PROGRAM

Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata No. 3 in E flat Major (1798)
Igor Stravinsky Divertimento (1938)
-Intermission- 
Jonathan Cziner Solaris (2023)
Ruth Crawford Seeger Sonata (1926)
Maurice Ravel TziganeT(1924)

PROGRAM NOTES

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 3, in E-flat Major (1798)

Beethoven dedicated his three Op. 12 sonatas to Antonio Salieri, the composer and Imperial Court Kapellmeister in Vienna, with whom he was studying at the time. It is the only music he dedicated to any of his teachers, likely because Salieri was the only teacher in a position to offer work or even a court position to his student. “Heaven help us!” Beethoven wrote mockingly to the publisher Franz Hoffmeister, “What appointment at the Imperial court could be given to such a mediocre talent as myself.” (Salieri evidently agreed—or feared the competition—since no job offer was forthcoming). 

Beethoven composed the three sonatas quickly. The E-flat sonata is the grandest of the three and the most purposeful. Its opening movement is a virtuoso vehicle for both violin and piano.  The lyrical slow movement is one of Beethoven’s finest to this point, designed to explore the ability of the violin to sustain a singing melody. The finale is another virtuoso movement in which an energetic theme—the only theme in the movement, after the manner of many a Haydn finale—is busily worked into a rondo, with a fugal conclusion. 

—  © 2025 Keith Horner

IGOR STRAVINSKY Divertimento (1928)

“I dedicate this ballet to the memory of Pyotr Tchaikovsky by relating the Fairy to his Muse, and in this way the ballet becomes an allegory, the Muse having similarly branded Tchaikovsky with her fatal kiss, whose mysterious imprint made itself felt in all this great artist’s work.” — Stravinsky’s published dedication.

At age 11, Igor Stravinsky attended a performance at which Tchaikovsky was present, later recalling it as “the most exciting evening of my life.”  Just two weeks later, Tchaikovsky died. Stravinsky maintained a lifelong admiration for the composer, paying his most significant tribute with Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) (1928), an allegorical ballet that transforms Tchaikovsky’s music into a personal homage.

The ballet score is based on Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and songs—works the older composer had not orchestrated himself. Unlike Pulcinella, where Stravinsky exuberantly adapts and embellishes the music of Pergolesi and his contemporaries, The Fairy’s Kiss is a deeper reinvention. Here, Stravinsky liberally recomposes Tchaikovsky’s material, weaving elements from different pieces into entirely new forms. His immersion is so complete that he later admitted forgetting where Tchaikovsky’s music ends and his own begins.

The ballet, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ice-Maiden, tells a bittersweet tale of a child abandoned in a snowstorm and marked by a fairy’s kiss. Years later, on his wedding day, the fairy returns to reclaim him.

Stravinsky later arranged a four-movement suite from the ballet, which he further transcribed with the Russian/American violinist Samuel Dushkin for their joint concert tours. This Divertimento is drawn mostly from the ballet’s first three scenes, distilling its charm and expressive contrasts into a spirited duo for violin and piano.

— © 2025 Keith Horner

JONATHAN CZINER Solaris (2023)

I've always had a bit of an infatuation with the cosmos. Over the last few years, I've composed pieces which take various elements of the heavens as inspiration (including my first symphony, Celestial Symphony, which the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra premiered in November of 2022). Solaris, which in Latin means "of the sun," was composed for my friend Stella Chen, whose name in Latin means "star." I wanted to write a piece that highlights her dynamic and versatile abilities as a violinist, as well as her intelligence and bubbly personality.

The mysterious opening, featuring lyrical double stops in the violin accompanied by extended plucking techniques inside the piano, introduces many of the motivic and thematic material in the piece. The music the segues into a violin cadenza, which builds in tension and momentum. To reach the piece's first climax — marked "Bright!" —  which to me represents looking directly into the sun. Jazz-like chords support rapid scalar passages in the solo violin, which launch into the faster section of the work, a juxtaposition of soaring lyrical lines and violin virtuosity. This section dies away into a reprise of the opening, this time cast primarily in the piano. After this interlude, the violin reappears, leading the duo to a grand climax and a dazzlingly fast coda.

— Note from Jonathan Cziner

RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER Sonata (1926)

In her biography Ruth Crawford Seeger : A Composer's Search for American Music, Judith Tick quotes Seeger’s daughter, singer-songwriter Peggy, reflecting on her mother’s early, progressive new music: "I don't understand how the woman that I knew as a mother created something like the 1931 String Quartet.  It is like someone crying; it is like someone beating on the walls... and I don't want to think about this as regarding my mother because my mother always seemed to me to have it all together, to have gotten a life that pleased her."

Ruth Crawford’s search for a distinctively American identity began in Chicago in her early twenties, where she studied piano and gained the attention of Henry Cowell. Recognizing her as a “completely natural dissonant composer,” Cowell encouraged her to study with his own teacher, Charles Seeger, in New York.  There, Crawford’s modernist interests in dissonant harmony and linear structure aligned with Seeger’s work on dissonant counterpoint, sparking a creative and intellectual partnership that would last years. By the late 1920s, Crawford’s music was being published in Cowell’s New Music Quarterly and performed by prominent new music organizations. She became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to study in Berlin and Paris in 1931-32.

Throughout her time in Europe Crawford continued to develop her ideas about composition, with Seeger’s regular advice sent by mail.  On returning to the United States, she married Seeger in 1932, immediately becoming wife and mother to Seeger’s three boys (Charles, John, and Pete) and soon mother to four of their own children (Mike, Peggy, Barbara and Penny). With a move to Washington, D.C. and with her own progressive new music taking second place to motherhood, Crawford (now Crawford Seeger) turned a composer’s search for American music in the direction of another of Charles Seeger’s interests, towards folk music. Working at the Archive of American Folk Song, Crawford Seeger painstakingly transcribed hundreds of folksongs gathered by John and Alan Lomax, wrote articles about folk song, published her own song arrangements, and built a wide reputation as an educator. After wryly referring to her recent work in 1938 as ‘composing babies,’ Crawford Seeger was only able to return to composition in the late 1940s. Her Suite for Wind Quintet won a national competition in 1952 and, after a creative silence of two decades, she intended it as a return to exploratory, probing creativity. However, a diagnosis of intestinal cancer the following year was to lead to her death at the age of just 52. 

Sonata (1926) is among the earliest of her works, preceding the String Quartet 1931, the centerpiece of a tiny catalog of important but short compositions dating, for the most part, from the years 1924-36. During these years Crawford Seeger determinedly found her own voice as a composer in the early years of a young, progressive movement in American music. The Sonata, written during her Chicago years reveals her moving away from late-Romantic expressionism toward the angular, dissonant style that would define her mature work. Its première was given at a League of Composers concert in 1927, with another performance in Chicago the following year. The score, however, was not among the works she wished to keep and was burned.  Then it was only half a century later, in 1982, that her former student, composer Vivian Fine, found her own copy that allowed for more performances. 

Three terse chords, twice repeated, with a leaping violin extension are rich in the musical material that will, by way of a slowly rising chromatic violin theme, unfold into an emotionally wide-ranging opening movement. The second movement, Buoyant, has the character of a playful scherzo, with touches of whimsy and, perhaps, a distant suggestion of jazz. The reflective slow movement, Mistico, intenso, further explores ideas laid out in the first movement, rising in intensity to a sudden segue to the finale.  This includes a recurring theme that is contrapuntally exchanged between the two instruments and derived from the ostinato piano bass line of the second movement.  Throughout, the music is tautly written and idiomatically scored by its 25-year-old composer.

— © 2025 Keith Horner

MAURICE RAVEL Tzigane (1924)

Although neither violinist nor Roma in origin, French composer Maurice Ravel set himself the challenge of capturing the colorful tricks-of-the-trade of the Roma fiddler in his showpiece Tzigane. Its inspiration lay in the Roma-style fiddling of the Hungarian concert violinist Jelly d'Aranyi to whom Ravel dedicated what he described as a “virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian rhapsody." The flamboyant writing for violin—a staple in tzigane (Roma) music—also reflects his close study of the 24 Caprices of Paganini. Like the traditional csárdás, Tzigane opens with a long, slow violin introduction (Lento, quasi cadenza) during which the violin ruminates in a virtuoso way on a number of themes.  This leads to a rhapsodic friss (fast section) and whirlwind finale in which the violin sparkles with harmonics, pizzicatos (both hands), multiple-stops, octave passages and other fireworks. 

—  © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca