Joyce Yang in Macky Friday, David Korevaar in Grusin Sunday and Monday

By Peter Alexander Jan. 10 at 3:10 p.m.

Pianist Joyce Yang, silver medalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at the age of 19, will be joined by the Takács Quartet for a concert at Macky Auditorium Friday (7:30 p.m. Jan. 12; details below).

The pairing of her solo performances and chamber music with the Takács recalls her appearance at the Cliburn Competition in 2005, when she won Best Performance of Chamber Music. In fact, she will play the same piece with the Takács they played together in Ft. Worth for her prize-winning performance: Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major—a work they also have played for the Lincoln Center Great Performers series.

Chamber music has been a large art of Yang’s career ever since the Cliburn competition. In addition to performances with the Takács, she has played with the Emerson Quartet on the Mostly Mozart Festival and has a standing partnership with the Alexander String Quartet, with whom she has recorded Mozart’s Piano Quartets.

Other works on Friday’s program include selections from Tchaikovsky’s Seasons and Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, op. 32. The first half of the program concludes with one of the great virtuoso showpieces of the piano repertoire, Guido Agosti’s arrangements of the “Infernal Dance,” “Berceuse” and “Finale” from The Firebird by Stravinsky. 

The least familiar of the solo piano pieces will be the selections from Tchaikovsky’s Seasons. A set of 12 pieces sketching each of the 12 months, the pieces were published monthly throughout 1876 in a St. Petersburg music journal. Each of the pieces has a subtitle that was provided by the publisher.

Dvořák’s Quintet forms the second half of the program. One of the composer’s most performed chamber works, the Quintet was actually the second such work Dvořák wrote. It began as an attempt at a revision of the earlier quintet, also in A major, written when the composer was 31. Unsatisfied with that work—which he had since discarded— Dvořák decided instead to write a completely new work. In the usual four-movement structure, the Quintet No. 2 features many hallmarks of the composer’s mature style including a Dumka—a movement alternating mournful and rapid, happy sections—and a Bohemian folk dance for the third movement.

# # # # #

Joyce Yang, piano, with the Takács  Quartet

• Tchaikovsky: Selections from The Seasons
• Rachmaninoff: Three Preludes
• Stravinsky: Firebird Suite (arr. Guido Agosti)
• Dvořák: Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, op. 81

7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 12
Macky Auditorium

TICKETS

# # # # #

The Takács Quartet will kick off their spring concert series with another performance featuring a pianist joining them in a quintet.

This program—to be performed Sunday and Monday, Jan. 14 and 15 (details below)—will feature CU distinguished professor of piano and Helen and Peter Weil Faculty Fellow David Korevaar for the Piano Quintet in A minor of Florence Price. Other works to be performed by the Takács will be the Italian Serenade for string quartet by Hugo Wolf and Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1.

The early 20th-century African-American composer Florence Price has recently been rediscovered by orchestras and chamber music organizations across the U.S. The 2009 find of a trove of manuscripts in what had been her summer home in the village of St. Anne, Ill.,including previously unknown violin concertos and a symphony, has led to increased interest in her music. 

A native of Little Rock, Ark., Price studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and spent most of her life in Chicago, where she continued her education and worked as an organist for silent films. In 1933 her First Symphony was premiered to critical acclaim by the Chicago Symphony.

The Quintet in A minor was written in 1935, shortly after the premiere of the symphony. Price’s heritage is reflected in the third movement, titled “Juba”—a dance characterized by rhythmic hand-clapping that was associated with celebrations by enslaved Black people on Southern plantations.

Wolf’s Italian Serenade is often heard in its version for string orchestra but was originally written for quartet. Planned as part of a large, multi-movement work, the brief Serenade survives as a stand-alone work that is one of the most cheerful pieces by a composer whose largely unhappy life ended in an asylum. This is undoubtedly his best known chamber work, as most of his compositions were song collections by German poets from Goethe to Heine and Eichendorff.

The inspiration for Bartók’s first String Quartet, written in 1908, is often said to have been his rejection by the violinist Stefi Geyer,  as suggested by the mournful tone of the first movement. On the other hand, he got over the rejection well enough to marry someone else within a year.

The quartet is in three large, interconnected movements. Bartók had just stared collecting Hungarian folk songs by 1908, and other than the last movement, they had little influence on the First Quartet. In general the quartet is more Romantic in nature and less adventurous than his later quartets. The premiere of the First Quartet was given in 1910 by the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, to whom Bartók dedicated his Second Quartet.

# # # # #

Takács Quartet with David Korevaar, piano

Hugo Wolf: Italian Serenade for string quartet
Bartók: String Quartet No. 1
Florence Price: Piano Quintet in A minor

4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 14
7:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 15
Grusin Hall

In person and digital TICKETS