LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Socity of Lincoln Center

Schubert - Sonatina No. 3 in G minor for Violin and Piano, D. 408, Op. 137, No. 3 (1816)
Barber - Dover Beach for Voice and String Quartet, Op. 3 (1931)
Arensky - Quartet No. 2 in A minor for Violin, Viola, and Two Cellos, Op. 35 (1894)
Bloch - Quintet No. 1 for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello (1921-23)

"All music comes from the heart, but some clearly emerges from a composer’s most personal space. Composers from four eras and four cultures combine for this rare program which finds each of them at emotional heights. From Schubert’s early, darkly passionate sonata, to Bloch’s turbulent masterpiece composed between the wars, this concert will leave performers and audience alike breathless, touched, and yes, deeply inspired."

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is
not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

This comes from the eminent American artist Chuck Close. Close was stricken with spinal artery collapse in 1988 and, while using a wheelchair, continues to paint with a brush strapped to his arm.

Without question, all of the works on today’s concert fall under the deeply- inspired category. But what does that really mean in the light of Close’s dose of artistic reality above? Across the Lincoln Center plaza from us, the New York City Ballet posters quote their company’s mentor George Balanchine: “First comes sweat, then comes beauty.” Perhaps the only plausible answer to the question of where this music truly came from rests in our imaginations, as we are excited and moved by powerfully emotional music. How much of what we hear just dawned on these composers, and how much was generated by the force of their determination to surpass their own expectations? Author of A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine L’Engle believes: “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” We cannot help believe that good results of the creative process must come from a synthesis of imagination and determination, and in the end, from being among the chosen artists of our world."