Harmonia Chamber Players II
Saturday, March 8, 2025 • 2:00 p.m.
The Unitarian Church at 6556 35th Avenue NE
Nori Heikkinen, mezzo-soprano • Cristina Cruz-Uribe, viola • Sheila Bristow, piano
Stephen Provine, violin • Fritz Klein, violin • June Spector, violin
Katherine McWilliams, viola • Grant Hanner, viola
Matt Wyant, cello • Max Lieblich, cello
Yuh-Pey Lin, oboe • Steven Noffsinger, clarinet
Robin Stangland, horn • Jeff Eldridge, bassoon
Program
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Two Songs for voice, viola and piano, Op. 91
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4
— intermission —
Antonín Reicha (1770–1836)
Octet, Op. 96
Program Notes
Johannes Brahms originally composed his Geistliches Wiegenlied as an 1863 wedding gift for two dear friends, the violinist Joseph Joachim and the contralto Amelie Schneeweiss. (At the opening, the viola intones a Christmas carol, Josef, lieber Josef mein, before the singer enters with an original melody.) It was performed at the baptism of their first child (named Johannes, in the composer’s honor) the following year. Some two decades later, with the Joachim marriage on the brink of separation, Brahms composed a companion piece, Gestillte Sehnsucht, to help reunite the couple (this was unsuccessful, and when Brahms took Amelie’s side in the divorce proceedings, Joseph refused to speak to Johannes for the next four years).
The music of Brahms (along with that of Richard Wagner) was a strong influence on the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg in his earliest compositions, including a D-minor string quartet and many lieder, some of which were set to texts by the German poet Richard Dehmel. Another Dehmel poem, Verklärte Nacht, inspired Schoenberg’s remarkable 1899 sextet of that name, which unfolds in the manner of an extended tone poem. The Dehmel text relates the tale of a woman and man walking through the woods: she confesses that she gave herself to a stranger and became pregnant, but he responds that the warmth of their love will “transfigure” the unborn child as their own. The sextet was written at a time when Schoenberg had become enamored with Mathilde von Zemlinksy, the sister of his friend and counterpoint teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky. (Life would imitate art: at the time of Arnold and Mathilde’s 1901 wedding, she was six months pregnant.) Reflecting on Verklärte Nacht later in life, Schoenberg credited Brahms’ “technique of developing variation” (a term coined by Schoenberg himself) as an influence, as well as Wagner’s sense of “thematic construction” and “sonority,” but admitted that “there were also some Schoenbergian elements” including “some passages of unfixed tonality which may be considered premonitions of the future.”
The Bohemian composer Antonín Reicha, born in Prague, ran away from home at age 10 and was adopted by his uncle Josef, a cellist and conductor living in Bavaria, where the young Reicha learned to play violin, piano and flute. When Josef began conducting a court orchestra in Bonn, his nephew followed and played in the ensemble, which eventually welcomed a violist named Ludwig van Beethoven (a Bonn native born the same year as young Reicha). Reicha and Beethoven would reconnect in Vienna, where Reicha was particularly productive as a composer, but in 1808 Napoleon’s onslaught prompted Reicha to settle in Paris, where he taught composition and fugue (first privately, then at the Conservatoire); his pupils included Liszt, Gounod, Berlioz, Franck and Farrenc. It was here that Reicha composed the first of his wind quintets around 1811, publishing them in four annual groups of six beginning in 1820. These works have remained a staple of the chamber-music repertoire ever since. His Octet, Op. 96, was also published in 1820 and was likely written around 1817.