Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
12 April 2006

Chamber Night

Karl Stobbe and Simon MacDonald, violins
Daniel Scholz, viola; Yuri Hooker, cello
Alexander Tselyakov, piano

 

Franz Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809)
The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, op. 51
(string quartet version)

1. Introduction: Maestoso ed adagio
2. Sonata I, Largo: Pater, dimitte illis; non ennim sciunt,
quid faciunt (Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do)
3. Sonata II, Grave e cantabile: Amen diro tibi:
hodie mecum eris in paradise (Verily I say unto thee
today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise)
4. Sonata III, Grave: Mulier, ecce filuis tuus, et tu,
ecce mater tua! (Woman, behold thy son, and thou,
behold thy mother)
5. Sonata IV, Largo: Deus meus, Deus meus,
ut dereliquesti me? (My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?)
6. Sonata V, Adagio: Sitio (I thirst)
7. Sonata VI, Lento: Consummatum est (It is finished)
8. Sonata VII, Largo: Pater, in manus tuas commendo
spiritum meum (Father, into Thy hands
I commend my spirit)
9. Sonata VIII, Il Terremoto: Presto e con tutta
la forza (The Earthquake)

Intermission
Refreshments are available upstairs in the concert hall.

Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
Piano quintet in e flat major, op. 44

1. Allegro brilliante
2. In Modo d’una Marcia: un poco largamente
3. Scherzo: molto vivace
4. Allegro ma non troppo

Concert co-sponsors / Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP
and Education & Employment Preparation Services
Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio Two 98.3, CBC Radio One 990 and Golden West Radio
Electronic media sponsor / Shaw Cable

 

Simon MacDonald

Simon MacDonald began playing the violin at age seven in Victoria, British Columbia. He earned his AVCM from the Victoria Conservatory, Bachelor’s degree from New England Conservatory in Boston, and Master’s degree from McGill, in Montreal. Simon’s principal teachers include Sydney Humphreys, former first violin of the Purcell and Aeolian String Quartets, Malcolm Lowe, concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Israeli violinist Yehonatan Berick. Simon has participated in several international music festivals around Europe and North America, including the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival in Germany, the Festival of Two Worlds in Italy, the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts and, most recently, he has been a guest performer at ArtSpring Music Festival on Saltspring Island, BC. After playing the 1999 season with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in New Orleans, Simon returned to Canada where he now calls Winnipeg home.

In Winnipeg he is active as an orchestral musician, chamber musician, and soloist. As well as being Principal second violin of the MCO, he plays with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, is a regular guest with GroundSwell, and was a member of the MusikBarock Ensemble until its final season last year. He has also been a featured soloist on Arts Encounters, CBC Radio Two, with host Joe Fingerote. For the past two summers he has taken a break from the classical genre to play the solo violin parts for Rainbow Stage productions of The King and I and Good News.

Daniel Scholz

Daniel Scholz is the Principal violist of both the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Scholz plays a viola designed by Gerald Stanick and made by Alan Balmforth of Seattle. An active chamber musician, Mr. Scholz is a member of The Winnipeg Chamber Music Society and regularly performs with Canada’s finest musicians.

As a soloist Daniel has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the MusikBarock Ensemble, the Okanagan Symphony, and the Vancouver Chamber Players. Highly sought after as a teacher, Mr. Scholz has students at the University of Manitoba, Brandon University and the Canadian Mennonite University. He has also been invited to perform and teach at festivals across the country, including the Centara New Music Festival, the University of Manitoba Summer Chamber Music Program, the GroundSwell and Virtuosi series in Winnipeg, the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax, the University of Regina Summer Chamber Music Workshop, The Morningside Music Bridge in Calgary and at the Courtenay Music Centre on Vancouver Island.

Mr. Scholz has commissioned works by Bramwell Tovey, David Scott and Jim Hiscott. He is very pleased to have been appointed as conductor of the Winnipeg Youth Symphony.

Yuri Hooker

Yuri Hooker is the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra’s Principal cellist and also Principal cellist for the Winnipeg Symphony. He is an avid chamber musician and has performed with a variety of ensembles at numerous venues throughout Western Canada. He has a keen interest in period performance practice and newly composed music and has premiered a number of works, including one by Jim Hiscott. Last summer, he recorded a piece for solo cello composed especially for him by UBC composer Dorothy Chang. Yuri can be seen performing regularly on a number of local music series, including GroundSwell and the Winnipeg Chamber Music Society. He has also been a soloist with both the MCO and the WSO and has been featured on CBC Radio Two’s Arts Encounters. As well as performing, Yuri maintains a private teaching studio and has been on faculty at the Valhalla Summer School of Music in the Slocan Valley, BC. Yuri and his wife, WSO Conductor-in-Residence Michelle Mourre, have a daughter, Elly, and a son, Ari.

Yuri holds a Bachelor of music from Brandon University where he studied with Arkadiusz Tesarczyk, and followed that with graduate studies under Janos Starker and Stanley Ritchie (period performance) at Indiana University.

Alexander Tselyakov

Russian-born pianist Alexander Tselyakov began his concert career with the Azerbaijan State Philharmonic Orchestra in the Soviet Union at the age of nine. He went on to win leading prizes at the prestigious International Tchaikovsky competition, the International Music Competition of Japan, and competitions in Italy, Israel and the United States.

Tselyakov combines virtuosity with breathtaking musicality in the Russian tradition of great pianists. He studied with Lev Naumov (custodian of the Heinrich Neuhaus methods that are credited with producing many extraordinary 20th century keyboard masters, such as Gilels and Richter) at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where he was later appointed Assistant Professor of music. Mr. Tselyakov has performed frequently with the Leningrad Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Moscow Radio Symphony and many other leading orchestras in the Soviet Union, Japan, Israel, the US and Canada. After moving to Israel in 1991, Tselyakov continued to impress audiences and critics alike. He immigrated to Canada in 1994 and made his debut in Toronto to great acclaim. Recitals across the country soon followed and he is now counted in the ranks of Canada’s leading concert pianists.

Recent concerts have included a highly successful performance at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, a critically acclaimed concert at Wigmore Hall in London, performances at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington), the Centre Culturel (Paris, France), the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the University of Chicago, the University of Leicester (UK), the International Piano Festival in Istanbul, and Koffler Centre (Toronto). Mr. Tselyakov has also been heard recently on WQXR’s Reflections on the Keyboard (New York), and in music and conversation on the BBC Radio (London, UK), Live on WFMT (Chicago), and CBC Radio. His future engagements include recitals and music collaborations in San Jose, Ottawa, Moscow, Bad Kissingen, Paris, Istanbul, Munich, Stockholm, Vienna and Amsterdam.

Alexander Tselyakov lives in Brandon, where he has held a full-time position as professor of piano at the University since 2003.

The Seven Last Words
of Our Saviour on the Cross, op. 51
Joseph Haydn

Haydn’s ‘Instrumental Passione,’ the Seven Last Words, exists in several versions. The orchestral version dates from around 1786 after Haydn had received a strange commission from a priest in Cadiz, Spain, asking for an instrumental piece on the “Seven Last Words” to be performed on Good Friday.
Haydn was under the impression that the work was to be performed in the Cadiz Cathedral. Actually it was performed first in the underground grotto church of Santa Cueva.

According to Haydn’s own account published with the choral version in 1801, it was customary to enhance the performance. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, with only one large lamp hanging from the centre of the roof to break the darkness. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. “After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon.”

After the discourse, the bishop left the pulpit and prostrated himself before the altar. The interval was given over to music. The bishop then pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following at the end of each discourse. Haydn goes on to say “it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting 10 minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limit.”

Given its nature, the work was unexpectedly a great success. It was performed a number of times in Austria and Germany and was published in 1787. At the same time Haydn prepared the string quartet version with a piano reduction made for him by his publishers.

An interesting tale about Haydn’s original conception of the work was given by the English publisher and composer Vincent Novello, who in 1829 visited Vienna and had a conversation with the music historian and priest Maximillian Stadler. Stadler told Novello that he had been present when Haydn received the unusual commission from Cadiz and claimed that he had suggested to the composer how the work might be undertaken.

According to Abbé Stadler, Haydn was puzzled as to how to proceed in introducing sufficient variety in writing seven adagios directly following each other and it was Stadler who advised him to take the first words of each text and write a melody to them which would then be the leading feature of each movement.

Whether or not Stadler’s account is to be believed, his description of Haydn’s compositional technique is entirely accurate. As the English conductor Peter Holman has observed, the main themes of the seven movements do fit the rhythms required for the Latin sentences which, he says, explains why Haydn could, and 10 years later did, easily convert the work into an oratorio.

Piano Quintet in E flat major, op. 44
Robert Schumann

Schumann’s piano quintet is among his most frequently performed chamber compositions. It is also the pioneering quintet for piano and string quartet and the inspiration for a line of great works for that instrumental combination, including those of Brahms, Franck, Dvorak and Elgar.

Schumann began sketching this seminal work in September 1842, taking a week to prepare the sketches and two weeks to complete the score. He dedicated it to his wife, Clara, and scheduled the premiere for 6 December 1842 with Clara as the pianist. As it happened, Clara was ill on the day of the performance, and Felix Mendelssohn stepped in, playing the difficult piano part at sight.

Mendelssohn’s performance at the premiere made a lasting impact on the work: he thought the second trio section in the Scherzo weak and it was at his suggestion that Schumann wrote a much livelier replacement.

The quintet was criticized at the time as having an overly prominent piano part, with the string quartet relegated to the background. But Schumann conceived the piano part as a counterbalance to the string quartet and not as one part among five equals, so that the piano bears one-half of the musical burden, not one fifth.
A bold assertive first theme opens the quintet, followed immediately by a transformation into a warm cantilena melody. The cello and viola present a sensitive second theme as a kind of conversational dialogue. A heavily accented third theme, derived from the first, brings the exposition to a conclusion. The development section features long strings of virtuosic piano runs against sustained string chords. The recapitulation brings back the exposition, modified, and the movement ends without a coda.

Schumann structures the second movement as a cross between rondo and sonata form. The first theme has the feeling of a solemn, almost funereal, march. A tenuous first violin line over an anxious accompaniment functions as a contrasting second theme, then a faster section works over both the first and second before the movement ends with a final statement of the first theme.
The Scherzo is a ‘glorification’ of the scale. Whether played by a single instrument or combinations, up or down, loud or soft, there is literally nothing but scales. The first trio section offers some respite and a second is high powered, heavily accented perpetual motion. Schumann ends the movement with a final review and a summing-up coda.

The crowning final movement contains all the virility of the first. There is a muscular principal theme, backed by a stirring repeated-note accompaniment in the strings. A song-like subsidiary melody acts as a foil to the opening theme. After a short development on the second theme, the recapitulation handles both themes regularly.

According to musicologist Melvin Berger, “In a remarkable coda, Schumann introduces two major fugal sections, the first based on the movement’s principal theme, the second combining that melody with the main theme from the opening movement in a massive three voice double fugue.”

 

 

Anne Manson / Music Director and Conductor

MCO's 2010/11 season is sponsored by The Great-West Life Assurance Company.
Support has been received from Media sponsors The Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Radio One 990,
CBC Radio 2 98.3, Espace musique 89,9 and Golden West Radio. Heartstrings gala sponsor:
Mann Financial Assurance Limited. Sponsor of open dress rehearsals: Canadian Bridge Federation.
Arts Accessibility Program: Sun Life Financial.

© 2010 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra