The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The Token Creek Festival splendidly captures the poignancy and intimacy of late Schubert through songs and smaller piano works
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By Jacob Stockinger
Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker. Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT FM 89.9 FM. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison. He also took the performance photographs.
By John W. Barker
The Token Creek Chamber Music Festival for this year is presenting three concert programs of what the directors consider “Necessary Music” — as MacArthur “genius,” Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and festival co-artistic director John Harbison (below) puts it, “We did not even know we needed it until it appears.”
Of the resulting concerts, the first, on last Saturdays night and Sunday afternoon, featured music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Joseph Haydn, plus Harbison, suggesting their interaction.
The third program, to come on this coming Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. explores various works in waltz form, old and new. (For more information about the program and tickets, go to www.tokencreekfestival.org.)
And in between, on this past Wednesday night, came Franz Schubert. That was the concert I caught.
Three performers were involved.
To begin with, the two pianists, Ya-Fei Chuang (below foreground) and Alison D’Amato, played the slow movement from Schubert’s so-called “Grand Duo,” D. 812.
That full-length, four-movement work has been claimed by some commentators to be the surviving bit of Schubert’s supposed “Gastein” Symphony. It is splendid music in its own right, and I rather wished it had been played complete, especially with two such polished performers at hand. (You can hear it in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Next, Chuang played the six pieces that constitute the collection known as the Moments Musicaux, D. 780. These pieces, mostly in ABA form, bring Schubert’s inherent lyricism into a range of moods that go far beyond mere entertainment. Chuang played them with deeply probing intensity.
The second half of the program was entirely devoted to Schubert’s final collection of Lieder, his Schwanengesang, or “Swan Song,” as the publisher titled it.
It is not a true cycle, but a gathering of 14 songs on which Schubert had been working in his last years, published after his death. One can, to be sure, find common themes among them of longing, loss, isolation, loneliness and apprehension — themes that preoccupied the composer at the end of his all-too-brief life.
The singer, Charles Blandy (below), joined D’Amato in a deeply involving performance. His lyric tenor voice is flexible, with particularly fine German diction and a capacity for subtle variations in the moods of the individual songs. The pianist was a sensitive partner whose careful support offered a musical dimension of its own. The texts and translations were provided to the audience, allowing full immersion in these songs.
All of this music came from Schubert’s later years, when the composer, knowing that he was soon to die, concentrated his thinking so poignantly.
In bypassing the larger of the final works, too, this program stressed personal intimacy and demonstrated that Schubert’s reflections on the human condition do, indeed, make his music “necessary.”
Tags: American Record Guide, Arts, Bach, Cello, Chamber music, Charles Blandy, Classical music, composer, Concert, diction, Early music, Entertainment, four-hands, Franz Schubert, Gastein Symphony, genius, German, Grand Duo, Haydn, History, Isthmus, Jacob Stockinger, Johann Sebastian Bach, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John Harbison, John W. Barker, lecture, lyricism, MacArthur Fellow, Madison, Madison Early Music Festival, Medieval, Moments Musicaux, Music, necessary, performance, photo, photograph, Piano, professor, Pulitzer Prize, Sonata, symphony, tenor, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, vocal music, Waltz, Wisconsin, WORT-FM 89.9, Ya-Fei Chuang, YouTube
Classical music: You can hear Schubert’s last songs at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival TONIGHT at 7:30
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has been informed that seats still remain for tonight’s all-Schubert concert at the popular Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.
Half of the concert will be piano music, including the six Moments Musicaux and a work for piano, four-hands, a genre that Schubert often composed in and performed with friends. Ya-Fei Chuang (below) is the featured piano soloist.
Also on the program is “Swan Song” – sung by tenor Charles Blandy (below top) with pianist Alison D’Amato (below bottom) of the Eastman School of Music and the University of Buffalo.
Here are program notes by the festival’s co-artistic director and prize-winning composer John Harbison about the work:
Schwanengesang is not a planned cycle. Instead it is a collection of Schubert’s last songs, as serious and searching as the two great cycles Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.
Thematically and musically, the songs have much in common and, taken together, they are unequalled in plumbing the emotional depths of the soul, heart-wrenching and heartwarming.
We can’t be certain whether Schubert (below) ever intended them to be performed as a unity.
When they were published early in 1829, after his death at 31, it was the first publisher, Tobias Haslinger, who named the collection Schwanengesang (Swan Song), presumably to emphasize that these were the last fruits of the composer’s genius.
The sequence consists of settings of seven poems by Rellstab, six by Heine and, as an encore, Seidl’s “Taubenpost,” quite likely the very last song Schubert ever wrote. (You can hear “Taubenpost,” sung by the famed German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
For more information about the festival, the remaining concerts and tickets, visit www.tokencreekfestival.org
Tags: Alison d'Amato, Arts, baritone, Chamber music, Charles Blandy, Chinese composers, Classical music, composer, cycle, Die Schoene Muellerin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Eastman School of Music, emotion, emotional, encore, four-hands, Franz Schubert, fruit, genius, heart-wrenching, heartwarming, Jacob Stockinger, John Harbison, last, Madison, Moments Musicaux, Music, notes, Piano, Poetry, prize, program, publisher, singer, soloist, Sonata, song, soul, Swan Song, Taubenpost, tenor, theme, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, United States, unity, university, University of Buffalo, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, vocal music, winner, Winterreise, Wisconsin, Ya-Fei Chuang, YouTube
Classical music: This year’s Token Creek Chamber Music Festival will explore “Necessary Music” by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Ravel, Harbison and other composers from Aug. 26 through Sept 3
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post about an annual event that puts on a lot of MUST-HEAR programs:
TOKEN CREEK, WIS. – In what way, and for whom, is a certain kind of music necessary?
Certainly the presenters of a chamber music festival would be presumptuous to offer a program as a sort of prescription for listeners. And at Token Creek we won’t.
So often the music we need arrives by chance, and we did not even know we needed it until it appears. And other times we know exactly what we are missing. And so we offer this year’s programs of pieces that feed the soul.
Saturday, Aug. 26, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Aug. 27, at 4 p.m., Program I: Continuo
Some works of art are so rich that they sustain a lifetime of inquiry and encounters, each time revealing fresh new insights only possible through sustained engagement, pieces so resilient they admit multiple interpretations, approaches, nuances, shadings.
We open the season with music of Johann Sebastian Bach (below), pieces we’ve played before and some we have not, music that continues to compel for the very reason that it can never be fully plumbed, music that rewards over and over again. In a concert dominated by Bach, the requirement of the other pieces is really only that they offer sufficient originality and integrity not to be dwarfed or rendered ephemeral by his authority.
Flutist Dawn Lawler (below top), cellist Sara Sitzer (below second) and pianist Jeffrey Stanek (below third join the artistic directors composer-pianist John and violinist Rose Mary Harbison (below bottom) for this opening program.
Works:
BACH Sonata in E minor for violin and continuo, BWV 1023
HAYDN Trio in F major for flute, cello and piano XV:17
BACH Two Fugues, from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080
HARBISON Mark the Date, for flute and piano (pre-premiere)
BACH Sonata in G major for violin and continuo, BWV 1021
BACH Three-Voice Ricercar, from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
BACH Sonata in C minor, from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
Wednesday, Aug. 30, at 7:30 p.m. Program II: Schubert
A sequel to last year’s all-Schubert program, which offered Die Schöne Müllerin and the “Trout” Quintet, this season we offer two late masterworks by Schubert (below): the song cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Song) and the solo piano set of six Moments Musicaux (Musical Moments).
In structure, ingenuity and invention these two large works offer an eloquent counterpoint and complement to one another. We are pleased to welcome back pianist Ya-Fei Chuang (below top), and to introduce tenor Charles Blandy (below middle) with pianist Linda Osborn (below bottom).
Works:
SCHUBERT Andante, from Sonata in C for Piano Four Hands (“Grand Duo”), D.812
SCHUBERT Moments Musicaux, D.780
SCHUBERT Schwanengesang, D.957
Saturday, Sept. 2, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 3, at 4 p.m. Program III: Waltz
This program explores the familiar form of the waltz as an unexpectedly flexible and diverse musical type, with uncommon approaches from a wide variety of composers from Schubert through Sur.
We conclude the season with Schumann’s splendid Piano Quartet, whose third movement offers one of the greatest of slow waltzes of all time. (You can hear it performed by the Faure Quartet in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
We are pleased to introduce violist Becky Menghini (below top) and cellist Kyle Price (below bottom).
Works:
FRITZ KREISLER Three Old Viennese Melodies for Violin and Piano
DONALD SUR Berceuse for Violin and Piano
SCHUBERT Waltz Sequence
RAVEL Valses nobles et sentimentales
GEORGE CRUMB Sonata for Solo Cello
SCHUMANN Quartet in E-flat for Piano and Strings, Op. 47
The Token Creek Festival has been called a gem, a treasure nestled in the heart of Wisconsin cornfields, a late-summer fixture just outside of Madison.
Now in its 28th season, the Festival has become known for its artistic excellence, diverse and imaginative programming, a deep engagement with the audience, and a surprising, enchanting and intimate performance venue in a comfortable refurbished barn.
The 2017 festival offers five events to close the summer concert season, Aug. 26–Sept. 3.
Performances take place at the Festival Barn (below), on Highway 19 near the hamlet of Token Creek (10 minutes north of Madison, near Sun Prairie) with ample parking available.
The charmingly rustic venue—indoors and air-conditioned with modern comforts—is invitingly small, and early reservations are recommended.
Concert tickets are $32 (students $12). Reservations can be secured in several ways:
- Online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/token-creek-chamber-music-festival-2017-necessary-music-tickets-36091343179
- Website: www.tokencreekfestival.org (a link to our online ticketing, or a printable order form)
- Phone: 608-241-2525 (voicemail only, please leave a message)
- Email: info@tokencreekfestival.org
- U.S. mail: P.O. Box 5201, Madison WI, 53705
More information about the Token Creek Festival and all events and artists can be found at the website, www.tokencreekfestival.org or by calling 608-241-2525.
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