Ravinia 2022, Issue 6

MARTIN THEATRE 7:30 PM TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 THE KNIGHTS ERIC JACOBSEN, conductor COLIN JACOBSEN, violin # The Kreutzer Project C. JACOBSEN Kreutzings * BEETHOVEN Kreutzer Concerto * (arr. C. Jacobsen) after Violin Sonata No. 9 Adagio sostenuto—Presto Andante con variazioni Finale: Presto Colin Jacobsen –Intermission– CLYNE Shorthand * Karen Ouzounian, cello # JANÁČEK Kreutzer Sonata * (arr. E. Jacobsen, Adagio—Con moto orch. Atkinson) Con moto Con moto—Vivace—Andante Con moto—Adagio TRADITIONAL A Shadow Under Every Light (arr. C. Jacobsen) # Ravinia Steans Music Institute alum * First performance at Ravinia What exactly is it? I don’t understand. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? –Leo Tolstoy, responding to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata) Projects that begin with a question excite us, because they open doors to new questions and lead us down an Alice In Wonderland – like path to new understanding. The Knights had a question in response to Tolstoy’s: What is it about Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata that struck such a deep chord with the Russian author, becoming a deeply symbolic plot point of his novella The Kreutzer Sonata and its attendant themes of jealousy, obsession, and lust; failed relations between the sexes; and questions over the meaning of love and the institution of marriage itself? In Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s manic tone poem for string quartet (also entitled The Kreutzer Sonata ) we hear some answers. Written in a flash of artistic ferment over the course of a week, Janáček’s first string quartet was a response both to Tolstoy and to Beetho- ven; he mined the obsessive ostinatos of the sonata as well as some of its more tender ma- terial for musical inspiration. Janáček may have been drawn to some of the topics touched upon by Tolstoy (including society’s subjugation of women), but while Tolstoy seemed to suggest that music was a morally corrupting agent of society, Janáček believed music could be the “conscience of humanity” (according to Josef Suk, a member of the Bo- hemian Quartet, which premiered the work). The Kreutzer Project has allowed us to explore threads connecting Beethoven’s and Janáček’s “Kreutzers,” and to bring their groundbreak- ing identities into a contemporary context through the creation of new works and ar- rangements by members of The Knights and composer Anna Clyne. The title page of Bee- thoven’s ninth sonata for piano and violin (op. 47, written in 1803) includes the Ludwig van Beethoven by Carl Traugott Riedel (1801) inscription “scritta in un stile molto concer- tante, quasi come d’un concerto” —“ written in a molto concertante style, like a concerto.” This gave us the idea to go further in the con- certante direction. I created a new arrange- ment, now entitled the Kreutzer Concerto, for solo violin and orchestra, fleshing out the con- certo-like qualities of the piece while retaining the intimate interplay between instruments that is characteristic of chamber music. Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 (“ The Kreutzer Sonata ”) has also been expanded for chamber orchestra by Knights hornist Michael P. At- kinson and my brother and Knights conduc- tor Eric Jacobsen. While the original string quartet is rich in color and texture already, the new arrangement allows listeners the op- portunity to experience Janáček’s vivid world of fantasy with the full orchestral color palette of winds, brass, and percussion, in addition to the original string writing. While digging deeper into Janáček’s world, we discovered that he, like Bartók and Kodály, had engaged in extensive field work around folk song, recording on early phonographs and notating the music of the people from villages throughout Moravia and Slovakia and surrounding regions. Janáček wrote ex- tensively about “speech melody” as a window into people’s psyches and must have felt the deep connection between language and music embodied in folk music. It is the atmosphere of this folk music that pervades later works like “ The Kreutzer Sonata ,” even if in a deeply sublimated form. I was able to locate an out- of-print trove of these field recordings that Janáček made and have constructed a suite out of them, in the spirit of Bartók’s Romanian Dances, entitled A Shadow Under Every Light . Bringing the project fully into the present are two new compositions, one written by me and another by English composer and frequent Knights collaborator Anna Clyne. Anna’s piece Shorthand takes its title from a line in Tolstoy’s novella: “Music is the shorthand of emotion.” Written for Knights cellist Karen Ouzounian and strings, Anna follows Janáček’s model in drawing on motifs from Beethoven, including Leoš Janáček RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 41