Bryan Pezzone

Pianist, composer, arranger, Bryan Pezzone was trained in both the classical tradition as well as jazz.  As an improviser with in an eclectic style, one never knows what this great artist will provide. However there is no doubt that it will enlighten, and engage the audience. I once read a quote about another artist that is represented here tonight, which brings to mind Mr. Pezzone.

(The composer in this case was Richard Strauss.)

Anton Arensky (1861 - 1906)

Anton Stepanovich Arensky was born July 12, 1861 – was a Russian Romantic composer and music professor born in Novgorod, Russia.Arensky had composed a number of songs and piano pieces by age nine. His father and mother moved to St. Petersburg in 1879, where he studied composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, as a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. After graduation in 1882 he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Among his students were Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Gretchaninov. In 1895 Arensky returned to St. Petersburg as director of the Imperial Choir, having been recommended by Balakirev. He retired in 1901, spending his time as a pianist, conductor, and composer.Arensky died of tuberculosis in a Finnish sanatorium in 1906. It is alleged that drinking and gambling undermined his health.

Rimsky-Korsakov predicted oblivion for Arensky, and he just about had it right. Excepting the first piano trio, people have forgotten Arensky's music. I've heard several works by Arensky, and I think the chances slim we will discover either a neglected Brahms or a neglected Rimsky, for that matter. Nevertheless, we listen to all kinds of music for all kinds of reasons, and not everything need give us a vision of heaven.

The trios, I believe, show Arensky at his attractive best, for the music is indeed attractive. The first especially shows off a genuine lyrical gift. The themes in fact are the work's main strength, with a Slavic melancholy cast to some of them and, oddly enough, a Mendelssohnian reminiscence to others (the Scherzo especially). If I had to guess when Arensky composed this work, I would have guessed around 1860, one year in fact before the composer was born. There's almost no hint that Arensky has heard Wagner or Brahms or Liszt, and perhaps he hadn't. Yet, he should have gleaned something from the Five and from Tchaikovsky, the latter supposedly a great influence on him - perhaps so, in the way Russian folk influence on his themes has been sublimated. Still, you listen in vain for harmonic daring or structural genius. Development is often a matter of mere sequence, there's far too much reliance on "call and response" between violin and cello, and the distribution of musical interest never really varies. Instead of (to me) a chamber ideal of a colloquy of equals, Arensky relies on melody-basic accompaniment-figuration. Further, basic accompaniment he almost always gives to the piano. To some extent, it reminds me Saint-Saëns's chamber music, but not nearly as interesting. The slow movement stands apart from the schoolboy development and dilettantish textures of the rest. Here, Arensky seems free and does what he apparently wants: to sing. He lays down a melody and follows it with increasing fervor, mining it for maximum expressivity.

Richard Strauss   (1865 - 1949)

In Munich, Strauss met the violinist and sometime composer Alexander Ritter, who introduced him to the revolutionary works of Wagner and Liszt, music that Strauss’ reactionary father had forbidden him to hear. Strauss became convinced by Ritter, and the musical examples he provided, that an instrumental piece could spring from the inspiration of what Strauss later called “a poetic idea,” and need not be restricted to the abstract expression of the Classical masterworks that had served as the models for his earlier compositions.

The Sonata for Violin and Piano of 1887–1888, the last work of Strauss’ youthful Classicism, Strauss’ Violin Sonata is firmly rooted in the Classical models that he mastered as a youth, but it also shows the breadth of gesture and the sharpening of artistic profile that he had gained through the contemporaneous work on his first three symphonic poems, Aus Italien, Macbeth, and Don Juan. Indeed, the heroic proclamation from the piano that serves as the main theme of the work’s opening movement could well have been chiseled for Don Juan. The violin responds with a tender reflection of the piano’s phrase without losing the music’s impetuous rhythmic drive and sense of urgency. The subsidiary subject, floated high in the violin’s compass, provides lyrical contrast. The center of the movement is devoted to a loquacious development of the principal motives before a full recapitulation of the earlier themes provides balance and formal closure. Though Strauss titled the second movement Improvisation, there is nothing extemporaneous about the work’s precisely delineated form nor about its richly textured instrumental lines. An arching violin melody, a wordless product of Strauss’ skill as a song writer, occupies the Andante’s first section before the movement moves onto more animated and chromatically inflected music in its center region. The opening melody, considerably elaborated, returns to round out the movement. The main theme of the sonata-form finale, previewed in a shadowy piano introduction, revives the bold, quasi-symphonic style of the first movement. A delicately playful transition leads to the second theme, a broad melody introduced by the violin over sweeping piano arpeggios. The development section is brief, little more than a few iterations of the main subject at various tonal levels. The recapitulation is announced by the piano’s bold theme. A dashing coda, based on the principal theme, closes this final work of Richard Strauss’ apprenticeship.

Sonata for Cello and Piano op. 6 in F Major

Richard Strauss  

Strauss was born in Munich on the 11th of June, 1864, the son of Franz Joseph Strauss, principal hornist in the Court Orchestra (Hoforchester) and Josephine Pschorr, whose family were prominent brewers in the Bavarian capital (a city still famous the world over for its beer). This lineage provided the young Richard with a background both musically and financially secure and, indeed, he showed great promise from an early age: he started piano at four (he could read musical notes before letters and words) and began composing at the age of six (lieder, piano pieces and orchestral overtures). At the age of eight, Richard Strauss began violin studies and at eleven, theory, harmony and orchestration (of which he was to become an acknowledged master). His father encouraged him to listen to the music of the older masters, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann, all of whose influences can be clearly heard in Strauss's cello sonata, which he began to compose in 1881 at the age of seventeen. He revised the work extensively during the winter of 1882-1883, preserving only the introductory Allegro con brio, in which the cello is treated in a heroic style anticipating his tone poem, "Don Juan", of 1888. When the sonata was first performed in Berlin in 1884, he was congratulated on the opening lyrical theme by the legendary violinist and composer, Joseph Joachim.

The vitality and verve of the opening pervade the entire first movement, whose unified thematic structure shows the influence of Beethoven and Schumann. There is extensive dialogue between the cello and piano, and an ingenious four-part fugue leading into the recapitulation. The second movement, with its pensive, dark-hued atmosphere and sensitive theme in "Romanza" style, is clearly inspired by Mendelssohn - possibly by one of his "Songs without Words". In the Finale, Strauss draws inspiration from Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony and Wagner's "Parsifal". In addition, the movement reveals some unmistakably Straussian characteristics, including a cadence that foreshadows his own "Elektra", written fifteen years later. The F Major Cello Sonata was written for the Czech cellist, Hans Wihan, who gave the first performance in Nürnberg on the 8th of December, 1883.