Performing this Week

The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

Summer 2011 — Program 8

Welcome to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series production blog, home of program out takes, artist commentary, and other related tangents we like to call "web extras."

Week 9 of the 2011 season of radio broadcasts was about the pleasure of discovery -- which thanks to artistic director Marc Neikrug, happens frequently here at Santa Fe! We had these two incredible, very satisfying, though virtually unknown pieces from the early 20th century, both by composers who are fairly obscure today.

Bella Hristova, Giora Schmidt & Victor Santiago Asuncion played the Suite for Two Violins and Piano, opus 71 by Moritz Moszkowski. After that, Cho Liang Lin collaborated with Jennifer Gilbert, Hsin-Yin Huang, Peter Stumpf and Jeremy Denk for a performance of Renaldo Hahn's Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor.

Morris Moszkowski was quite popular in his time. His catalog includes more than two hundred compositions including many small scale piano pieces, piano and violin concerti, orchestral suites, a symphony, a ballet, an opera, and, of course, this Suite for two Violins and Piano. So beloved were the man and his music that, in 1921, more than a dozen pianists gathered at Carnegie Hall to present a �monster concert� to benefit the composer who had fallen on hard times at the end of his life.

Despite the fact that Reynaldo Hahn was born in Venezuela in 1874, he is considered a French composer, having moved to Paris at the age of three. He is best known for his art songs which are quite beautiful, and for the full life he led. Massenet considered him a genius. He had close relationships with Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt, and was very much a part of the vibrant Parisian arts scene of his day. How could those experiences not help but influence Hahn's music?

Explore below to find excerpts from Kerry Frumkin and Marc Neikrug's conversation about this week's program, as well as some remarks from some of the artists.

I hope you enjoy perusing these items rescued from the �cutting room floor� and the other things found along the way to creating this broadcast from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio programs.

Thanks as always to Josh and Dan for their help. And thanks to YOU for stopping by,
Louise Frank
Series Producer

PS - These nationally syndicated radio concerts of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival can be heard in the Chicago area Saturdays at 5pm, from April through June 2011, on 98.7 WFMT. You can also listen anywhere there's Internet. WFMT provides free, live streaming at wfmt.com and via a free, downloadable app for your iPhone.

Moritz Moskowski was born in 1854 in Germany. He was a composer, pianist, and teacher. (Source: Wikipedia)

MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI

Suite for Two Violins & Piano in G Minor, Op. 71 (ca. 1900-1910)

Giora Schmidt, violin
Bella Hristova, violin
Victor Santiago Asuncion, piano

Wilhelm Ganz memoire excerpt about Moszkowski

Wilhelm Ganz was a composer, pianist and composer. When writing his memoire, Reminiscences Of Seventy Years Of Musical Life: Memories of a Musician, he included this humorous anecdote about Morris Moscowski by Theodor Leschetizky, the alliterative Polish pianist, pedagogue and composer.

Marc Neikrug shares his observations about this composer, the piece, and the players he assembled to perform it. (Part 1 of 2)

Marc Neikrug shares his observations about this composer, the piece, and the players he assembled to perform it. (Part 2 of 2)

Series music producer Matt Snyder sometimes records video in addition to sound. Here are Giora Schmidt, violin; Bella Hristova, violin; and Victor Santiago Asuncion, piano performing Moszkowski's Suite for Two Violins & Piano in G minor, Op. 71, recorded Live at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival 2010.

I. Allegro energico