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The Music of Ezra Laderman vol 2
sonata for violin and piano
Erick Friedman, violin
Elizabeth Parisot, piano
Erick Friedman, violin
Elizabeth Parisot, piano
theme & variations for violin & piano
Kyung Hak Yu, violin
Elizabeth Parisot, piano
When I was accepted as a student at the High School of Music & Art, created in 1934 by Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York, my family decided to move a block away from the school in Manhattan. The move to 492 West 136th Street was significant because it brought us across the street from Lewinsohn Stadium, the summer home of what was essentially the New York Philharmonic. It also brought me to within a 15 minute walk of the old Juilliard School of Music. What precipitated the move was that living in Brooklyn we were 1 1/2 hours by subway from the High School. I came home from school the first day in September 1936 lugging a full size double bass. The next morning my resolute mother paraded me to confront Alexander Richter, head of the music section at the School. Before my mother uttered a word, he calmly took away the double bass and handed me a flute.
Abraham Klotzman, a terrific clarinetist, became my flute teacher. Although he was hardly a flutist he became a mentor, and that fall I wrote and heard performed a piece for woodwind quartet. It was my first piece not written for the piano. In a composition written in 1985 for the Albany Symphony titled “Pentimento,” a piece that recalls important musical ideas that I had created over the years, we hear the first eight measures of the quartet. It is the first composition that helped define my craft.
The summer of '37, with the Stadium across the street and Alexander Smallens its resident conductor, I attended rehearsals every morning at 10 a.m. In the evening Bruno Labate, John Wummer, Martin Ormandy, Simon Bellison, Isidor Strassner, Saul Goodman, and John Corigliano, musicians of the orchestra who had befriended me, would take turns getting me in to attend the concert. Often I would take my brother Gabriel, and one extraordinary evening we witnessed a staged performance of “Lohengrin.” That summer I also added Juilliard to the mix, studying theory and harmony with Vittorio Giannini, and playing flute in the orchestra conducted by Igor Buketoff.
I wrote my first Piano Concerto in the summer of '39 (as Germany signed a nonaggression pact with Russia). I played it one September afternoon for my teacher Abe Rattner and a group of students. My life was perceptibly changed. The girls looked at this gawky teenager in another way, and I went from obscurity to notoriety overnight. The following spring I performed the work with Andor Toth, a fellow student, conducting the school orchestra. The piece, strongly influenced by Shostakovich, Gershwin and Kurt Weill was recorded by WNYC on an acetate disc which has since warped. A scratchy tape survives.
When I reflect over the nineteen thirties and how I was shaped in those early years, the record library at Juilliard looms awfully large. For the first time in my young life I was able to listen to recordings while reading scores of the main body of music. Whether it was Sibelius's Second or the Grosse Fugue, it was absorbed with enormous excitement. I would spend countless hours listening, my ears covered by huge ear phones, my eyes buried in the print. Over and over again, score in hand, I would listen while the librarians, wonderful in helping and guiding me through this newly discovered wonderland looked on with amusement. I was hooked. —Ezra Laderman
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Consider whether this catch phrase applies to musical traditions, though. Composers who write in sonata forms, variation forms and rondos, for time-honored combinations of instruments, hardly flatter the traditions behind these forms unless they extend and develop them, breathing into them new lives. Even from his student days Ezra Laderman has understood this, and over the course of his distinguished career he has plucked from the repertory those approaches which he can employ as springboards to his own invention.
He has often described his chamber works as adventures, with the initial gesture in each piece being the first step on the journey; it is a fine metaphor for organic development, an approach that Arnold Schoenberg ascribed to Brahms. Laderman knows, as Brahms knew, the importance of this first step, and so invests it always with content and power—but with what variety, too. The Duo for Violin and Piano, for instance, opens with the violin alone on a single tone, middle C, hesitant and colorless. Eventually, the violinist makes a huge leap upward, but only after he gathers confidence in his initial tone and begins to play with vibrato. This opening, one of preparation and emergence, is so different from the opening notes of the Fantasy for Cello, written twenty-eight years later. Here, the first six pitches, bundled together in a motive, all plummet on glissandi. Both pieces highlight the importance of the first moment by incorporating unusual timbres. But the Fantasy opens from a strong gesture that diminishes, the opposite of the Duo.
Equally traditional is the deliberate selection of simple materials to make vibrant sets of variations. Think of Diabelli's rather plain theme, so brilliantly exploited by Beethoven, or so many variation sets by Mozart built from silly opera tunes by lesser composers. The violin starts off, in Laderman's Theme and Variations for Violin and Piano, with such material: a children's march, static and opaque. He opposes it, though, with clashing chromatic piano chords that assume a life of their own. Before moving on to the middle of the three-part theme, the piano joins in the violin's line. This central part of the theme at first breathes equally without direction, perhaps implying a tonal centrality on F, far removed from the A major outlined in the beginning. Then the music does begin to move, the violin reworking its initial march until it engineers a complete return to A major. The close of the theme brings the F major expected earlier, but as a surprise chord leading to F sharp minor, upon which the violin fixes its cadence. It is an intriguing gathering of ideas.
Usually, in a set of variations, the composer exploits notable features of the theme and develops them further each time he passes over them. Laderman does this, but in a unique way, in each variation choosing from the theme some, but not all, of its disparate strands. So in the first variation, marked Offbeat - Promenade, he begins by flattening out the violin march into even eighth notes; he presents them in octaves with the piano, at the same time ignoring altogether the clashing piano chords of the theme. These he introduces in the middle section of the variation, and intensifies their effect underneath the return of the march. For Caprice/Dirge, the second variation, Laderman mines different material from the theme, now ignoring what he had just developed. Dirge, maintained by the piano, is drawn from those clashing chords originally pitted against the march. Laderman stretches the boundaries of the theme by providing an introduction before the violin enters with its Caprice. As aspects of the Promenade brought the instruments together, Dirge/Caprice wedges them apart, even more so than in the theme. In the remaining sections—Colors, Canon, and Thematic Fragment—even as Laderman exploits different aspects of the opening material, he shifts constantly the interactions between violin and piano. However unorthodox his management of the theme, Laderman is well aware that these changing relationships are the essence of chamber music. Pianist Harriet Wingreen premiered the work with violinist Henry Siegl at a Columbia University Chamber Concert. The performance took place in March 1954, a few months before the composer reached his thirtieth birthday.
Laderman takes equally unorthodox approaches in working with other classical models. Listen, for example, to the slow movement of the Sonata for Violin and Piano—the Pastorale, Chorale and Funebre. The final section is a ground, which after almost three complete statements moves toward a cadence on a Picardy third. Alone, the piano makes the first statement to prepare the violin's entrance; the second underlies the violin's periodic phrase, which is designed to reach a cadence on F sharp minor in the eighth bar. But precisely at the point that Laderman sets up this resolution, he wrenches the violin away to play a series of half-step sighs, from C to B, far from the F sharp minor tonality. These sighs in time resolve into the F sharp major chords, only to begin again. A logician might find closure in the violinist reaching B, the first note he plays in the Funebre section. Anyone else hears weeping, the procession offering no comfort. The moment is even more striking because the instruments are so intimately bound in the rest of the movement, each sharing with the other the music it has introduced.
Other parts of the Sonata are equally adventurous in their formal aspect. A recitative introduces and closes the first movement, yet its material is integrated thoroughly into the body of the movement. The first theme begins with a retrograde of the introduction's downward flourish; both are elaborated from slowly rising chromatic scales. Similarly, motives embedded in the first theme emerge as dominant gestures in a subsequent one: The jazzy, syncopated repetition of D, dancing in the violin down to C and B, launches a new Agitato section after the more serenade-like second theme. This is the same C and B that stands aloof in the Funebre of the second movement; Laderman, like others before him, links his movements in subtle ways. In 1957 the Sonata for Violin and Piano was premiered by violinist Erica Morini and pianist Rudolf Firkusny at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium in New York.
In May 1971, Jaime and Ruth Laredo premiered Ezra Laderman's Duo for Violin and Piano at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. The work was commissioned by The McKim Fund of the Library. The composer offered this program note for the occasion:
The Duo for Violin and Piano was begun early in the summer of 1970 and completed in October fifteenth of the same year. Its three movements are sharply delineated and its form takes shape from the opening thrust from whence all else follows. In the opening movement you actually sense the composer's creative impulse. As with music, the Duo begins on a timbre; the timbre takes on a life of its own, a decision is made, the leap is upward to the ninth. The composer had committed himself. The initial middle c begins in a void, the sound almost inaudible, (triple piano), no vibrato - it gathers strength, intensity, volume, direction . . . and then the leap upward. The movement that develops is in three contrasting sections. The opening, prelude-like, with forceful, angular, dramatic expository material asserting a forceful interaction of the two instruments. The middle section is texturally on another pole; fleeting arpeggio-like phrases on the piano counterposed with a variety of tremolos form a different aural world. The third section returns to the original material with the piano now taking the rhythmic pulse, while the violin counters with the pristine outline of the middle section's lyric line. The polarities are then once more reversed in a final burst of flashing energy.
The second movement has a unique structure. It can be notated as: A, A1, A2, A3. In a sense it is a variation movement; however, each return to “A” evokes a new evolution of the original material. This material is of two qualities: one, large leaps create definite outposts, like the outlines of a constellation; the second, minute major and minor seconds dissecting the purity of a single tone. The juxtaposition of these two elements merge in time to become a complete unit, one that has a sense of flowing linearity and suppressed but implied tension. The third movement begins with a violin solo, almost an afterthought of the previous statement, but it soon takes on the shape of an introductory dialogue between the instruments. This leads to a most dramatic and exciting Allegro that demands pin-point accuracy, and an equal virtuosity of both voices. And finally, the sense of violent energy that has been implied earlier is now released.
The composer's note reveals his approach, emphasizing the passionate, intuitive aspects rather than their
logical underpinning. His themes are locked in a struggle for primacy; in describing them he speaks of “violent
energy” and the “dissecting of purity.”
His recent work exhibits the same concerns. The Fantasy for Cello, which Ezra Laderman composed for Patrick Jee in 1998, was premiered by him at Weill Recital Hall in New York during November of the same year. The composer speaks of the Fantasy as “essentially an homage to an instrument that has given me endless pleasure.” In parts of the work Laderman develops further the technical innovations of Kodály in his solo sonata and of Britten in his solo suites: finding ways to support a treble melody with an expressive bass line, to use left hand plucking as a pivot between arco and pizzicato passages. The first notes of the piece become a motto, recurring in the same “key”, or pitch level, to articulate the music's form. The title Fantasy has for centuries evoked virtuosity and a freedom of spirit that at times nears improvisation. Laderman's Fantasy is certainly a cellist's showpiece. But though the surface of the music flows freely and naturally, the musical arguments are as structured as the more ambitious fantasies of Bach or Mozart.
Erick Friedman, the renowned American violinist, has appeared in his long career as guest soloist with most of the world's great orchestras: the New York Philharmonic and the National Symphony, the orchestras of New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, Indianapolis, the Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and many other major orchestras throughout the world. Karajan, Stokowski, Steinberg, Previn, and Ozawa are some of the celebrated conductors with whom he has collaborated. Mr. Friedman has recorded for RCA with the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony and London Symphony. His recordings of the Bach Sonatas for Violin and Clavecin and the Franck and Debussy Sonatas won prestigious Grammy Award nominations. Recently, Mr. Friedman won the 1996 Grammy Award for his participation in the recently released BMG/RCA CD set of all the recordings of Jascha Heifetz. Mr. Friedman is at present a Professor of Music at Yale University and for the past 11 years he has been the conductor and music director of the Garrett Lakes Summer Festival in Maryland. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Isadore Freed, Ezra Laderman, and Laurent Petitgirard are some of the internationally celebrated composers who have written and/or dedicated compositions to him. In 1983, subsequent to his European recording of the Bartok Violin Concerto with the Orchestra of the Sudwestfunk with Zdenek Macal on the Musical Heritage label, Mr. Friedman also performed this work on an A&E Television Production on this composer's life released worldwide. In addition to his own annual summer festival in Maryland, Mr. Friedman is an annual guest at the Holland Music Sessions and the Flaine Festival in Europe, the Newport Music Festival, the FAME Festival and the Yale Norfolk Festival in the United States, and the ITU Festival in South America. He recently served on the distinguished panel of jurors for the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists in France. In 1999, a new recording of the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky Concerto with Laurent Petitgirard and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo was released in Europe, his first recordings of these works being with Seiji Ozawa and the London Symphony in the 1960s.
Elizabeth Parisot received her D.M.A. degree from the Yale School of Music in 1973, and has served on the faculty of the School since 1977. She has appeared in solo and chamber music concerts throughout the world, performing at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York, Kennedy Center and The National Gallery in Washington, DC, Queen Lizabeth Hall in London, the Hispanic Institute in Madrid and the Jerusalem Music Center in Israel. Ms. Sawyer Parisot has served as coordinator and performing artist at the Aldo Parisot Internaitonal Competitions and Courses in Brazil for several years and has also been a guest artist at the International Music Institute in Santander, Spain; at the Banff Festival of the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. With her husband, the famed Brazilian cellist Aldo Parisot, she has toured extensively, joining him in sonata performances as well as in chamber music with other renowned artists. She has also performed recently with Yo-Yo Ma, Janos Starker and Ralph Kirshbaum.
Ms. Parisot appears on the Musical Heritage Society, Serenus, Albany and Delos record labels.
Kyung Yu received the M.M. and B.M. degrees form the Juilliard School, and the Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music. She has served on the faculty at Yale. Ms. Yu was the Concertmaster of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. She has appeared as a soloist with the Seattle Symphony, the New Haven Symphony, and the Yale Philharmonia. The New York Times hailed Ms. Yu as a “gifted young artist” after her New York debut recital in Carnegie Hall as a winner of the Artists International Competition. She has performed numerous recitals in New Haven, New York Seattle, Aspen, and throughout Korea. She has served on the faculty of the Aspen Music
Festival and was an assistant to Dorothy DeLay in the Juilliard Pre-college Division. Her teachers include Paul Kantor, Dorothy DeLay and the late Professor Emanuel Zetlin. Ms. Yu has two children, Spencer, age six, and Yuna, age four.
In November of 1998, Patrick Jee gave his New York debut recital in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall under the auspices of The Korea Society. He is hailed as being a “gifted virtuoso” with “…lustrous suavity and a satin-smooth bowing and singing line” (Harris Goldsmith/New York Concert Review). He has garnered top prizes in many competitions including the first André Navarra Cello Competition and the 1998 Irving Klein International String competition.
As a soloist, Mr. Jee's performances include the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of toulouse, and the National Orchestra of Toulouse, His recital and chamber music engagements have taken him across the country to venues such as the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshop at Carnegie Hall, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the La Jolla Chamber Music Festival. He has also participated in the Caramoor Music Festival's “rising Stars” series where he performed the Brahms A Major Piano Quartet with Leon Fleisher.
Mr. Jee has worked with members of the Emerson, Orion, Tokyo, and Vermeer Quartets along with other distinguished artists such as Emanuel Ax, Boris Berman, Claude Frank, David Shifrin, Janos Starker, and Isaac Stern.
In May of 1999, he received his Masters of Music degree from the Yale School of Music under the tutelage of Aldo Parisot with whom he continues to study at the Juilliard School.
The Music of Ezra Laderman, vol 2
sonata
for violin
& piano
2 Pastorale, Chorale and Funebre [6:54]
theme &
variations for violin & piano
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