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The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia Britannia Sunday, April 21, 2024, 4:00pm Second Presbyterian Church 5 N. 5th St., Richmond, VA with: Rieko Aizawa, piano Brendon Elliott, violin Mari Lee, violin Tanner Menees, viola Lauren Williams, oboe James Wilson, cello

Program “Petite Suite de Concert,” Op. 77 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Le caprice de Nannette (1875 -1912) Un sonnet d'amour La tarantelle frétillante Aizawa, Elliott Musical Time Machine Inspired by H. G. Wells 2020 Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water Hannah Kendall (b. 1984) 1977 Eustace and Hilda Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) 1924 Excerpt from Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin Ethyl Smythe (1858-1954) 1884 Intermezzo Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918) 1812 Nocturne in C minor, H. 25 John Field (1782-1837) 1680 Fantasia Upon One Note, Z. 745 Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

Phantasy: Quartet in one movement Benjamin Britten for oboe, violin, viola, violoncello, Op. 2 (1913-1976) Lee, Menees, Williams, Wilson Intermission Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 Edward Elgar Moderato – Allegro (1857-1934) Adagio Andante – Allegro Aizawa, Elliott, Lee, Menees, Wilson CMSCVA's 2023-24 Season is presented in partnership with the Richmond Public Library and is supported in part by the Allan and Margot Blank Foundation, the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Notes on Today’s Program More than any other concert in our 19th season, today’s program embodies the season's theme of passing time. During today’s concert, time will be used as a tool that will allow you to “meet” a wide range of British composers and enjoy their musical styles. Any discussion of classical music from the British Isles must go back to its glory days of the Renaissance and Baroque with the famous court music of John Dowland, Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, English music suffered in comparison with the music written in Germany, Austria, and France. However, once we hit the mid-20th century, English music underwent a reawakening, with composers like Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and William Walton creating music with a distinctly English sound. If all of this sounds like a history lesson, in fact it is. British music has always been bound to historical reference: nostalgia and tradition run deep. But through the timeline of British music, there are many memorable characters and, of course, much beautiful music. We start the program with one of the more popular pieces by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, his Petite Suite de Concert. Coleridge-Taylor was born in London to a single mother. His father was a medical student from Sierra Leone whose ancestry included former slaves from America. His mother named him after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As Coleridge-Taylor became a successful composer, violinist, and conductor, one of his artistic goals was to draw on African music and integrate it into the classical music framework, much in the same way that Brahms did for Hungarian music or Dvořák for music from Bohemia. His Petite Suite de Concert was likely written for a more mundane purpose – to earn some money in between bigger projects. Some of the work’s musical material is found in youthful sketches for a piece about Harlequin and Columbine, the commedia dell’arte characters from early Italian theater. Attractive, fresh, and full of melodies, the piece became popular in the thriving scene of “light orchestral music” and was

adapted into forms for home performances such as the violin/piano version you are hearing today. Although currently undergoing a rediscovery, the work and life of this ambitious and talented musician would be better known to American audiences if not for the societal and artistic prejudices that worked against him. Coleridge-Taylor made three remarkably successful tours of the United States in the early part of the 20th century. He was acquainted with Paul Lawrence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois, was received at the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a concerto for the great American violinist Maud Powell, and had schools in Baltimore and Louisville named after him. The next portion of the concert was inspired by the English writer H. G. Wells’ famous 1895 novel, The Time Machine. The plot concerns a scientist who creates a machine that transports him forward and backwards through millions of years in time where he witnesses all the changes around him, while “real time” remains constant. Similarly, our musical time machine travels backwards from our current time to the Baroque era in a short space of time, stopping to sample great music along the way. The first stop is Hannah Kendall’s Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, an extraordinary piece for solo cello inspired by the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the movement for racial justice during the summer of 2020. Evoking a spirit of restlessness and irritation, the piece opens with “Then Shall the Eyes of the Blind be Open’d” from Handel’s Messiah played on an archaic sounding music box, while the cellist hums the traditional spiritual Wade in the Water. However, there is no balm of water in this piece, which climaxes in a sonic “timestamp” of a police whistle. The score is prefaced by a passage from Isaiah and offers a plea for a peaceful and just world where eyes of the blind will be opened, and mute tongues will shout for joy. Traveling back to the 1970’s we have Richard Rodney Bennett’s title track for the BBC miniseries Eustace and Hilda. Bennett won acclaim as a composer of film music as well as classical art music.

This brief glimpse into his work shows his gifts at creating beautiful melodies and mood. It also shows the important role that classical music plays in film and television in modern times. Backwards we go to meet the amazing Ethel Smyth, a composer, conductor, suffragette, and queer icon. A child prodigy, Smyth studied in Germany where she met the Schumanns, Tchaikovsky, and Grieg. A composer of works both large and small, her opera Der Wald was produced by New York’s Metropolitan opera in 1903, the only work by a woman to be performed there until 2016. In addition, she was the first female composer to be granted a damehood. Intensely political, Smyth was imprisoned for throwing stones through the house windows of politicians who opposed votes for women and wrote anthems for the suffrage movement. Her personal life was equally passionate - she had relationships with many influential artists, among them was writer Virginia Woolf and harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse. Her Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin takes a delicate English Renaissance tune and transforms it into variations that are fanciful and humorous, then rustic, then thoughtful. Sir Charles Hubert Hastings (Hubert) Parry was one of the pillars of the Romantic period in British music. As head of the Royal College of Music, his students included Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Most famous for writing sacred works such as cantatas and hymns, Parry’s output included a large catalog of symphonic works and chamber music. The charming Intermezzo we hear on our time travels captures British romanticism at its uncomplicated best. Back we go in time to the influential and beautiful piano music of Irish composer John Field. Educated in London by musical luminaries such as Clementi, Field became a famous pianist and toured Europe. Eventually, he settled in Russia and the distance away from the rest of Europe allowed him to develop an intensely personal style of composition. He was the first composer to use the term “Nocturne” to denote a kind of dreamy, languid composition. His forward-looking nocturnes that anticipated the aesthetics of 19th century piano music, including the lovely Nocturne in C minor,

were admired and championed by Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, who made the genre of “nocturne” into a world of its own. Writing about Field’s nocturnes, Liszt stated that: “None have quite attained to these vague aeolian harmonies, these half-formed sighs floating through the air, softly lamenting, and dissolved in delicious melancholy. Nobody has even attempted this peculiar style, and especially none of those who heard Field play himself, or rather who heard him dream his music in moments when he entirely abandoned himself to his inspiration.” Baroque composer Henry Purcell, one of the true greats of British music, is the last stop on our backwards travel to the 1600’s. Considered one of England’s best opera composers, Purcell’s output also included music for the courts of Kings James II and Charles II; sacred music, music for ceremonies, and entertainments for the court. Drawing on an English Renaissance genre, the “consort of viols,” some of this musical entertainment included multipart, complex pieces for string ensembles, like a set of Fantasias. These dreamy and cerebral pieces contained biting harmonies to affect the emotions and changes of tempos to keep the ear interested. The Fantasia Upon One Note is just that – a multipart fantasy in which one of the players continuously plays a D. The effect of the piece rising and falling around the unchanging note is itself a metaphor for W. G. Wells’ solitary time traveler. Our time travel thus ends in the Baroque era with Purcell. But as an illustration of how history and tradition effuse British music, we vault forward to 1932 to hear another musical fantasy, this time the Phantasy Quartet from the 18-year-old Benjamin Britten. Inspired by Renaissance and Baroque fantasies (much like Purcell’s), the piece is made in a fanciful arched form which can be mapped as: March – Fast – Slow – Fast – March. One of the unsung gems of British classical music is the Piano Quintet in A minor by the Edwardian-era composer Edward Elgar. At once grandiose, inspired, and melancholic, the quintet represents a different side of the composer known for his large-scale orchestral works and coronation marches.

Experiencing the quintet is like watching a sweeping dramatic movie rather than hearing a pleasantly conceived piece of chamber music. In this case the movie would be about the life and nature surrounding “Brinkwells,” Elgar’s summer cottage, which was situated in the remote village of Fittleworth, near Sussex in Southeast England. A haven where he could escape the horrors of World War I London, Elgar and his wife spent the summer of 1918 among friends at the cottage during which time he found the inspiration to write chamber music such as the piano quintet plus one of his most famous pieces, the Cello Concerto in E minor. According to a bogus local legend, a group of trees near the cottage embodied the souls of Spanish monks who, after performing sacrilegious rites, were struck by lightning and transformed. Accordingly, the first movement starts in a halting and ghostly way, and develops into music sounding remorseful, choral-like and even a bit Spanish. The middle movement starts with a profoundly beautiful viola solo, reminiscent of the composer’s famous Nimrod movement from his Enigma Variations. The last movement features a melody marked to be played “with dignity,” and through its fractured form, reintroduces melodies from the previous movements. This ends a brief list of tangible listening clues for this remarkable piece of chamber music. Rather than a series of details, the piece is an emotional journey, full of stunning solos that allow the individual players to express their personalities. Although the quintet is positive and even heroic at times, overall, it is full of longing, nostalgia, and regret. One cannot help wondering how much the music reflects the composer himself during a fraught time in world history.

Artists Bios Praised by the NY Times for her “impressive musicality, a crisp touch and expressive phrasing”, Japanese pianist Rieko Aizawa made her début at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Schneider. She has since established her own unique musical voice, performing at New York City’s Lincoln Center, Boston's Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and Wigmore Hall in London, among others. The youngest-ever participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, she has performed as guest with such string quartets as the Guarneri and Orion quartets. She is a founding member of the Horszowski Trio and of prize-winning Duo Prism, and she is artistic director of the Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival. Ms. Aizawa is a graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School. She was the last pupil of Mieczyslaw Horszowski and she also studied with Seymour Lipkin and Peter Serkin. She is on the faculty at the Bard College and Brooklyn College. Virginia Native, Brendon Elliott received his BM studying with Pamela Frank and Joseph Silverstein at The Curtis Institute of Music and attained his master’s at The Juilliard School under Sylvia Rosenberg and Ronald Copes, then completed a fellowship with the New World Symphony. He began his violin studies under his mother’s tutelage at the age of three and made his solo debut when he was

10 years old. As a three-time concerto competition winner, Brendon was invited as a guest soloist with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra at age 17 on their Masterworks Series. He toured with the Virginia Symphony performing Adolphus Hailstork’s Violin Concerto as an opener for Natalie Cole and his performance of William Grant Still's Mother and Child was broadcast on WMRA radio. Brendon has soloed with The Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Harlem Chamber Players, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, and has performed in orchestras such as the Sphinx Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Chineke! Orchestra. Brendon is a member of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and is currently touring as Joseph Bologne’s musical half in Bill Barclay’s play The Chevalier . The New York Times review of The Chevalier wrote, “Elliott lends his silvery tone, superb phrasing and a commanding technique to the Chevalier’s solos.” Mari Lee is an artist dedicated to forging deep human connections through music. Praised as “extremely impressive” by the influential music magazine The Strad, Mari has performed as a violinist at such prestigious venues as the Wigmore Hall, Philharmonie Berlin, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall, as well as renowned festivals including Ravinia, Verbier, and Marlboro. As the CEO and Artistic Director of Salon Séance, Mari creates experiential concerts rooted in the idea that performing is an act of channeling. The winner of Tarisio’s Young Artists Grants and the Britten-Pears Foundation’s Britten Award, Salon Séance collaborates with both prominent arts organizations as well as corporate partners such as Yellow Barn Festival, Schubert Club, The Crypt Sessions, IMEX, and Google. Mari is an alumna of New England Conservatory of Music, Universität der Künste Berlin, Carnegie Hall's Ensemble

Connect, and Beth Morrison's Producer Academy. Mari plays on 1863 Jean-Baptiste Villaume. Tanner Menees is forging an enviable career as a chamber musician. He has collaborated in chamber music performances with artists including Miriam Fried, Susan Graham, Lynn Harrell,Gary Hoffman, Kim Kashkashian, Susanna Phillips, Mitsuko Uchida, Donald Weilerstein, Carol Wincenc, and the Calidore Quartet. Tanner has performed internationally at festivals such as the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, Caramoor Evnin Rising Stars, Edinburgh Music Festival, and NEXUS Chamber Music Chicago. As a committed artist to new music he frequently performs with Copland House. He has performed as a soloist with the Colburn Orchestra and Symphony New Hampshire. Tanner plays on a viola of the Tarasconi school made in Milan, Italy c. 1880 courtesy of Guarneri Hall NFP and Darnton & Hersh Fine Violins. Oboist Lauren Williams is a multifaceted performer and educator. From 2022-2023, she was Acting Associate Principal Oboe/English Horn of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, a position she previously held from 2019–2021, and has also performed with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Virginia Symphony Orchestra. She holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School and a Master of Musical Arts degree from Yale School of Music. Upon graduation from Juilliard, she received the John Erskine Commencement Prize, which is presented to one undergraduate student for outstanding scholastic and artistic achievement. Lauren is of Armenian descent and has been a featured performing artist through the Armenian

General Benevolent Union at Carnegie Hall and in São Paulo, Brazil. Since 2019, she has served as Acting English Horn of the Britt Festival Orchestra, and is the General Manager and Music Librarian of the Lake George Music Festival. Cellist James Wilson is a performer, administrator, and educator, who has performed in venues and festivals around the world including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Sydney Opera House, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and the Musikverein in Vienna, the Deutches Mozartfest, the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and the Aspen Music Festival. Mr. Wilson is a member of the acclaimed Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, regularly serves as guest principal cellist of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and is in demand as a Baroque cellist throughout North America and Europe. He currently teaches cello at Columbia University in New York. To read the complete bios of today’s artists, and all of our 19th season artists please use the QR code.

The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia would like to thank the following who have made financial gifts over the past year, making possible our artistic mission and community service. Donors (up to $99) David and Shiu-Min Block Beata Boodell Eugenia H. Borum Frances Caldwell Douglas Durso Christine Ertell Martha Faulkner Richard Fine and Sara Ferguson Diana Gabay-Selby Kevin Hoover Denis and Carol Klisz Julie Laskaris Victoria Lewkow Hortense Liberti Rob McTier Sharon and Edson Pederson Ragan Phillips Paul Quel Kevin Rosengren John Rupp Teresa Shuk Theresa Singleton Elisabeth S. Wollan Members ($100 - $249) Anonymous Dennis Anderson Charles and Jean Arrington Carolyn and Gary Bokinsky Frances Caldwell John B. H. Caldwell Kevin Campbell Col. & Mrs. Robert M. Clewell Diana Damschroder David Depp Alan W. Dow II Martin and Hope Armstrong Erb Marilyn T. Erickson Ann H. Franke Sharon Fuller Martin Gary Janet and Jonathan Geldzahler Ralph and Jocelyne Graner Eric and Christiana Jacobson Carlyle Robin Jones Nancy Jones Harry and Barbara Kaplowitz James Kidd Joann L. King Tricia and Jack Pearsall Ellen Sayles Margaret Stokely Misa Stuart George and Carolyn Watkins Marsden Williams Rick and Laurie Williams Jane and Brian Wilson

Patrons ($250 - $499) Laurel Nelson Brooks Clarke Bustard Nina and Ned Conway Ross Decker Robin and Rick Dietrich Fran and John Freimarck Gita and Davis Massey Phyllis McCafferty Jack and Marilyn McClard Jeffrey Riehl Grace E. Suttle Robert and Mary Ellen Wadsworth Perry and Ernest Wilson Artist Sponsors ($500 - $999) Anonymous Phoebe Antrim Rosa E. Bosher Zade Child Lois Wilson Crabtree Mary Boodell and Evan Davis Sarah Harriman Virginia Weight Michael and Molly Wray The Powell Donor Advised Fund Outreach Sponsors ($1000 - $2499) Anonymous Sarah Harriman Elizabeth A. King Elizabeth Lowsely-Williams Peter Gilbert and Ann Reavey James H. Wilson Coille Limited Partnership LP Concert Sponsors ($2500 and up) Anonymous Jennifer A. Cable and David Lingerfelt The Virginia A. Arnold Fund of the Community Foundation serving Richmond and Central Virginia The Virginia Commission for the Arts Thanks also to: The incredible staff at Second Presbyterian Church, all our wonderful volunteers, and our hosts, Mary Boodell, Henry Bowen, Susan Caley, Elizabeth King, Tricia and Jack Pearsall, and Mary Helen and Robert Sullivan, who are essential to our organization.

Thank you for being a part of CMSCVA’s 19th Season! Consider donating to support future events here through this QR code. CMSCVA’s 20th Anniversary Season Celebrate with us as we look back on 20 years of excellence and creativity, and envision the future of classical music in the greater Richmond area. Our season highlights include: The House of Handel. September 15, 2024 – a bespoke program of G. F. Handel’s music played on period instruments. Swept Away! October 14, 2024 – scintillating cabaret music and a chamber opera about forbidden love. Bach by Candlelight. December 16, 2024 – Bach suites and sonatas for solo cello and violin. Celebration. February 16, 2025 – Mendelssohn’s infectious Octet and the premiere of a new piece by Richmond’s Donovan Williams. Baroque at Wilton House. March 8 & 9, 2025 – CMSCVA returns to the 18th century Wilton House with vocal and instrumental delights, Schubert Quintets. May 4, 2025 – the Trout Quintet and the Cello Quintet in C major in one spectacular program. Tickets on sale now! Visit cmscva.org and go to our events page for more info.

Pop Up Concert: Bach Fugues and Suites May 5, 2024, 4:00pm Holy Comforter Episcopal Church 4819 Monument Ave. Richmond, VA CMSCVA ushers in the spring with the fabulous, soul-searching, thought-provoking music of J. S. Bach. Carsten Schmidt returns to the beautiful space of Holy Comforter Episcopal Church and plays a recital of Bach’s fugues and suites. The program will be played on a reproduction of an easrly-18th century harpsichord made by Michael Mietke, an instrument on which Bach would have composed his famous Brandenburg concertos. Tickets on sale now! Visit cmscva.org and go to our events page for more info.