (Louise Stéphanie) Chaminade (Paris, 1857 – Monte Carlo, 1944) began learning the piano with her mother and studied composition privately after her father forbade her from attending conservatory. She performed from the age of eighteen, in France and England, and later in the United States. She wrote about four hundred works, including two hundred piano pieces, songs, an opera, a ballet, orchestral suites, and chamber music. She published most of her works, and her piano pieces and songs were very popular in the salons of the time. However, according to musicologist Marcia J. Citron, her gender and reputation as a composer of salon music probably negatively influenced the reception of her other, larger works. In praising Chaminade, the composer Ambroise Thomas said: ‘This is not a woman composing, this is a composer who is also a woman.’
Chaminade later reduced her activities due to health problems and World War I, but she recorded several performances on wax cylinders between 1901 and 1914. She wrote two piano trios: The Piano Trio No. 2, from 1887, is in three movements: the Allegro moderato is marked by ascending scale passages, powerful and dramatic, the singing Lento unwinds quite slowly, and the rushed Allegro energico is, as expected, more ‘decisive’ and filled with chromaticism. Marcia Citron writes: ‘Her music is melodic and accessible, with memorable melodies, clear textures and slightly chromatic harmonies. The emphasis on wit and color is typically French, and many of the pieces seem to be inspired by dance.’
Mahdis Golzar Kashani (Tehran, 1984) is an acclaimed Iranian composer and pianist. She began learning the piano with Javad Maroufi at the age of six and gave her first solo concert at the age of fourteen at Sedā va Simā University. She studied electrical engineering at Azad University in Tehran before earning her MA in composition from Sooreh Art University. Kashani has performed at numerous festivals, such as the Tehran Classical and Contemporary Music Festival and the Festival 4020 in Linz, Austria, she has given piano recitals at the Niavaran Hall, and collaborated with the Vahdat Concert Hall Choir, also in Tehran. She has participated in international composition workshops, and her work has been recognized in various competitions: she was a finalist in the KLK New Music Festival in Ukraine (2013), shortlisted by the Docklands Sinfonia in the Epic Composition Competition (London, 2014), winner of the IAWM Orchestral Competition in the USA (2015), and a semi-finalist in several other competitions.
The piece To the Pointer Stars was commissioned by Trio Sitkovetsky and premiered in Nuremberg this May. The term ‘pointer stars’ refers to the stars Dubhe and Merak in the Ursa Major constellation. They point to the North Star, which is important for navigation – therefore, they are the stars that point in the right direction. Here is what Mahdis Golzar Kashani wrote about her piece To the Pointer Stars: ‘Suppression and elimination of intellectuals is a common practice of totalitarian regimes. This piece is dedicated to the memory of those who were sacrificed for defending freedom of thought, and is inspired by those who fell in the fight for free thought, the Pointer Stars. Morteza Keyvan, Alexei Navalny, Sattar Beheshti, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King Jr…’
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (St. Petersburg, 1906 – Moscow, 1975), one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, whose fiftieth anniversary of death is marked this August (he died on 9 August 1975), was also familiar with violent regimes. He grew up in a bourgeois family with revolutionary inclinations. He was taught piano by his mother before he was admitted to the Conservatory at the age of thirteen as the youngest student, where he studied piano and composition. To support his studies, he worked as a pianist in cinemas. His first success came with the performance of his graduation piece, Symphony No. 1 (1925), followed by an award at the First International Chopin Competition. He continued writing symphonies, film music and stage pieces, his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District being particularly successful – until, after numerous performances, it was attacked in the newspaper Pravda in 1936. After the incident, he withdrew his Symphony No. 4 and wrote the more conservative, ‘reconciliatory’ Symphony No. 5 which improved his political status. Nevertheless, his whole life was marked by balancing between art and politics, by attempting to survive under Stalin’s rule and preserve his integrity as a composer. He taught at the Leningrad and later the Moscow Conservatory, received awards and composed acclaimed works filled with drama and irony, but his music was once again deemed inappropriate in 1948, which cost him his teaching position, after which he began performing and recording more often and turned to composing shorter pieces. After Stalin’s death, he became a prominent Soviet composer.
Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos, sonatas, numerous film scores and important chamber works. He was not a proponent of any of the new developments in music, although he was familiar with them (he occasionally used the twelve-tone technique in his later works), developing instead his own style, since he was to a certain extent forced to write ‘ambiguous’ music in order to avoid political problems, often using irony and ‘encoding’ his original intentions.
His Trio for violin, cello and piano, Op. 67, written in 1944, is one of the most important chamber works of the 20th century, a piece whose dramatic intensity and combination of elements, with transient melancholic moments that are defeated by the grotesque, the high voltage and the final tragedy, quite possibly unsurpassed in music. Shostakovich composed it distressed by the news of the death of his close friend – the musicologist to whom he dedicated the Trio, Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, represented by the first, ‘Russian’ theme of the piece – but also the news of the atrocities of the Second World War. The atmosphere is defined by the gloomy opening, with cello harmonics and ‘awkward’ mournful fugato with instruments seeming as if they are unsuccessfully trying to move apart. The second movement brings mania, a grotesque dance, while the largo – which was performed at Shostakovich’s funeral – returns the slow suffering in the form of a passacaglia, with the theme in the bass. The mournful march of the fourth movement is a culmination of the piece, interpreted in a number of ways associated with war: as an allusion to concentration camps, Jewish music and destruction. The piece is concluded with a distinct, nearly festive gloom from its beginning.
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