LECTURE

New York Institute of Technology
What Would the Founding Fathers Think of America Today?

The 1786 Constitutional Convention: What Really Went On?

Carol Berkin / Baruch College

Most of us know that America's Founding Father's attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia and drafted the Constitution of the United States. The delegates decided to replace the Articles of Confederation with a document that strengthened the federal government, with the most contentious issue being the apportioning of legislative representation. Two plans were presented: the Virginia plan, favored by the large states, apportioned representatives by population or wealth; the New Jersey plan, favored by the small states, provided for equal representation for each state. A compromise established the bicameral Congress to ensure both equal and proportional representation.

But a lot more happened as well - much of it underreported or misunderstood. That's the focus of this insider's look at the birth of American Government as we know it today.

Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY. She has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries, including, The "Scottsboro Boys," which was nominated for an Academy Award as the best documentary of 2000. She has also appeared as a commentator on screen in the PBS series by Ric Burns, "New York," the Middlemarch series "Benjamin Franklin" and "Alexander Hamilton" on PBS, and the MPH series, "The Founding Fathers." She serves on the Board of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Board of the National Council for History Education.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton: If They Could Only See Us Now

James Morone / Brown University

Over the past ten years, the United States has endured a stark economic crisis, fierce partisan political battles, remarkable changes in the global political environment, and a historic presidential election unlike any other - ever! During this time, there has been a great deal of debate as to whether these actions are in line with the U.S. Constitution and the intent of those who founded our nation.

In this unique first-time-ever class, we will address these debates with a specific focus on the writings of key founders such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and our first president, George Washington. What would these men say about the federal bailouts, Obamacare, the size of our financial institutions, immigration, the national debt, same-sex marriage, gun violence, and U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts?

James Morone is the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy Brown University. He has won the Best Teacher award at Brown University five times. Professor Morone has published ten books and over 150 articles, reviews, and essays. His "Hellfire Nation" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and named a top book of the year by both Christianity Today and Playboy Magazine. Professor Morone also comments frequently on political issues for shows like The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, The BBC, C Span, NPR's Market Place, and others.

PERFORMANCE

The Morgan Library and Museum
The Sound of Colors & Pictures at an Exhibition

Mikhail Rudy - Piano

This concert features two 35 minute animated films with synchronized piano accompaniment performed by the Russian-French pianist and filmmaker Mikhail Rudy. The New York Premiere of Chagall: The Sound of Colors (2013) depicts Chagall’s sketches for the ceiling of the Opera Garnier as Rudy performs the music of Gluck, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy, and Ravel—the composers represented in the painting. Pictures at an Exhibition (2010) features Kandinsky’s watercolor drawings for the Art Total Exposition at the Bauhaus in 1928 and Mussorgsky’s magnificent piano suite.

Please, play the two short videos below to get a sense of the performance...

Marc Chagall, La Couleur des sons

Pictures at an Exhibition

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic - Open Rehearsal

Semyon Bychkov - Conductor
Yefim Bronfman - Piano

Glinka - Valse Fantaisie

Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No. 2
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5

"All Open Rehearsals are “working” rehearsals and therefore the program may not be played in its entirety. Additionally, we cannot guarantee the appearance of any soloist at an Open Rehearsal."

"The Philharmonic’s Tchaikovsky festival begins with a stunning line-up. Semyon Bychkov conducts Symphony No. 5, with glorious “heart-on-sleeve” melodies that never cease to enthrall audiences. And the fiery Piano Concerto No. 2 is perfect for experiencing Yefim Bronfman’s virtuosity (“Warmly romantic sentiment, and jaw-dropping bravura” — Chicago Tribune).

CONCERT


Carnegie Hall
Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim - Music Director, Conductor, and Piano

• Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482
• Bruckner - Symphony No. 6

"Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim’s long-standing and deeply personal relationship with the music of Mozart and Bruckner is showcased. Mozart’s joyous Piano Concerto No. 22 is an energetic opener to this concert that also features Bruckner’s colossal Sixth Symphony, a work that includes one of the composer’s most deeply affecting slow movements."

"Anton Bruckner is perhaps the most misunderstood of the great symphonists. In his own day, he confused both his supporters—leading them to undertake extensive editing of his works to make them conform better to contemporary norms—and his detractors, among them the redoubtable Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who savaged most of his symphonies at their premieres. In our own day, too many concertgoers react to him with incomprehension and boredom.

Labeled by his contemporaries "the Wagner symphonist," Bruckner actually wrote symphonies that are anything but the Romantic/Wagnerian celebration of self. Instead, they are spiritual quests and homages to God, in whom he fervently believed and whom he sought to glorify in his music. "Each of his symphonies is in reality one gigantic arch that starts on earth in the midst of suffering humanity, sweeps up toward the heavens to the very Throne of Grace, and returns to earth with a message of peace," writes biographer Hans-Hubert Schönzeler.

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin give us the unprecedented opportunity to experience all nine of these magnificent symphonies over an 11-day span—both the ones we may know well and those we rarely encounter. The Sixth Symphony is one of Bruckner's loveliest and most melodious works, one filled with memories of his rural Austrian homeland. As in all these concerts, it is paired with one of Mozart's sublime concert works, the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482; brilliant and popular in style, it is crowned by one of Mozart's greatest slow movements, which the Viennese audience perceptively demanded be encored at its premiere."

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center - Clarinet Trios

Inon Barnatan - Piano
Alisa Weilerstein - Cello
Anthony McGill - Clarinet

 Beethoven - Trio in B-flat major for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, Op. 11 (1797)

Hallman - Short Stories for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (CMS Co-Commission) (New York premier( (2016)
Brahms - Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, Op. 114 (1891)

"There may be no more gifted a clarinetist in New York than the Philharmonic’s Anthony McGill....Two formidable young virtuosos, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the pianist Inon Barnatan, complete the ensemble.

       The New Yorker

Anthony McGill and Alisa Weilerstein, who joined CMS from 2000 to 2004, have since ascended to the world’s most distinguished stages.

Anthony, whose flute-playing brother Demarre also came through the program, leapt with unstoppable momentum from the Cincinnati Symphony to the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and recently to the first clarinet chair of the New York Philharmonic, placing him among a handful of the top players of his instrument.

Alisa is now one of the most in-demand cello soloists with an already full coffer of singular accomplishments and honors.

And Inon, who joined the greatly-expanded CMS Two program in 2006, most recently became a local household name as the first Artist-in-Association of the New York Philharmonic, while juggling a multinational career. 

Each of these three artists exemplifies the new ideal of the complete musician: a consummate technician, a charismatic performer, an intelligent interpreter, and most relevant to us, an expert and sensitive chamber music player whose passion and curiosity knows no bounds.

CONCERT

Merkin Hall
Young Concert Artists

Zorá Quartet

Mozart - Quartet No. 15 in D major, K. 421
Webern - Langsamer Satz
Shostakovich - Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major, Op. 117

"The perfect quartet. They are so polished, so breathtakingly well-blended, the Zorá Quartet makes you listen very closely to their sond, fresh with sonic ideas in every phase." (The Calgary Herald)

Winners of the 2015 YCA International Auditions, Quartet in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, they have won the Grand Prize of both Indiana's 2015 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the 2015 Coleman Chamber Music Competition in California ... Appearances include the Banff Centre in Canada, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the Emilia Romagna Festival in Italy ... "Encounters" with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

One of the offerings performed at this performance...

The Zorá String Quartet (violinists Dechopol Kowintaweewat and Seula Lee, violist Pablo Muñoz Salido, and cellist Zizai Ning) won the Grand Prize and Gold Medal of the 2015 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the 2015 Coleman National Chamber Music Competition in California, and the 2015 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, where they were also awarded the Sander Buchman Award, which provides major support for their New York debut, and five concert prizes. As a result of winning the Fischoff Competition, they toured the Midwest and appeared at the 2016 Emilia Romagna Festival in Italy.

During the 2016-2017 season, the Zorá gives its New York and Washington, DC recital debuts in the Young Concert Artists Series and performs throughout the U.S. at Chamber Music Wilmington, the Lied Center of Kansas, the Paramount Theatre, Rockefeller University, Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music Series, University of Florida Performing Arts, the Schneider Concert Series at the New School in New York, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Chamber Music International, and with Curtis on Tour.

The Quartet was selected to participate in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Encounters program in June 2016, which concludes with a performance at Alice Tully Hall. In the summer of 2016, the Zorá also appears at Chamber Music Northwest and the Oregon Music Festival, and last year, they participated in Chamber Music Residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. The ensemble also participated at the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies of the Aspen Music Festival in 2014, working intensively with Earl Carlyss, the Takács Quartet, the Pacifica Quartet, and the American String Quartet.

The Zorá collaborated with Pulitzer-Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw and the NOTUS Contemporary Ensemble in fall 2013. In spring 2014, the Quartet was selected as the string quartet in residence to perform and study manuscripts at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany.

The Zorá Quartet aspires to educate individual students, serve as mentors for collegiate-level string, and initiate outreach projects in Bloomington to introduce new audiences to chamber music. The Zorá has worked with the non-profit organization Reimagining Opera for Kids and performs at the Wylie House Museum, Waldron Arts Center, and the Art Museum of IU Bloomington to bridge the gap better with the local community.

The Quartet’s members earned prestigious Chamber Music Performer’s Diplomas from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, and served as the Graduate Quartet in Residence at the Jacobs School of Music under the tutelage of the Pacifica Quartet and Atar Arad. The Zorá is Quartet in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music during the 2016-17 season.

The name “Zorá” was chosen by Bulgarian professor Kevork Mardirossian; it means “sunrise” in Bulgarian.

The Zorá String Quartet (violinists Dechopol Kowintaweewat and Seula Lee, violist Pablo Muñoz Salido, and cellist Zizai Ning) won the Grand Prize and Gold Medal of the 2015 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the 2015 Coleman National Chamber Music Competition in California, and the 2015 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, where they were also awarded the Sander Buchman Award, which provides major support for their New York debut, and five concert prizes. As a result of winning the Fischoff Competition, they toured the Midwest and appeared at the 2016 Emilia Romagna Festival in Italy.

During the 2016-2017 season, the Zorá gives its New York and Washington, DC recital debuts in the Young Concert Artists Series and performs throughout the U.S. at Chamber Music Wilmington, the Lied Center of Kansas, the Paramount Theatre, Rockefeller University, Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music Series, University of Florida Performing Arts, the Schneider Concert Series at the New School in New York, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Chamber Music International, and with Curtis on Tour.

The Quartet was selected to participate in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Encounters program in June 2016, which concludes with a performance at Alice Tully Hall. In the summer of 2016, the Zorá also appears at Chamber Music Northwest and the Oregon Music Festival, and last year, they participated in Chamber Music Residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. The ensemble also participated at the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies of the Aspen Music Festival in 2014, working intensively with Earl Carlyss, the Takács Quartet, the Pacifica Quartet, and the American String Quartet.

The Zorá collaborated with Pulitzer-Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw and the NOTUS Contemporary Ensemble in fall 2013. In spring 2014, the Quartet was selected as the string quartet in residence to perform and study manuscripts at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany.

The Zorá Quartet aspires to educate individual students, serve as mentors for collegiate-level string, and initiate outreach projects in Bloomington to introduce new audiences to chamber music. The Zorá has worked with the non-profit organization Reimagining Opera for Kids and performs at the Wylie House Museum, Waldron Arts Center, and the Art Museum of IU Bloomington to bridge the gap better with the local community.

The Quartet’s members earned prestigious Chamber Music Performer’s Diplomas from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, and served as the Graduate Quartet in Residence at the Jacobs School of Music under the tutelage of the Pacifica Quartet and Atar Arad. The Zorá is Quartet in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music during the 2016-17 season.

The name “Zorá” was chosen by Bulgarian professor Kevork Mardirossian; it means “sunrise” in Bulgarian.

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic - Beethoven & Brahms

Alan Gilbert - Conductor
Stephen Hough - Piano

Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor
Brahms - Symphony No. 3

"Beethoven’s magisterial and poetic Emperor Concerto will be performed to perfection by Stephen Hough (“It’s hard not to be a little awestruck by the breadth of [his] passions, to say nothing of his talents” — The Boston Globe). Also on the program: Brahms’s Third Symphony — perhaps his most personal and serene, once compared to “a rainbow after a thunderstorm.”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor” (1809)

Composed while Vienna was under siege by Napoleon’s armies, Beethoven’s last piano concerto was born under the sign of war. “What a destructive, unruly life around me! Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of all sorts!” wrote the nearly deaf composer. To protect his deteriorating hearing from the noise, Beethoven had sought refuge in a friend’s basement and covered his ears with pillows. Yet his despair amid the chaos is never manifested in the score; the music remains defiant, rebellious, triumphant. This concerto concluded one of Beethoven’s most vibrantly productive periods, in which he created an astonishing number of masterpieces (including four symphonies, the Piano Concerto No. 4, the opera Fidelio, the Violin Concerto, the three dramatic “Razumovsky” String Quartets, and two of his great piano sonatas—the “Appassionata” and the “Waldstein”). Sadly, however, it is the only one of his five piano concertos that he could not premiere himself, due to his near-total deafness. Beethoven introduced something new in this piece: where soloists would normally expect to improvise and show off their technical abilities in a cadenza, he wrote in the score: “do not play a cadenza, but immediately begin the following.” He notated an enhanced cadenza-like passage that continues to work the thematic materials and then proceeds to the end of the first movement. After its Leipzig premiere in 1811, a journalist proclaimed: “It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos.” It is ironic that this concerto should come to be known as “Emperor” (the nickname was appended after Beethoven’s death and refers not to Napoleon, but to the work’s regal temperament); it was Napoleon’s power grab, after all, that so disillusioned and infuriated the composer of the Third Symphony that he tore its original title page. Political implications aside, Beethoven’s masterpiece speaks with both majesty and poetry—a crowning achievement indeed.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 (1883)

"Like a rainbow after a thunderstorm" — that's how Johannes Brahms's biographer Karl Geiringer describes the cyclical Third Symphony, in which the rising opening motif returns again and again. It was premiered in Vienna to great acclaim-perhaps more than the composer had experienced before. Brahms was his own worst enemy when it came to his craft; he was a tough critic of his creations, and once finally satisfied with what he had written, he destroyed all traces of the "journey." He threw away more than he left us. But perhaps it's not surprising: in the article "Neue Bahnen" ("New Paths") in the October 28, 1853 issue of the music journal Neue Zeitschrift für MusikSchumann had made a prophecy that probably turned out to be a mixed blessing: according to him, the barely 20-year-old Brahms was "the young blood...the One called to convey the most exalted spirit of our time in an ideal way...the One at whose cradle the Graces and heroes stood guard..." It is no wonder that Brahms waited till he was 42 before he dared to write his First Symphony. When that creative struggle had finally been won, the Second Symphony followed quickly, and in 1883 the present Third was completed. This work has often been called Brahms's most personal symphony. The notes of the opening motif, F, A-flat, F, are said to represent the German words "Frei aber froh" (free but happy) — Brahms's response to his violinist/friend/musical advisor Joseph Joachim's motto "Frei aber einsam" (free but lonely). Whether it's true or not, that musical cell is the foundation and backdrop to much of the symphony. Still, the "free but happy" explanation seems a little off the mark at times, because throughout the symphony Brahms sets up conflicts expressed in the alternation of major and minor keys — as if he felt a greater kinship to the "free but lonely" motto and to an emotional palette that paints in colors of yearning, reflection, and serene acceptance.

Wednesday night’s concert of the New York Philharmonic under music director Alan Gilbert featured a not-very-imperious emperor and a symphonic enigma beyond the dreams of Edward Elgar.

Pianist Stephen Hough gave Beethoven’s robust Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”) the kind of introspective reading usually reserved for its more lyrical sibling, the Concerto No. 4. And Brahms’s Third Symphony, as it so often does, stubbornly refused to give up its secrets despite a respectable performance by Gilbert and his players.

Of course Hough’s piano flourishes opened the concerto in grand style, and Gilbert gave full symphonic breadth to the long orchestral exposition (no “waiting room” effect here). After that, however, while Gilbert continued with splendiferous tuttis, Hough took every opportunity to pull back and display his feathery leggiero touch, his elegant chord voicing, and tone that ranged from brightly singing to veiled.

The resulting contrast was agreeable, and served as a reminder that the title “Emperor,” irresistible as it is in this case, didn’t originate with Beethoven, and an all-lights-on approach isn’t the only one that works with this music.

The brief interlude that is the second movement was made briefer still by Gilbert’s interpreting the marking Adagio un poco mosso (Slow, with a little motion) as something more like a brisk Andante. Hough continued his introspective ways, exploring shades of piano and pianissimo, as if the music were an unfolding improvisation rather than a rendering of a score.

One wished some of that sensation had lasted into the finale. In the first phrase of that movement’s theme, Hough put a crashing sforzando where the composer’s notation had implied a slight stress, and the performance proceeded from there with a kind of grim determination instead of the gaiety the music needed.

Beethoven takes some rather long walks in the woods in this movement, and without a feeling of fantasy and unpredictability the pages of modulating scale passages can grow tiresome, as they did Wednesday. But in the movement’s second theme, the pianist provided some welcome lighter moments, sensitively supported by Gilbert and the orchestra. 

After intermission, Philharmonic president Matthew VanBesien came onstage to read some acknowledgements and introduce guests, including eleven students from Music Academy of the West who were sitting in with the orchestra for the Brahms performance. One wouldn’t normally mention such ceremonials in a review, but in this case the presence of visiting young musicians might help explain the difficulty Gilbert had with coordination and balances in the symphony’s first movement.

Anyway, thank goodness for the repeat sign at the end of the first movement’s exposition, because Gilbert, the Philharmonic, and their guests went back and played the whole thing again, with much improved results.

Still, Brahms’s Third was perhaps not the best choice for a hospitality piece, since even in ideal circumstances it’s challenging for an orchestra and conductor to find an expressive line that flows through the piece’s volatile episodes, raging one moment and caressing the next. It’s even harder when one is micro-conducting the details, as Gilbert sometimes did on Wednesday, possibly to bring the visitors along.

The clarinet had a tough time in the second movement, its opening theme masked by the accompaniment of horns (no surprise there—Gilbert seems to have a Manhattanite’s ability not to hear horns honking) and bassoons, and its later theme taken over by a bassoon that was supposed to be discreetly doubling in the background. In general, wind imbalances made the movement’s line hard to follow.

Things looked up in the third movement, where, rather than try to figure out the tempo marking Poco allegretto (literally, “slightly a little bit fast”), Gilbert just gave the music a natural swing and surge, and a listener could relax and go with the flow for a few minutes.

By the finale, the orchestra was sounding more pulled together and balanced. The opening bars murmured mysteriously, the fortes pounced, and the Brahmsian fist-shaking was fierce and incisive. In Brahms’s day, this seemingly incoherent bundle of shouts and muttering, with its oddly wan conclusion, had even opponents of “program music” reaching for metaphors and stories, or psychoanalyzing the composer.

One would like to say this music is well understood today, but it still isn’t, and it’s a rare performance that affords more than a glimpse of what Brahms was getting at. On Wednesday, a bit more grace in the second theme would have been a welcome contrast with all the rage around it, and maybe unlocked a meaning or two. But among all the things Elgar may have envied about his contemporary Brahms, the ability to keep a secret was right up there.