2024-2025 Season
Program Notes © Steven Ledbetter
Music is one of the very few fields of human endeavor (chess is another) in which particularly talented individuals make their mark at an astonishingly early age. This program offers a bouquet of works written by some of the most early-rising masters in our musical history, some supremely well known, others gradually coming to light.
FLORENCE PRICE (1887– 1953)
Elfantanze for violin & piano
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, of mixed-race parents, Florence Price grew up in the home of professional African Americans and benefited from a thorough education there. Beginning early piano lessons with her piano-teacher mother, she showed immediate talent, making her first public appearance at 4 and publishing her first song at 11. From 1902 to 1906, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, where, in addition to taking degrees in organ and piano teaching, she pursued studies on composition, a subject denied to most women at the time. However, the director of the Conservatory, George W. Chadwick, one of Boston’s leading composers, opened the program to talented women and minorities. At the commencement concert when she graduated, her performance closed the program, automatically identifying her as the top student in the graduating class. She spent most of her career in Chicago, where she attained considerable renown, but it faded after her death, and most of her music risked being lost. But in recent years, rediscoveries have built an increasing fame. In 2009, a large carton of scores was discovered in the attic of an abandoned home in a Chicago suburb, containing her fourth symphony, two violin concertos, and much else. In recent years her music has been welcomed on orchestral and chamber concerts, as well as piano recitals. “Elfenlied” (Elf song) is one of more than 100 songs with piano that she left.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Auf dem Wasser zu singen (“To be sung on the water”)
Schubert was the real creator of the great culture of German song with piano accompaniment. He composed 600 of them, 150 in the year he turned 18! The freshness of melody and the variety and color of the piano parts have made them treasured by singers and pianists—and envious composers!—for two centuries. “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (To be sung on the water) is a nature painting, a boat gently rocking on the waters of the lake, with a hint of the light waves in the piano part and a sweet turn to the major key at the end of each stanza.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Songs Without Words: Venetian Gondelier No. 2 & Contemplation
Mozart is generally given as the example of the composer with the earliest demonstration of musical mastery, but Mendelssohn may win the prize as the earliest to compose a supreme masterpiece: his Octet for strings came at the age of 16, while Mozart was all of 18 before he composed the first work rated truly masterful. (Of course both composers had written dozens of pieces before then.) Mendelssohn wrote many songs with piano accompaniment, like Schubert, but he also composed dozens of “Songs without Words,” essentially songs, but with the “vocal” melody put right into the piano part. They were gathered into collections of five or six pieces each and published in that way, starting in 1833 and ending only after the composer’s early death. Since there are no words to these “songs,” the title serves to give an indication of its mood—as here, with “Contemplation.”
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Divertimento for String Trio in E flat Major, K. 563
The summer of l788 was the period when Mozart composed his last three symphonies, but it was also a time of personal anguish and ill health. For six weeks after finishing the C‑major symphony, K.551, he composed no large‑scale works at all. On September 27, he finished composition of any importance for many months. The work was composed for Michael Puchberg, a freemason like Mozart, who had repeatedly come to his aid when he was in financial difficulties. The composer described the present work in his personal catalog as a Divertiment, a term he had not used for more than a decade—and, indeed, this string trio, however much its layout of six movements may suggest the divertimento of old, has little in common with the purely social music to which the term is normally attached. For this is deeply felt music, serious and serene, with string writing that is inventive throughout. Three of its six movements will be heard here. Few musical compositions encompass so much in such a small space.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Piano Quartet in G minor, Op.25
We generally think of Brahms as a late-maturing composer, but that is because he did not compose a symphony until he was in his 40s. But he was already a touring pianist in his teens, composing fiery showpieces—a style that he later moderated. Brahms may have begun this quartet as early as 1857, when he was 24. It was premiered in Hamburg in 1861. It played a part in spreading Brahms’s name in Vienna, where he went on what was intended to be a short visit the following autumn, though as it turned out he settled there for life. After a private performance at the home of the pianist Julius Epstein in October 1862, Joseph Hellmesberger, who had played the violin in the reading, exclaimed, “He is Beethoven’s heir!” At his insistence, Brahms himself played the piano part at a public performance in which the “gypsy rondo” again attracted the most attention.
The opening Allegro starts off on its course with two very different thematic ideas, one in G minor, the other immediately following in the relative major. The remainder of the spacious exposition is largely in D major; the opening phrase is literally repeated, and the listener has no way of knowing at first whether the entire recapitulation is to be repeated literally, or whether this is a feint to lead into the development. Only with the harmonic changes of the second phrase is it clear that the latter is the case. After a wide-ranging development, Brahms brings in the recapitulation not with the opening phrase (which we have by now heard twice in the tonic) but rather with the following phrase, stated in the bright, consoling key of G major. Of still greater emotional impact is the return of the secondary material, originally heard in D major, now in G minor, as the fiery elements take control and close the movement solidly in the minor mode.
At one point Brahms labeled the second movement “Scherzo,” then recoiled (from a comparison with Beethoven perhaps?) and chose instead what became a favorite term for this type of movement, “Intermezzo.” In any case, the movement has a mysterious, subdued feeling with its muted strings, harmonic shifts, and unexpected phrase lengths.
The noble melody of the Andante con moto is first accompanied by eighth‑notes in the piano, but over the course of an extended statement Brahms introduces triplet rhythm and later dotted notes, both of which play a part in the masterful transition to a quasi‑military middle section. This in turn gradually returns to the opening theme but (at first) in the key of the middle part before it melts back to its proper level.
Haydn had written a famous gypsy rondo in one of his piano trios, and Brahms most assuredly knew that work, just as he was familiar with what passed at the time for authentic Hungarian—read “gypsy”—musical style. The energy and drive, coupled with the instrumental colors and dance rhythms (including the unusual three‑bar phrases at the beginning), have aroused enthusiasm in audiences since the earliest performances, especially in the final headlong tumble to the end.
2023-2024 Season
Program Notes © Steven Ledbetter
PAUL SCHOENFIELD (b. 1947) Trio for clar, violin, piano 1 Freylakh
Detroit-born Paul Schoenfield (born 1947) is one of an increasing number of composers whose music is inspired by the whole world of musical experience‑‑popular styles both American and foreign, vernacular and folk traditions, and the “normal” historical traditions of cultivated music‑making, often treated with sly twists. He frequently mixes in a single piece ideas that grew up in entirely different worlds, making them talk to each other, so to speak, and delighting in the surprises their interaction evokes. (Who would imagine Wagner’s Tannhäuser turning up in a country fiddle piece? But it happens, in one of Schoenfield’s earliest works.)
Schoenfield’s shorter chamber works with characteristic titles–Three Country Fiddle Tunes, Vaudeville, and Cafe Music–and longer pieces such as a recent piano concerto often refer to popular styles of entertainment music, often reflecting his own Hasidic tradition, even though Schoenfield transmutes them clearly into concert works–serious compositions with a sense of humor.
The Trio for violin, clarinet, and piano was designed to highlight three instruments that featured especially prominently in traditional klezmer music and also in the hands of Jewish classical musicians. Schoenfield’s work has always reflected his interest in the Hassidic. The opening movement refers to tunes that might have been heard in many locations throughout Europe where Jews congregated and passed their musical ideas to one another over the centuries.
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949) Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
Richard Strauss’s tone poem, “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” vividly portrays the mischievous exploits of the legendary German folk hero Till Eulenspiegel, a trickster figure known for his clever and playful antics. Strauss masterfully brings his misadventures to life through whimsical melodies and harmonies in this iconic composition in a beautiful arrangement by Franz Hasenöhrl.
In 1945, as Viennese musical life was recovering from the war, Franz Hasenöhrl (1885-1970) was asked to make a chamber version of the Strauss work by a musical administrator outraged when an acquaintance was unfamiliar with it. The idea was that a few players of the Vienna Philharmonic could play it to alleviate the poor fellow’s ignorance. Strauss himself found the arrangement delightful.
VINCENZO GAMBARO (1785-1828) Wind Quartet No 2 in C minor
There seem to be three composers named Gambaro with overlapping dates and similar names, Vincent or Vincenzo Gambaro. Italian classical composer and publisher, Vincenzo Gambaro, made his career in Paris and composed his wind quartets for students at the Paris Conservatory. Very little else is known about him except that these wind quartets are charming and a delight to listen to.
ERNÖ DOHNYANI (1877-1960) Sextet in C, Op. 37: IV Allegro vivace
All too nearly forgotten today, Ernö Dohnányi was one of the chief architects of Hungarian music in the 20th century, as a distinguished pianist, conductor, composer, teacher, and administrator. We seldom hear his own music, though he wrote far more than the orchestral Variations on a Nursery Rhyme, Opus 25, the only work that even approaches repertory status. And he particularly shines in the realm of chamber music. No less a critic than Johannes Brahms hailed his Opus 1, the First Piano Quintet in C Minor, completed when its composer was but eighteen. For the next forty years, he created distinguished works in various chamber-music genres. The Sextet in C, Opus 37, is the last published work in his lifetime. His last years were troubled by the political events that darkened the entire world. A staunch anti-Nazi, he passed his political views onto his sons, one of whom was executed during the war for his role in the abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After the war, Dohnányi settled in Tallahassee, Florida, where he taught at Florida State University from 1949 until his death in 1960.
Dohnányi’s Sextet is an expansive work, its flowing lines generated from the outset by the horn, which, as the instrument least frequently encountered in chamber music. The last movement, heard here, is a lively work with a main theme recalling any number of witty Haydn finales, with a rondo theme in 2/4, its light‑hearted wit culminating in a high-spirited close.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Serenade in D, Op. 11, for flute, 2 clarinets, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, & bass arranged by Alan Boustead
While working at the ducal court of Detmold in his middle 20s, the young Brahms heard many examples of that lighter sort of entertainment music turned out by Mozart under such headings as cassation, serenade, or divertimento, featuring the wind instruments. Brahms composed a large chamber work of the serenade type for nine instruments, five winds and four strings. The premiere was not a success; Brahms was charged with writing music that was too complicated. He expanded the Nonet for a larger ensemble not just once, but twice, unfortunately destroying the original in the process. Eventually the piece was recognized as worthy of its composer, though only in the surviving larger form. Here arranger Alan Boustead has created a reconstruction of the original form of the work, for the nine instruments that Brahms used.
From beginning to end the Serenade reflects its composer’s loving, careful study of the classics. The very first sonority of the Serenade immediately conjures up the Finale of Haydn’s “London” Symphony, with its D‑major pedal point in the lower strings and the statement of a jovial, folk like theme in the horn. But matters have not progressed far when Brahms indicates to the alert listener that he is planning a work on a far grander scale altogether. After building up to a restatement of the first theme in the ensemble, progress to the secondary key brings in a new theme of extraordinary range in the violin, soaring upwards as it plays the composer’s favorite rhythmic game of two‑versus‑three. If the opening bars were reminiscent of an earlier composer, this theme could have been composed by no one but Brahms. After a powerful fortissimo climax, the movement dies away in a coda that is delicate, witty, and of chamber music lightness.
Serenades in Mozart’s day had a string of movements following the opening Allegro, which was almost invariably the largest. These included various dances, usually minuets, surrounding a central slow movement, a lively finale, and perhaps a few other dance movements scattered here and there. Brahms follows this pattern by putting a Scherzo between the opening Allegro and the slow movement, and then following the Adagio with two more movements in dance patterns. The Scherzo is an unusually elaborate one, making use of canonic techniques that few composers would choose to employ in a “light” movement, though Haydn, one of Brahms’s likely models would do so. In the Adagio, Brahms allows his love for luxuriant development full sway here in the twining thirds and sixths of the woodwinds against string tremolos, played off against a sensuous horn call. The paired Minuets, even in the largest version of the score, remained essentially chamber music. The horn, which rested during the Menuetto, leads off the second Scherzo in a theme that immediately recalls early Beethoven. In fact, the Scherzo is a wonderful homage to the Opus 20 Septet and the Second Symphony, just as the first movement recalls Haydn. The Rondo finale brings the Serenade to an end in a burst of high spirits that recalls the penchant for long strings of dotted rhythms characteristic of another Brahms mentor, Robert Schumann.
Program notes © Steven Ledbetter
DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)
La Création du monde, Opus 81, Finale
Among the most prolific of twentieth-century composers, with a catalog running well past 400 works, Darius Milhaud absorbed music wherever he went and transmuted the received impressions into his own work. Having done so, he would move on to new territory. The mere fact that a work in one style might prove to be very popular was not enough to induce him to continue writing in that style. Among his most successful works were those inspired by his encounters with various popular musical traditions during and immediately after the First World War. Two years in South America left an indelible impression on him, followed closely by the influence of American jazz, which began making its way to Europe via recordings long before musicians traveled there in person.
Already in 1919, Milhaud composed the cheeky, jazzy ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit as a musical depiction of an American speak-easy, though at that time he had never seen one. Most “serious” musicians of the twenties in the United States considered jazz a form of musical primitivism that was beneath contempt, a view that had as much to do with racism as with musical values. Milhaud was fascinated, and his first visit to America (at the height of Prohibition) reinforced his interest. He startled journalists by reporting that the American music that interested him most was jazz, and he took many opportunities to hear it. He heard Leo Reisman’s jazz orchestra at the Hotel Brunswick and wrote, “he got from his instrumentalists an extreme refinement of pianissimo tones, murmured notes, and glancing chords, whisperings from the muted brass, and barely formulated moans from the saxophone, which had a highly individual flavor.” The New Orleans jazz he heard at a Harlem night spot “was absolutely different from anything I had ever heard before and was a revelation to me. Against the beat of the drums, the melodic lines crisscrossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms.”
Back in Europe, Milhaud wrote, “I had the opportunity I had been waiting for to use these elements of jazz to which I had devoted much study. I adopted the same orchestra as used in Harlem, seventeen solo instruments, and I made wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling.” Milhaud later arranged it for piano quintet and Mistral has added back the original timbre and color of the clarinet into this mix.
No one will likely confuse Milhaud’s work with actual New Orleans jazz. But the finale breaks out in a still faster tempo with a four-bar rhythmic lick as an ostinato accompaniment, which builds to a kind of melodic free-for-all characteristic of New Orleans jazz. Ideas in the earlier movements conclude that this score remains one of the most successful examples of a rapprochement between symphony and jazz band ever written.
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
Symphony No. 104 in D, “London” (chamber arrangement by J.P. Salomon)
One morning in 1790, a visitor appeared at Haydn’s home and announced, “I am Salomon from London and have come to fetch you.” Salomon was a violinist and impresario who ran a concert series in London, then the concert capital of Europe. He was on a recruiting tour of the continent when he heard that Haydn’s long‑time employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy had died, thus presumably freeing Haydn from the necessity of remaining near Vienna. He quickly went to Vienna and made the great composer an offer that was hard to resist. Haydn accepted. His two extended English visits (one starting in January 1791, the second ending in August 1795) brought him acclaim as the greatest living composer as well as a substantial measure of wealth.
Haydn’s last twelve symphonies were composed for performance in London; they have long been the most famous and best‑loved of his voluminous output. As each was premiered, the reviewers expressed their continuing astonishment that Haydn, at an advanced age for the time (he was in his 60s) showed no sign of losing his special spark. Indeed, with each new symphony he seemed to have topped himself yet again. Time after time the reviews noted that his music was both “pleasing” and “scientific,” terms that described the composer’s unique accomplishment: writing music that is immediately accessible yet at the same time structurally significant, advancing the very idea of “symphony” to levels yet unheard, with a fully refined technique.
But of course, a symphony could only be heard in the concert hall. Recording technology was a century in the future, so every performance had to be live. Salomon, a very canny impresario, knew that Haydn’s symphonies would grow even more popular if people could hear them at home—and that meant playing them themselves! Music publishers were happy to produce music that amateur pianists, wind and string players could buy for home performance, so Salomon himself arranged the late Haydn symphonies especially to appeal to this market.
Haydn could scarcely have known that the “London” Symphony would be his final contribution to the great symphonic edifice that he had been building for more than three decades. He lived another fourteen years, but his creative output turned in different directions after that. But even if he had guessed that this would be his last symphony, he could hardly have left a grander and more brilliant example of the genre.
The work begins with the dramatic slow introduction in D minor, setting expectations of a powerful drama to follow. That power is tempered with a smile, which appears at the arrival of D major and the beginning of the main section. The themes themselves are popular in character, yet they contain within them material for development. The main theme begins with four notes that sound like the beginning of a popular tune, soon followed by four repeated notes, like a knock at the door. These two tiny elements become fundamental atoms out of which the first movement is built—not only the main theme, but also the secondary theme. The “knocking” figure dominates the development section, from which Beethoven clearly learned much.
The slow movement develops its dance-like theme, heard in both major and minor-key forms, to a frenzy of activity that requires a grand pause to calm it down—and then continues in a pure and tranquil way, like a slapstick comedian trying to recover his poise.
The Minuet is marked by heavy beats, like a rustic dance (rather than an elegant court dance, where it would usually be seen). The contrasting Trio, on the other hand, is as elegant a version of a rustic country dance as one is likely to find. It seems as if Haydn is cheerfully interchanging the worlds of court and countryside.
The finale, according to Charlotte Papendieck, who heard many of the original performances and wrote about them years later, referred to the idea that London street cries were inserted into the music of one of the symphonies, and some believe that it was the finale of this symphony that contained references to “Live cod” or “Hot cross buns.” Whether or not Haydn used actual street tunes, the main theme certainly has a popular character and might well have been adapted from some folk source that the audiences could have been expected to recognize. Whether or not the melody actually quotes an original folk tune or street cry, it serves Haydn for every kind of serious and playful musical trick, ending in a blaze of glory.
ELIZABETH BROWN (b. 1953)
Liguria, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano (1999)
Elizabeth Brown was born in Camden, Alabama, a small rural community where her early musical experiences were generally limited to piano lessons, school bands, and church. At age 16 she took up the flute, which became her principal instrument, leading her to study and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, followed by the Juilliard School in New York, She became an active freelance performer. On an orchestral tour of Japan, she encountered the shakuhachi, a form of wooden flute especially characteristic of Japanese music. Already enamored of what she thought of as the weightless character of music for the flute, she was entranced by the flexibility of the shakuhachi’s sound, its way of “bending” pitches, its evocation of nature. She studied it and adapted many aspects of its sound into the music that she started to compose in her late twenties, producing music of fresh color, meditative character, with a sense often of lightness and airy floating.
She later also began to compose for and perform on the theremin, an electronic instrument that similarly explore flexible pitches and unusual sonorities. But while many composers have used it for “spooky” music (especially in films), Brown makes it part of a natural-world sound image, along with other instruments, the familiar one and modern inventions by avant-garde composer Harry Partch. In addition to purely instrumental works, she has composed chamber operas like Rural Electrification, which reflects on the arrival of electricity to an agricultural community like the one she grew up in, with a soprano, the theremin as leading instrument (occasionally quoting “Old Macdonald had a farm”), field recordings of birds, and visual projections created by Brown’s artist husband Lothar Ostenburg.
Liguria offers an aural memory of an actual visit to a beauty spot in Italy, the province of Ligura, on the Mediterranean coast around Genoa. (Television viewers who have watched the recent series “Portofino” on PBS’s Masterpiece will have seen many stunning views of land and sea in that area.) The composer explains the elements of the piece:
Liguria was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation for the New York New Music Ensemble, who premiered it on May 18, 1999, at Hunter College in New York City. The music, constructed of layers, echoes, and shadows of a few themes set in a resonant, pulsing sound world, reflects a certain lyrical melancholy I felt during an Italian residency in 1998. Above the Liguria Study Center, steep narrow walkways twisted through ancient olive groves and between walled houses and small farms, with the Mediterranean spread below. In nearby Genoa, centuries of history were revealed in layers of beautiful decay in the dark old quarter. Even the food and wine had accumulated ages of rich flavor, and I always had a sensation of falling backward through time. Liguria was completed at the MacDowell Colony in January 1999.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Souvenir de Florence, Sextet in D minor for two violins, two violas, and two cellos, Opus 70
As early as June 1887 Tchaikovsky had made a start on a string sextet for the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, but he gave it up after a few days. He was not to return to the medium until the early months of 1890 when, while living in Florence and deeply involved with his opera The Queen of Spades, he wrote down the melody that would become the slow movement’s main theme. This fact alone motivated the title of the finished composition.
He completed the opera on June 20; five days later he began serious work on the sextet. He was concerned about the medium, a new one for him, and particularly about the question as to whether he might not be conceiving music that demanded an orchestra and then reducing it to six strings. By the time he finished his sketch on July 12, his view of the piece had begun to improve. But he still worried about the scoring as he worked out the final details, which were completed by August 6. Neither the composer nor his closest friends were entirely happy with the third and fourth movements at a private performance in December. Tchaikovsky set it aside for a year then made major revisions to the last two movements and a small adjustment to the first movement, resulting in the form in which we know the piece.
The sextet is one of Tchaikovsky’s last multi-movement instrumental works (only the Sixth Symphony followed) and the last in which he retained the traditional patterns of abstract symphonic form. He worked out a splendidly detailed sonata-form exposition for the first movement, in which the transition grows out of a three-note figure that appears in the main theme and then continues under the surprisingly shy entrance of the second theme in the first violin. Although formal structure was always something of a struggle for Tchaikovsky, this exposition clearly demonstrates his hard-won mastery over the years.
The slow movement is among the most purely personal passages in Tchaikovsky’s output, and the one place in the score where his love of melodic lines laid out as a duet, intertwining, mutually complementary, comes to full flower.
The third movement takes a melody of a Slavonic folkish cast and puts it through its paces, alternating two different versions with varied textures and accompaniments.
For the finale, Tchaikovsky offered another sonata-form movement based on a dancing theme of Slavonic imprint varied with two sections of vigorous contrapuntal development. In writing for the mostly German membership of the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, Tchaikovsky knew that he would be expected to offer some display of his ability at counterpoint, and he obliged with these two passages, the second of which becomes a full-scale fugato leading to a wildly sonorous close.
Program notes © Susan Halpern
Antonio VIVALDI (1678-1741) Concerto for four solo violins in B minor, RV 580, from L’Estro armónico
Vivaldi was one of the best, most successful, and most influential musicians of the late Baroque era, but he died in poverty and obscurity, leaving behind approximately 700 compositions of which only a few dozen were known to be his until 200 years later. In the mid-19th century, when it was discovered that several works included among Bach’s manuscripts were not Bach’s but copies of ones Vivaldi composed, scholars began to seek out more information about the Italian composer. Still, it was not until the 1970s that the exact dates of Vivaldi’s birth and death became known.
Vivaldi’s father, a respected musician, was probably his son’s only teacher. Vivaldi became a brilliant violinist, but in 1693, he took holy orders, and a decade later, was ordained a priest, although he soon gave up saying Mass. From 1703 until 1740, he was intermittently director of instrumental music, staff composer, teacher, and violinist at a church-supported home for foundling girls in Venice, called a “conservatory of orphans.” Because of the intensive musical training the girls received, the word conservatorio (conservatory) eventually came to mean a “school of music.”
No one knows how many concertos Vivaldi wrote, but around 500 have survived, most composed for the young musicians of his conservatory. They are not didactic, but rather brilliant showpieces that made great demands on players’ technical skills. Baroque convention required composers to be prolific because the convention then was that older works were not played unless supremely popular. Since the works were usually created for a specific program, the first performance was often the last, and many works were not saved. Vivaldi, following the practice of the day, often reworked his earlier compositions into his current writing to meet deadlines or to capitalize on what he knew had been successful.
Between 1705 and 1737, thirteen collections of Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions were published in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Venice, including 36 sonatas and 84 concertos of various kinds; each collection bore an opus number from 1 to 13. The most popular was Opus 3, a grouping of 12 concertos that had fifteen printings between 1712 and 1751. L’estro armónico, published in 1713, means something like “Harmonic Inspiration or Harmonic Invention.” It was ingeniously edited, either by Vivaldi himself or by an employee of his publisher, to provide for the varying number of violin parts. The concertos of L’Estro armónico are arranged in groups of three, a group for four solo violins, followed by one for two soloists, and a third of solo concertos.
Bach knew Vivaldi’s concertos well and valued them so highly that he arranged six of them as concertos for harpsichord and strings and transcribed some of them for a keyboard instrument without accompaniment; his talented but untrustworthy son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, actually claimed to have composed one of them, a concerto his father’s arranged of one of Vivaldi’s original works. For many years before Vivaldi’s originals were rediscovered, some of the concertos were believed to be Bach’s works. It was not until the 20th century that all of Vivaldi’s concerti were correctly attributed.
Concerto No. 10, one of the most popular in the set, long known by Bach’s version of it for four harpsichords and strings, appears as a concerto grosso in Vivaldi’s original with a solo group consisting of four violins.
J.S. BACH (1685-1750) Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067
In 1717, Bach entered the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt‑Cöthen, a great lover of instrumental music who maintained an orchestra of sixteen or eighteen musicians at court. Bach’s position was Director of the Prince’s chamber music. During his six years in Cöthen, he wrote most of his great instrumental ensemble works. All four of his Orchestral Suites were performed at the concerts of the Telemann Society there, but later, as new styles made the music of Bach seem old‑fashioned to audiences who wanted to hear only the latest works of the newest composers, Bach’s suites disappeared. Suite No. 2 was not published until more than a hundred years after the composer’s death.
Each suite is written for strings plus a different complement of wind instruments. In Suite No. 2, the featured wind is a single flute. Bach did not call his works suites but simply wrote Ouverture at the head of each, designating the first movement as an overture in the French style. The remaining movements constitute a set of dances, all in the same key. Each dance has two sections, both of which are repeated. When there is a pair of dances of the same type, after the second has been played, the first is repeated. The Badinerie has two repeated parts and has become a favorite showpiece for flutists.
George Frideric HANDEL (1685-1759) Lascia ch’io pianga (“Let Me Weep”) from the opera Rinaldo, arr. for solo viola
Handel, who was originally German, had such a deep understanding of Italian opera and such an exceptional ability to write for voice and orchestra that soon after his arrival in England in 1711, he became established as the English composer Henry Purcell’s successor. Handel went to England after having spent time in Italy, where he acquired the experience that enabled him to compose Rinaldo, the first Italian opera specifically composed for the London stage. Rinaldo is still regularly performed and is renowned for its range of writing.
The aria Lascia ch’io pianga, with its beautiful melodic line, is one of Handel’s most famous arias. He originally composed it in 1705, and subsequently transformed it into a lament aria for the opera Rinaldo, where it became a moment in the opera that is touching for its beauty and simplicity. Rinaldo exemplifies two characteristics of Handel’s earlier operas. The first is that in this opera, Handel, like other composers of his time, (see above) reused his own material. In the Baroque era, composers regularly borrowed from earlier works, creating a kind of potpourri referred to as “pastiche.” In Handel’s time, pastiche was not only accepted but expected and necessary because of the unremitting demand for new works, which exceeded what original music a composer could produce. The text of the original aria is the following:
Let me lament my cruel fate/ And let me sigh for liberty.
May sorrow break these chains/ Of my sufferings, for pity’s sake.
Now the trumpet sound rejoices/ Reminding me of triumph.
As a warrior and as a lover/ Glory and love I want to win.
Antonio VIVALDI (1678-1741) Concerto in D Minor for two violins & cello, RV 565
See first Vivaldi note.
The Eleventh Concerto (of 12 in the set) in L’Estro armónico became known from a manuscript found in the Berlin State Library of an organ‑solo version of the work bearing the name Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. It was first published in 1840 as William Friedemann’s original composition, but later studies proved that he had simply put his name to his father’s arrangement of a Vivaldi concerto. The Vivaldi Concerto Grosso in D minor became very popular in several modern arrangements for piano and for orchestra.
Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace ROYER (1705-1755) L’Aimable for solo harpsichord
A composer of the mid 18th century, Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer earned a reputation as a formidable harpsichordist and composer in Paris. Although his music is rarely performed today, he was famous in his own time. His harpsichord works were often extravagant and virtuosic. When he was twenty-nine, Royer became “maître de musique des enfants de France,” responsible for the musical education of King Louis XV’s children. In 1753, he became music director of the Royal Opera orchestra. He also wrote many operas and ballets for the court at Versailles.
Royer’s harpsichord works display features of his operatic work. His style merges Italian melodic technique with French freedom, including much elaborate ornamentation and rhythmic fluctuations. In a preface to the Premier Livre de Pièces pour Clavecin, the composer wrote that the “pieces are open to great variety, passing from the tender to the lively, from the simple to the tumultuous, often successively within the same piece.” The gracious L’Aimable (Kindness), written in 1746, is tender and lyrical.
Alessandro MARCELLO (1686-1739) Concerto in C minor for oboe & strings
Marcello was a dilettante in the best sense of that word, a gentleman of ease and learning, who painted, wrote poetry in Latin and Italian, and studied philosophy and mathematics. His home in Venice was the scene of weekly concerts at which his own music was sometimes performed.
This concerto was published in Amsterdam in 1717 in a miscellaneous collection of concertos under the name of Benedetto Marcello, Alessandro’s younger brother, whose compositions, then and even now, have been more popular. The brothers, noble Venetians, were serious amateur musicians who, musicologists think, wrote many works that have not remained extant. Music historians, however, have realized that the oboe concerto is definitely a work of Alessandro’s. We do know that Bach thought enough of the work to copy it out and transcribe it for harpsichord (BWV 974). In the 1950’s, the Amsterdam publisher Roger located a copy of the concerto, confirming its composer as Alessandro Marcello.
Antonio VIVALDI (1678-1741) Concerto for two violins in A minor, Op. 3, No. 8, RV 522, from L’Estro armónico
See first Vivaldi note.
Vivaldi, in L’estro armónico, was the first to make regular use of ritornello form, which is the use of a repeating “refrain” in the fast movements. The theme, or refrain, occurs in different but related keys, for all the instruments, alternating with free elaborations by the soloist. Many of the slow movements have the character and shape of an instrumental da capo aria, an ABA form filled with lyric grace.
Concerto No. 8 in A minor, a concerto grosso featuring a solo group of two violins, makes use of the three-movement form, in a fast, slow, fast alternation. The concerto opens with a lively movement, Allegro, in emphatic style, before passages of contrasting texture with the solo violins alternating with the ripieno, the full orchestra. In the slow movement, Larghetto e spiritoso, the solo violins enter in imitation. In the final movement, Allegro, Vivaldi uses a descending scale as the focus of his thematic material. Bach later transcribed this concerto for organ.
Program notes © Susan Halpern, except where indicated by the composers
J.S. BACH (1685-1750) Sonata in G minor, BWV 1020
Although its first appearance is in an early copy bearing Bach’s name, no documentation has been discovered to support the claim that Johann Sebastian Bach composed this sonata. It is possible that some gifted contemporary could have written it, perhaps even another member of the musical family of Bach’s. Some recent scholars have attributed this sonata to Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, in great measure because of its simple and sentimental melodies. The young Carl Philipp may even have composed this sonata with his father´s help, combining the new style with Johann Sebastian´s mastery of contrapuntal technique.
This sonata has characteristics of a “trio‑sonata,” because the music was written in a three‑part texture with one instrumental “voice” in the flute, another in the right hand of the keyboard (in this concert the harp) and a third in the left hand’s bass line. The three movements follow what was in the High Baroque period called the Italian style, using a sequence of alternating tempi, fast‑slow‑fast. In this flute sonata, both instruments are soloists throughout, an unusual feature in this historic period. Only in the second movement does the harp accompany the flute´s agreeable melody with a rich bass line written out completely by the composer.
PAQUITO D’RIVERA (b. 1948) Bandoneon for solo harp
Winner of fourteen Grammy Awards, D’Rivera is celebrated both for his artistry in Latin jazz and his achievements as a classical composer. He began his musical studies as a young child, studying classical saxophone from the age of five from his father, Tito Rivera. Paquito D’Rivera debuted with the National Theatre Orchestra at age ten, studied at the Havana Conservatory of Music and, at seventeen, became a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony. He co-founded the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna and was its conductor for two years. In 1973, he became co-director of Irakere, a popular ensemble that became known for its explosive mixture of jazz, rock, classical, and traditional Cuban idioms.
In 1981, while on tour in Spain, D’Rivera defected from Cuba by seeking asylum in the United States embassy. Since then, he has toured the world with the Paquito D’Rivera Big Band, the Paquito D’Rivera Quintet, and the Chamber Jazz Ensemble and has recorded more than 30 solo albums. In 1988, he was a founding member of the United Nation Orchestra, a 15-piece ensemble Dizzy Gillespie organized to showcase the fusion of Latin and Caribbean influences with jazz. In 1991, D’Rivera received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Carnegie Hall for his contributions to Latin music and was featured on the Grammy Award-winning recording, Live at the Royal Festival Hall.
He has appeared at or written commissions for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, the National Symphony Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra, Simón Bolivar Symphonic Orchestra, and Montreal’s Gerald Danovich Saxophone Quartet. He is the artistic director of jazz programming at the New Jersey Chamber Music Society and director of the Festival Internacional de Jazz en el Tambo (Punta del Este, Uruguay) and the Duke Ellington Festival in Washington, DC. His memoir, My Sax Life, was released in 2005, the year he received the National Medal of Arts. The only artist ever to have won Grammy awards in both the Classical and Latin Jazz music categories, he often creates genre defying compositions.
A note from the composer:
When the harpist Bridget Kibbey asked me to write for the instrument, I immediately thought of “Bandoneon,” an Argentinean Milonga, that recreates the nostalgic sound of the exotic instrument that in the opinion of many, represents the very soul of the Tango. (Just try to imagine Astor Piazzolla playing the harp instead of his legendary bandoneon at a very dark Tango joint in old Buenos Aires and you might get the image.)
CAMILLE SAINT SAENS (1835-1921) Fantaisie, Op. 124, for vln & hp, arr. for flute (J. Scolnik)
Saint-Saëns was one of the notable child prodigies in the history of music, as remarkable a young musician as Mozart or Mendelssohn, even though he never became as great a composer as either of them. He began to play the piano while he was still only a toddler, by five could play an opera score at the piano, and accompany a professional violinist in a Beethoven sonata. At six, he began to compose, and at fifteen wrote his first symphony, thereafter beginning his long and influential career as one of Europe’s most important musicians as composer, conductor, pianist, and author.
He traveled extensively on concert tours, and made his first visit to the U.S. in 1906, just months before he wrote the Fantaisie. “He has,” Romain Rolland wrote in 1915, “a clarity of thought, an elegance and precision of expression, and a quality of mind that make his music noble.” In France at that time, although opera was the pre-eminent form, Saint-Saëns helped to establish the importance of instrumental composition.
He composed the Fantaisie on the Italian Riviera while he was touring the Mediterranean in winter 1907, when he was seventy-two. He dedicated the piece to two sisters: Marianne, a violinist, and Clara Eissler, a harpist. It was the second of three major pieces Saint-Saëns’ wrote for harp: the others were a Fantaisie for solo harp written in 1893 and the Morceau de Concert for harp and orchestra, composed in 1918. A virtuoso piece for both players, the Fantaisie has a special, light and delicate quality and as its title suggests, this single movement work has a relaxed, spontaneous form in its four distinct sections. It, like much of Saint-Saëns’s music, is balanced, well-crafted, and charming.
DAVID BRUCE (b. 1970 ) Caja de música
Composer David Bruce grew up in England and now enjoys a growing reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 2013/14 season he was Associate Composer of the San Diego Symphony for whom he wrote three pieces including Night Parade for the orchestra’s 2013 Carnegie Hall debut and the violin concerto Fragile Light for Gil Shaham in 2014. In the United Kingdom, David’s piece Sidechaining was featured in the 2018 BBC Proms. As the 2012-13 Composer-in-Residence with the Royal Opera House, he was co-commissioned by the Royal Opera House with Glyndebourne to compose his opera Nothing (after the book by Janne Teller), which premiered in Glyndebourne in February 2016. His chamber opera The Firework Maker’s Daughter after the Philip Pullman story) toured the United Kingdom and New York in 2013 and was shortlisted for both the British Composer Awards, and the 2014 Olivier Awards for Best New Opera Production. It was revived for a 27-performance run at ROH Lindbury Studios in December 2015.
From the composer:
“I have always found something intriguing about the music a music box plays. It is true that, like the organ museum, it can have a slightly macabre quality – the ghostly, soullessness of machine-made music. But it also invariably has a charming, naïve simplicity. And it was this naivety that first came to mind when Bridget Kibbey asked me to write a piece for solo harp. Composers often struggle to write for the harp, not just because of the technical difficulties of the instrument, but also, I think, because everything sounds so beautiful – it can be hard to get variety when even the harshest dissonance sounds so sweet. But my instinct was to embrace this sweetness rather than deny it, to write something that is unashamedly sweet – quite a brave/foolish thing for a contemporary composer to do!
At the same time, however, a somewhat contrasting musical thought came to me. I had not long before come across the wonderful Joropo music from Venezuela, which is usually written for a trio of harp, Cuatro (a guitar-like instrument) and shakers, with the harp taking a central melodic role. I was immediately taken with the use of the harp as a raw, vibrant and above all, rhythmic instrument. I knew straight away that this was another aspect of the harp I would want to try to bring to the piece.
“Caja de música’’ – Spanish for ‘music box’ – seemed an appropriate title, and the resulting piece is a strange hybrid of these two totally unconnected traditions. There are strong hints of Joropo throughout – including a 3-beats-to-a-bar time signature at the start of all three movements; but there is also something of that music box naivety here too. Though I instruct the performer to let any mechanical motions the music might have to take care of themselves, and to concentrate on making the three dances as human as possible!”
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) Prélude à L’ Après-Midi d’un Faune (arr. for fl. & harp by Judy Loman)
Debussy could have been called an Impressionist if composers were designated as such in the years of the Impressionist painters; but he did not belong to a group, and his music was unlike that of the Wagnerian style dominant then in Paris. As a result, Debussy felt much more comfortable with painters and poets than with established composers of his time. Among his colleagues were Monet and Renoir and the Symbolist poets Stephane Mallarmé and Verlaine. He joined the circle who met at Mallarmé’s house weekly for discussions and companionship because his work, like that of the Impressionist painters, emphasized light and color. As a result of the cross-fertilization, Debussy’s music also displays the influence of the Symbolist poets’ hallucinatory images.
In 1892, Debussy began a composition inspired by L’Après‑midi d’un faune, a pastoral poem published in 1876 by Mallarmé. The poet had conceived it as an atmospheric drama to be read aloud. After the novelist Huysmans mentioned it in É Rebours (“Against the Grain”), curiosity about L’Après-midi d’un faune suddenly bloomed, and the poem was republished. It was only then that Debussy became acquainted with the poem he would make famous. Debussy’s original idea for this work, it is thought, was to write incidental music to accompany a reading of the poem. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was a musical evocation of Mallarmé’s famous poem, full of sensory enchantment.
In December of 1894, the piece as we know it today was performed, and Debussy invited Mallarmé to the première at the Société Nationale de Musique, with Gustave Doret conducting. The first-person narrator is a faun, a mythological half-man, half-goat creature who lives in the woods, recalling the nymphs who surrounded him in his dreams.
When asked about the music’s connection to the poetry, Debussy said that the faun’s flute had dictated the music to him; he described his work as intended as “a very free illustration” of the poem, reasonable enough since as the poem was vaguely atmospheric and impenetrably labyrinthine. The English poet and critic Sir Edmond Gosse called it “a miracle of unintelligibility,” but further explained: “A faun—a simple, sensuous, passionate being—wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recapture his experiences of the previous afternoon.”
After hearing the music, the Mallarmé had remained silent for a while and said, “I did not expect anything like that. The music prolongs my poem’s emotion and sets the scene more vividly than paint ever could.”
Today the piece is so famous and familiar that it is difficult to imagine the impact that it had on the public in 1894. It was as if this piece marked a turning point in the history of music. Pierre Boulez said that “the sound of Debussy’s flute awakened music into the modern era.”
KATI AGÓCS (b. 1975) Northern Lights (2011)
The Canadian-American Kati Agócs, has been called “a composer of penetrating individuality, a composer of imposing artistic gifts” by Gramophone Magazine. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award in music composition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, two nominations for Classical Composition of the Year in the Juno Awards (aka the Canadian Grammys), and her orchestral/vocal album The Debrecen Passion was one of The Boston Globe’s Top Ten Classical Recordings of the Year. Agócs earned a Ph.D. at the Juilliard School. She has served on the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2008, and maintains a work studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland.
From the composer:
In 2011, Conrad and Louise Golaski approached me to commission a work in celebration of their fortieth wedding anniversary, to be premiered by the harpist Bridget Kibbey, who was putting together a program of music for solo harp based on folk songs from different regions of the world. The result is Northern Lights, a cycle for solo harp that incorporates folk songs from three regions of Canada, bookended by a prelude and postlude of original material that set the mood and interpolate. The three central movements are not folk song arrangements, but rather subject the original melodies to my own harmonic inflections, fragmentation, and juxtaposition with new motives. In this way, the piece builds upon my 2005 harp cycle, Every Lover is a Warrior, where I worked with folk songs from Appalachia, France, and Hungary.
Since I spent my first nineteen years in Canada and many of its folk songs are as familiar to me as breathing, choosing and working with its songs presented a special challenge: I needed to cast aside my own associations with the songs, to hear them in a new light, and to “mine” the musical material for its own intrinsic beauty.
In the opening prelude, Carillon (Church Bells, Montréal), my sonic point of departure was the sound of bells in the church where Louise and Conrad Golaski got married.
À la claire fontaine is a lyrical French-Canadian folk song about lost love. I used changes in modality and non-diatonic pitch collections to capture the bittersweet essence of the original words: “It has been a long time that I have loved you; I will never forget you.”
I’s the B’ye is an irrepressible Newfoundland jig in dialect, saying: “I am the boy who builds the boat, and I am the boy who sails her…” In this movement I interwove continuous melodic layers with cross-rhythms against the tune and played with the coloristic possibilities of harp harmonics, making a hybrid that fuses a Maritime jig with a Baroque toccata.
The source for The Huron Carol (‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime) is a Christmas song introduced to Canada by the Jesuits with the goal of converting its Native people. It describes the birth of Jesus in a silent, snow-covered winter landscape. Wise men’s gifts are replaced by furs and pelts harvested by the native people in the woods. This movement links the mystery of Christian mysticism with the pristine natural environment in Ontario, the country’s central region.
The postlude, Aurora Rising, is a perpetual-motion movement that accumulates resonance over the entire range of the harp, with special attention to the instrument’s extreme registers. This movement evokes the emergence of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis).
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) Pavane pour une enfante défunte.
Ravel was born in France, only a short distance from the Spanish border, to a French father and a Basque mother. Although his family moved to Paris when he was just an infant, he was always attached to the region of his birth and composed several works of Spanish inspiration. The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla once wrote, “Ravel’s Spain was Spain idealized and represented by his mother. Her refined conversation, in Spanish that remained excellent always, delighted me — especially when she used to recall her youth in Madrid.”
His Pavane, like many of his early works, has a definite Spanish flavor. He composed it in 1899 as a piano piece and orchestrated it in 1910. Ravel once indicated that he had made the title up just because he liked the sound of it; the alliteration appealed to him, he said, and the name did not have any programmatic significance. But the name seems to have occasioned performances that Ravel despised. After one he is reported to have said, “What I wrote is a Pavane for a Dead Princess, not a Dead Pavane for a Princess.”
The pavane, originally a stately, processional dance of the Spanish or Italian Renaissance played on the lute, took its name from the Latin word pavo, which means “peacock,” because the movements of the dancers resembled the stately strutting of that vain and beautiful bird. The pavane became particularly popular in England during the 16th and 17th centuries, where it became an important musical form. It was usually followed by a faster galliard, in a different rhythm, and the two together formed the nucleus of the classic dance suite. In 1899, when Ravel composed this neo-classical Pavane, he used pizzicato strings to suggest the sound of the older instrument. He composed it in a rondo like structure and, hinting at characteristics of his idiomatic style that he would later develop, he included elements of Debussy’s new impressionistic style in his harmonies by writing parallel chords instead of the more traditional harmonic progressions and leaving dissonances unresolved for effects of color.
CÉCILE CHAMINADE (1857-1944) Concertino op. 107 (arr. Kibbey)
Cécile Chaminade, from an upper middle-class, music-loving family, as a child took piano lessons from her mother, who, like her father, was an amateur musician. She was very young when she began composing; when she was only seven, she played some of her sacred music for the composer Georges Bizet, who was very impressed with her talent. She did not give her first concert until she was eighteen, but from then on, her work gained a steady following. She composed mostly character pieces for piano and salon songs. Her music has been described as melodic, very accessible to listeners even though it includes some chromaticism and features of late-Romantic French music.
Chaminade is best remembered for this pleasing piece that represents neither her highest aspiration nor her greatest accomplishment. Feminist projects interested her greatly, and among her major works is a big “lyric symphony” for chorus and orchestra entitled Les Amazones.
In 1902, Chaminade received an official honor given to French composers: she was asked to write a test piece for the annual competition at the Paris Conservatory, and she responded with this Concertino. It consists of a single fluently written and charming, melodic movement whose extremely difficult solo part is designed to challenge not only final-year Conservatory students but to test the abilities of the most experienced of flutists as well. In 1913, she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, a first for a female composer.
ROMAN PRYDATKEVYCH(1895-1980)
Ukrainian Rhapsody for Violin & Piano, No. 1: Song
Ukrainian composer and violinist Roman V. Prydatkevych is known as the composer of more than 200 individual pieces of music, and his musical language is closely tied to Ukrainian folk melodies and motifs. Born in 1895, Prydatkevych began his violin studies at the age of 5, and he went on to study at some of the finest institutions in the world, including Columbia University and the Curtis Institute of Music. He became known as the organizer and violinist of the Ukrainian Trio and The Ukrainian String Quartet. Prydatkevych was an avid performer and a champion of performing works by Ukrainian composers. He founded an organization known as The Society of Friends of Ukrainian Music, which gave eight concerts per season. His wrote mainly for the violin, but his many compositions also include 4 symphonies, “Ukrainian Suite” for chamber orchestra, instrumental ensembles, two Ukrainian Rhapsodies, arrangements of folk songs for chamber performance, and works for voice, violin, and piano. Vincent Kaverud
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)
Quartet for piano and strings in A minor
During his student years at the Vienna Conservatory, Mahler won prizes both in piano and composition. The composition prize came for the first movement of a piano quintet, now lost, probably never finished. This was not the only chamber music he composed at that time. Before graduation he had written at least part of another piano quintet, a violin sonata, and a piano quartet in A minor. Of these, only the quartet survives. The composer’s widow, Alma, owned a manuscript containing the first movement and the first twenty-four bars of the scherzo. This manuscript was finally edited by Dika Newlin, and the quartet movement was given its first known performance at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on February 12, 1964.
Mahler told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner that he had never finished a single composition at the conservatory, dropping them all after a movement or two. “It was not only that I was impatient to begin a new piece, but rather that before I finished my work it no longer challenged or interested me, as I had gone beyond it.” Indeed, his friends predicted that he would never finish anything. As Mahler explained to Natalie, he felt that his ideas were not original, that they all came from some other source. In this he was certainly right; the genuine Mahler that we recognize at once today is scarcely to be found in this single surviving movement. Probably the strongest influence on the young composer at this time—at least for chamber music—was Brahms, whose tightly worked motivic treatment is also found in Mahler’s piece. The quartet movement gives us a fascinating glimpse at the very different composer Mahler might have become if he had not been so aware of his own originality, which marched in an entirely different direction.
LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
From String Trio in E Flat major, Opus 3
Though his major instrument was the piano, Beethoven had an affinity for stringed instruments as well; as a teenager he made his living playing viola in the opera orchestra of his native Bonn. There he was often filling in for his alcoholic father; eventually his father was let go and the young Beethoven earned the bulk of the family income. Though his earliest large-scale works (at the age of fifteen) featured the piano, after he moved to Vienna he was determined to make a serious name for himself. He avoided competing directly, at first, with the outstanding local figure, Haydn (who also became Beethoven’s teacher for a short time). He also avoided the genres for which Haydn was especially noted: the symphony and the string quartet. Instead, he presented himself as a notable pianist and wrote piano sonatas and piano trios. And he carefully approached the string quartet, in which he would later become famous, by writing string trios, a less “serious” genre, but one that gave him plenty of opportunity to learn the contrapuntal interplay of stringed instruments.
His first string trio (Opus 3, in E-flat) is basically a divertimento, a light-hearted work with multiple movements of varying type. Two of the movements here are arranged to replace the violin with a flute (this kind of thing was commonplace at the time to allow different groups of musicians to play the music for their own pleasure, regardless of the specific instruments available). The witty finale shows Beethoven picking up ideas from Haydn, whom he greatly admired even before he was willing to challenge him directly. This lively work enjoyed great popularity in its own day, for the best of reasons.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Lensky’s Aria from Eugene Onegin
Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, is the most beloved of Russian literary masterpieces. When an acquaintance first proposed it to Tchaikovsky as the basis of an opera, the composer thought of it as “wild.” Russians love the book for the beauty of Pushkin’s poetry. The plot, though simple and not especially profound, allowed Tchaikovsky’s music to deepen the effect of the story.
Two young friends, Onegin and Lensky, visit a country estate, where Onegin, a foppish fellow, attracts the attention of Tatiana, daughter of the house, who impetuously writes him a passionate love letter, which he does not take seriously and tries to warn her against such open statements. His friend, Lensky, falls in love with Tatiana’s rather vapid sister, Olga. At a party, Onegin entertains himself by flirting with Olga. Lensky loses his temper, foreswears his friendship with Onegin, and challenges him to a duel, which is accepted. The next morning, while waiting for the tardy Onegin, Lensky sings his famous aria, a farewell to Olga. When Onegin arrives, the duel proceeds, and Lensky falls at the first shot. (The third act reveals many ironies, but they are not relevant to the scene where Lensky sings his passionate farewell.) The version performed here is a transcription for flute and piano.
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
Piano Quartet in E Flat Major, Op.47
Until 1840, Schumann had composed entirely for the piano, and almost entirely in miniature. But in 1840, out of overwhelming enthusiasm for finally gaining legal permission to marry his beloved Clara Wieck (over the strenuous objection of her father), he burst forth into new genres: 1840 was mainly devoted to songs, 1841 to symphonies, and 1842 to chamber music. Clara was herself a superb pianist and an excellent composer. She encouraged Robert to try larger forms, and praised these new, grand compositions.
Robert had always found it something of a strain to think in the large-scale terms necessary for a symphony or a major work of chamber music, but with Clara’s encouragement that he prove himself as a composer in a wider realm, he demonstrated his genius repeatedly during this period, including his first symphonies and the major part of his Piano Concerto. His Piano Quintet, Opus 44, is the first such work ever composed, a large piece, analogous in its chamber music terms to his symphonic writing of the previous year. He followed it with the Opus 47 Piano Quartet, in the same key, as a smaller lyrical pendant to the quintet, and a gem in its own right, full of felicitous Schumannesque touches.
The slow introduction to the first movement prefigures the main motive of the Allegro that follows. The Scherzo is a headlong rush of eighth-notes twice interrupted for more lyrical trios; the second of these features one of Schumann’s favorite rhythmic tricks—a passage so syncopated that upbeats sound like downbeats. The richly lyrical slow movement that features a sumptuous melody offered to each of the strings in turn while the piano decorates and supports. The energetic finale begins with a fugato based on a familiar-sounding theme; was Schumann thinking of the Jupiter Symphony? His interest in contrapuntal work is clearly evident in both of the E-flat chamber works with piano composed at this time, and actual fugues or fugatos are a central part of the finale in each case.
Behind the beauty of Schumann’s compositions lay the shadows of his ongoing mental instability. Throughout his life, Schumann struggled with mood swings, depression, and other mental health challenges that often found their expression in his music. His struggles were punctuated by episodes of mania and melancholy, which some now believe to have been symptoms of bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder. In 1854, after years of worsening mental health, Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine River. He was rescued but spent the remainder of his life in a mental institution, where he continued to compose sporadically. This piano quartet, composed during a relatively stable period in his life, represents a moment of respite from the storm that often raged within him, and showcases his mastery of form, lyricism, and profound emotional depth.
2022-2023 Season
Program Notes © Copyright Steven Ledbetter
NIKOLAY RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908): Scheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Opus 35 Chamber arrangement by David Walter. World Premiere
During the winter of 1887‑88, Rimsky‑Korsakov was engaged in one of his many generous acts of pious devotion to a deceased Russian master: he was orchestrating the opera Prince Igor, left unfinished at the death of its composer, Alexander Borodin. A few excerpts played in concert—among them the overture and the famous Polovtsian Dances—demonstrated the effectiveness of the work. He had to put off original composition while engaged in this labor of love, but he did manage to conceive two new pieces which turned out to be among his best‑known compositions. One was based on episodes from The Arabian Nights, the other on themes from the Obikhod, a collection of the most frequently used canticles of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both were finished that summer: the first was Sheherazade, Opus 35, and the second was the overture Svetlïy prazdnik (The bright holiday), generally known in English as the Russian Easter Overture.
The massive collection of tales known as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand-and-One Nights is built on a framework reflected in the score of Rimsky‑Korsakov’s musical treatment: the Sultan Shakhryar, discovering his wife’s infidelity and convinced of the inconstancy and faithlessness of all women, has sworn henceforth to marry repeatedly in rapid sequence, putting each wife to death after the first night in order to avoid another betrayal. To put an end to this bloodbath, Sheherazade, the daughter of the Sultan’s most trusted adviser, seeks to become his wife (even though she had been exempted from this fatal position because of her father’s rank at the court). She saves her life after her wedding night by telling a story that captures the Sultan’s interest, breaking it off just at dawn, with the promise of continuing it the next night. Each night, as she continues, her story puts out roots and branches, becoming an intricate network of tales, some told by characters within other tales, so that at no point do all the stories in progress come to their conclusion. Each day at dawn the Sultan puts off her execution for another day in order to hear the end of the story first. Gradually her seemingly artless and endless series of colorful fairy tales softens the cruel heart of the Sultan, and, at the end of one thousand-and-one nights, he abandons his sanguinary design and accepts Sheherazade as his one, permanent, loving wife.
Of course, The Arabian Nights is much too long simply to be translated into music as a story-telling program. The introduction represents the stern Sultan Shakhryar (in the opening unison phrase) and Sheherazade the storyteller (in the solo violin); the remainder of the first movement is identified with the sea and the ship of Sinbad the sailor; the second movement is the tale of the Prince Kalendar; the third is simply “The Prince and the Princess”; and the finale is a festival at Baghdad and a shipwreck. In his memoirs, the composer explained, “I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each.”
GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924) Pelléas et Mélisande, incidental music to Maeterlinck’s tragedy, Opus 80: Sicilienne
Fauré was a long time coming into his own as a composer who could draw an audience. Even in his fifties, though he was highly regarded by cognoscenti as a creator and teacher, he was in no sense a “popular” composer. Much of his music gained a hearing only in the salons of cultivated aristocrats like the Princess Edmonde de Polignac, whose activities as a patron of advanced composers lasted for decades. Fauré also had a group of devoted English friends who sponsored performances of his music in London, so he spent a substantial part of every year from 1892 to 1900 in the British capital. Thus it was that when he met the famous actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, at the home of a mutual friend, Frank Schuster, in 1898, she commissioned him to write incidental music for a production she was planning of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande at the Prince of Wales Theatre.
There had been only one performance of the original French text of the play, on May 17, 1893, but that had resulted in general incomprehension. Claude Debussy was in the audience, though, and he began at once to work on an opera, which was not to be performed until 1902.
The air of charming reticence that runs through much of Fauré’s music is equally to be found in his incidental music for Maeterlinck; it is an appropriate mood for a play in which virtually nothing happens, in which every effort to do anything leads to tragedy. The Sicilienne, heard before Act II, is characterized by the rocking rhythm of that delicate Italian dance known as the siciliano. All is grace and gentle reflection, entirely appropriate to the mysterious world of the play—even though this movement was composed independently five years earlier!
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) Ma Mère l’oye (Mother Goose) Suite
As an adult Ravel could penetrate the world of childhood as few composers before or since. It may be that his empathy came through a shared passion for toys—especially the mechanical kind—or simply because Ravel, who was always painfully sensitive about his small stature, felt more comfortable with persons still smaller than himself. His empathy for a child’s point of view is especially apparent in his response to a series of illustrations of French fairy tales, which he used as the basis of a suite of simple four‑hands piano pieces called Ma Mère l’oye (Mother Goose) designed as a gift for Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of his friends Ida and Cipa Godebski. Ravel was prevailed upon to orchestrate the work so it could be mounted as a ballet.
The Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty) is a graceful dance, exceedingly brief and almost totally diatonic (this is surprising considering Ravel’s reputation for chromaticism).
Petit Poucet (Hop o’ my Thumb) is a of little Hop o’ my Thumb lost in the forest and casting out breadcrumbs to leave a trail that he may retrace, only to find that the birds have eaten them all up. The movement is filled with marvels of ingenious invention: the melody representing Hop proceeds from 2/4 to 3/4 to 4/4 to 5/4 as he gets progressively more bewildered and lost; the scattering of crumbs in an unending sequence of thirds from the violins; and the chirping of the birds that eat them up (a complicated series of harmonics).
Laideronette, impératrice des pagodes (The Ugly Little Girl, Empress of the Pagodas), indulges in a bit of orientalism, with repetitive percussive figures lending a genuinely eastern air.
Les Entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) has generally been regarded as the favorite movement of the suite, if only because of the unchanging popularity of the fairy tale that inspired it. Beauty has a graceful waltz, to which the Beast contributes some inevitable growling.
Le Jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden) concludes the suite with the same utter and quiet simplicity that characterized the opening.
EDVARD GRIEG (1843-1907) Selections from PEER GYNT Suites 1 & 2
Henrik Ibsen’s poetic drama Peer Gynt was an early play, intended more for reading than for stage performance. But a meeting with the young composer Edvard Grieg during a winter stay in Rome led to the decision to compose an elaborate musical score to accompany a production, a project that united the two men’s names ever after.
At first Grieg considered the play unmusical, but he needed the commission, so he went ahead. His score is so rich with wonderfully engaging melodic invention that it has long since become one of his best‑known works—or, anyway, the selections that he arranged into orchestral suites have done so.
Because the play is scarcely known today, and because Grieg’s richly colorful Norwegian music is most often heard in the context of pops or youth concerts, we tend to think of it as being a kind of fairy tale. Yet Peer Gynt was Freud’s favorite play—a kind of dramatization of internal conflict, a psychic battle between ego and id (before Freud had invented those terms) disguised as a folk tale.
Of the two suites that Grieg prepared, Suite No. 1 contains the music that has become best known. It opens with Morning Mood, designed to introduce a scene set at dawn on the Moroccan desert (how many of us have blithely assumed for years that this music represented the break of day over the Norwegian fjords!). At one point in the play, Peer returns briefly to Norway to visit his dying mother, Åse. He attempts to comfort her with the same tall tales she had told him when he was a boy, and while he is caught up in his own story, she passes away quietly. Åse’s Death, for muted strings, was a prelude to the scene. While he was in the desert, Peer encounters the entrancing Anitra. Anitra’s Dance is sensuously graceful, though it has little to do with the Middle East in its musical style; Grieg gives it the designation of Tempo di Mazurka! The most colorful of Peer’s adventures comes early in the play, when he enters the realm of the trolls, having fallen in love with the Mountain King’s daughter. When it is clear that they are about to turn him into a troll so that he will be a suitable husband for the girl, Peer makes a hair-raising escape in music that grows more and more exciting as the number of trolls chasing him increases (In the Hall of the Mountain King).
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) Contemplation from Songs without Words (see Mendelssohn note below)
FRANZ SCHREKER (1878-1934) Violin Sonata in F major
Schreker was singularly unfortunate in the timing of his life—over which, of course, he had no control. No sooner had he begun to make a considerable mark on German musical life than the First World War broke out. And a change of taste and a pursuit of new styles following the war left him less well established than comparable composers who were enough older to have gotten their careers well underway. Moreover, Schreker’s métier was the opera; with rare exceptions (Wagner being the most notable), Austrian and German audiences have been suspicious of composers who were not at least equally devoted to purely instrumental composition. In addition to his composition, he was best known as a conductor, but being Jewish, he was forced to retire when the Nazis took power, and he died soon after, a deeply disappointed man.
ALEXANDER von ZEMLINSKY (1871-1942) String Quartet No.1, Op.4
For some years Alexander Zemlinsky remained completely unknown or else cast into the shadows by the dominance of his sometime pupil, Arnold Schoenberg. But performances and recordings have begun to bring to light this imaginative and expressive composer of the last years of Vienna’s musical hegemony. A native Viennese, Zemlinsky showed his musical talents early, and by age thirteen he had entered the conservatory at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. By 1890 he finished his piano studies, officially ranked as “the best pianist at the Conservatory,” and continued work in composition for two more years. When, in 1896, the Hellmesberger Quartet played Zemlinsky’s first string quartet, the young composer had a chance to become well acquainted with Brahms. In the last months of his life, Brahms wrote to his publisher Simrock, commenting, “I can equally recommend the man and his talent.”
Zemlinsky attained renown in Vienna, then in Prague, where he was the director of the opera company from 1911 to 1927, following that with directorship of the Kroll Opera in Berlin until 1933, when, with the rise of Hitler, he fled home to Vienna. In 1938 he fled once again, via Prague, to the United States; there he lived out his last few years. He died in 1942 virtually penniless and unknown. Yet the accidents of his political fortunes had one lucky result: Zemlinsky’s manuscripts ended up not in Vienna (where they might have been destroyed by the Nazis before the war was over) but in the Library of Congress.
KURT WEILL (1900-1950) Songs for mezzo-soprano & piano
One Life to Live ; One Touch of Venus: Foolish Heart
Kurt Weill became known as an avant-garde composer during the Weimar Republic and who had enjoyed a world-wide success as the composer of the popularist The Threepenny Opera with the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Kurt Weill was number two (after Schoenberg) on Hitler’s hate-list of Jewish composers, but like Schoenberg, Weill had been lucky enough to escape Germany, and after some time in France and England, had moved to the United States, where he eagerly adopted American ways, even to giving up the pronunciation of his own name (which sounds like “vile” in German, but which he pronounced “wile” in this country).
Indeed, few composers have ever had such lasting success on the varied venues of the concert stage, the opera house, in the ballet, and in the musical theater as Weill. A survey of his theatrical work alone includes some thirty projects ranging from the expressionist opera Der Protagonist (1926) and the well-known collaborations with Bertolt Brecht (especially The Threepenny Opera [1928], The Rise and Fall of the City Mahogonny [1930]) to Broadway productions in many styles. Two of the most successful are represented here.
Moss Hart wrote the play Lady in the Dark, in which a psychiatrist treats a woman whose desire for love has been hampered by a difficult youth. The play is entirely without music, but the heroine’s dreams, interpreted by the psychiatrist, are elaborate musical numbers by Weill with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. “One Life to Live” comes from one of these dream sequences. Weill’s next show, One Touch of Venus, with a book by S.J. Perelman and lyrics by Ogden Nash, was designed for Mary Martin, as a statue of Venus who comes to life in modern-day New York. Her song “Foolish Heart” was one of Weill’s biggest hits in the Broadway style.
Although Weill’s name is still most closely associated with that of the socialist (later communist) Brecht, all of whose plays are highly politicized, Weill himself can best be described as a non-political humanist, whose music expresses the individuality of his principal characters, freeing them from the strictures of race, class, or political persuasion to express their essential humanity.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Neue Liebe from 6 songs Op. 19a no. 4;
Andres Mainlied from 12 songs Op. 8 no. 8
Felix Mendelssohn has been declared the most brilliant prodigy—even outshining Mozart!—in terms of the early age at which he created his first absolute masterpiece. He was sixteen when he wrote his astonishing Octet for Strings. Though he died far too young, his large output of music—symphonies, concertos, large choral works, chamber music, songs, and piano music retained their popularity, with the exception of the Nazi period, which banned his works on account of his Jewish heritage (though he had been baptized and raised as a Christian). During the 1930 until the end of the war, Germany and Austria refused performances of his works and tried to replace even his most popular music (like the violin concerto) with a similar, but far less successful or well known works by German composer’s (such as Schumann’s violin concerto).
The expressive melodic character of Mendelssohn’s music was especially suitable for his piano music and his songs, which were aimed especially at the family circle and home music-making. The Songs without Words is a set of short piano pieces of explicitly songlike character designed for solo piano (though in this case arranged as a duet with flute). The songs, too, can certainly be performed in concert, but were often designed to be sung in the parlor of cultivated homes in the evening.
DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) Lullaby from Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79
Piano Trio No. 2 (Movements 3 & 4)
On a number of occasions Dmitri Shostakovich expressed in his work a fascination for Jewish folk music in a place—the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin—when anti-Semitism was an ugly, potent force. For this reason his Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Fourth String Quartet, and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry—all composed about 1948—all drew in various degrees on Jewish musical ideas, had to be “secret” compositions for a number of years.
Shostakovich is quoted in Testimony, the much-disputed supposed memoirs of the composer (published by Solomon Volkov after Shostakovich’s death), as saying that, after being drawn into sympathy with the Jews as victims of persecution in the Nazi death camps, he identified with them also as individuals. “Jews became a symbol for me. All of man’s defenselessness was concentrated in them.” The music of Jewish people particularly struck him: “It’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears.” The “Lullaby” performed here evokes the mother singing sadly to her sleeping child, whose father is in chains in Siberia.
Shostakovich composed his Second Piano Trio in late 1943 and 1944 as a tribute to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died suddenly at 41 in February 1944. Shostakovich was devastated. He began work on the Trio before Sollertinsky’s death, which occurred just a few days before he completed the first movement. Periods of depression and ill health in the spring—partly, no doubt, in reaction to his friend’s death, and partly the continuing devastation of war—kept him from composing at all. In April he wrote that “it seems to me that I will never be able to compose another note again.” In the summer Shostakovich was at last able to work. In addition to its homage to Sollertinsky, the work as a whole evokes the wider world situation in 1944.
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD (1897–1957) Marietta’s Lied from Die tote Stadt, for piano, string quartet, & mezzo soprano
The prodigiously talented Erich Wolfgang Korngold was in his youth hailed as a new Mozart (the middle name that his music critic father bestowed on him clearly indicates his hopes in that direction). When he was ten, Mahler pronounced him a genius upon hearing his cantata Gold. The following year he composed a ballet, Der Schneemann (The Snowman) and saw it performed with sensational success at the Vienna Court Opera. Soon after that he wrote a piano sonata that impressed Schnabel enough to perform it all over Europe. And he achieved world fame with the performance, in 1920, of his opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), composed when he was twenty.
Although Korngold was only twenty-three when it premiered, Die tote Stadt is his fourth work for the stage, and it has remained by far the best known. The work calls for an enormous orchestra of Straussian size, but it is arranged here for chamber ensemble.
The opera takes place in Bruges, an ancient city in Belgium, where the tenor, Paul, continually mourns the death of his young wife Marie. He keeps a room in his house as a “temple of memories,” which continually reminds him of her – and prevents him from moving on with his life. One day he encounters a dancer named Marietta, who bears such a close resemblance to Marie that he brings her home to compare her directly with the portrait of his late wife. He begs her to sing a song, and she offers the most famous number in the opera, a sad song (quite different from her usual light-hearted personality), and it moves him deeply. As performed in concert, the song actually contains some lines sung by Paul as well as Marietta, but it maintains the passionate sweetness and sense of loss of the operatic scene. © Copyright Steven Ledbetter
GEORGE FRIDERICK HANDEL (1685-1759)
Concerto Grosso in F major, Opus 6, No. 12 (HWV 330)
The years 1738‑1739 marked the great change in the focus of Handel’s creative attention from Italian opera to English oratorio. Throughout the 1730s Handel had kept writing opera, but with steadily decreasing commercial success, though often with stunning artistic accomplishment. But by the late 1730s, the successes were constantly dwindling at the opera house, while his oratorios—compositions in English featuring powerful choral movements—were increasingly successful.
Thus in the spring of 1738 Handel produced two Italian operas, both largely unappreciated. Early in the next year he composed the great dramatic oratorio Saul, followed by Israel in Egypt, signal successes. His career blossomed anew. He established a series of oratorios. But the performances called for still more: What drew the audience almost as much as the vocal music was the fact that Handel filled the intermissions with organ concertos (with himself as the soloist) or improvisations on the organ or concerti grossi. He produced no fewer than twelve concertos in the month between 29 September and 30 October. The entire set of twelve was published as “Opus 6;” no doubt all of them introduced as intermission features at oratorio performances.
ANTONÌN REICHENAUER (1694-1730)
Concerto for Bassoon and Oboe in B-flat major
Born in Prague about 1694, Reichenauer is totally unknown until 1721, when documents establish his employment as a choirmaster at a church in Prague. At that point, he had only nine years to live. Despite his short life, he was popular for his religious works, which generally reflected the influence of Vivaldi. His works began to reappear in the 20th century, but he is still a very little-known composer.
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Concerto in B-flat major for violin and cello, RV 547
Vivaldi’s reputation all but disappeared after his death, lost in the press of new composers promoting their music in new styles. During his lifetime he was the most famous and influential Venetian composer of the era, largely on the strength of his many hundreds of concertos (220 for violin alone!). These established a style and a flexible form that other composers were able to use for decades. But the rest of his output—dozens of operas, a large body of sacred music—was almost totally forgotten, and by the time of his death even the concertos were beginning to fall into an abyss of oblivion. For a century no one cared much about the red-headed composer priest from Venice. But the discovery that J.S. Bach had taken Vivaldi seriously enough to copy out entire works and to rework some of his violin concertos for keyboard and orchestra caused a generation of late nineteenth‑century scholars to view Vivaldi in a more respectful light.
A huge series of manuscripts of Vivaldi’s music, mostly in his own hand, came to light in the 1920s, most seem to have been his personal library of his works. Vivaldi was born just south of Venice; he learned violin at home and took the first steps to enter the priesthood at fifteen. He became the director of the chorus and orchestra of a group of orphan girls, who developed famous musical abilities. (The orphaned boys were taught “practical” trades like carpentry.) He composed many of his concertos for these gifted girls, whose performances attracted listeners from all over Europe.
The standard plan of a concerto was three movements—fast, slow, fast—with solo statements altering with a “ritornello,” or passage for the full ensemble. Typically in a slow movement (as here) the texture becomes more that of chamber music. The two soloists play alone with the continuo in a sustained passage of unbroken lyricism. The last movement is again fast and especially lively. In this case it has a driven, dance-like character that carries the listener along with tremendous verve while giving the soloists the chance to show off their dexterity and virtuosity.
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Chamber Concerto in G minor for fl, ob, bso, vln, vcl, continuo (RV 107)
Besides his hundreds of concertos, Vivaldi produced works of chamber music in a variety of groupings. The structure is more flexible than that of the concerto, though it still usually calls for the three movements in the standard fast-slow-fast arrangement. But in a concerto, the soloist(s) dominate in the ritornello, alternating with the full orchestra, whereas here the multiple instruments intertwine flexibly with playful threads of shimmering variety.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
Concerto in D minor for two violins (BWV 1043)
In 1717 Bach left his post at Weimar to move to Cöthen, though not without first spending some time in jail for having had the temerity to ask for leave to change jobs! The ruler at Cöthen, Prince Leopold, was a knowledgeable and passionate lover of music, and he gave Bach every kind of encouragement to write chamber music, orchestral scores, and cantatas to celebrate birthdays and other secular events. Thus, the time Bach spent in Cöthen was the period when he wrote a great deal of his purely instrumental music, including the violin concertos and at least some of the Brandenburg concertos.
All three of Bach’s violin concertos—the two for solo violin and the double concerto to be heard here—reflect the Italian concerto tradition in general and especially the concerto technique of Vivaldi. Bach may have encountered Vivaldi’s music as early as 1708, and he certainly made an extensive study of it, converting several Vivaldi violin concertos into keyboard concertos for his own use, and learning from Vivaldi such matters of style and technique as “the direction of the ideas, their relationship to one another, the sequences of modulations, and many other particulars besides.” (The quotation is from the biography by Forkel, who knew Bach.)
Despite his interest in Vivaldi’s brilliant and energetic style, Bach never failed to endow his concertos with a richly detailed contrapuntal structure in the best German manner, and he pursues a consistent course of development, creating his episodes out of fresh treatments of the ritornello material, rather than introducing sharply contrasting ideas out of nowhere. Thus he took the best of what he found in Italian music and combined it with the best that he knew of German technique to create a concerto that superbly balances structure and expression, that allows the orchestra to participate to an unusual degree, yet still highlights the soloists as the prime movers in their story.
CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567-1643)
Pur ti miro from L’Incoronazione di Poppea
Claudio Monteverdi was not the first composer of operas, but he wrote his first (Orfeo) just a decade after the genre had been invented in Florence, and he is the first to write operas that are still performed with considerable regularity 400 years later. Telling the story of how Poppea, the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, achieves her goal of becoming the empress, it is the most advanced opera of its day, coming less than a half century before the first experiments in the genre. “Pur ti miro” is the closing love duet of the opera. Historically their relationship did not last long, but musically it is surely the first great operatic love duet.
GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681-1767)
Concerto in E minor for flute and oboe (TWV 52:A2)
Telemann was an astonishingly prolific composer, one who wrote more than Bach and Handel combined, in just about every genre known, many times over, sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, operatic and more. His speed of composition was remarkable, writing with a generally lighter texture than either Bach or Handel, he anticipated the flow of the early classical style that was approaching. At the same time, he mastered the elements of the late Baroque style of his colleagues and presented lively coloration with the instruments he employed. The two solo parts are interwoven in fascinating and delightful ways throughout the concerto, but they are particularly beautiful in the E major Largo of the third movement.
The folk character of the final Presto suggests the influence of Telemann’s time at the court at Sorau (1705-6), when he would make excursions into the Polish countryside. There, according to his own account, he would listen for days to the improvisations of folk fiddlers and bagpipe players. Inspired by what he heard, he tells us that he wrote concertos and other works which he “dressed in an Italian coat.” © Copyright Steven Ledbetter
Many of the works on today’s program are arrangements from larger works or pieces originally composed for different instruments. The beauty of transcriptions is that they allow artists to offer a fascinating and ever-varied range of musical styles from different countries and eras. These notes are abridged to accommodate the many composers.
MANUEL DE FALLA (1876-1946) Spanish Dance from La vida breve
Manuel De Falla is the most significant Spanish composer of the early 20th century. As a young man, he won a competition to write a short opera. The opera, La vida breve (The Short Life) is set in Granada and is filled with characteristic sounds of that location, especially in the “Spanish dance No. 1,” to be played here in an arrangement for flute and guitar.
JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR (1697-1764) Sonata in E minor, Op. 9, No. 2
A leading violist of his day, Jean-Marie Leclair created a sensation when he published his first book of violin sonatas. He is regarded as one of the supreme figures in the composition of sonatas in the French Baroque era. His death was tragic—murdered on a dark night at his own doorstep. But the sonatas (here in E minor from his Op. 9, No. 2) established a strong French tradition that extended through the Baroque and early classical eras.
JOHN WILLIAMS (b. 1932) The Chairman’s Waltz from Memoirs of a Geisha
More than almost any composer of film music, John Williams has an uncanny ability to create the colors and moods to evoke various cultures. In the case of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” he gently suggests the world of Japan in a lyrical dance, “The Chairman’s Waltz.” Scolnik recorded this (as well as Valse sentimentale by Tchaikovsky) with harp on her CD, Bejeweled, and asked Vieaux’s arranger, Andy Poxon, to arrange the guitar version.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893) Valse sentimentale
Tchaikovsky’s publisher, Petr and Osip Iurgenson, asked him to write a set of waltzes for the piano. He produced this group of six short pieces between August and October of 1882. The sweetly lyrical Sentimental Waltz is the last of the set, published as Opus 51e. At Scolnik’s behest, Andy Poxon arranged the version performed here for guitar and flute.
ISAAC ALBENIZ (1860-1909) Torre Bermeja from 12 Piezas características
Albéniz wrote a great deal of music that is enjoyed on the guitar, though he never wrote specifically for that instrument. He was himself a fine pianist, and his piano music very often strongly suggests the influence of the guitar in its conception. Torre Bermeja is the last piece in his 1888 set “12 Characteristic Pieces for Piano,” where it is identified as a Serenade. Jason Vieaux arranged the version performed here.
BELA BARTOK (1881-1945) Romanian Folk Dances
Béla Bartók spent many long periods of his life traveling among the various peoples of his native Hungary and surrounding areas making recordings on shellac cylinders of the songs and dances he heard. He studied them for academic reasons, but also worked them into many of his compositions. The names of the Romanian dances performed here give some hint of their character. These popular dances have been arranged for numerous instruments, winds as well as strings.
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) Habanera
Near the beginning of his career, Ravel’s closest friend was the composer and pianist Ricardo Viñes, with whom he passed his entrance examination at the Paris Conservatory on the same day. Ravel and Viñes once spent an entire day at the piano “experimenting with new chords,” as Viñes reported in his diary. This experimentation paid off in this Habanera (a kind of Cuban dance) which Ravel composed for two pianos, and which is filled with subtle harmonies of muted sensuality. Many instrumentalists play this in a duo version.
DAVID LEISNER (b. 1953) Samba from Dances in the Madhouse
David Leisner is a versatile musician with a multi-faceted career as a guitarist, composer, and teacher. Scolnik met him when they were both undergraduates at Wesleyan University, and they performed together. Leisner has won prizes in top competitions and has produced nine acclaimed CDs. Mr. Leisner is also a highly respected composer noted for the emotional and dramatic power of his music. Fanfare magazine described his music as “rich in invention and melody, emotionally direct, and beautiful.” South Florida Classical Review called him “an original and arresting compositional voice. “ This Samba movement is from a longer work called “Dances in the Madhouse.”
MANUEL DE FALLA (1876-1946) Canción
De Falla’s Canción (Song), published in 1900, was (like the songs of Albéniz) written for solo piano. Scolnik heard it on the radio one day and immediately arranged it for flute and piano to play with her daughter, Sophie. She asked Vieaux’s arranger, Andy Poxon, to arrange the version performed here with guitar.
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) Bordel from Histoire du Tango; Oblivion
Astor Piazzolla showed his musical talent early in his native Argentina, but when he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, she strongly recommended that he focus on the tangos he had written, in which field he was absolutely unique. Bordel is a movement from his famous History of the Tango, and it suggests the bordellos where such music was often heard. Oblivion is perhaps his most famous single tango.
PAT METHENY (b. 1954) “Four Paths of Light” for solo guitar (excerpts)
(composed for and dedicated to Jason Vieaux)
Guitar legend Pat Metheny is a master technician, an improviser of extraordinary, natural fluidity, and a composer with a gift for exquisite melodies. Four Paths of Light was written by Metheny for fellow American guitarist Vieaux. It is a technical tour de force, but a work, too, of thrilling rhythmic drive and intense beauty. “I wanted to offer Jason something that would take advantage of his strengths, and also challenge him,” reveals Metheny.
DAVID LEISNER (b. 1953) Acrobats
A note from the composer about this piece states: “In Nathan Englander’s debut short story collection, ‘For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,’ there is a story called, ‘The Tumblers.’ In it a group of Polish Jews during World War II is supposed to be herded onto a train bound for the concentration camps, but instead, quite by chance, they board a train full of circus performers who are on a tour to entertain the Germans. The story is set in an atmosphere where fateful decisions about life or death are made in an instant, by a nod of the head or a toss of a coin.
‘Acrobats,’ published in 2002, begins in this atmosphere. It brings to musical life the final moments of the story, when the reluctant, disheveled performers are about to go on stage, barely having a clue what they are supposed to do but knowing that their lives depend on it. The piece is not intended to be a narrative description of these moments, but rather an imagined evocation of the inner mental and emotional activity during them.
In the first movement, ‘In the Wings’, the acrobats wait offstage with nervous anticipation, distracted by thoughts darting here and there. The performers finally go ‘Up in the Air’ in the final movement, twisting, flipping and soaring in all manner of risky acrobatics. Just before the end, the guitar remembers an old Yiddish folk song, Oyf’n Pripetshik, a recollection of deep Jewish roots in a contemporary world of assimilation. The piece ends with a return to the precarious.”
JOSE GOMEZ DE ABREU (1880-1935) Tico-Tico no fubá
De Abreu (better known as Zequinha de Abreu) wrote this exceptionally popular choro (a kind of Brazilian popular music) in 1917. The title translates as “Sparrow in the Cornmeal.” In the United States it became extremely popular in the 1940s, with recordings by Ethel Smith, the Andrews Sisters, Carmen Miranda and Ray Conniff, among others.
© Copyright Steven Ledbetter
WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978)
Pastorela for flute, violin, and piano.
The prolific composer William Grant Still was experienced in just about every aspect of music in American life, and his talents were such that he became a pathbreaker in all of them. He was the first black composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, the first black conductor to conduct a major symphony orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major opera company, and the first to conduct a white radio studio orchestra. He worked in both “popular” and “classical” styles. After studies at Wilberforce College (which he left without a degree) he worked for W. C. Handy. Later he enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory, where he was encouraged to compose. He played the oboe in theater orchestras (including that for Sissle and Blake’s landmark show Shuffle Along) and studied in New York with the modernist Edgard Varèse. George Chadwick offered him a scholarship at the New England Conservatory and encouraged him to compose specifically American music. H was an arranger for Handy, Paul Whiteman, and Artie Shaw. He conducted the CBS studio orchestra for the radio show “Deep River Hour” in New York, and he worked in Hollywood for films and television (including “Gunsmoke” and “Perry Mason”). Still was a prolific composer in all musical forms, creating a total of five symphonies, nine operas, four ballets, and many other works. His Afro-American Symphony was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic in 1931; it marked a breakthrough for serious concert music by black composers.
WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART (1756-1791) String Quintet in C major, K.515
Mozart was not the first composer to write string quintets, but the genre was still a new one, without established conventions, when he turned to it in 1787 for two masterpieces in C major and G minor (K.515 and 516 respectively), two works of extraordinary scope and expressive power. The addition of a second viola to the well-established medium of string quartet gives new opportunity for richness of sound in the middle of the texture, since violas can serve simultaneously as melody and accompanying instruments, and, when used in the lower register, they can also free the cello from its function as bass instrument. Mozart entered the C-major quintet in his catalogue of works on April 19, 1787; the G-minor work followed less than a month later, on May 16. The closeness of dates suggests that he conceived them as a contrasting pair, and what a contrast! The first is expansive and brilliant, the later work inner directed and plaintive. Each, in its own way, is a peerless masterpiece of chamber music technique and personal expression. The C-major quintet is the largest of all of Mozart’s four-movement instrumental compositions (it exceeds the average length of the other string quintets by some 400 measures). The opening bars of the Allegro hint at the work’s expansiveness with a boldly simple theme: the cello rises through two octaves of crisp arpeggio answered by a turn figure in the first violin on the tonic chord, whereupon the entire gesture repeats on the dominant chord. A songful cadence seems about to close off the opening phrase when it suddenly breaks off into silence, and the process repeats, strikingly, in C minor, with the violin and cello reversing their original roles. Already this introduces an almost Schubertian, romantic quality, though, of course, Schubert was not even to be born for another decade. The same sense of spaciousness applies to the extended modulation to the secondary key, which Mozart establishes in the listener’s ear several times before offering a little “sighing” tune—as simple and contained as the opening theme is expansive. The two middle movements of the quintet are smaller in size and more intimate in expression than the opening and closing pillars. The Menuetto is much simpler, though quirky in its own way. By contrast with the rather bland Menuetto, the expressive depth of the dialogue between the first violin and the first viola lends the Andante a character all its own. There are three principal musical ideas first stated with a modulation to the dominant, then restated with only enough change to end in the tonic. Yet the simplicity of the architecture only highlights the expressiveness of the conversation. The finale is the longest of any of Mozart’s instrumental movements, but it unfolds with such verve and wit that the listener is simply carried along by the sheer exuberance of Mozart’s invention. Formally it combines the rondo (in which the bouncy main theme returns frequently after the appearance of some kind of contrast) and the sonata form (which plays contrasting themes in different keys against one another and works out an almost theatrical accommodation at the end. Part of the delight of the movement is that the main theme so often appears in different guises (such as upside down) and with different counterpoints, giving the heady impression that Mozart simply never runs out of fresh ideas for the delight of the listener and the performer.
WOLFGANG AMADÈ MOZART (1756-1791) Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K.414 (385p)
One of Mozart’s urgent concerns upon settling permanently in Vienna and entering into the state of matrimony, which meant that there would soon be children to provide for, was to establish himself financially. And one of the best ways to do this was to write and play piano concertos, which would serve the double function of promoting him as composer and performer. Thus began the series of the great Mozart concertos, starting with three rather modest works composed late in 1782 and early in the following year, identified as Nos. 413, 414, and 415 in the Köchel catalogue. It was probably finished before the end of 1782, since on December 28 Mozart wrote to his father to the effect that he still had two more concertos to write (he was planning to sell the group of three as manuscript copies on subscription). No doubt he was already quite advanced in planning the two later concertos, because he was able to describe all three of them to his father in these enthusiastic terms: These concertos are a happy medium between what it too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why. More than simply pleasing the audience in performance, Mozart wanted to sell copies of the music, and the only way he could do that was to make it practical for performance not only by virtuosos appearing in public concert but also by the many ladies of the aristocracy and the middle class who played well but rarely if ever performed outside their private circles. In order to attract this much larger audience of purchasers, Mozart wrote the orchestra part in such a way that the strings carry all of the essential material, with the winds supplying only color and reinforcement. That way, a concerto could be played successfully at home by a pianist with a string quartet with bass (as will happen here). Throughout the A major concerto, the keyboard seems to dominate more than it does in those concertos with larger orchestral complements, as if to compensate in some way for the diminutive ensemble. This appears not only in the normal “composed” part of the concerto, but also in the “improvised” cadenza like passages, of which there are a considerable number—one full cadenza in each of the three movements, And, aside from having less of an orchestral battery to contend with, the piano dominates as always in Mozart’s concertos by controlling the musical discourse and introducing new musical ideas of its own. The first movement “development” section scarcely develops anything that has been heard in the exposition, but rather provides a comfortable modulatory activity leading back to the home key for the restatement, never suggesting any hint of severely intellectual thematic working out. The slow movement opens with a quotation from a Johann Christian Bach symphony. Since the “London Bach,” whom Mozart had met and admired as a child on his first London visit, had died on New Year’s Day of 1782, the quotation makes the Andante an elegy composed in response to that event. The concluding Rondo is a sprightly Allegretto, a lively and fitting conclusion to this graceful and witty work.
© Copyright Steven Ledbetter
