Keeping Fresh in Rites of Spring

Tomoko keeps fresh – by continuing to performing, including duets with her students and musical friends. She also adds to her repertoire with 20^th century composers alongside earlier masters. As Tomoko assert, “All performers have responsibility to keep up.”

One example of combining those freshening actions? Performing a duet of the first part of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: “Adoration of the Earth.”

Back in 1913 when it was first performed publicly, The Rite of Spring was very controversial. The French audience even tossed things into the orchestra pit. 

The piece was commissioned for the Ballets Russes, and was supposed to depict primitive rituals. The underlying tone recalled Russian folk music but the composition also including several novel aspects of rhythm, meter, and especially dissonance. The choreography was also experimental, created by Nijinsky. 

While composing this piece, Stravinsky made a four-hand piano arrangement, which was the first published version of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky and Claude Debussy played it as a duet in June 1912: the first public performance of the work. 

So it is exciting to follow in the steps of these avantgarde composers to play forward-thinking music. And Tomoko continues to model a fresh attitude to music. It’s her own rite of spring, which she continues throughout the year. As she says, “All performers look for a keen sense of the music.” Part of that sensibility is its freshness, which can be timeless. 

Singing Sibelius

Sibelius was one of the featured composers at Tomoko’s November concert. Miwako Isano sang soprano, and Tomoko accompanied her.

Sibelius is considered Finland’s greatest composer and helped develop his country’s national identity, even though his songs were written in his mother tongue Swedish. He drew upon the Finnish landscape in his tone poems, and he captured the spirit of Finland in his patriotic works. 

Jean Sibelius was born in 1865 and died in 1957. Sibelius’s family vacationed on the coast each summer, which started his love of nature: picturesque, primitive and sublime. 

Although he started with piano, Sibelius turned to the violin and considered going professional, but he chose to become a composer instead.

Varen flyktar hastigt (Spring flies fast), Opus 13 No. 4 was one of a set of seven songs with lyrics by Runeberg, published in 1982; the opus was his first publication with his name on the title page. The song elegantly captures the essence of Nordic seasons. Sibelius had just returned to Finland from Vienna, and wanted to express Finnish culture in his music through incorporating the tonalities of traditional folk music such as natural-minor tonics and accentuating Finnish language rhythms. At that time Finland underwent a national romanticism, partly in protest to Russia’s looming preoccupation of the country.

The end of the 19^th century marked the most productive time for Sibelius in composing songs that were performed the most often in Europe at the time and globally since then. The songs were generally melancholy and even chilling in effect.  

The duet performed two songs from the 1899 Opus 36: Demanten pa massnon (The diamond on the March snow) and Säf, säf, susa (Reed, reed, rustle). The former uses a diatonic approach to express the transition of seasons. The latter bemoans the cruel treatment of a young woman in love, using a metaphor of crashing nature. 

Their final selection was the last song in the Opus 37 five-series set, published in 1901. Flickan kom ifran sin alskings mote (The girl returned from meeting her lover). The song expresses a traditional sense of lost innocence and sexual change. It also became one of Sibelius’s most celebrated pieces. 

Even though Sibelius touted Finnish nationalism, his songs resonate universally.

Dueting with Mozart

Mozart is one of Tomoko’s favorite composers, so it is no surprise that she started her November 18^th concert with his Sonata for Violin and Piano in B-flat Major, K 378 (317d), playing duet with violinist Robin Hansen.

This sonata was written in Salzburg in 1779 after returning from a disappointing tour. It is one of the six sonatas dedicated to Josepha Barbara Auernhammer, one of his piano students. This sonata demonstrates Mozart’s transition into his late style in which the instruments have an intimate dialogue, at the same that they are more large scale. The left hand also gained more expressive patterns and thick chord textures that alternate with the violin part. 

The movements follow a fast-slow-fast pattern. Allegro moderato begins with a melting lyrical theme, and the violin has an offbeat accompaniment. The second theme belongs to the violin, and then the remaining themes reflect duality: in mood -- alternating pathos and cheer – and instrument. Mozart also modulates the upward development in the subsequent slower sensuous movement, and then motions downward and recapitulates the original theme in the lively allegro refrain.

Tomoko’s and Robin’s performance demonstrated the rich partnership of the two instruments.