CMT 2018: BEETHOVEN PRELUDE

BIRTH OF A MASTER
Sunday, December 9, 2018, 2:00 p.m
IBK Chamber Hall
Seoul Arts Center
Nambusunhwanro 2406,
Seocho-gu, Seoul, 06757

Beethoven: Piano Trio in E-flat Major, op. 1, no. 1 (1794–1795)
Wu Han, piano; Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Nicholas Canellakis, cello

Weber: Grand duo concertante for Clarinet and Piano, op. 48 (1815–1816)
Anthony McGill, clarinet; Gloria Chien, piano

Franck: Piano Quintet in f minor (1879)
Gloria Chien, piano; Bella Hristova, Arnaud Sussmann, violins; Mark Holloway, viola; David Finckel, cello

Artists

Notes on the Program

Germany was the first European country to experience an industrial advancement that would dramatically affect the course of Western music history: the rise of the publishing industry. For the first time in the history of written music, compositions could be printed in industrial quality and quantities and be made available across the Western world. The second program of the 2018 Chamber Music Today program opens with Beethoven’s very first published work, his groundbreaking E-flat major Piano Trio. The work belies the heroically Romantic compositions from his late period that Beethoven would become best known for and instead introduces his unmistakably unique compositional voice through the refined medium of the Classical tradition. German composer Carl Maria von Weber was undoubtedly aware of and influenced by Beethoven’s early published works before completing his Grand duo concertante in 1816, a virtuosic staple of the clarinet repertoire that is featured in this program, as he published a derisive, satirical critique of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in 1809 (though curiously enough, that very same year, Weber was criticized by other composers and publishers for imitating Beethoven’s style in his works!). Nearly one hundred years after Beethoven’s Opus 1 was composed, French composer César Franck completed his epic F minor Piano Quintet, which closes the program. Though far removed from Beethoven geographically, culturally, and temporally, there is no doubt that Franck’s own compositions were influenced by the weight of Beethoven’s universal contributions to music (indeed, the principal theme of Franck’s D minor Symphony is derived from a fragment from Beethoven's final string quartet).