Presidential Chamber Series Concert Set For Monday

Mountain Mail reports

SOCORRO -- Trios for an unusual combination of instruments – clarinet, piano and viola – are featured in the second concert in the Presidential Chamber Music Series at New Mexico Tech. The concert is on Monday, Nov. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in Macey Center. Thanks to support by Dr. Daniel H. López, president of New Mexico Tech, the concert series is free and open to the public.
The series is part of New Mexico Tech’s Performing Arts Series. Future concerts are set for Feb. 1 and March 22.
On the program are works by Robert Schumann, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,George Gershwin, and German composer Max Bruch.
Willy Sucre, organizer and violist of the chamber music series, is joined by Mindy Sampson on piano and Lori Lovato on clarinet. Sucre is a violist with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and plays widely with chamber music groups around New Mexico.
Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen: Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano. Op. 132 “Fairy Tales” is a charming four-movement piece written in 1853, the last year of his working life. With the clarinet the dominant instrument, these four “Fairy Tales” have a dream-like mood, an intertwining of the real and the imaginary, and the special qualities of all the instruments are perfectly caught.
Mozart’s Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano in E Flat Major, K. 498 is fancifully subtitled “Kegelstatt” (“Skittles”), because presum­ably it was written while Mozart was playing skittles (similar to bowling) with his friend, clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler.
If this story is true, nothing in the music betrays the place of its composi­tion.
The trio’s unusual instrumentation was probably chosen for the use of his favorite piano student Franziska von Jacquin, Stadler, and Mozart himself playing viola.
Gershwin’s Three Preludes for Clarinet and Piano are short piano pieces that were first performed by the composer at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in 1926. Each prelude is an example of early 20th century American classical music, as influenced by jazz.
Gershwin originally planned to compose twenty four preludes, but this number reduced to five in publc performance, and only three were published in 1926. The pieces have been arranged for solo instruments and piano.

Presidential Chamber Series Concert Set For Monday