Event Detail

MARTINU AND BRAHMS
A Camera Lucida Concert

Anna Skálová, violin
Jeff Thayer, violin
Che-Yen Chen, viola
Charles Curtis, cello
Reiko Uchida, piano

MARTINU: Serenade No. 2 for Two Violins and Viola, H. 216
BRAHMS: Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major
MARTINU: Quintet No. 2 for Piano and Strings, H. 298

A note from Camera Lucida Artistic Director Charles Curtis about this program:

The music of Bohuslav Martinu is too often overlooked. Or it is listened to without the close attention it deserves. A childhood spent living in the belltower of a village church left its mark on his harmony, a bracing fusion of open dissonances and church mode-derived chordal sequences. On Monday, November 17, Camera Lucida offers the rarely performed Second Piano Quintet, composed in New York City in 1944. One hears the assimilation of New World elements - racy jazz rhythms and hints of Broadway musicals, the clamor and energy of the big city, the scope of 1940's cinema; one is reminded of other austere European modernists reveling in their new environment, Mondrian and his "Broadway Boogie Woogie" among many others. But the darkness of the war years and the pain of exile keep returning in Martinu's music as ghostly echoes; a genuine grief finally overwhelms the Quintet.

Martinu contributed striking qualities to the music of the mid-century. Long stretches of roiling timbres with only minuscule harmonic changes are typical; a music that teems below a static surface. Formally the music is simple, but up close it is densely figured and sonically detailed. Rhythmic ambiguity adds to a sense of vastness, and there are moments of pure atmosphere that are unequalled among his contemporaries. Like other emigrés, he brought to American music as much as he took from it, and with his many exiled European colleagues in all of the arts and sciences he participated in huge and lasting changes to the American cultural landscape.

Our program opens with Martinu's more modest Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, and also includes Brahms' late A-major Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 100, the first installment in our survey of Brahms' sonatas for string instrument and piano.