Music: Sun Jun 7

Composers change and evolve over the course of a lifetime, but a core identity often pervades their work. The piano pieces performed in this morning’s Centering  and Opening Music date from Beethoven’s early years. In the 1790’s, the composer was perhaps best known as a brilliant pianist and improviser. His compositions owed much to the models of Mozart and Haydn, although already the subversive juxtapositions of humor and spirituality, the fury and the rebelliousness, which would become hallmarks of his style, were present. Around the turn of the 19^th century, Beethoven suffered the transformative event of his lifetime, as he realized he was losing his hearing. Musicologists frequently talk about the music he composed after 1800, characterized by increasingly bold experiments in form and expression, as embodying his defiant heroism. The music from his final creative phase, heard in the Meditation and Postlude, seems to depict a sort of transcendence of the struggles of his middle period. The tensions are still present, but they are overcome more through grace and introspection than through the strife of the battlefield.

The Musical Interlude features a juxtaposition of two short Lyric Pieces by the Unitarian composer Edvard Grieg. “Arietta” was the first work Grieg published as a “Lyric Piece,” and “Remembrances”—written some 40 years later—was the last. Touchingly, Grieg returns to the melodic material of “Arietta” in “Remembrances,” where he recasts the flowing lyricism of the earlier composition as a lilting waltz. Beyond the rhythmic transformation, is the sense of a lifetime’s experience and adventure, mirrored in the harmonic audacity of the later work.

The CUUC Choir contributes a joyous anthem as well, which celebrates the transformative power of music. Read on for programming details.

Centering Music: Adam Kent, piano
Bagatelles, Op. 33

            No. 4 in A Major

            No. 6 in D Major

            No. 7 in Ab Major
            No. 3 in F Major
 

                                                Ludwig van Beethoven

Opening Music:
Piano Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 1

I.               Allegro 

                                          Beethoven

Interlude:
Arietta, Op. 12, No. 1

Remembrances, Op. 71, No. 7

                                                            Edvard Grieg

Anthem: CUUC Choir directed by Lisa N. Meyer and accompanied by Georgianna Pappas; Amanda Cataldo, piccolo

Come to the Music

Joseph M. Martin

       
Meditation:
Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101

I.               Etwas lebhaft, und mit der innigsten Empfindung

Beethoven

Postlude:
Bagatelle in B Minor, Op. 126, No. 4

Beethoven