LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Schubert - Fantasie in F minor for Piano, Four Hands, D. 940, Op. 103 (1828)
Schumann - Dichterliebe for Voice and Piano, Op. 48 (1840)
Brahms - Quintet in B minor for Clarinet, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 115 (1891)

Paul Appleby - Tenor

Ken Noda - Piano

Wu Han - Piano

Aaron Boyd - Violin
Francisco Fullana - Violin

Yura Lee - Viola
Keith Robinson - Cello

David Shifrin - Clarinet

"Before his death in 1897, Johannes Brahms memorialized his cherished, fast-disappearing Old World in works of breathtaking tenderness and profundity. Moved by the serene purity of the clarinet, he created a quintet for the ages, a heart-rending epitaph for himself and the 19th century combined. Schubert’s similar Fantasie, composed in the autumn of his life, and Schumann’s emotional Dichterliebe build a nostalgic musical path to Brahms’s late masterpiece."

"The late works of Brahms together constitute an immense musical milestone. As the composer’s life neared its conclusion, so did the 19th century and virtually all that went with it. Brahms felt the icy winds of change: in 1897, the year he died, he could see from his window on the Karlsplatz the Secession Building being erected, the home of the new artistic thinking that rejected the hallowed traditions upon which Brahms had built his music and his life. In spite of a triumphant career to the end, Brahms sensed his day was gone and into his autumnal last works he poured nostalgic remembrances of his beloved age.

Further supporting the milestone status of Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet is its predecessor and equal partner in the genre, the Clarinet Quintet of Mozart, composed almost exactly a century earlier. Mozart, too, had found a clarinetist whose playing inspired him and his only quintet for this combination set a standard that no one met (although many tried) until Brahms was similarly motivated. Brahms of course had been burdened since his youth with the expectation of filling Beethoven’s shoes and perpetuating the Classical style in Romantic garb and he did not shy from the challenge. Certainly the depth, quality, and beauty of his Clarinet Quintet are together a testament to his unqualified success.

The spirit of early Romanticism, heard in the works of Schubert and Schumann, set the stage for Brahms to sum it all up at the close of the century. We cannot imagine more potent preludes to his epic work."