Chamber Recital: Rhapsodic Encounters

February 12, 2022 | 07:00 pm

February 12, 2022 | 07:00 pm

To RSVP please contact junga@mit.edu

 

Pianist Jung-A Bang presents the ‘violin-piano’ chamber works of the late 19th and early 20th century composers: Antonìn Dvorak, Guillaume Lekeu, Franz von Vecsey, and Béla Bartok, in collaboration with Rumanian violinist/conductor Radu Paponiu.
The program, titled ‘Rhapsodic Encounters’, was inspired by the rich folk tradition permeated in each composer’s heritage. Hungarian ethnomusicologist, Béla Bartok, traveled extensively throughout villages in Hungary and Romania, recording local folk musicians. He would later transcribe and stylize these motives and tunes, which are at the base of what was to become Bartok’s unique musical language.

Franz von Vecsey was a Hungarian violinist whose compositional style was also profoundly influenced by Hungarian folk music. Vecsey was considered a child prodigy and toured Europe extensively throughout the 1910s and 20s, at one point with Bartok himself as a pianist. Unfortunately, Vecsey’s career slowed down significantly after becoming seriously ill in the mid-30s.

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak is well-known for his ties to the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is one of Dvorak’s most popular songs, initially written for voice and piano, but presented here in an arrangement made by Fritz Kreisler for violin and piano. The original lyrics listed below were written by the Czech poet Adolf Hejduk.

Songs my mother taught me in the days long vanished,
Seldom from her eyelids were the teardrops banished.
Now I teach my children each melodious measure;
Often tears are flowing from my memory’s treasure.
 

Guillaume Lekeu was born in a Belgian village called Heusy. He later traveled to Paris where he studied composition, counterpoint, and orchestration with Cesar Franck and Vincent d’Indy. Even after moving to and living in Paris, Lekeu could not escape the influence of the earlier days in the Belgian countryside––the heart of Lekeu’s Violin Sonata in G major lies in the slow second movement. It opens with an unusual 7/8 meter, leaving listeners the feeling of a melancholic, suspended, and never-ending melody. The melody that resonates throughout the movement is played “very simply and with the feeling of a popular song.”

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