music @ main: 1/16/2010 @ 3:30 p.m.: Jayoung Kim, cello

Assisted by JooHyun Lee, piano

With concert appearances throughout the United States, Costa Rica, and South Korea, cellist Jayoung Kim enjoys an active performing career as both chamber musician and soloist. A native of Korea who took up the cello at age 10, she has appeared in music festivals and artist series including Promising Artists of the 21st Century (San Jose, Costa Rica), OK MOZART International Music Festival (Bartlesville, OK), Young-San Artist Series (Seoul, Korea), and The Varga Celebration (Greensboro, NC), and was soloist at the University Orchestra Festival with Ewha University Orchestra.

As a member of the chamber ensemble enhakē she has captured numerous prizes including the Grand Prize at the Yellow Springs Chamber Music Competition (2009), Gold Medal at International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition (2008), and Judge’s Special Recognition Award at Plowman Chamber Music Competition (2008). She has given recitals and master classes at Valdosta State University, Texas A&M University, Mesa State College (Grand Junction, CO), and University of Costa Rica, and in addition to touring France and America, upcoming engagements include the world premier of a work by Libby Larsen commissioned by enhakē.

Ms. Kim has served as principal cellist of Florida State University Symphony Orchestra and Ewha University Orchestra, and as guest principal cellist of Sinfonia Gulf Coast and Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra. She received a B.M. degree from Ewha University with Ewha Honor Scholarship, an M.M. from the Eastman School of Music, and is now a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. Her teachers have included Gregory Sauer, Alan Harris, David Bjella, and Il-Whan Bae, and she has participated in master classes with Lynn Harrell, Fred Sherry, Mihai Tetel, Andres Diaz, Edward Aaron, and Thomas Landshoot.

A native of Seoul, Korea, Pianist JooHyun Lee earned a doctoral degree in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music at the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Jean Barr and solo piano with Nelita True as her minor field. Ms. Lee also received Masters degree at Eastman School of Music following her undergraduate degree studies in Piano Performance at Seoul National University.

She has enjoyed great success as a vocal accompanist, playing for major voice competitions in Korea, the United States, and Germany. Recent honors include the Barr Award in accompanying which is given to an outstanding collaborative pianist, the excellence in accompanying, second prize in the Jessie Kneisel Lieder competition, Eastman’s prestigious Brooks Smith Fellowship in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music, and the Barbara M.H Koeng Award given to an accompanist who has a passion for working with singers. In addition to these collaborations, Ms. Lee also enjoys partnering instrumentalists, and for two summers participated in The Quartet Program where she performed with violinist Charles Castleman and violist Allyson Dawkins. She is currently a staff pianist at Eastman School of music and Bowdoin International Music Festival.

Program Notes by Ed Lein, Music Librarian

The music of the transcendent German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) formed the culmination of the Classical style and the foundation of the Romantic. Along with J.S. Bach, Beethoven is arguably the best known Western classical composer, but over the past few decades works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) have become almost as recognizable, especially after the success of the 1984 movie of Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus. Himself a big fan of Mozart, Beethoven used the show-stopping Act 1 duet between Pamina and Papageno from Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute") as the inspiration for Seven Variations on Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen, WoO 46. By 1801, the year Beethoven wrote these Variations, the 31-year-old composer had already suffered acute hearing loss, which he described in his letters. For the last decade of his life Beethoven was completely deaf, but he continued to produce revolutionary masterworks that still provide benchmarks other composers strive to attain.

By virtue of a scholarship from his hometown of Barcelona, a nine-year-old Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966) was able to accept an invitation to study in Paris with the legendary Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, where, in addition to his cello lessons, Cassadó studied composition with both Manuel de Falla and Maurice Ravel. After World War I, Cassadó began a successful international career as both cellist and composer, including several concerts with Casals. During the1920s Cassadó settled permanently in Florence, Italy, and after World War II his reputation and career, not to mention his personal morale, suffered tremendously when his mentor unjustly accused him of sympathizing with Mussolini’s fascist regime, despite Cassadó’s continuing friendship and collaboration with perhaps the most vocal of Italy’s anti-fascist composers, Luigi Dallapicolla. The rift between teacher and protégé was finally reconciled during the mid 1950s through the efforts of a mutual friend, the British violinist Yehudi Menuhin, but Cassadó’s career never fully recovered. The 1926 Suite for Solo Cello remains one of Cassadó’s best known works. Its modal inflections and folk-dance rhythms attest to the composer’s Catalan heritage, and the rhapsodic first movement acknowledges other influences, with direct references to Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, and Ravel’s ballet, Daphnis et Chloe.

Joining Prokofiev and Khachaturian, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is one of few composers of the former Soviet Union to sustain a large following in the West, but his career was far from “smooth sailing.” During his lifetime his music was periodically banned by Stalinist authorities, and he suffered two official denouncements, in 1936 and 1948. However, because of his worldwide popularity the Soviets liked to use Shostakovich as propaganda, so their censures always proved temporary—but he still withheld his more personal works until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Shostakovich likewise has had detractors among many of the West’s avant-garde, centering around composer-turned-conductor Pierre Boulez. Although the influence of the self-styled “cutting edge” has since dulled, from the 1950s into the 1980s the group and its followers wielded their own brand of artistic totalitarianism, insisting that composers abandon familiar musical forms in favor of mathematical or electronic compositional procedures, and dismissing works by those who used tonal idioms to communicate directly with listeners. Ignoring the ideological tyranny on both fronts, performers and listeners have always embraced Shostakovich’s music, and he remains among the most frequently performed and recorded of 20th-Century composers. Shostakovich wrote is Sonata in D Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 40, in 1934, before the 28-year-old composer experienced government interference, or, for that matter, artistic browbeating.

The Polish-born pianist Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was the first composer to make full use of the expressive qualities and coloristic potential of the piano when it was a still-developing keyboard instrument, and he rightly has been called the "Poet of the Piano." Much of all piano music by subsequent composers shows his influence, and his revolutionary use of chromatic harmonies and unusual key relationships profoundly influenced composers of symphonic music and operas as well, such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner--thus Chopin's importance in the development of the "Romantic" style in general can not be overestimated. The vast majority of Chopin’s music is for piano solo, and his few other works all feature the piano. Chopin’s four chamber music pieces likewise include parts for the solo cello, and the earliest of these is the Introduction and Polonaise brilliante, Op. 3, dating from 1829. Patterned after a stately Polish dance that has become closely identified with Chopin, the Polonaise brillante was originally written as a diversion for a piano-playing princess and her cello-playing father. It demonstrates that the 19-year-old composer had already found a compositional voice which was not merely an imitation of other composers—in this regard Chopin’s precociousness surpassed even Mozart’s. Chopin added the Introduction the following year for his own public performances of the showpiece.

music @ main

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

1/16/2010 @ 3:30 p.m.: Jayoung Kim, cello

Assisted by JooHyun Lee, piano

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