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https://livestream.com/thenewschool/schneider-concerts-merz-piano-trio
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Merz Piano Trio - Online Performance
Brigid Coleridge, violin
Julia Yang, cello
Lee Dionne, piano
Gold Medal Winner 2019 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition
Pauline Viardot Twelve Poems of Pushkin, Fet, and Turgenev: 12. Zvezdy "Stars" (1862-63)*
Hildegard von Bingen Hymn O ignee spiritus (c. 1100)*
Cheryl Frances-Hoad "My Fleeting Angel" (2005)
Franz Joseph Haydn Piano Trio No. 45 in E-flat Major, Hob. XV/29 (1797)
Robert Schumann Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 (1847)
This concert will be approximately 1 hour in length
Immediately following the performance, stay online for a conversation with the musicians and composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad hosted by Mannes Opera's Artistic Director, Emma Griffin. Audience members may join in via chat.
This streaming event is presented in collaboration with New England Conservatory.
Note - this program is subject to change without notice.
Presented by the Mannes School of Music at the College of Performing Arts.
$8.00 single ticket - online performance
Note - you must have email and internet access to attend this event.
The Schneider Concerts is committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible and inclusive for all. This event will feature open captioning. Please let us know when registering if you need any additional accommodation.
Please note that tickets are not refundable.
Call +1 212.229.5873 or contact nsc@newschool.edu
Pauline Viardot (1821 - 1910) - arr. Merz Trio
Twelve Poems of Pushkin, Fet, & Turgenev
12. Zvezdy (Stars)
Hildegard von Bingen (1098 - 1179) - arr. Merz Trio
Hymn O ignee spiritus
Cheryl Frances-Hoad (b. 1980)
My Fleeting Angel (2005)
Larghetto
Allegro spiritoso e scherzoso
Allegretto eleganza
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
Piano Trio No. 45 in E-flat Major, Hob. XV/29
Poco allegretto
Andantino e innocentemente
Finale: Presto assai
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63
Mit Energie und Leidenschaft (With energy and passion)
Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch (Moving, but not too fast)
Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung (Slow, with inner expression)
Mit Feuer (With fire)
Merz Trio's spirit animal might best be described as a koala having an argument with itself. Hailing from opposite corners of the globe, the Trio's members can only agree on two things: (1) how to pronounce the word ‘Merz’ in a faux German accent, and (2) that shopping for concert clothes should be classified as a form of torture...
New England Conservatory (NEC) is recognized internationally as a leader among music schools, educating and training musicians of all ages from around the world for over 150 years. NEC cultivates a diverse, dynamic community for students, providing them with performance opportunities and high-caliber training with internationally-esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. NEC’s alumni, faculty and students touch nearly every aspect of musical life in the region; NEC is a major engine of the vital activity that makes Boston a musical and cultural capital.
NEC's Professional String Quartet Program and Professional Piano Trio Program provide intensive training and coaching for exceptional groups that show the talent and commitment necessary to pursue a concert career. Led by Paul Katz and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, the programs come with full tuition scholarships and stipends for each student, weekly coachings and studio instruction, daily rehearsals, and training in all aspects of musicianship and career development.
is recognized internationally as a leader among music schools, educating and training musicians of all ages from around the world for over 150 years. NEC cultivates a diverse, dynamic community for students, providing them with performance opportunities and high-caliber training with internationally-esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. NEC’s alumni, faculty and students touch nearly every aspect of musical life in the region; NEC is a major engine of the vital activity that makes Boston a musical and cultural capital.
NEC's Professional String Quartet Program and Professional Piano Trio Program provide intensive training and coaching for exceptional groups that show the talent and commitment necessary to pursue a concert career. Led by Paul Katz and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, the programs come with full tuition scholarships and stipends for each student, weekly coachings and studio instruction, daily rehearsals, and training in all aspects of musicianship and career development.
Founded at The New School in 1957 as New School Concerts, this series was renamed the Schneider Concerts in 1993 in honor of founding artistic director Alexander “Sasha” Schneider, conductor, violinist, and member of the famed Budapest String Quartet. Since 2004, it has operated under the auspices of the Mannes School of Music. The series has been guided by Frank Salomon since 1959 and administered by Rohana Elias-Reyes since 2001. Guided by music advisors John Dalley, Pamela Frank, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Anthony McGill, Kurt Muroki, Tara O’Connor, and Arnold Steinhardt, the series continues Mr. Schneider’s commitment to provide early career exposure to exceptional young artists and ensembles, and offer outstanding, accessible concerts at modest ticket prices to ensure access to all. Pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the Guarneri, Dover, and Calidore string quartets are among the many artists and ensembles to receive early career exposure on the series.
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
To receive updates about public programs and events at The New School, subscribe to our mailing list. Visit our Livestream and YouTube channels to watch select events live and recorded.
Merz Trio's spirit animal might best be described as a koala having an argument with itself. Hailing from opposite corners of the globe, the Trio's members can only agree on two things: (1) how to pronounce the word ‘Merz’ in a faux German accent, and (2) that shopping for concert clothes should be classified as a form of torture.
The Trio met in the middle of a snowstorm in NYC in December 2016; hilariously - and gloriously - we now spend the majority of our lives together, rehearsing, laughing (a lot), traveling, and arguing - usually over music and whether Australian English is better than American English. Together, we’ve walked onto stages around the world and are humbled to have been recognized as Winners of the 2019 Concert Artists Guild Competition and Gold Medalists of the Fischoff and Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competitions.
But whether concerts or competitions, large or small, the most thrilling thing about all of these experiences is the energetic communities that have emerged from them. Merz Trio loves to be in community with others. We love talking and laughing and getting carried away - in the rehearsal room, on stage, after the concert. We understand what we do as a conversation between ourselves, the composer, our audience, and the changing world we step into each day. Our name, Merz, speaks to this: It’s the term coined by German artist and polymath Kurt Schwitters, who once floor-to-ceiling decorated his parents’ house in Hannover with found objects and insisted that art only occurred in shared spaces. So Merz refers to connection, to sharing, to possibility. And yes, we’re very glad Schwitters didn’t live with us.
Our rehearsal room is a noisy fusion of our interests: Music of all varieties, literature, theatre, cooking, dance, running, unnecessarily snobbish ideas about beverages. We love this messiness. We play in living rooms and large halls; galleries and schools; black box theaters and crypts. There are very few places we don’t feel at home.
We also love investigating other people’s messiness. Alongside our ‘traditional’ recitals, we create original inter-disciplinary projects, sometimes just with ourselves and our extra-musical interests, more often with inspiring and generous artists. So far, we’ve brought our music into conversation with dancers, directors, chefs, sommeliers, and graphic designers. Upcoming work features puppeteers, mime artists and actors. Every time we collaborate, we understand the music that we play differently.
We are encouraged in our explorations by the New England Conservatory in Boston and its visionary faculty. We’re grateful too, for other homes around the world: Yellow Barn, Snape Maltings, Avaloch Farm Institute, the Lake Champlain, Olympic, and Chesapeake Music Festivals, and the Fischoff Competition. Not to mention hundreds of welcoming venues and hosts around the US, Australia and the UK. We’re with Schwitters on this one: Art happens where people are. We hope you'll come along for the ride.
At last, Beethoven felt ready to enter the weighty string quartet medium and offer his first set of quartets for publication in 1801. Interestingly, the first quartet he wrote chronologically is known to us as Op. 18 No. 3, in D Major, and this F Major Quartet, written second, was placed at the beginning of the set. Whether or not this was an intentional choice, the piece presents rather well what the rest of this set and the later works would end up featuring: a radical evolution of the quartet medium he inherited from the reins of Haydn and Mozart. This was all a product of Beethoven’s painstaking and probing working process unsurpassed by any composer before or since.
The work begins with a fragment of a melody played in unison, followed by a mysterious silence. The fragment returns, more searchingly into another silence, only to be completed in a classical phrase structure. Immediately, there is another surprise as the phrase repeats as a forte outburst. The motive that comprises the opening phrase is a monorhythm which repeats in the movement literally hundreds of times, yet much like Beethoven’s future Fifth Symphony, its effect only enhances the energy and drama of the work. The first forte outburst serves as the precursor of many sudden dynamic contrasts, the motive acting as the thread stringing the music tightly together through all upheavals.
An early draft of this quartet which Beethoven sent to his trusted friend, violinist and theologian Karl Amenda, is a unique vantage point into Beethoven’s working process and coming of age. While the overall thematic structure remains the same as in the final version, the dizzying amount of detail-oriented changes the piece underwent is shocking to compare. The most important revelation from the earlier version is Beethoven’s clear handwritten indications that the pathos-laden and dramatic slow movement is meant to correspond to the events of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliette. With this discovery, one can only wonder if other abstract instrumental compositions of Beethoven, an ardent Shakespeare reader, were also meant to have programmatic ties. However, this is the only such example from his whole output that is explicitly stated, and Beethoven felt as though his music should speak for itself in the listener’s imagination. Even without knowing any programmatic connections, this movement would have been most striking for a listener of the era, especially with the melodramatic climaxes and painfully pronounced pauses.
Following this Adagio, the last two movements serve largely as comic relief, with an especially virtuosic violin passage in the Scherzo’s trio catapulting the energy to a feverish height. The mood returns to playfulness throughout the satisfying finale movement, culminating in a jolly bon voyage tune combined with the main theme at the close.
“Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.
Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
— Jessie Montgomery
The Fourth String Quartet of Béla Bartók is a landmark example of his compositional ethos, synonymous with all of the stylistic traits of his mature writing. It combines his sharp formal and technical mastery of pre-and post-twentieth century musical language and his devotion to folk music traditions of his native Hungary and beyond as one of the first modern ethnomusicologists. Above all else, his work reflects his prioritizing the myriad possible uses of symmetry in music. This quartet is groundbreaking in introducing various symmetries as the fabric of the main thematic material, the pitch centers of the five movements, and the function of each movement in the overall form of the piece. Bartok had a keen interest in arch form, congruous halves melded together around a central point, and the Fourth Quartet is the quintessential example of this form at all levels. All of these elements enhance a unique expressivity also apparent in the work’s scintillating energy and wide range of colors.
The first and the fifth movement pair as high energy movements presenting music as rhetoric — pitch motives going back and forth in discourse between voices, sometimes argumentatively.
They feature the same symmetrical motif throughout both movements, as well as an
Arabian-inspired tune heard gently in the first movement and roaringly in the last. Even within the intellectual discourse of the movements, a dance element is omnipresent. The second and fourth movements are hushed interludes which demonstrate music as a form of serious play, delicate yet full of inextinguishable energy. The second movement is a highly chromatic, eerie, and devilishly fast scherzo. The fourth is entirely plucked, with some of Bartók’s trademark snap-pizzicato and other extended techniques creating a unique sound world. At the center of the arch lies a serene and otherworldly slow movement that fits Bartók’s textural genre of “night music.” This third movement begins with the unfolding of a 6-note drone, featuring a delayed vibrato effect one can imagine as pulsating heat waves on a hot summer evening. The lengthy cello solo is said to emulate a Hungarian reed instrument called the Tárogató, and the subsequent solos of the other instruments vividly portray bird calls and even insects. The movement returns to tranquility at the end, with each instrument poetically dropping out in the reverse order they first entered.
Thank you to our audience, Jessie Montgomery, The New School, the Schneider Concert Series, and the New England Conservatory for allowing us to perform for you today. It is a pleasure to play these works and a very special occasion to perform “Strum” by the Mannes School of Music’s newest violin and composition faculty member, Jessie Montgomery.
— Notes by the Balourdet String Quartet, except where otherwise noted.
Emma Griffin is a theater and opera director based in New York City; she is also the Managing Artistic Director of Mannes Opera at The New School. Hailed by the New York Times for her "deeply resonant", "intelligent", and "darkly enchanting" staging, Griffin's productions have been seen in performance venues all over the country. With a diverse background in theater, musical theater and opera, she has been produced by companies such as BAM, Opera Saratoga, Prototype Festival, Opera Colorado, Atlanta Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Curtis Opera Theater/Opera Philadelphia, Perseverance Theater, Geva Theater Center, Southern Rep, Actor’s Express, Virginia Stage, HERE, Salt Theater, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges and the Williamstown Theater Festival.
Admired for her originality, fluency and professionalism, Cheryl Frances-Hoad has been composing to commission since she was fifteen. Classical tradition (she trained as a cellist and pianist at the Menuhin School before going on to Cambridge and King's College, London) along with diverse contemporary inspirations including literature, painting and dance, have contributed to a creative presence provocatively her own. "Intricate in argument, sometimes impassioned, sometimes mercurial, always compelling in its authority" (Robin Holloway, The Spectator), her output - widely premiered, broadcast and commercially recorded, reaching audiences from the Proms to outreach workshops - addresses all genres from opera, ballet and concerto to song, chamber and solo music.