Gut Instinct
CHAPEL HILL, NC – Our state has a new chamber ensemble and a new chamber music series. Both are called Gut Instinct and originate from the music department at UNC, the flagship University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill. There will be three concerts on this season’s series, all in Person Recital Hall at UNC. The first is upcoming on Friday 30 August. Like the other two concerts in the series, it will be at 7:30. Also of interest to our readers: the concerts are free (donations happily accepted). Arrive early to get a seat! The interesting name is a pun, by the way; keep reading to find out what it means.
The creators of the series Gut Instinct are Nicholas DiEugenio and Mimi Solomon, a violin-piano team who started off as chamber partners in 2010 and have since become a husband-wife performance duo. Both teach at Chapel Hill where they moved in 2014.
Mr. DiEugenio is a two-time prizewinner at the Fischoff competition, one of the world’s leading contests for chamber music. He is a core member of the New York-based group The Sebastians, and has performed as a guest with ensembles such the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. His published recordings include one with the violin sonatas of Schumann and two others together with Mimi Solomon. The first of those, Into The Silence, is in tribute to the music of Steven Stucky, a Pulitzer prize-winning composer. The second, Unraveling Beethoven, features commissions from five living composers.
Ms. Solomon has appeared widely as soloist and chamber pianist in the U.S. and internationally. She was featured on the McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase and has been a regular presence at chamber festivals such as Santander (Spain) and Lockenhaus (Austria). Her decade of study in Paris was supported by three grants, and her work included study with the important French pianist Patrick Cohen. The recording with music of Stucky, mentioned above, was released in 2017.
The focus of the Gut Instinct series is multi-fold. One aspect is their interest in bringing forward composers who deserve to be heard more. Each of the concerts will feature a fine female composer of the 19th century alongside a canonical figure. The first concert will include music of Robert Schumann and Amanda Maier. Schumann probably needs no introduction, but the Swedish Amanda Maier (1853-1894), is only recently being rediscovered. She was a well-known violin soloist who appeared in Sweden and internationally in over 100 concerts during a performance career lasting just seven years. Among them was the premiere of her own violin concerto with the (then as now) famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and her as soloist. After she married at age 27, her public performances ceased, but she continued composing. Several of her compositions were published, rare for a woman at that time. (Those interested to know more about her might like to have a look at this 2018 dissertation from the University of Toronto.)
The composers featured on the second concert will be Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), paired with Gabriel Fauré, with whom she was friends; he was also engaged for a few months to her daughter. Viardot was a star soprano especially well-known for her performances in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Saint-Saëns dedicated his opera Samson and Delilah to her and had hoped she would sing the leading role. She was multi-lingual and an author as well. She had originally wanted to be a concert pianist and, highly accomplished, played duets privately with Chopin; the two had a close musical association. As a composer she was highly praised by Liszt.
The third concert pairs Schubert with his near-contemporary Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847), the only one of the three women on the series to be already (and deservedly) well-known.
Another focus of the concerts will be to showcase the two historic pianos housed in the UNC music department. One was made by Pleyel, the renowned French manufacturer whose instruments were famously played by Chopin. The other is a copy made in the 1990s of one by Conrad Graf, an equally famous Viennese piano manufacturer whose instruments were played by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt, among others. The idea of playing piano music on 19th-century keyboards seems to be gaining wider traction. The International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments was held in Warsaw in 2018. Among others, the thirty pianist-competitors could choose from a Pleyel and a replica Graf.
In the Gut Instinct series, listeners will experience chamber works played on instruments original to the time in which they were written (or copies). That applies, in other words, to the strings as well as the piano. When all of this music was written, strings were of gut, almost always sheep. Used for millennia, gut gives a different sound quality than the steel strings prevalent since WWII. They are softer, more mellow, and give rise also to bowing and articulations that can differ significantly from what would be typical on modern instruments. Listeners can look forward to experiencing music they may know in quite a different way!
And now the pun of the series title. Drum roll…for one thing, music performed on gut strings, as just described. The instinct part? These are not meant to be scholarly performances, in the sense of focusing on period correctness. Rather, these renditions are meant to be visceral, immediate, the way composers of the time most probably conceived the pieces, and musicians most probably played them. There you have the other meaning of gut: with passion and spontaneity. So, Gut Instinct: played on gut with a healthy dose of (musical) instinct: from the gut!
Returning to the Pleyel and the Graf pianos, which are a jewel in the holdings of UNC. Solomon spent almost 10 years in Paris, as mentioned. She had originally gone there to study piano; a serendipitous meeting with a friend on the metro led to her attending a class on early keyboard instruments, and with that a new fascination was off and running. Fast forward to this season, and she will be the pianist on this series of concerts featuring UNC’s historic instruments. Meanwhile, her teacher Patrick Cohen remains an inspiration to her; her three years of study with him ended 15 years ago but, she says, “I still think about him every time I approach a fortepiano.”
The Pleyel is an original instrument from 1843, during Chopin’s (1810-1849) lifetime. Pleyel was the first to build pianos with a metal frame, necessary for the higher string tension and the demands placed on instruments by virtuoso pianists like Liszt (who reportedly nearly destroyed even sturdy wooden-framed Graf pianos in concerts; Graf had originally been a cabinet maker and knew how to build a solid structure). With an interruption of just four years in the 2010s, Pleyel pianos have been manufactured continuously since 1807. Famous figures of the 20th century such as Ravel and Cortot played them. Solomon describes the Pleyel as having a very long decay, meaning that notes continue to resonate…and resonate. It is easy to imagine that this sound is integral to the seemingly endless, Italian-opera-inspired melodic lines of Chopin, who preferred the Pleyel above all other pianos.
The Graf is, as mentioned, a copy dating from the 1990s. Copies play an important role. Sometimes there are not many original instruments of a certain type still extant. Those remaining may not be in good enough condition to withstand the rigors of concert performance. Or they may be hopelessly costly. So, builders work to make faithful copies – importantly, using authentic materials – which will give the sound of the original while being durable enough for concert use. Graf made some of the finest instruments to originate in Vienna, itself an important center of piano building. With his instruments in demand, soon to be used by some of Europe’s leading pianists, Graf also pioneered methods of mass production. In 1824 he became the piano maker to the imperial court in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian empire, which was one of the most powerful empires in Europe.
Those at these concerts may be surprised to see four pedals on the Graf piano! Pedals on the piano didn’t become standardized until much later, and at that time, as with so many other things, a large variety can be found. On this you have the usual right pedal, to sustain all the notes; the usual left pedal to mute the sound: a moderator pedal, which produces a different muted quality by pressing a piece of cloth or felt onto the strings; and an exotic one, a bassoon effect pedal. Let’s see if you get to hear that in the performance! (Not on this keyboard: a janissary pedal, which simulates percussion instruments – great for Mozart’s Turkish March!)
A point not often noted is that Graf commissioned the famous 1840 painting Liszt at the Piano by the then well-known Biedermeier artist Josef Danhauser. Some of our readers may have seen this picture of an enraptured Liszt playing poetically to an imagined gathering of his friends, with a bust of Beethoven presiding over all. In what must be an early example of product placement, the piano Liszt is playing can be seen to be a Graf.
Thematically connected with these concerts (and why not a little bit of juicy anecdote?), Pleyel’s much-younger wife for four years was the well-known piano virtuoso Marie Pleyel (1811-1875), née Moke, who was also a composer and sometimes played her own music on her concerts. Apparently, her numerous infidelities led to a separation in 1835, when she was already a known performer. From the 1840s she played large-scale concert tours and was highly praised to the extent that the renowned Clara Schumann considered her a rival. Liszt and Chopin both dedicated works to her. Before marrying Pleyel she had broken off an engagement with the mercurial Berlioz, who then plotted to kill her; fortunately for them both he didn’t attempt it. That she probably made a wise choice (as if that wasn’t already clear) is further suggested by the outcome when Berlioz, again greatly enamored, married the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. In the memorable phrase of a Berlioz biographer, both of them lived to regret it.
One more element should be added to the focal points of these concerts: as mentioned, they are free. DiEugenio commented that this is from the desire to make the music and the performances accessible. He and Solomon are joint directors of a Triangle-area program called MYCO, which seeks to bring powerful musical experiences to pre-college kids of varying levels of advancement. The idea, to use the phrase again, is to make great musical experiences accessible. For both of them, that is a passion.
Hopefully you will be able to get to Person Hall on some or all of 30 August, 15 November, and 1 March 2025 for some exciting and potentially thought-provoking music making!
