Friday, April 9, 2010, 8 pm

Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front Street West

HEATHER SCHMIDT, Pianist and XIAOHAN GUO, Violinist
 

Born in Shenyang, China, Xiaohan Guo began her violin studies at the age of six, winning many awards in numerous youth competitions. Continuing her musical education, she enrolled at the Shenyang Conservatory at the age of 13. In 1998, she pursued her Bachelor’s Degree, majoring in violin, at the Shanghai Conservatory subsequently receiving first prize in the 2001 Mozart Violin Concerto Competition, whereby receiving an invitation to perform the Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 with the Shanghai Youth Symphony Orchestra. Upon graduation she joined the Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, having the honor of performing with outstanding musicians such as Itzhak Perlman, Seiji Ozawa and Mstislav Rostropovich. She has been a student of Mrs. Eleonora Turovsky at University of Montreal since her arrival in Canada in 2004, completing her Master’s Degree and is now undertaking her Doctorate program. During her studies she was a winner of several bursaries. Xiaohan has given many solo and chamber music recitals at Chapel de Bon-Pasteur and University of Montreal, as well as being a guest soloist with I Musici de Montreal Chamber Orchestra with Waxman ’s Carmen Fantasy. 

Heather Schmidt has emerged as one of the most gifted pianists of her generation as well as a noted composer. She began piano lessons at age four and first played in public at six. Her many performance awards include First Prize in the Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition, and the First Place, Audience Choice and Maestro’s Choice Millennium Awards at the Canadian Concerto Competition. Recent and upcoming performances include major recitals in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Chicago, New York and Dallas, and concerto engagements with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Montreal Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra London, Hamilton Philharmonic, Calgary Philharmonic, and the Windsor, Edmonton, Newfoundland, Red Deer, Kingston and Aguascalientes (Mexico) Symphony Orchestras.

Ms. Schmidt’s dual career as both pianist and composer is reminiscent of such illustrious predecessors as Buxtehude, Schumann, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. She has been composer-in-residence for numerous short-term residencies and festivals, including the Strings of the Future Festival in Ottawa, Niagara Symphony, Orchestra London Canada, Germany’s Schloss Elmau Festival and the Banff Centre, and is the current composer-in-residence of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ms. Schmidt’s Cello Concerto was recorded by Shauna Rolston and the CBC Vancouver Orchestra; released in 2001, this CD won Best Classical CD at the 2002 West Coast Music Awards. Her first solo piano CD, “Solus,” dedicated to some of her own compositions as well as works by other Canadian composers (CMC Centrediscs) was named Opus Magazine’s Best Classical CD in 2003.

In addition to performance and composition, Ms. Schmidt is committed to education and community outreach. From 1999 to 2001 she was adjunct Assistant Professor of Music at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where she taught private piano, keyboard harmony, and chamber music.
 

 

PROGRAM NOTES

 

Divertimento in F Major K 138 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

This divertimento and its two companion divertimenti was composed in Salzburg in 1772 by the 16-year-old composer. The initial allegro movement is in richly sounding sonata form, followed by a lyrical andante. In the final presto Mozart has amusingly contrasted themes.

 

Caprice by Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)   

Regarded as the ‘French Mendelssohn’, Camille Saint-Saens started his music studies as a pianist. Even though, Saint-Saens was predicted a great career as a piano virtuoso, he pursued a career as organist and was appointed organist at the Madeleine in Paris where he held this position for over 20 years. Saint-Saens was a music professor at the Ecole Niedermeyer where one of his students was Gabriel Faure. Saint-Saens was very productive and versatile composer, and his music continues to be very popular through centuries.

 

 

Carmen Fantasy by Franz Waxman (1906-1967)    

Georges Bizet (1838 - 1875) died only three months after the premiere of “Carmen” convinced that it was a failure. Not so many years later it was the most-often performed opera in the international repertoire, and for the better part of a century this music has been popular far beyond the lyric theater. 

In our own time the Bizet masterpiece has been transmogrified as a musical (Carmen Jones) as a ballet (by the Soviet avant-garde composer Rodion Shchedrin) not to mention Tin Pan Alley songwriters, jazz instrumentalists, bathroom baritones and even rock groups. Violinist/composer Pablo Sarasate (1844 - 1908) seems to have been the first to discern a specifically violinistic character in “Carmen.” He wove a virtuosic if somewhat patchy fantasy for violin and piano (Op. 25) out of themes from the opera.
     
Franz Waxman did, in fact, compose the very different “Carmen” Fantasie. This work is not at all related to the Sarasate’s version. He wrote his “Carmen” and “Tristan & Isolde” Fantasies for the 1947 film Humoresque for John Garfield to “play” on screen to Isaac Stern’s recording on the soundtrack. Jascha Heifetz saw the Joan Crawford - Oscar Levant melodrama with a screenplay by Clifford Odets based on the famous Fannie Hurst story about the budding career of a young New York violinist (Garfield) and his patron (Crawford).

Heifetz asked Waxman to expand the work for him to play on the popular radio program, The Bell Telephone Hour. The composer revised the score and the premiere performance of September 9, 1946, was a great success and Heifetz toured the world playing “Carmen” Fantasie. He recorded it with Donald Voorhees on November 11, 1946 and the recording has never been out-of-print.

The Russian violinist David Oistrakh gave the Heifetz recording to his student Leonid Kogan. Unable to obtain a score for the work in the Soviet Union, Kogan made up his own score by listening to the Heifetz recording and copying the notes down one-by-one! “Carmen” Fantasie is Waxman’s most requested concert work and the post-Heifetz generation of violinists has championed the music on every continent.
           
Franz Waxman ® is best known for the 150+ film scores he composed in Hollywood beginning at Universal Pictures in 1935 with The Bride of Frankenstein.
   

Piano Concerto No. 6 "Mythos" by Heather Schmidt  (1975)

Toronto premiere                                                

Piano Concerto No. 6 evokes the night galaxy with magical and mythological inspiration. "Mythos" is a Greek word that can be translated as story or legend.  The piano part is filled with delicate virtuosity of subtle colour changes and textures, capturing the essence of the universe and the night sky.  Each movement is name after a different Greek goddess - Nyx, Goddess of the Night, Selene, Goddess of the Moon, and Asteria, Goddess of the Stars.  The concerto was commissioned by Barrie's 7th Colours of Music Festival, and was premiered in September 2009 by pianist Heather Schmidt with Sinfonia Toronto conducted by Nurhan Arman.

 

 

Four for Tango by Astor Piazzolla  (1921-1992)

 

One of Astor Piazzolla's most popular tangos, Oblivion became widely known through the soundtrack of Marco Bellochio's film Henry IV, the Mad King. The short piece has been recorded in many versions, including for klezmer clarinet, saxophone quartet, and oboe and orchestra.

 

A late work of Piazzolla (he died only three years later, in 1992), Four for Tango is written for one of his strongest influences, the Kronos String Quartet.

 

The Tango genre, with Piazzolla, is transformed from its traditional roots in the late 19th century into something utterly different. His works -- over a thousand of them -- are termed "Tango Nuevo," and are the product of an eclectic mix of ideas, exemplified by the people with whom he studied and with whom he performed. Many of those were classically trained musicians, beginning with Herman Scherchen, Nadia Boulanger, and Alberto Ginastera, with whom he studied composition, and Mstislav Rostropovich, the Kronos Quartet, and Gidon Kremer, with whom he occasionally recorded. But Piazzolla's roots were always in the folk idioms of his home in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and in Buenos Aires, where the Tango took form. He was born March 11, 1921 and by the age of four had moved to New York City, where apart from one year in Argentina he lived until he was 17. His father bought him a bandoneón, a South American folk instrument, at a pawn shop when he was eight, and he became a devoted bandoneónista for the rest of his life. Moving back to Argentina in 1937, he immersed himself in the study of the Tango, playing with several groups, and simultaneously studying Classical music, working with a pupil of Rachmaninov, Bela Wilda, and pianist Raul Spivak. In 1953 he won the Fabien Sevitzky Competition with a work for two bandoneóns and symphony orchestra, and at the Buenos Aires premiere a fistfight broke out between purists of both Classical music and Tango, all of whom felt offended by the mixture of genres. But with the money he won, he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, who urged him to abandon Classical studies for the Tango. Finding his authentic voice, he wrote and performed with the greatest Classical and Jazz musicians of his time from the Fifties on, and achieved immense popular success.

 

Prelude and Scherzo op. 11 by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Overshadowed in all the excitement surrounding Dmitri Shostakovich's first real success as a composer were a pair of movements for double string quartet that he wrote at the same time.  The Symphony no. 1, op. 10 was his graduation piece in composition at the Leningrad Conservatory and a sensation at its premiere on May 12, 1926.  But the brash, inventive, experimental flavor of his Two Pieces, op. 11 was even more in the spirit of the times.  Things were still pretty open in the young Soviet Union, with the works of many Western composers such as Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith being both performed and discussed.

 

In spite of their smaller scale, the Two Pieces have an orchestral feel. Shostakovich actually interrupted work on the Symphony no. 1 in December 1924 to write the Prelude in D minor in memory of his friend, the young poet Volodya I. Kurchavov. The Prelude, marked Adagio, has an appropriately mournful air, with a tragic opening, a passionate center, and grave conclusion.

 

The Scherzo in G minor dates from the same month he completed work on the symphony, July 1925.  One critic has called it the "wildest" single movement in the literature of the string octet.  Another likened its agitation to “crowds swirling crazily through the streets.”  The scurrying glissandi and Shostakovich's idiosyncratic take on canonic structure certainly make this Allegro molto memorable.

                                                 

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