Max Bruch, widely known and respected in his day as a composer, conductor and teacher, received his earliest music instruction from his mother, a noted singer and pianist. He began composing at eleven, and by fourteen had produced a symphony and a string quartet, the latter garnering a prize that allowed him to study with Karl Reinecke and Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne. His opera Die Loreley (1862) and the choral work Frithjof (1864) brought him his first public acclaim. For the next 25 years, Bruch held various posts as a choral and orchestral conductor in Cologne, Coblenz, Sondershausen, Berlin, Liverpool and Breslau; in 1883, he visited the United States to conduct concerts of his own choral compositions. From 1890 to 1910, he taught composition at the Berlin Academy and received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. Though Bruch is known mainly for three famous compositions for string soloist and orchestra (the G minor Concerto and the Scottish Fantasy for violin, and the Kol Nidrei for cello), he also composed two other violin concertos, three symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, various chamber pieces, songs, three operas and much choral music.

Bruch composed his Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Op. 83 in 1909, in his seventieth year, for his son Max Felix, a talented clarinetist who also inspired a Double Concerto (Op. 88) for his instrument and viola from his father two years later. When the younger Bruch played the works in Cologne and Hamburg, Fritz Steinbach reported favorably on the event to the composer, comparing Max Felix’s ability with that of Richard Mühlfeld, the clarinetist who had inspired two sonatas, a quintet and a trio from Johannes Brahms two decades before. This was indeed sweet praise to Bruch, since Steinbach had been Music Director at Meiningen before moving to Cologne, and knew Mühlfeld’s playing intimately. Like Brahms’ late works for clarinet, the Eight Pieces favor rich, mellow instrumental hues in the alto range and an autumnal maturity of expression, deeply felt but purged of excess. Clarinet and viola are here evenly matched, singing together in duet or conversing in dialogue, while the piano serves as an accompanimental partner. Bruch intended that the Eight Pieces be regarded as a set of independent miniatures of various styles rather than as an integrated cycle, and advised against playing all of them together in concert. The Pieces (they range from three to six minutes in length) are straightforward in structure — binary (A–B) or ternary (A–B–A) for the first six, compact sonata form for the last two — and are, with one exception (No. 7), all in thoughtful minor keys. Though Bruch was fond of incorporating folk music into his concert works, only the Rumanian Melody (No. 5, suggested to him, he said, by “the delightful young princess zu Wied” at one of his Sunday open-houses; he dedicated the work to her) shows such an influence; the only other movement with a title is the Nachtgesang (No. 6, “Nocturne”). “The Eight Pieces are the product of one aspect of the 19th-century cultural climate,” wrote Gordana Lazarevich. “In their display of lyrical effusiveness where each piece is based on an exten- sive melody, and in their rhapsodic treatment of the material, the compositions epitomize those aspects of Romantic thought which glorified the sensual, the emotive and the sentimental.”

Kotoka Suzuki was born in Tokyo, received her professional training in the United States, and has made her career in this country and Canada. Suzuki earned her bachelor’s degree in composition at Indiana University and her doctorate at Stanford University as a student of Jonathan Harvey; her additional studies include the IRCAM Composition Summer Workshop (France), June in Buffalo (New York), Domaine Forget (Canada), and Voix Nouvelles Academy at Fondation Royaumont (France). She has taught at the University of Chicago and Arizona State University and is now Associate Professor in Music at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Suzuki’s works, most of which are for traditional acoustic instruments combined with various electronic media, have been performed by such leading contemporary music ensembles as the Arditti String Quartet, eighth blackbird and Pacifica String Quartet at international concert series and festivals in the United States, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, South Korea and Shanghai. Among Suzuki’s honors are the Bourges First Prize in Multimedia (France), First Prize in Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Czech Republic), Robert Fleming Prize from Canada Council for the Arts, and grants, fellowships and residencies awarded by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (the prestigious German government-sponsored program that claims to be “the world’s largest funding organization for the international exchange of students and researchers”), MacDowell Colony, Howard Founda- tion, New Music USA, Gerald Oshita Fellowship from Djerassi, and Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Suzuki composed Furusato (“Home of the Heart”) for violin, viola, cello and “fixed media electronics” (i.e., electronically manipulated recorded acoustic sounds) in 2021 on a commission from CityMusic Cleveland.

Notes by Kotoka Furusato
Many years ago, I met a Japanese woman at an American hospital where I volunteered as a musician. Patients would sign up for me to play music by their bedsides to lift their spirits. This Japanese woman was overjoyed at the prospect of speaking Japanese with me, and would frequently ask for me to visit. She would exclusively ask for Japanese folk songs, mostly children’s songs, which we would sing together as I played my portable piano. She was ostracized by her family after marrying an American man following World War II. She moved to America with her husband and never returned to Japan. She told me about her long struggle with loneliness in America, and how she feels lonely once more now that everyone she loved, including her husband, has passed. The secret in coping with loneliness, she told me, is to sing Japanese folk songs, as it always brings her heart closer to her homeland.

Furusato is in four short movements — Prologue, Amefuri (‘Rainfall’), Hamabeno Uta (‘Song of the Seashore’) and Akatombo (‘Red Dragonfly’) — and was inspired by my time with this woman and by her remarkable strength and courage in reclaiming her freedom and identity in a foreign land. The work loosely incorporates three well-known Japanese children’s songs.

Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit on January 24, 1947, began studying piano at age six and wrote his first composition the following year; he later studied piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh and Rudolf Serkin. Schoenfield received his Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Arizona (at age 22) after earning his undergraduate degree at Carnegie-Mellon University. He worked for several years in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as a free-lance composer-pianist and taught in Toledo before serving on the faculty of the University of Akron from 1988 to 1993, while his wife was doing her medical residency at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Cleveland. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2007-2008, and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in September 2008. Schoenfield has since devoted himself to composition while dividing his time between Israel and the United States.

Schoenfield has been awarded grants and fulfilled commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Commission, Rockefeller Fund, Minnesota Commissioning Club, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, Soli Deo Gloria of Chicago and many other organizations. He was also winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1994. Schoenfield’s music has been performed both on television and radio nationally and internationally and by such leading ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and Haifa Symphony Orchestra. His compositions include the opera The Merchant and the Pauper (based on a story by Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava), works for orchestra, piano, voice and chamber ensembles, and a concerto (1998) for Cleveland Orchestra Principal Violist Robert Vernon. Recordings of his music have been issued on the Angel, Decca, Innova, Vanguard, EMI, Koch, BMG and New World labels. Although he now rarely performs, Schoenfield was formerly an active pianist, touring the United States, Europe and South America as a soloist and with groups including Music from Marlboro; among his recordings are the complete violin and piano works of Bartók with Sergiu Luca. A man of many interests, Paul Schoenfield is also an avid scholar of mathematics and Hebrew.

Writing in the third person, the composer noted that “Paul Schoenfield is one of an increasing number of contemporary composers whose works are inspired by the whole range of musical experience — popular styles (both American and international) and vernacular folk traditions, as well as the established forms and idioms of cultivated music-making (which are often treated with sly twists). Schoenfield frequently mixes within a single piece ideas that emerged from entirely different musical worlds, making them ‘talk’ to each other, so to speak, and delighting in the surprises that their interaction elicits.”

Of Freylakh (“Joyous”), Schoenfield wrote, “This piece realized a long- standing desire to create entertaining music that could be played at Chassidic gatherings as well as in the concert hall. Freylakh is a joyous dance that is almost frenetic in the intensity of its merry-making. The movement is based partly on an East European Chassidic melody. The exact source of many Chassidic melodies is unknown. Frequently they were composed by the righteous Tzadikim of the 18th and 19th centuries, but as often as not they appear to have been borrowed from regional folk songs, Cossack dances and military marches. In their Chassidic versions, however, the melodies and texts were completely reworked, since the borrowed tunes that originated in a different milieu could not satisfactorily express the Chassidic ideal that regarded the exuberant expression of joy as a religious duty.”

If Mozart had not been so hectically busy during the first months of 1786, he might well have taken time to congratulate himself. His new opera, The Marriage of Figaro, was scheduled for its premiere on May 1st at Vienna’s Burgtheater; he had received from the Emperor himself a commission for a one-act comic opera, Der Schauspieldirektor (“The Impresario”), to be performed at Schönbrunn Palace in February for the entertainment of the visiting Governor-General of the Netherlands; the list of subscribers for his Lenten concerts had swollen to 120 names, many from the loftiest reaches of Austrian society; he had almost more commissions than he could fill; he was in demand as a teacher; Constanze was pregnant with their third child (the Mozarts had six in the nine years of their marriage; only two survived infancy); and he was living in a spacious flat just around the corner from St. Stephen’s Cathedral. His self-congratulations, however, would have been premature.

There had long been an undercurrent in Mozart’s output of a particularly probing sort of expression, one very different from the rococo charm and surface prettiness of the vast bulk of 18th-century music. As early as 1771, his overture to the oratorio La Betulia liberata (K. 118) was cast in a solemn minor mode.

In 1773, when he was seventeen, the unexpected expressive elements that pierced the customary galanterie of his opera Lucio Silla had so disturbed and puzzled the Milanese audiences that his earlier popularity in Italy began to wane and he never returned to that country. Later that same year he visited Vienna and first learned of the new, passionate, Romantic sensibility — the so-called Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) — which was infusing the music of some of the best composers, including Haydn. When Mozart returned home to Salzburg in September, he wrote his own stormy G minor Symphony (No. 25, K. 183).

As Mozart reached his full maturity in the years after arriving in Vienna in 1781, his most expressive manner of writing, whose chief evidences are the use of minor modes, chromaticism, rich counterpoint and thorough thematic development, appeared in his compositions with increasing frequency. Such characteristics had regularly been evident in the slow movements of his piano concertos, but in 1785 he actually dared to cast an entire work (the Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466) in a minor key, though he did relieve the work’s austerity somewhat by concluding it with a third-movement coda in a bright, major tonality. “An experiment, just an aberration,” thought the Viennese public, who recognized Mozart’s talent, if not its full range and power. They assumed he would return to the more popular and accepted means of expression the follow- ing season, and subscribed to his 1786 concerts in large numbers. In March he presented his patrons with the beautiful and deeply felt A major Concerto (K. 488), with a passionate middle movement in the key of F-sharp minor.

A month later he introduced the Concerto in C minor (K. 491), which, unlike the earlier D minor Concerto, maintains its tragic mood to the last measure. “It is hard to imagine the expression on the faces of the Viennese public when in April 7, 1786, Mozart played this work at his subscription concert,” wrote Alfred Einstein, in his classic 1945 study of the composer. Having thus stirred the doubts of Viennese audiences about the artistic path he was following, it is little wonder that Figaro received only small applause when it was premiered at the Burgtheater on May 1st. The following year his concert subscription list was returned almost blank. The year 1786, which had begun with high hope for great success, ended with frustration. The noble C major Concerto (K. 503) of December was the last such work he was to play at one of his own concerts, after which he was never again able to secure enough patrons to sponsor another similar venture.

Among the most important harbingers of the shift in Mozart’s musical language was the G minor Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello (K. 478), which he completed on October 16, 1785 in response to a commission for three (some sources say six) such works from the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Hoffmeister had only entered the business a year earlier, and Mozart’s extraor- dinary and disturbing score, for which the publisher saw little market, threw a fright into him. “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!” he admonished. Mozart cast some quaint expletives upon the publisher’s head, and said it was fine with him if the contract were canceled. It was. (Composer and publisher remained friends and associates, however. The following year, Hoffmeister brought out the Quartet in D major, K. 499, that still bears his name as sobriquet.) Rather surprisingly, then, Mozart completed another piano quartet, one in E-flat major, eight months later in Vienna, on June 3, 1786, without any known prospect of commission or publication. The new work was somewhat lighter in mood than its G minor predecessor, but was every bit as rich (and challenging to the contemporary Viennese taste) in its harmonic daring and contrapuntal elaborations. Artaria & Co., proving more bold than Hoffmeister, acquired the piece, and published both of the piano quartets a year later; there are hints in contemporary documents that they enjoyed a number of performances in Vienna.

The quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello was essentially an invention of Mozart. On his visit to Paris twenty years before, he had heard a quartet for piano, two violins and cello by Johann Schobert, the Silesian-born composer to a noble Parisian household who died in 1767 at the age of 27 from eating poison mushrooms. Schobert’s example found little following until Mozart’s works. Haydn wrote no such pieces, and two of the Bach boys, Carl Philipp Emanuel and John Christian, made tiny piano concertos out of their chamber composi- tions with piano. Mozart’s piano quartets are true chamber works rather than concertato gratifications for the pianist, with a thorough integration of all the participants, a technique he has polished during the creation of the “Haydn” Quartets in the three preceding years. Mozart’s two excursions in the form served as the inspiration and model for a modest flurry of interest in the piano quartet among the Romanticists: Beethoven wrote four specimens of the genre, Schumann one, Mendelssohn three, Brahms three, Fauré two and Dvořák two.

Alfred Einstein called the G minor tonality in which the K. 478 Quartet is cast the composer’s “key of fate.... The wild command that opens the first movement, unisono, and stamps the whole movement with its character, remaining threateningly in the background, and bringing the movement to its inexorable close, might be called the ‘fate’ motive with exactly as much jus- tice as the four-note motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” Contrast to the movement’s pervasive agitation is provided by a lyrical melody initiated by the strings without piano. The Andante, in sonatina form (sonata without a develop- ment section), is probing, emotionally unsettled music, written in Mozart’s most expressive, adventurous harmonic style. Of the thematically rich closing rondo, English musicologist Eric Blom noted, “[It] confronts the listener with the fascinatingly insoluble problem of telling which of its melodies ... is the most delicious.” So profligate is Mozart’s melodic invention in this movement that he borrowed one of its themes, which he did not even bother to repeat here, for the principal subject of a piano rondo (K. 485) he composed three months later. “[This Quartet] furnishes conclusive proof, more than any other single masterpiece of his,” wrote Hans Keller, “that Mozart’s was the only omniscient ear of which we know.”