2023 Neighborhood Porch Concert

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Date: Friday, June 23, 2023 
Time: 7 PM
Address: 3414 Hawthorne Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63104

Musicians from Left to right:
​XiaoXiao Qiang (Violin), Young-Whun Kim (Piano), Yin Xiong (Cello), Robert Walker (Clarinet), Seul Lee (Violin), Tzuying Huang (Clarinet), Weilu Zhang (Violin).

Mendelssohn: Concert Piece No.2 for two clarinets and piano
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was a German composer, pianist, organist, and conductor. He died at the tragically young age of 38, but was still able to compose a huge library of works during his lifetime. Among his most famous compositions are Midsummer Night’s Dream, Symphony No. 4 (Italian), his Violin Concerto in E minor, and his String Octet In E-flat major. In 1832, Mendelssohn was home in Berlin when a famous clarinet duo, Josef and Carl Baermann (father and son), were passing through. They commissioned Mendelssohn to compose a piece for them to play and Concert Piece No. 1 was the result. It was written for clarinet and basset horn, which is a type of alto clarinet. The work was first performed in 1833 and was a hit. The duo asked Mendelssohn to compose another work for them to perform, and the result was Concert Piece No. 2.

Gerald Finzi: Five Bagatelles, Op.23 for clarinet and piano
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) was one of the most prominent British composers of his generation. He was famous for his choral compositions but also wrote for many other instrumentations. In 1941, Finzi was at the pinnacle in his composition career and feared its interruption by the inevitable draft into war service. However, months before the beginning of his service he was
able to complete three works for clarinet and piano using bits and pieces of ideas he’d saved for 20 years. Finzi managed to complete a fourth piece in 1942, and the four pieces were first performed in 1943 during a lunchtime war concert to cheer the people of London. Soon after Finzi added a fifth piece that would complete the set of bagatelles. The Five Bagatelles were
hugely popular during his lifetime and remain the most commonly performed pieces of Finzi’s chamber music compositions.
Antonin Dvorak was a composer born in 1841 in the region of Bohemia, now known as the Czech Republic. Dvorak was influenced by composers such as Smetana and Brahms and was known for combining Romantic period compositional practices with the folk music of his own country. Dvorak’s early success was due in part to a recommendation from Brahms to his publisher who subsequently commissioned Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances.

Dvorak: String Quartet No. 12 (American Quartet) mvt. 1
Dvorak moved to the United States in 1892. He was hired as the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. In 1893, while on summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa Dvorak composed his 12th string quartet, known as the American Quartet. It took Dvorak only a little more than two weeks to complete the work. Although Dvorak was greatly influenced by the folk music he encountered living in the U.S., especially the spirituals of African Americans, the title American Quartet doesn’t necessarily come from the reference of folk music. It has been argued that the only real tie between Dvorak’s 12th quartet and its title is the location in which it was written. During his years in New York Dvorak also wrote his New World Symphony and his Cello Concerto. He died in 1904 of an unknown cause. 

Borodin: String Quartet No.2 mvts. 1,2 and 3
The second string quartet of Alexander Borodin was written in 1881, almost forty years after the quartets of Schumann. He found time to write the piece during a busy career as a doctor and a chemist. Music was his hobby and passion. He dedicated the quartet to his wife Ekaterina Protopova, and according to several scholars presented the piece as a gift on their twentieth wedding anniversary. It is rumored that the composition is reminiscent of their first encounter in Heidelberg, Germany. The third movement of the quartet, “Nocturne”, is evocative of the moods and emotions of night-time. It is the most memorable movement of the quartet as it is hard to forget the dreamy melodies being passed between violin and cello.