About this Program

Franz Liszt (1811–1886), arr. Jules de Swert

Consolation No. 3: Lento placido

A true Romantic visionary, Franz Liszt was as celebrated for his pianistic virtuosity as he was for his richly expressive compositions. His Consolations, a set of six lyrical piano pieces, were likely inspired by the French poet Charles Sainte-Beuve’s Pensées de Consolation. The third in the series, Lento placido, is perhaps the best known, with its serene, hymn-like melody and gentle accompaniment evoking a profound sense of introspection. Its timeless charm has made it a favourite among pianists and arrangers alike.

The version presented here, arranged for cello and piano by Jules de Swert, transforms Liszt’s introspective piano miniature into a poignant dialogue between the cello’s singing voice and the piano’s tender harmonies. Jules de Swert, a Belgian cellist and composer, was a contemporary of Liszt and a notable figure in the Romantic era. His arrangement retains the work’s heartfelt simplicity while showcasing the cello’s ability to convey Liszt’s intimate lyricism. This piece is a perfect example of Liszt’s ability to blend poetic expression with virtuosic elegance, offering a moment of calm reflection amidst the grandeur of Romanticism.

David Popper (1843-1913)

Selections from Im Walde, op. 50

Gnomentanz (Dance of the Gnomes)
Reigen (Round Dance)

The website dedicated to David Popper claims, “David Popper is the uncrowned king of the cello, and unfortunately this is not known by many people other than cellists.”  Popper was born in Prague. His father was cantor in the synagogue, and Popper studied cello at the Prague Conservatory. He began touring as soon as he graduated in 1863, gaining not only great reviews, but a position as cellist in the royal Hohenzollern court orchestra. Three years later, he became principal cellist of the Hofoper in Vienna; he was still only 24 years old. In 1872 he married pianist Sophie Menter, a protege of Franz Liszt and the following year they began a highly successful tour of Russia, England, continental Europe and America. They were classical music’s glamour couple of the 1870s. When the marriage was dissolved in 1886, Popper took a position teaching cello at the newly founded Liszt Conservatory in Budapest where he taught and continued to perform as a soloist and chamber musician, including playing in a quintet with Johannes Brahms as the pianist.

As a composer, Popper was prolific. He created music almost exclusively featuring the cello. His works include five cello concertos, numerous dances and suites, a book of forty etudes (still widely used by advanced cello students) and a requiem for piano and three cellos. Im Walde (“In the Forest”) is a suite of six pieces published in 1882. It traces the journey of the Romantic Hero (portrayed by the cello, of course) through the forest where he glories in nature (‘Introduction”), watches a group of gnomes dance, pauses to pray, comes across faeries doing a mazurka, and quietly contemplates an autumn flower before mounting his horse and galloping home. Im Walde was a sweeping success and audiences frequently demanded it (especially “The Gnomes’ Dance”) at Popper’s concerts.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano in e minor, op. 38

i. Allegro non troppo
ii. Allegretto quasi Menuetto
iii. Allegro

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany.  His father, a professional musician, gave him his first musical education, teaching him to play the violin and cello. Later, Brahms took piano lessons, but his piano teacher was frustrated, complaining that the nine-year-old Brahms "could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing."  In his early teens, Brahms studied the works of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert with the result that Brahms's own compositions were grounded in that tradition; and by his mid-teens, he was giving piano recitals in Hamburg which often included his own compositions.  In 1853, Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann. It was the beginning of a long and complex relationship.  Robert Schumann’s glowing review of Brahms' talent – he named him the successor to Beethoven – gave his career a boost, but this praise may have aggravated Brahms's self-critical standards of perfection. Brahms became an intimate part of the Schumann family circle, acting as a go-between for the couple during Robert’s incarceration in a mental institution. After Robert Schumann’s death in 1856,  Clara Schumann helped support Brahms’ career by frequently programming his compositions in her own performances. By the 1860s, Brahms’ career and reputation as a composer were well established.

Brahms began work on his first sonata for cello and piano in 1862.  As was not uncommon for the perfectionist composer, he completed it three years later, in 1865.  The sonata is a “homage to Bach” as the main themes of the opening and closing movements are based on Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, while the middle movement dance has a French baroque feel. This is not meant to suggest that the piece is a mere imitation of Bach. The material has been transformed by Brahms' creative Romantic sensibility.

~INTERMISSION~

Erno Dohnányi (1877-1960)

Ruralia Hungarica, Op. 32D

Erno Dohnanyi is considered the architect of Hungary’s musical culture in the 20th century. He was born in Hungary in 1877.  His father, a mathematics professor and gifted amateur cellist, began his musical education. He took formal lessons from age seven and graduated from the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music before he turned twenty. He immediately embarked on a musical career as a concert pianist, chamber musician, composer, and later as a conductor, teacher and administrator.  His last performance took place ten days before his death in New York in February 1960, more than sixty years after his concert debut in Berlin. Buffeted by the events rocking Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s, Dohnanyi moved to the United States in 1949 and took up a position at Florida State College in Tallahassee which he used as a base for the final decade of his life. Heavily influenced by Brahms during his youth (which is noticeable in his first Piano Quintet), Dohnányi owes more thanks to the noble structures of German Classicism than the late Romantic or early twentieth-century aesthetics. His output includes three operas, two symphonies (1901 and 1943), and a wealth of chamber music including three string quartets and two piano quintets which remain vital to the repertoire. 

Ruralia Hungarica began life as a suite of seven pieces for solo piano (Opus 32a) in 1923. The following year, Dohnanyi revised it as a five-piece suite for piano and orchestra (Opus 32b). In 1927, he revised it again this time for violin and piano (Opus 32c). In this incarnation, the piece had tremendous success, often programmed by superstar violinists Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz. The arrangement for cello and piano (often titled “The Gypsy Andante”) was published in the 1930s as Opus 32d.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Sonata no. 2 for cello and piano in F major, op. 99

i. Allegro vivace
ii. Adagio affetuoso
iii. Allegro passionato
iv. Allegro molto

One of the most distinguished conductors of the Nineteenth Century, Hans von Bulow, ranked Johannes Brahms with Bach and Beethoven, thereby creating the “Three Bs of classical music”. Brahms was then – in the 1880s – at the peak of his career as a composer, with an international reputation. The University of Breslau awarded him an honorary degree, calling him "the leader in the art of serious music in Germany today". Cambridge University offered him an Honorary Doctor of Music and the city of Hamburg made him an Honorary Citizen. Although a painstaking perfectionist who laboured over his manuscripts, frequently revising them even after they had been premiered, his output was prolific. By 1885, he had produced four symphonies, four concertos, sonatas for several instruments, roughly 150 pieces for piano (both solo and four hands) as well as miscellaneous vocal, chamber and orchestral works.

Brahms’ Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano had been championed by Robert Hausman, an outstanding German cellist who had performed it frequently. In 1886, Brahms composed a second sonata for cello and piano, this one written expressly for, and dedicated to, Hausman. Brahms and Hausmann gave a private preview performance in Berlin on November 14, 1886, followed by a public premiere in Vienna ten days later, and repeated the work several times that winter.  “In the Cello Sonata, passion rules,” the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in a review of early performances. Ironically, this second sonata is more full of youthful ardour than the one composed some twenty years earlier.  Hanslick continued, “How boldly the first Allegro theme begins, how stormily the Allegro flows! It is true that the passion subsides into quiet mourning in the Adagio and fades away, reconciled, in the finale. But the beating pulse of the earlier sections still reverberates, and pathos remains the determining psychological characteristic of the whole.” 

Program notes by Larry Bent

About the Artists

Cameron Crozman, cello

“With a rich imagination and a keen mind” (Diapason Magazine), Canadian cellist Cameron Crozman leads an active performing career as a soloist and chamber musician in Canada, the USA, and Europe. He has appeared as a soloist with the Orchestre National d'Ile-de-France (Paris), Montreal, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Vancouver Island Symphonies among others, and performances have taken him everywhere from the Philharmonie de Paris and the Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre, to the Qidi Vidi Brewery of St. John’s, Newfoundland. An avid collaborator and chamber musician, Cameron shares the stage with eminent artists such as James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Louis Lortie, Gérard Caussé, James Campbell, and members of the Ébène, New Zealand, and Penderecki String Quartets. 

Winner of the 2021 Canada Council for the Arts Virginia Parker Prize, the Council’s largest award for emerging classical musicians, Cameron was CBC/Radio-Canada’s 2019 Classical Revelation artist and a laureate of Gautier Capuçon’s Classe d’Excellence at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Cameron’s debut album, Cavatine, recorded on the ca. 1696 “Bonjour” Stradivarius cello with pianist Philip Chiu, was released in 2019 and described by the French publication Classica Magazine as displaying “technical perfection with a personal style that leaves us wanting to hear more.” He has since recorded a number of CDs for the labels ATMA Classique in Canada and Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo in Monaco. His most recent release from May 2024 of the Haydn Cello Concertos and Jacques Hétu’s Rondo performed with Les Violons du Roy and conductor Nicolas Ellis has garnered international praise. Cameron’s performances are broadcast on CBC, BBC, RTÉ Radio, Radio France, and Medici.tv. 

Deeply committed to the music of today, Cameron is active in leading projects commissioning and premiering new music by some of Canada’s most recognized composers including Alexina Louie, Allan Gordon Bell, Liam Ritz, James O’Callaghan, and Kelly-Marie Murphy. After studying in Canada with Paul Pulford, Cameron was a student at the Paris Conservatoire and received his “Prix de violoncelle” with the highest honours studying in the class of Michel Strauss. In 2018, he received a one-year mentorship with violinist James Ehnes as part of the André-Bourbeau award from the Jeunesses Musicales Canada. Passionate about teaching the next generation, he has been invited to give masterclasses at the Académie Rainier III in Monaco, Lawrence University (Wisconsin), University of Montreal, Conservatorio Superior de Música Joaquín Rodrigo Valencia, and the Escola Superior de Music de Lisboa, among others. 

Cameron is the co-founder of ClassicalValley, a festival bringing together chamber music and wine in Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada, and the artistic director of chamber music for the Edeta Arts International Festival in Llíria, Spain, designated a Creative City of Music by the UNESCO. Along with pianist Meagan Milatz, he produces a series of chamber music concerts in Montreal called “HausMusique” in one of North America’s landmark Art Deco spaces, the Grande Salle of the 9th floor of the Eaton Centre. He currently plays on a c. 1750 Gennaro Gagliano cello, generously on loan from the Canada Council for the Arts Instrument Bank.

Meagan Milatz, piano

Meagan Milatz, winner of the 2024 Prix Opus ”Discovery of the Year, is “a remarkable pianist with a seemingly limitless palette of expression” (Le Devoir). Meagan regularly shares the stage with top international musicians including Andrew Wan, concertmaster of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra; Stefan Dohr, Principal Horn of the Berlin Philharmonic; cellist Matt Haimovitz; and mandolinist Avi Avital. In 2022, Meagan was named co-artistic director of HausMusique, along with cellist Cameron Crozman.

Awarded the 2024 Prix Choquette-Symcox by Fondation Jeunesses Musicales Canada, Meagan’s recent engagements have included performances with Olivier Charlier, Michel Michalakakos, Cho-Liang Lin, Peter Hanson, Olivier Charlier, Pablo Hernán Benedí, Steven Dann, and tubist Øystein Baadsvik, among others. Internationally, Meagan has performed at the New Ross Piano Festival in Ireland in 2023 - the first Canadian musician to be invited - as well as at the Edeta Arts International Chamber Music Festival where she appeared in concert in Spain with violinists Wolfgang Redik in 2024 and Kai Gleusteen, concertmaster of the Orchestra del Gran Teatre del Liceu of Barcelona, in 2022. Meagan recently embarked on a 2024 European recital tour with cellist Cameron Crozman in Italy, France, Malta, and Portugal.

Meagan has appeared as a soloist alongside orchestras such as the Edmonton, Regina, Sherbrooke, and McGill Symphonies. Meagan was top prize winner in the Shean Piano Competition, CFMTA National Piano Competition, and Canadian Music Competition, and the recipient of a Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award. Her performances are regularly broadcast on CBC/Radio-Canada.

Meagan has a recording contract for nine albums of solo and chamber music with ATMA Classique. She recently recorded an album of music for fortepiano and natural horn alongside Louis-Pierre Bergeron, released in December 2023. She has also launched a brand-new violin-and-piano duo partnership, “Duo M”, alongside Violaine Melançon, renowned violinist and founding member of the Peabody Trio. For the 2019/2020 season,

Meagan undertook a 50-concert, Canada-wide tour alongside violinist Amy Hillis as the duo “meagan&amy”, winners of the first-ever Pan-Canadian Partnership Recital Tour offered by Jeunesses Musicales Canada, Debut Atlantic, and Prairie Debut.

Meagan began her studies in Saskatchewan and holds a Master’s degree from McGill University. She is grateful to her teachers and lifelong mentors Cherith Alexander, Ilya Poletaev, Philip Chiu, and Tom Beghin with whom she was greatly privileged to study the fortepiano. Enthusiastic about helping the next generation of young musicians, she is a passionate faculty member of the “Session sonates violon et piano” of Camp Musical du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean.

Meagan lives in Montreal where she loves biking, reading outside whenever possible, and enjoying the occasional tasty pastry.

Le violoncelliste Cameron Crozman et la pianiste Meagan Milatz

À propos de ce concert

ARTISTES : Cameron Crozman, violoncelle ; Meagan Milatz, piano

COMPOSITEURS : Brahms, Dohnányi, Liszt, et Popper

La pianiste Meagan Milatz, lauréate du Prix Opus Découverte de l'année, et le violoncelliste Cameron Crozman, considéré par CBC Music comme « la prochaine grande vedette du violoncelle au Canada », font leurs débuts très attendus en duo à Halifax. Leur programme, une célébration de la musique romantique, est centré sur les deux sonates pour violoncelle et piano de Johannes Brahms : l'émouvante Sonate no 1 en mi mineur, op. 38, et la radieuse Sonate no 2 en fa majeur, op. 99. Ces chefs-d'œuvre imposants mettent en évidence la profondeur de l'émotion et la maîtrise de la forme de Brahms, incarnant l'essence du romantisme allemand. Le programme comprend également la Consolation n° 3 : Lento placido de Liszt, dans un arrangement pour violoncelle et piano de Jules de Swert, qui restitue le lyrisme et l'introspection caractéristiques de Liszt. En outre, des sélections de Im Walde, opus 50, de David Popper, qui capture magnifiquement les qualités sereines et mystiques de la forêt, et Ruralia Hungarica, opus 32d, d'Erno Dohnányi, qui dépeint de manière vivante la vie et les traditions folkloriques hongroises. Ensemble, ces pièces reflètent la fascination de l'ère romantique pour la nature et la culture populaire, promettant une soirée d'exploration musicale profonde. Décrits par Le Devoir comme un partenariat « tout simplement idéal », Milatz et Crozman donnent vie à ces œuvres avec passion et finesse. Commanditaire de la saison : Jules Chamberlain / Red Door Realty.

Cette représentation est rendue possible grâce au soutien généreux de John Himmelman et Helga Guderley.

Les notes de programme et les informations sur les artistes seront bientôt disponibles en français.