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This hour, you’ll hear two of the world’s great cellists, British and Hungarian: Steven Isserlis and Miklós Perényi.With great artistry, but very different playing styles, they partner with pianists Jeremy Denk and András Schiff in masterful performances of two major chamber works for the cello, Beethoven’s Sonata in A major, Op. 69, and Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style. Later on in the broadcast, the Beaux Arts Trio’s remarkable cellist, Antonio Meneses, has a moment to shine in a Schubert Notturno.

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Explore What's Behind the Music

Performer Bios

Beaux Arts Trio

In 2008 the world’s chamber music capitals salute the Beaux Arts Trio in its farewell season. Winner of dozens of prestigious awards, the standard-setting Beaux Arts celebrates its 53rd year as an ensemble considered "the gold standard" of piano trios. Since its 1955 debut at the Berkshire Music Festival (now Tanglewood) this ensemble has been admired for stunning, memorable performances of extraordinary musicality.

Miklós Perényi

Miklós Perényi is an internationally praised Hungarian violoncellist. He was born in 1948 into a musical family and by the age of seven he was studying the cello seriously. In 1962, Perényi was a prize winner at the Casals International Violoncello Competition in Budapest.

Since 1980, Miklós Perényi has been a professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, but he has also been an active performer with appearances at many of the international music festivals. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1980, and the Bartok-Pasztory Prize in 1987.

Miklós Perényi has played regularly with a number of distinguished musicians in acclaimed sonata and chamber music concerts. These include Zoltán Kocsis, Dezso Ránki, András Schiff, the Takács Quartet and the Keller Quartet.

Steven Isserlis

British-born cellist Steven Isserlis is equally at home drawing the audience into his circle of friends for chamber music or in recital; delving into the historical archives to emerge with a forgotten gem; or on the concert platform with some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, such as Boston Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; and conductors, among them, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Colin Davis, Ton Koopman and Christoph Eschenbach. His chamber concerts are renowned, not only for the quality of performance but also for his ingenuity and innovation in programming. Projects in the past few seasons have included a "Taneyev and Friends" series at the Wigmore Hall, a Brahms series at the Salzburg Festival, a festival entitled "Sleeping Beauties" with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a highly-acclaimed Saint-Saëns festival in London. Isserlis is also well-known for his musical enthusiasms, which, in addition to the late music of Schumann, include the lesser-known music of Carl Frühling, performers such as cellist Daniil Shafran, violinist Jacques Thibaud and Chorale Gabriel Fauré. Among his non-musical enthusiasms are the Marx Brothers, the 19-century novelist Wilkie Collins and the children’s book "The Land of Green Ginger" by Noel Langley. The Nippon Music Foundation of Japan has kindly loaned the Feuermann Stradivarius of 1730 to Steven Isserlis.

András Schiff

Pianist and conductor András Schiff was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1953. He began piano lessons at the age of five and continued his musical studies at the Ferenc Liszt Academy in Budapest. Recitals and special projects have won him great fame in the world’s music capitals, including cycles of the major keyboard works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann and Bartók. His chamber orchestra, the Cappella Andrea Barca, is a stellar group of international soloists, chamber musicians and friends.

Winner of two Grammy awards, with a vast discography, he has won many international awards, including being named an Honorary Member of the Beethoven House in Bonn; the renowned Italian prize, the "Premio della critica musicale Franco Abbiati," in recognition of his Beethoven Piano Sonata Cycle; and The Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize, sponsored by the Kohn Foundation.
Schiff was also rewarded the Bartok Prize in 1991 and the Claudio Arrau Memorial medal from the Robert Schumann Society in Dusseldorf in 1994. He has received the highest Hungarian distinction, the Kossuth Prize, and Denmark’s Leonie Sonnings Music Prize.

Jeremy Denk

Winner of the 1998 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 1997 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Jeremy Denk made his New York recital debut at Alice Tully Hall. Since then he has as recitalist and orchestral soloist in major venues and has been a featured artist-in-residence on NPR’s Performance Today. Denk has participated in many premieres, including Mark O’Connor’s Fiddle Sonata (with the composer on fiddle) at the Library of Congress, Leon Kirchner’s Duo No. 2, Ned Rorem’s "The Unquestioned Answer," Jake Heggie’s Cut Time with the Eos Orchestra, Alternating Current (written for him by Kevin Puts) and Libby Larsen’s Collage: Boogie with the American-Soviet Youth Orchestra and Zubin Mehta. Collaborations include projects with the Borromeo, Brentano, and Shanghai quartets. Marlboro and Spoleto are two of a long list of important music festivals where he is well known. He is on the piano faculty at Bard College.

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Notes on the works performed

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Scholars studying the music of Ludwig van Beethoven have noted that his development as a composer is easily traced in his works for cello and piano. Consisting of five sonatas and three sets of variations, these pieces demonstrate how, over a period of roughly 20 years, the composer explored strategies for combining these two instruments. In fact, the pairing of cello and piano was in itself somewhat novel. During the 1700s, the violin, with its lyrical soprano "voice," was the string instrument most commonly chosen as a featured instrument in chamber works. As the century drew to a close, however, the cello became a substitute for the violin, its "tenor" adding a rich, dark timbre.

Since there are virtually no compositional models for the earliest of Beethoven’s cello and piano works—the two op. 5 sonatas—he is therefore credited with pioneering a musical partnership that would highlight the cello while at the same time bring the keyboard out of its supporting role as accompanist. These groundbreaking works later served to inspire Beethoven’s followers, such as Mendelssohn and Chopin, to create their own sonatas for piano and cello.

Beethoven’s cello and piano compositions are intimately connected with several people who influenced his life, and three of them were excellent cellists. The dedicatée of the op. 5 sonatas, for example, was King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who was known for his skill on the instrument. Perhaps more significant to the sonatas’ history, however, was the lead cellist at Friedrich Wilhelm’s musical establishment, Jean-Louis Duport, who premiered the sonatas in 1796 with Beethoven at the keyboard. 1

When Beethoven departed from the court, the king rewarded him for both the sonatas and their performance with a gold snuff box filled with Louis d’ors—not just an ordinary gold snuff box, Beethoven would later report, but the kind that was presented to dignitaries. More important to the composer’s personal life, however, were the dedicatées of the op. 96 sonata and the two sonatas comprising op.102: Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein and Countess Marie Erdödy, respectively. Gleichenstein, a talented cellist, had met Beethoven in Vienna in 1797 and quickly became one of the composer’s most valued friends and supporters.

Chronologically, Beethoven’s compositions for cello and piano begin with the op. 5 sonatas that the composer premiered at the Prussian court. Next from the same year came two sets of variations, one on "See the conqu’ring hero comes" from Handel’s oratorio "Judas Maccabeus" and the other on Papageno’s aria "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen" from Mozart’s "Die Zauberflöte." Mozart’s opera served as inspiration for another set of variations some five years later, this time employing Pamina and Papageno’s duet "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen."

In 1809, Beethoven dedicated the op. 69 sonata to his friend Gleichenstein, and in 1815 he penned his final composition for cello and piano, the two sonatas of op. 102, for Countess Erdödy. Of course, compositions in other genres stemmed from the same time period in Beethoven’s life, among these his sole opera "Fidelio" (1804-1805), the "Archduke" piano trio (1810), and eight of the nine symphonies (1801-1812).

It is interesting that the years from which these piano/cello works date coincide exactly with the time from which the composer first noticed his increasing deafness to the point when he lost his hearing entirely. Musicians and composers, of course, "hear" music in their heads; nevertheless, the innovative harmonic elements in these duets underscore Beethoven’s remarkable genius even more, given his disability.

No other score for these cello and piano works demonstrates quite as clearly as does the autograph manuscript of op. 69 how Beethoven labored over revisions to satisfactorily work out the division of labor between the instruments. Perhaps this attention to detail spoke of his regard for Gleichenstein, the cellist for whom the sonata was composed. Giving the baron "the first word," the cello begins the theme but is quickly joined in its statement by the piano. Throughout the opening Allegro, Beethoven carefully exploits the lyric voice of both instruments.

The following Scherzo is a playful exercise in syncopation that contrasts with the duo’s dramatic expressiveness in the Allegro. The concluding movement begins with an elegant Adagio that truly merits the directive cantabile — "in singing style." It quickly breaks into an Allegro vivace, a perfect ending for a composition that has demonstrated every possible technique and expression of which its two instrumental voices are capable.

Excerpted from program notes by Denise P. Gallo, Music Division, Library of Congress

Franz Schubert

The mature chamber works of Schubert, including an Adagio movement in E-flat Major and the Piano Trios in B-flat Major and E-flat Major, were all written during the last nine years of his life (1819-1828). The autograph of the Notturno, found in the Austrian National Library, bears only the tempo marking Adagio; the title "Nocturne" ("Notturno" in later editions) was added when it was published as op.148 by Diabelli in 1845.

Robert Schumann: Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102

Despite occurrences of "stupid hypochondria" and "dumb melancholy" during the year 1849, Schumann produced close to 40 works for various instruments and combinations, among them the Fünf Stücke im Volkston (Five Pieces in the Folk Style) for cello, op. 102 and the Drei Romanzen (Three Romances) for oboe or violin or clarinet, op. 94. Many of them were forms of Hausmusik [house music], works that were more accessible and commercially successful. Conventional wisdom has denigrated these late Schumann works as inferior, a judgment more than likely based on the composer's mental and emotional condition at the time rather than on the works themselves.

But as Kay Jamison points out, (1) episodes of depression and mania occurred throughout most of Schumann's adulthood, a condition that today would be described as a bipolar affective disorder. (2) The affliction appears to have been in part hereditary. His father suffered a nervous breakdown the year he was born, his mother had recurrent bouts of depression and his sister committed suicide. The illness seems to have been handed down to Schumann's children—one son became insane in his 20s and was confined to an asylum, while another became a morphine addict.

With regard to Schumann's late works, recent evaluations of musical and documentary evidence belie what a biographer (3) calls "the myth that portrays the late works as a necessary complement to the final illness." Schumann's last diary entries show no sign of dementia. More importantly, "an unbiased look at the late music will disclose qualities too frequently overlooked: a heightened intensity of expression, a rigorous limitation of thematic materials and a visionary prefiguration of features associated with later composers including Bruckner, Reger and even Schoenberg."

Cellist Steven Isserlis—who regards late Schumann as one of his musical "enthusiasms"—writes:

"There's a generally accepted idea that [Schumann's] late music is weak; I disagree VEHEMENTLY! Some of it is strange, definitely, and maybe not as immediately appealing as his earlier works, but the more one knows it, the more one gets to love it." (4)

—Tomás C. Hernández, Music Division, Library of Congress

1. Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, 1993 (Return to text)
2. Peter Ostwald, Schumann: Music and Madness, 1985 (U.S. edition, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius) (Return to text)
3. John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," 1997. (Return to text)
4. Steven Isserlis Web site (Return to text)

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