Aliento Chamber Players - Concert Schedule

  4 Main Street
  East Kingston, NH 03827
  (603) 944-7070
  alientochamber at comcast dot net

Sunday, October 30, 2022, 3:00pm

Aliento Chamber Players @ First United Church, Rochester

Johann Sebastian Bach

Toccata in D Minor (BWV 565)

Kevin G. Lindsay, organ

Dmitri Shostakovich

Piano Trio No. 2 (1944)

Andante - Moderato
Allegro con brio
Largo
Allegretto - Adagio

Piano Trio Opus 67 was composed in 1944 during wartime Russia. Composed in memory of his best friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, who died on February 11, 1944, at the age of only forty-one, of a heart attack while in evacuation in Siberia with the Leningrad Philharmonic, which he was then serving as artistic director. "I cannot express in words all of the grief I felt when I received the news of the death of Ivan Ivanovich … who was my closest friend," Shostakovich wrote to Sollertinsky's widow. "I owe all my education to him." This wartime work, written just after the discovery of the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka in the wake of the Nazis' retreat from the eastern front, evokes the extremes of joy and bitterness that must have been juxtaposed in daily life at such a time (taken from James M. Keller, Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic.) From the eerie beginning of solo cello in harmonics that speak 2 octaves above their playing note, to the quiet, contemplative ending, with a hair-raising dance and soulful Passacaglia in between, this trio reads as a testament to fear and mourning.

Nicholas Roy, piano

Matthew Liebendorfer, violin

Dorothy Braker, cello

Poetry with Music
Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror), Arvo Pärt; Sunken Cathedral, Claude Debussy

Silent

Zoetic Beams

Daybreak

Poet Claire Conroy

~Short Intermission~

Sergei Rachmaninov

Sonata Opus 19 (1901)

Lento - Allegro moderato
Allegro scherzando
Andante
Allegro mosso

After the disastrous 1897 premiere of his First Symphony, Rachmaninoff suffered a psychological breakdown that prevented composition for three years. After trying to recover at the home of Leo Tolstoy with disastrous results, his family introduced him to neurologist Nikolai Dahl, whose new studies in hypnosis were able to help Rachmaninov recover. The famous Piano Concerto No. 2 was composed at the same time at the Cello and Piano Sonata, with melodies pouring out of the composer in tumultuous fashion.

Nicholas Roy, piano

Dorothy Braker, cello