NZTrio Photo: Jennifer Raoult
The 2023 Homeland series has a focus on the music of Antonin Dvořák. This performance also includes the willing air - a new piece by Eve de Castro-Robinson, and piano trios by Weinberg and Daniel Temkin.
DVOŘÁK: Piano Trio No 2 in G minor Op 26
This is an early work of Dvořák’s, written as he was developing his individual style, influenced by the folk music of his native Bohemia.
It’s been suggested that the general serious mood – minor keys predominate throughout – is an indication of Dvorak’s distress at the recent death of a baby daughter.
Daniel TEMKIN: Five Bagatelles
American composer Daniel Temkin Photo: Lauren Desberg
American composer Daniel Temkin writes:
"Written in 2007, Five Bagatelles is one of my earliest compositions. At the time, I was an undergraduate music student focusing on percussion, and I was discovering a lot of great 20th-century music for the first time. Pieces by Bartok, Dutilleux, Corigliano, and countless others were striking my ears, and I was enraptured with the colors, sounds, and rhythms of this music. This early piano trio is a set of homages, each movement dedicated to a different composer. It reflects very pure impressions I had of the music I was hearing at that time in my life, unfiltered and without a thorough intellectual lens or strong technical composing skills. In this sense, these miniatures are some of the purest and most earnest pieces I’ve written, they are a youthful love letter to music and composers who made me want to write music myself."
I. Fugue (Homage to Benjamin Britten)
II. Ostinato (Homage to Béla Bartók)
III. Romanze (Homage to Aaron Copland)
IV. Rondo: Cadenza (Homage to Henri Dutilleux)
V. Chorale (Homage to György Ligeti)
DE CASTRO-ROBINSON: the willing air
Eve De Castro-Robinson Photo: Supplied
Of this new commission, Eve de Castro-Robinson writes:
“The title is a phrase taken from a poem of my mother’s: ‘Were we to meet in unexpected places A sudden warmth would fill the willing air...’
"It is dedicated to the memory of Aotearoa composer Jenny McLeod, an inspirational woman and composer. Always reflective, she told me, 'You can’t fool the Muse, she is higher than God, a memorable phrase elevating the creative impulse.' My own composerly balancing of the creative and spiritual involves the belief that each dimension is beyond human understanding.
"The character of this trio is directly influenced by a visit to a sanctuary in Melbourne, the Mingary Quiet Place. Intimate, meditative, and generally sotto voce, the willing air’s six movements reflect on Mingary’s elements of nature; rock, water and light, and its invitations to visitors, to 'Breathe. Refocus and reflect. Touch the stone. Go further'.”
WEINBERG: Piano Trio in A minor Op 24
A work that seems to reflect the tumultous life that Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg led during the Second World War and subsequently.
Paraphrasing Charlotte Wilson’s programme notes: Several members of his family were massacred in the anti-semitic Kishinev pogroms early in the century. He graduated in 1939, and just ahead of Hitler's army, he fled Warsaw to Soviet Russia while his parents and younger sister were rounded up and murdered in the Trawniki concentration camp. He settled first in Minsk, then Uzbekistan and finally in Moscow, only to become the target of Soviet agents himself. He was arrested and jailed on charges of "Jewish bourgeois nationalism".
Shostakovich, his friend, worked tirelessly to try and save him and just as it seemed hopeless, a massive stroke of luck - Stalin died. Weinberg was released from jail, his music was at last allowed to be heard, and he spent the rest of his life in Moscow performing and enjoying a success that until Glasnost, remained relatively unknown to the west.
DVOŘÁK arr NZTrio: Songs my mother taught me
A little programmed 'encore' to send the audience away in a lighter mood than the Weinberg trio would have allowed.
Dvořák set the words of Czech poet Adolf Hejduk: “When my mother taught me to sing when I was small, she would often shed tears, strangely. And now it's me who cries, tears pour down my cheeks when I teach gypsy children to play and sing, play and sing!”
Recorded by RNZ Concert in Auckland Concert Chamber, 5 March 2023
Producer: Tim Dodd
Engineer: Adrian Hollay
