Ravinia 2021 - Issue 4

PAVILION 7:30 PM THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 NEXUS CHAMBER MUSIC † BENJAMIN BAKER, violin BRIAN HONG, violin and co-artistic director JORDAN BAK, viola ALEXANDER HERSH, cello and co-artistic director STEFÁN RAGNAR HÖSKULDSSON, flute KRISTINA BACHRACH, soprano AUGUSTA READ THOMAS, composer and emcee Upon Wings of Words BEACH Theme and Variations for flute and string quartet * Theme: Lento di molto, sempre espressivo Var. 1. L’istesso tempo Var. 2. Allegro giusto Var. 3. Andantino con morbidezza (quasi Valzer lento) Var. 4. Presto leggiero Var. 5. Largo di molto, con grand’ espressione —Presto leggiero—Tempo del Tema Var. 6. Allegro giocoso Tempo del Tema AUGUSTA READ THOMAS Upon Wings of Words (Emily Dickinson Settings) + for soprano and string quartet A. MAHLER Five Lieder (1910) for soprano and string quartet * (arr. Cliff Colnot) Die stille Stadt In meines Vaters Garten Laue Sommernacht Bei dir ist es traut Ich wandle unter Blumen There will be no intermission in this program. † Ravinia debut + World premiere * First performance at Ravinia MRS. H.H.A. BEACH (1867–1944) Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet in A minor, op. 80 Amy Marcy Cheney grew up in an old New England family. Her parents discovered early and fostered her extraordinary musical tal- ent. According to Mrs. Cheney, her daugh- ter could improvise “a perfectly correct alto to any soprano air I might sing” before the age of 2. At 4, two years before her first pi- ano lesson, Amy could play four-part hymn harmonizations after one hearing, even in the correct key, according to family lore. After studying piano with her mother for a few years, Amy Cheney continued to develop under the tutelage of two Boston musicians: Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann. Junius W. Hill, professor of music at Wellesley College, provided training in music theory and en- couraged his 14-year-old student to study harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and instru- mentation treatises, advice she eagerly ac- cepted. Unlike most other musicians of the so-called “Second New England School” at the end of the 19th century—John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, and George Whitefield Chadwick, among others—Amy Cheney nev- er attended university, nor did she finish her training at a European conservatory. She took great pride in her American musical educa- tion and her self-training in composition. An accomplished and active concert pianist throughout her life, Cheney made her profes- sional recital debut on January 9, 1884, and gave dozens of recitals and appeared as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra over the next two years. Amy married physician Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885. Thereafter, she insisted on being called Mrs. H.H.A. Beach in all professional matters. Mrs. Beach devoted more time to composition after her marriage, producing more than 150 works in her life- time. The 1890s brought several auspicious firsts. Her Mass in E-flat was performed by the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in Feb- ruary 1892, the first composition by a wom- an presented by the organization. Four years later, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave Mrs. H.H.A. Beach the premiere of her Gaelic Symphony, the first symphony by an American woman. Many people have misunderstood the effect of marriage on Mrs. Beach’s musical career. Rather than discouraging her professional activities, Dr. Beach encouraged his wife’s in- terests. Mrs. Beach explained many years af- ter her husband’s death on June 28, 1910: “Dr. Beach did not want me to drop my music, in fact, urged me to keep on, with the stipulation that any fees I received should go to charity. … I was happy and Dr. Beach was content.” After mourning her husband’s death, Beach departed for Europe on her 44th birthday— September 5, 1911—and over the next three years gradually re-emerged as a concert pi- anist and was introduced to European audi- ences as a composer. The outbreak of World War I forced a reluctant return to Boston on September 18, 1914. Now a busy concert artist, Beach spent several months in New York City before embarking on a tour of California, where she settled for the next year and a half. Beach’s 1915 California concert season culmi- nated in a performance of her Piano Quintet, op. 67, by the San Francisco Quintet Club, an organization that that had risen from the rub- ble of the 1906 earthquake, under the guid- ance of Elias Hecht, in union with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. With Beach at the piano, this performance received ec- static reviews. “Mrs. Beach is an executive as well as creative musician, and she is entitled to all the honor and respect which a grateful public is able to bestow upon her. She was surely deserving of the enthusiastic ovation which her audience so readily accorded her,” wrote critic Alfred Metzger in the Pacific Coast Musical Review (November 6, 1915). An elated Hecht immediately commissioned a chamber score for the following concert sea- son: the Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80. Beach completed the score in July 1916, and the premiere took place on September 28 in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. One month before the performance, Beach moved unexpectedly from San Fran- cisco to Hillsborough, NH, closer to her fam- ily. The composition and performance, with Hecht playing flute, elicited mixed reviews, although this score eventually became a sta- ple of the San Francisco Quintet Club (later, Chamber Music Society of San Francisco). Beach selected her own partsong for women’s voices— An Indian Lullaby , op. 57, no. 3—as the Lento di molto, sempre espressivo theme, heard initially in a string quartet arrangement. The flute begins the first of six variations with an unaccompanied rhapsody. Afterward, the flute becomes an integral member of the five- part ensemble rather than a solo instrument rising above a string quartet accompaniment. Each variation offers a different characteri- zation of the theme, with changes in tempo, texture, thematic embellishment, and key. The RAVINIA MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 48