The 16th Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival
Peter Rejto, Artistic Director

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GABRIEL FAURÉ
Piano Quartet in C minor, Opus 15

France’s last great classicist, Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) created poetic chamber works through a subtle and sensuous harmonic palette. He began his Opus 15 Piano Quartet (1879) after a devastating broken engagement. Because of its dramatic intensity, Opus 15 is perhaps Fauré’s most popular chamber composition.

The work begins fervently as the unison strings introduce a restless motive permeating the entire movement. The viola then states a sinuous theme imitated by the other instruments. The Scherzo’s meter playfully alternates between 6/8 and 2/4 to create varied accent patterns; a trio section offers smooth contrast. The melancholy three-part Adagio (E flat major) explores two ideas based on a rising scale pattern. The tempestuous finale, in sonata form, echoes earlier themes.

PIERRE JALBERT
The Invention of the Saxophone, for Alto Saxophone, Piano, and Narrator

Pierre Jalbert (b. 1967) has received numerous awards for his energetic and colorful works, including the Rome Prize, the BBC Masterpiece Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2007 Stoeger Award “in recognition of significant contributions to the chamber music repertory.” Jalbert is currently Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University, where he has taught since 1996. Jalbert based his evocative composition on Billy Collins’ whimsically reflective poem “The Invention of the Saxophone.”

ROSS EDWARDS
“Binyang” for Clarinet and Percussion

Australian composer Ross Edwards (b. 1943) writes: “Captivated by a persistent and strikingly melodic birdcall, I derived from it the scale underlying ‘Binyang’(1996). Binyang means ‘bird’ in the now defunct Sydney Aboriginal language. The identity of the bird remains a mystery, my whistling it over the phone to ornithologists having left them stumped. The second piece, ‘Interior’, remote and mysterious, is an oblique comment on ‘Binyang’, starkly in contrast with its joyous melodic outpouring. Both pieces were commissioned by the Sydney clarinetist Peter Jenkin, to whom they are dedicated. Peter had requested a solo work, but as I began to compose, a rhythmic accompaniment for Aboriginal clapping sticks asserted itself and quickly became inseparable from the clarinet line.”

GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
Quartet No. 3 in C major for Two Violins, Cello, and Double Bass

Europe’s most celebrated opera composer during his maturity, Rossini (1792–1868) wrote his chamber music during his early youth. The title page for his set of six “Sonatas a Quattro,” known only in string and wind transcriptions before their manuscript discovery in 1951, states that their author was 12 years old. At that time the Rossini family lodged with a double bass player who was also a patron of the arts, and the young composer scored his quartets to include him.

Rossini admired all the classical masters, but Mozart provided the primary model for his quartets. Each features songful melodic lines and requires virtuoso execution from all players. Most notably, in the rondo finale of Quartet No. 3 the double bass executes a virtuoso solo passage in sixteenth notes to answer the violin’s triplet figuration. Later in the movement the second violin is showcased by bravura passagework.

OSVALDO GOLIJOV
“Last Round” for String Nonet

American composer Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) spent his youth in Argentina, where he absorbed both classical chamber music and the new tango style of Astor Piazzolla. Golijov writes: “Astor Piazzolla, the last great tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him in 1992. He left us, in the words of the old tango, ‘without saying goodbye,’ and that’s the day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. “I composed ‘Last Round’ in 1996 and borrowed the title from Julio Cortazar’s short story on boxing. My work imagines that Piazzolla’s spirit has the chance to fight one more time (he used to get into fist fights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of violent compression and the second a final, seemingly endless sigh. But ‘Last Round’ is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass. Violin and viola bows fly in crisscrossed choreography, always in danger of clashing but avoiding this with the immutability acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.”