We're excited to host an afternoon of chamber music at the Maybeck Studio on Sunday, September 8 at 3:00 pm.
The performance is free. Seats are limited. Click here to reserve your seats online.
The program:
The performance is free. Seats are limited. Click here to reserve your seats online.
The program:
Trio for Bb Clarinet, F Horn and Piano George Rochberg
(1918-2005)
(1948,
rev. 1980)
Alan Shonkoff, clarinet
Bob Satterford, horn
Bill Rudiak, piano
***
Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8 (1854,
rev. 1889) Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Farallon Piano Trio
Gayle Strang, violin
Chris Brann, cello
Bill Rudiak, piano
Chris Brann,
‘cello, began playing at age 12, and has studied with Laszlo Varga at San
Francisco State University, as well as Milly Rosner and Peter Wyrick. He
has performed with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra as well as several local
orchestras, and is currently a member of Symphony Parnassus. He is an
avid chamber music performer. Chris is a software engineer and lives in
San Francisco.
Gayle Tsern Strang, violin, began her studies at age 10, studying with Elena Grimes in
Los Angeles, and has played in the YMF Orchestra under Myung Whun Chung (in
association with the LA Philharmonic), the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano,
and the Columbia University Orchestra under George Rothman. Gayle is an
architect and lives in San Francisco.
Bill Rudiak,
piano, began piano studies at age 4 in his native Canada. At 17, Bill
earned his Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory
of Music, and won the first Northern Ontario Recording Awards (NORA) competition
and recorded for CBC Radio. He later earned his Bachelor of Music in
Theory and Composition from the University of Western Ontario in London,
Ontario, Canada, where he studied piano with William Aide and Clifford von
Kuster, and composition with Peter Paul Koprowski. He continues his piano
and chamber music studies with Richard Rogers in the Adult Extension Program at
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Bill works in the cybersecurity
field and lives in Oakland.
Bob Satterford, horn, is a former naval person and retired attorney. He plays professionally in the Golden Gate
Park Band and freelances actively as an orchestra and chamber player throughout
Northern California. He is currently on
leave from the Contra Costa Chamber Orchestra and the Diablo Symphony while
pursuing graduate study in music at CSU Sacramento, where he studies horn with
Pete Nowlen and is principal horn in the Symphony Orchestra.
Alan Shonkoff was a student of Donald Montanaro of the Philadelphia
Orchestra. He attended the Aspen Music Festival where he studied with Earl
Bates. He also studied with Allan Pollack, music director of the Mendocino
Music Festival. Alan has performed in various chamber music groups throughout
the San Francisco Bay Area including Old First Church Concerts, the Berkeley
City Club, Chamber Music at St Andrew’s, Contra Costa Performing Arts Society,
and Berkeley Hillside Club. He has also played clarinet with the UC Berkeley
Summer Orchestra and the Kensington Symphony Orchestra. When not engaged with
music, Alan works as a clinical neuropsychologist and is an Associate Clinical
Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Trio for Bb
Clarinet, F Horn and Piano, George Rochberg
From the 1940s until the ‘60s, George Rochberg emerged as one of
America’s first and finest serialist composers. He then gradually reassessed
his compositional outlook and ultimately embraced composition in
tonal styles. It was this turn to a whole-hearted employment of
traditionally-oriented tonal possibilities which not only warmed up the musical
climate, but also opened the way to greater freedom and latitude in the way
composers could express themselves. Rochberg
may have been speaking for others as well as himself when he declared serialism
“finished, hollow, meaningless…” “The
hope of contemporary music,” he wrote, “lies in learning how to reconcile all
manner of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes; the past with the present,
tonality with atonality. That is why, in my most recent music, I have tried to
utilize these in combinations which reassert the primal values of music.” The Trio
for Bb Clarinet, F Horn and Piano is certainly emblematic of this point of
view. The piece was originally written
in 1947 during the composer’s serial-based expressionist period, and was
revised in 1980, long after his return to tonality. In an interview in the last year of his life,
Rochberg stated that, after writing his first fully tonal piece in 1972, he was
subjected to a great deal of criticism, some of it extremely harsh. “It’s already been done,” some said. Others complained, “It sounds like
Brahms.” In response, Rochberg
said: “My attitude was, yes, it’s already
been done – and I want to do it again. I
wanted to prove to myself and the world that beauty is not dead!”
Piano Trio in B Major, op. 8, Johannes Brahms
Brahms
composed the original version of the first of his three piano trios when he was
barely twenty years old. He had just been introduced to Robert and Clara
Schumann, merely a few months before Robert was committed to an asylum for his
mental illness. Thirty-five years later, in the twilight of his career,
he revised the work; it is this later version we almost always hear performed
today. Upon completing the revision, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann,
“With what childish amusement I whiled away the beautiful summer days you will
never guess…I have rewritten my B Major trio. It will not be as wild as
before — but will it be better?”. Brahms also said of the revised
version, “I did not provide it with a wig, but just combed and arranged its
hair a little”. In fact, the revision was substantial, and this later
version reflects the composer’s mature compositional style — more refined
and less overtly romantic. Still, the revised version comprises some of
the composer’s most expansive and beautiful themes, conveying a range of
passionate emotions including joy, agitation, and serenity.