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Category Archives: 15-16 Season

Program Notes: Sir András Schiff (Tuesday, February 9)

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Franz Joseph Haydn
Sonata No. 62 in E flat major, Hob. XVI:52

Joseph Haydn wrote his last three piano sonatas on his second visit to England
(1794-95), keenly aware that the sound of the English piano was very different from
that of its Viennese counterpart. Viennese pianos were quick and responsive but
their sound, like their action, was light. English pianos had a heavier action, longer
keys, and a fuller, more room-filling sound.

The so-called London piano school (Clementi, Cramer, Dussek) excelled in
exploiting this beefier sonority to create keyboard textures brimming with dramatic
effects that played to the instrument’s strengths: full chords in both hands, frequent
dynamic contrasts, dizzying runs plunging from the top to the bottom of the
keyboard, and sugary double 3rds for an extra-sweet sonority in the upper register.

Haydn obviously knew this bag of tricks carefully, because his Sonata in E flat
contains all of them, and more. Opening boldly with a fanfare of full-textured 6-
and 7-note chords, its first 10 bars feature no less than five alternations between
forte and piano, the last coming at the end of a dramatic run that swoops down a
good four octaves to a low E flat. The first theme abounds in double 3rds while the
second theme imitates the tick-tock action of a mechanical clock, a popular musical
motif of the period. Piano sonority is putty in Haydn’s hands, swelling with the throb
of orchestral tremolos, then subsiding in long held notes (a good example is just
before the development section).

A different kind of sonic theatre is enacted in the second movement sarabande, a
stately piece in 3/4 time with a noticeable emphasis on the second beat. Added
stateliness is assured by the double-dotted rhythm in the theme, but the real story
in this movement is in the ornamentation. The score is simply swimming in grace
notes and other grand ornamental additions to the melodic line, many of them
ecstatic runs gliding up to the high register in the manner of an improvising opera
singer.

The finale pulses to the beat of an army drum, introduced at the opening in a series
of repeated notes over a low bass pedal: the shepherd’s musette meets the military
tattoo. Adding to the comic tone of the proceedings, all this mechanical precision
is frequently stopped dead in its tracks by inexplicable pauses that often set the
listener up for a sound explosion and a burst of activity to follow. Add in more than
a handful of cheeky fz accents on weak beats of the bar and you have as good a
demonstration of Haydn’s impeccable musical wit as his keyboard music has to
offer.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in C minor, Op. 111

Beethoven’s last sonata is surely his most poetic essay for the piano, conceived as
a musical diptych expressing the contrasting states of human existence—earthly
struggle and spiritual transcendence—in terms of the raw elemental building blocks
of music itself. It comprises a fast-moving, contrapuntally active sonata-form
movement in the minor mode matched with a slow-paced, harmonically stable set
of variations in the corresponding major mode.

There is a skeletal starkness to the musical fabric of the first movement, its jagged
leaps over harmonically aberrant intervals evoking a mood of worried restlessness;
a mood only reinforced by frequent scurrying passages of fugato that seem to
emphasize a disunity between the voices rather than their complementarity.
Strikingly lacking in this movement is any sense of lyrical repose. The second
subject appears only briefly, more in the spirit of emotional exhaustion than
heartfelt fulfillment. At every turn, Beethoven seems to emphasize the unusually
large space that separates the voices and the hands (separating the mortal from the
divine?), at one point orchestrating a climactic antiphonal exchange between treble
and bass of more than six octaves.

The C major chord on which the C minor first movement ends is taken up in the
second movement Arietta, marking not only a change in mode, but a fundamental
change in the construction of the musical texture. Instead of angular motivic
gestures we have an eloquently simple and well-rounded melody. Instead of
contrapuntal conflict we have harmonic fullness and warmth. The first three
variations introduce the compositional process that will guide this melody through
its successive transformations: a gradually increasing animation in the figuration
accompanying the variation theme. The third variation arrives at a degree of elation
that in its syncopations prefigures the arrival of jazz, before the timbre turns dark
with low murmurings underpinning melodic fragments of the theme pulsing above.
It is here that Beethoven begins to gaze up at the stars in textures that twinkle
luminously in the highest register of the keyboard. As the theme becomes ever
more cradled in the swaddling clothes of its enveloping figuration, it appears to
glow, sonically, from within, by means of pearly chains of trills, until transmuted into
the essence of the divine.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sonata in D major, K. 576

It is a measure of Mozart’s genius that he always knew how to do the minimum
to create maximum effect. The texture of his piano sonatas are spare—just shy of
spartan, in fact—but within them thrives a wealth of musical content rich enough to
satisfy the broadest range of listeners, with attractive melodies, foppish ornament
and learned procedure all cohabiting the same small musical space. Such, in fact,
was his ability to create attractive multi-dimensional musical structures that the
listener—like an ultra-hip viewer of The Simpsons—must constantly be on the lookout
for insider jokes.

Take the first movement of his Sonata in D K. 576, for example, which begins
with as macho an opening as could be imagined—a triadic, hunting horn motif—
answered directly by a phrase with frilly trills and a feminine ending that Robert
Levin has described as coming from “Miss Goody Two-Shoes.” Not to mention the
tangle of imitative counterpoint into which this call-to-the-hunt soon falls. Bach,
on horseback? Seriously? Or is this just a craftily disguised musical representation
of the hunt itself, with the melody ‘chasing’ itself, musically? The gap between a
Mozart musical structure and the thorniest of British crossword puzzles narrows
considerably when the dimension of wit is considered.

An air of operatic dignity radiates from the lyrical slow movement, laid out in
the A-B-A form of the Baroque da capo aria, with its more active middle section
in the relative minor key. This middle section, however, is anything but singable,
being more in the style of a richly chromatic, free keyboard improvisation on its
underlying harmonies.

Carefree nonchalance rides in the same carpool with learned counterpoint in the
last movement rondo as an opening theme, so coyly inflected as to be almost
flippant, gets immediately roiled by a left hand of churning countermelody.
Compositionally, Mozart puts everything but the kitchen sink in this finale, with
virtuoso passagework in the style of a piano concerto sitting cheek-by-jowl with
canons and fits of double counterpoint, all the while maintaining a pose of naïve
simplicity and toe-tapping rhythmic regularity.

Franz Schubert
Sonata in B flat major, D. 960

It would be wrong to judge Schubert by the standards set by Beethoven, who
represented the logical extension of an outgoing rationalist Classical age. Schubert
represented the intuited beginning of a new Romantic age, an age in which formal
models, previously held together by patterns of key relationships and motivic
manipulation, would find coherence in a new kind of structural glue based on the
psychological drama of personal experience.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Schubert’s approach to the Classical era’s
pre-eminent formal structure, the sonata. Like a good tailor adjusting an old suit, he
lets out the seams of strict sonata form to allow it to breathe with the new lyrical
air of his age. Concision and argumentative density are replaced with timeless
daydreaming and lyrical breadth. Schubert’s sonata movements often contain three
major themes instead of the standard two, arrived at and departed from by way of
unexpected, sometimes startling, modulatory surprises. By this means he blunted
the expectation that a sonata-form movement would be about resolving largescale
tonal tensions but rather directed the listener’s attention to the momentby-moment
unfolding of melodic contours and harmonic colours. And yet even
these moments are frequently punctuated by thoughtful pauses. In the end, what
Schubert aims to create is a balanced and satisfying collection of lyrical experiences
within the formal markers of the traditional sonata: exposition, development, and
recapitulation.

Given these lyrical aims, it should not be surprising that he favoured moderate
tempos such as the Molto moderato of the first movement of his Sonata in B flat
D. 960, a work composed just months before his death in 1828. Its opening theme
features a peaceful melody, with a hint of pathos in its second strain, supported by
a simple pulsing accompaniment and ending with a mysterious trill at the bottom
of the keyboard. This trill will be an important structural marker in the movement,
repeated (loudly) at the first ending of the exposition and just before the start of
the recapitulation.

A second theme of a more serious cast, and a third of hopping broken chords
round out the exposition, each passing fluidly between the major and minor modes
like a tonal dual citizen, mirroring the dual modes of sweet yearning and inner
anxiety that characterize the composer’s ‘outsider’ persona in works such as Die
Winterreise. Major becomes minor and minor major as well in the development,
which maintains the initial pulse of the opening as it builds to a fierce climax.

The second movement Andante sostenuto is surreal in its starkly spare texture
of layered sonorities, featuring a sombre but halting melody in the mid-range
surrounded on both sides by a rocking accompaniment figure that quietly resounds
like the echo inside a stone tomb. Only Schubert could create such a melody, one
that combines sad elegy with tender reminiscence and pleading prayer, relieved
only by the nostalgic strains of the movement’s songful middle section.

The third movement scherzo is surprisingly smooth-flowing in a genre known for its
mischievous wit, but mixes it up with twinkling echo effects in the high register and
exchanges of melodic material between treble and bass. The trio is more sombre
and contained, expressing its personality more through syncopations, sudden
accents, and major-minor ambiguities than through wide-ranging scamper and
exuberance.

One might actually think that some of the lightness of mood from the previous
movement had influenced the start of the finale, Allegro ma non troppo, which
keeps wanting to start in the ‘wrong’ key (C minor, for a movement in B flat), but
quickly sorts itself out to offer us one of Schubert’s most unbuttoned, ‘bunnieshopping-in-a-box’
merry themes. And more still await us as a gloriously songful
melody takes over, only to be rudely interrupted by a dramatically forceful new
motive in a dotted rhythm that charges in, like a SWAT team breaking down the
door of an evil-doer’s lair. But it was all a misunderstanding, of course, and these
threatening minor-mode motives are soon dropped in favour of an almost parodistic
variant of the same material in the major mode, something that kindergarten
children might skip to at recess. The force of Schubert’s imagination ensures that
this last movement of his last sonata is as vivid and riotous a ride through the rondo
genre as that of his Erlkönig “through night and wind.”

Donald G. Gíslason

Program Notes: Sir András Schiff (Sunday, February 7)

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sonata in B flat major K. 570

The period of the 1770s and 1780s brought regime change to the world of keyboard
music as the harpsichord was gradually edged out by the first generation of
fortepianos, capable of playing both loud (forte) and soft (piano) on the same set
of keys. The pace of development was dizzying, comparable to that of computers
today, with game-changing new models coming out every few years.

While Haydn delighted in exploiting the sonic capabilities of each new instrument
that came under his fingers, Mozart was much more conservative in his approach.
He remained generally much closer, in his keyboard writing, to the lean contrapuntal
textures of the chamber ensemble than to the bold new pianistic world of handcrossings,
extreme ranges, and pedal effects explored by Haydn.

Mozart’s Sonata in B flat K. 570 is a perfect example of his more conservative
approach. It opens with a meet-and-greet introduction to the home key: the B-flat
major chord is spelled out note by note, and the key is confirmed by a running
passage containing all the notes of the scale.

Then like a celebrity chef challenged to create a multi-course meal using only a
few ingredients, Mozart uses the opening theme as his second theme, as well—in
a contrasting key, of course, and cast into the bass. But it’s the very same theme,
presented anew with some entertaining contrapuntal chatter in the treble, and it is
this contrapuntal chatter that will dominate in the development section. Mozart is
masterfully economical in this movement, constantly re-using his material over and
over again, mixing garnish and main course at will.

The second movement Adagio opens with a theme somewhere between stately
and solemn, a theme as lovingly devoted to the notes of the E-flat major chord as
the first movement’s opening was to that of B flat. Written in the form of a rondo, it
features two contrasting episodes, each quicker in pulse, more expansive in mood,
and wider in melodic range than the more static refrain to which they reliably return.

The last movement Allegretto, with its recurring tick-tock beat, summons up
the mechanical world of clockwork music, and features some robotic C-3POstyle
humour in its comic leaps and mock-confused meanderings of imitative
counterpoint.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in A flat major Op. 110

Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata is remarkable for the utter simplicity of its
musical ideas and the directness with which they are expressed. The most obvious
late-period features of this work are an extremely wide keyboard range and a
melding of slow movement and finale into a continuous musico-dramatic unit.
The first movement, marked con amabilità (likably), opens with a tune one
could well imagine accompanying a thoughtful walk in the forest. Simple as
it is, it moves to become simpler still, passing into a songful melody-andaccompaniment
texture before evaporating into a delicate pattern of harmonic
lacework luxuriantly caressing the keyboard over a space of four octaves. It
is this gracious pattern of figuration, almost Romantic in its warmth of tone
and celebration of keyboard colouring, that most attracts the ear in this
movement. Its complete absence from the central development section is amply
compensated for when it rises richly up from the bass to inaugurate the return of
the main theme in the recapitulation.

The second movement is one of Beethoven’s most jocular scherzi. Its main section
is based on two popular tunes of the time: the feline nativity ode Unsa Kätz häd
Katz’ln g’habt (Our cat has had kittens) and the anti-hygienic anthem Ich bin
liederlich, du bist liederlich (I’m so slovenly, you’re so slovenly). Inspired thus in
equal measure by the reproductive capacity of household pets and the haphazard
grooming habits of the Austrian male, Beethoven lards his first section with
rhythmic irregularities, dynamic surprises, dramatic pauses, and other raw signifiers
of loutish humour. The central section continues the mayhem with a series of
tumble-down passages high in the register, rudely poked from time to time by offbeat
accents.

The sonata concludes with a wonderfully vivid piece of musical theatre, rife with
dramatic contrasts and unusual turning points in the musical action. Combining the
traditional lyrical slow movement and triumphant finale, it opens with an evocation
of the opera stage: a lonely solo voice pleads its case in a halting recitative and
then in an affecting lament of considerable intimacy over soothing and sympathetic
triplet pulsations, set in the troubled key of A flat minor.

But then, like a ray of Enlightenment sunshine announcing the triumph of reason
over emotion, a three-voice fugue steps onto the stage, replacing the little sigh
motives and rhythmic hesitations of the previous section with quietly confident,
evenly spaced 4ths and 3rds, the same intervals used in the opening bars of the first
movement.

All this Baroque counterpoint fails, however, to ward off a relapse into pathos as
the heart-rending arioso returns, even more plangently whimpering than before,
until Beethoven astonishes us with the ultimate coup de théâtre. In what could
only be construed as a musical representation of strengthening psychological
resolve, we hear the same major chord, repeated over and over, getting louder
and louder, leading back to the fugue theme, now presented in inversion. A new
mood of quiet triumph and victorious liberation spills over into increasingly
elaborate fugal lacework until even the fugal pretense is dropped and the sonata
concludes in a glorious songful strain of rejoicing expressed over five octaves of
the keyboard.

Franz Joseph Haydn
Sonata No. 61 in D major Hob. XVI:51

Haydn is known for his surprises and his 61st sonata does not disappoint. First there
is the unorthodox two-movement structure of the work, with an opening movement
at a gentlemanly Andante pace and a finale that could easily be mistaken for a
scherzo. Each movement, moreover, ends on a quiet note, suggesting that this was
not a concert work, but rather conceived for private performance with a feminine
sensibility as its aesthetic target.

Composed during Haydn’s second visit to London (1794-95) this sonata was
obviously written to exploit the heavier, more powerful sound of the English piano.
English pianos were more resonant than their Viennese counterparts, especially
in the treble, but had a slower action less suited to pearly passagework. So Haydn
goes light on thematic development, maximizing instead the sonic effects made
popular by the London piano school of Clementi, Cramer, and Dussek: frequent
dynamic contrasts, multi-octave arpeggios, and passages in double 3rds and double
6ths.

The first movement begins with a snappy and ear-catching echo-dialogue between
right and left hands, quickly followed by a reply in stately dotted rhythms. A
strong current of vocally-inspired lyricism soon takes over in octaves with a triplet
accompaniment that strongly foreshadows the songful textures of Schubert.
Switching elastically between these two poles of collar-pulling excitement and
lyrical relaxation Haydn spins out copious variations of his material, maintaining all
the while a tone of leisurely amusement.

The same generosity of sentiment is evident in the finale, which despite its Presto
tempo indication proceeds in a moderately-paced succession of quarter notes for
much of its course. Beneath this placid surface of rhythmic uniformity, however, is a
lively pattern of rapidly changing harmonies, and a weak beat of the bar that keeps
aspiring to be the strong beat, jabbing you in the ribs with a gusto and relish that
would soon become known as ‘Beethovenian’.

Franz Schubert
Sonata in A Major D. 959

The wretched state of Schubert’s health in the last months of his life stands in
striking contrast to the vitality of his creative output in this period, exemplified by
his last three piano sonatas. The second of these, the Sonata in A Major, displays
in its four contrasting movements all the qualities that make this composer so
hard to pin down as either an inheritor of Classical-era forms or a brilliant pioneer
of the new Romantic movement, with its emphasis on psychological reality as a
structuring element in music.

Much of the confusion may be laid at the feet of Beethoven, whose shadow hangs
heavy over Schubert’s musical legacy. The argumentative force of the great
composer’s musical vision seems to relegate Schubert to the margins of musical
greatness by comparison. But then again, Schubert is not arguing with you. The
prize-fight atmosphere of Beethoven’s most compelling sonata movements, with
motivic combatants duking it out in the musical boxing ring, is hardly comparable
to the imaginative flights of fancy that make Schubert much closer to My Dinner
with André than to Rocky.

The first movement of Schubert’s A Major Sonata puts Classical and Romantic
musical gestures side-by-side. Solidly Classical is its stern opening comprised of
repeated motives driving to a firm cadence. And Classical as well is the strong
contrast between first and second themes, not to mention the eruptions of
contrapuntal ‘churn’ that roil the texture at regular intervals. But the Classical mould
is just as often broken in Schubert’s use of irregular phrase lengths, miraculous
modulations, and a pursuit of instrumental colour that sees cascades of octavespanning
arpeggios interpolated into the musical argument with the nonchalance of
a reader turning the pages of a book. Indeed, the closing bars of the movement are
awash in rippling waves of harmonic colour that foretell the poetic opening pages
of Liszt’s A Major Concerto.

Where Schubert sets his sights on the sublime is in the second movement, a tour de
force of compressed emotional energy that explodes into near-chaos in its middle
section. It opens with a simple, sparsely textured, repetitive lament that circles
fretfully round itself like a madman rocking back and forth in his hospital chair. More
wide-ranging harmonic ravings lead to an outburst of unexpected violence and
eventually to a dramatic confrontation. When the hypnotic world of the movement’s
bleak opening returns, it finds itself accompanied by a strange knocking-on-thedoor
motive, resounding like a distant echo.

Another personality entirely inhabits the third movement scherzo, an energetic,
acrobatically playful diversion that hops from register to register with carefree
abandon, often dancelike, always impish. Its contrasting trio is much more of a
home body, staying put in the centre of the keyboard, stabilized by a recurring
pedal tone.

The sonata-rondo finale has many fathers, being a reworked version of the middle
movement of Schubert’s own Sonata in A Minor D. 537, patterned after the finale of
Beethoven’s Sonata in G Major Op. 31 No. 1, and with an opening theme strangely
reminiscent of the St. Anthony Chorale attributed to Haydn. In presenting his
material, Schubert often imitates a chamber ensemble, with melodies singing
out loudly from the mid-range, or passing antiphonally from treble to bass. The
development section goes through a bruising bout of orchestral-style turbulence,
but Schubert’s special fondness is for the pure singing tone of the piano itself. This
movement is full of melodies set against a burbling accompaniment in triplets, or
chiming up high in its register like a music box.

Donald G. Gíslason

Program Notes: Roman Rabinovich

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Franz Joseph Haydn
Sonata in B-flat Major, Hob. XVI:41

In 1784 Haydn wrote three keyboard sonatas for Princess Marie, the new bride of Prince Nicholas Esterházy, grandson of Haydn’s employer Prince Nicholas I. Each is a two- movement work, without a lyrical slow movement, perhaps reflecting the taste of the young Princess for lighter fare.

The second in the set, the Sonata in B-flat, begins in a spirit of pageantry with
an emphasis on sprightly dotted rhythms and frequent coy changes in dynamics, indicating clearly that the work was intended for performance on the fortepiano, which had largely replaced the harpsichord by the 1780s.

The female breast is given ample room to heave beneath its stiff lace bodice with the arrival of a restlessly modulating second subject dark with minor-mode colouring and rippling triplet accompaniment. A rich variety of ornamentation in the form of trills and turns maintains a high level of elegance in the melodic flow throughout.

The second movement Allegro di molto strikes a quasi-learned tone with its freely contrapuntal texture of answering phrases and its lively chatter of small leaps in dialogue with smooth runs and churning broken chords, all within the grasp of the delicate hand of a princess. In this movement as well, a minor-mode shadow falls melodramatically over the proceedings, only to be banished by a cheerful reprise of the opening material, tastefully varied at its return.

 

Robert Schumann
Kreisleriana Op. 16

Violinist Johannes Kreisler represented, for Robert Schumann, the very essence of the new Romantic spirit in art. This eccentric, hypersensitive character from the fiction
of E. T. A. Hoffmann was a cross between Nicolò Paganini and Dr. Who, an enigmatic, emotionally volatile figure committed to plumbing the depths of his creative soul.

Schumann’s tribute to this symbol of creativity in art, his Kreisleriana of 1838, is as wildly inventive and emotionally unstable as the artistic personality it describes. Each of the eight pieces that make up the work comprises contrasting sections that reflect the split in Schumann’s own creative personality, a bipolar duo of mood identities to which he self-consciously gave the names Florestan and Eusebius.

Florestan, Schumann’s passionate, action-oriented side, opens the work Äußerst bewegt (extremely agitated) with a torrential outpouring of emotion that only halts when the introspective daydreamer Eusebius takes over with more tranquil lyrical musings. The pairing is reversed in the following movement, Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch (very intimate and not too fast), which begins thoughtfully but is twice interrupted by sections of a much more rambunctious character.

Schumann’s inventiveness in creating this series of mood-swing pieces is
astonishing. Each is a psychologically compelling portrait of a distinct temperamental state, enriched and made whole by embracing its opposite.

Projecting these portraits is no easy task for the pianist as Schumann’s writing, especially in slower sections, often features a choir of four fully active voices with melodies as likely to rise up from the bass, or to emerge out of the middle of the keyboard, as to sing out from on top. Indeed, the smooth part-writing and polyphonic texture of many sections points to another prominent feature of Schumann’s writing: his great admiration for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Schumann’s desire to give a Bachian solidity of structure to his writing is most evident not only in his four-voice harmonization textures, but also in his use of close three-voice stretto in the 5th movement and fugato in the 7th, not to mention the many extended passages based on a single rhythmic pattern in the manner of a Bach prelude.

But most remarkable in this work is the sense of mystery and unease that it radiates as a result of the pervasive use of rhythmic displacement in the bass, where strong notes often fail to coincide with the strong beats of the bar, in imitation of the unregulated movement of tectonic plates of thought and feeling in the mind of the creative artist.

 

Anton von Webern
Variations Op. 27

The 12-tone system of composition propagated in the early 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg, and employed by his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, presents a daunting challenge for audiences accustomed to listening for tunes to hum in the shower and rhythms to inspire a tapping motion in their footwear. The density of intellectual content of this music is far out of proportion with the ability of even seasoned musicians to perceive its organizing principles on a first listening.

And yet, like modernist works of abstract art that pull in the viewer’s attention at a visceral level, 12-tone works such as Webern’s Variations Op. 27 can exercise an unexpected fascination that requires no explanation.

So in listening to this three-movement work, it is merely necessary to be aware of
the scale of listening at which the composer wishes to engage his audience, and
that scale, in comparison with traditional music in the repertoire, is the minute. This
is music for listening with an “aural magnifying glass,” music of pointillist patterns of sound unconnected to scales or keys, the elegance of which lies in the symmetry of its gestures and balance of its tonal patterning.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in A Major, Op. 101

The works of Beethoven’s late period see him writing with a more relaxed approach to form and a wider sound palette, one that in the case of his piano music reaches out to the extreme ends of the keyboard. This is music of an increasingly personal stamp, wilfully pushing towards new expressive horizons with a confidence that virtually defines this composer’s ‘brand’.

His Sonata in A major Op. 101 presents us with two pairs of contrasting
movements. Movements 1 and 3 are lyrical and reflective, with little by way of strong profiling in either tonality or rhythm. They seem to flow onward at the pace of personal thought and feeling. Movements 2 and 4 are punchier, driven by the momentum of a large-scale formal plan, with a decisive rhythmic edge and clear tonal outlines at the heart of which lies a yearning for the rigour of serious imitative counterpoint.

The work opens with a movement of great gentleness of expression, almost a meditation, full of rippling pulses rather than strong beats. Its exposition goes by in a single page, more a succession of dream states than a delineation of contrasting ideas, and its development merely seems to intensify rather than challenge the prevailing mood.

The second movement is a bold and forthright march with sharply chiselled dotted rhythms peppered with points of imitation (of a kind that may have inspired the fifth movement of Schumann’s Kreisleriana) and an even more formally contrapuntal trio.

The slow movement is surprisingly short, more an intermezzo than a formally poised exposition of lyrical thoughts. With an air of improvisation it follows a little melodic turn figure through a series of harmonic adventures culminating in a daydreaming cadenza and a reminiscence of the sonata’s opening bars.

An ear-catching flourish of trills leads us into the finale, a sonata movement brimming with exuberance and good-humoured melodies drawn from country life, including
an Austrian mountain yodel and a rollicking contradance. Each is presented from the outset with its own imitative echo, preparing us for the full-on fugue that breaks out in the development section. By his use of the extreme low register Beethoven turns the lowest voice in the fugue into a kind of basso buffo from comic opera, humorously out of place in such a learned context.

 

Bedřich Smetana
Four Dances from Czech Dances (Book II)

Bedřich Smetana was among the first composers to promote a distinctly Czech style
of music in the 19th century during a period of rising nationalist sentiment in his native Czech homeland. His best-known works are his comic opera The Bartered Bride and the set of six symphonic poems based on themes from Bohemian country life entitled Má Vlast (my homeland).

Smetana was a gifted pianist and composed more for the piano than for any other instrument, with dance music playing an important role in his projection of the Czech national style. His second set of Czech Dances dates from 1879 and are intended to be artful examples of the actual music that might accompany Czech folk dancing.

Medved (The Bear) is a heavily textured stomping piece combining duple and triple metres to paint the lumbering gait of the bear, with a much sweeter middle section that imitates the sounds of the Czech bagpipes.

Hulán (The Lancer) is a slow, tender dance evoking the love of a young girl for her soldier boyfriend. Despite the subdued mood, an underlying current of intense yearning provides the performer with the occasion for flamboyant pianistic display.

Slepička (The Hen) is a vivid portrait of the race of barnyard fowl immortalized by Rameau’s La Poule and the animated film Chicken Run. Smetana’s hen is a busy creature indeed, with a daily agenda full of strutting, clucking and feathery flapping, all to a polka rhythm occasionally put humorously off-stride by unpredictable changes in metre.

Skočná (Hop Dance) is an exhilarating stomping dance for couples that sees its participants whirling each other ever more frenetically around in circles with a joyous, almost madcap abandon.

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

 

 

 

Program Notes: Apollon Musagète Quartet

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Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet in D major, Op. 18 No. 3

In the Napoleonic era, when a Viennese aristocrat was thinking of entertaining friends at home, he might pop down to the local shop to pick up a six-pack—a six-pack of string quartets, that is. The most refined form of self-entertainment in the homes of the upper classes in Austria’s capital was the string quartet, and the established practice in the trade was for publishers to commission them, for composers to compose them, and for amateur performers to buy them, by the half-dozen.

And so it was that when Beethoven finally decided in 1798 that it was time for him
to scale the summit of compositional glory by composing for string quartet—a genre already aglow with masterpieces by Haydn and Mozart—he had a big task ahead of him. Or rather, he had six tasks.

The six quartets which Beethoven published as his Op. 18 were an important milestone in his career and he was out to impress. Each of the members of this brood of sextuplets displays a distinct personality and a temperament widely different from
that of its siblings. The D major Quartet Op. 18 No. 3 is the quiet one of the litter, the gentle introspective one, but surprisingly capable nonetheless of cutting up like a trickster when the circumstances are right. This quartet is bright and lyrical but not a show-off. There are no fugues or flashy variation movements, just a non-stop display of surpassing compositional inventiveness and contrapuntal skill.

The first movement Allegro opens unconventionally with the vocally conceived
leap of a 7th (A to G) played solo by the first violin. (If you don’t think a 7th is particularly singable, consider the first two notes of “There’s a place for us” from Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.) This leap spawns points of imitation in the other instruments that seem to spring spontaneously, without fuss, from the very fabric

of the texture. There is, in fact, such an assured air of relaxed normality about this movement that its contrapuntal feats almost pass unnoticed. The second theme is a pulsing chordal subject in simple note values with a slight bit of oomph on the second beat. The one feature of this movement that does raise an eyebrow is its moderately substantial coda—a hint at Beethoven’s future fascination with lengthy postscripts.

The second movement Andante con moto is a cozy little rondo comprised of a principal theme and two contrasting episodes. It begins in close harmony with a songlike melody in even 8th notes delicately nuanced by chromatic inflections in the harmony. The mood of this movement never varies from its pose of poised thoughtfulness, even when passing through moments of reflection in the minor mode. Rather, it becomes ever richer in texture until finally reaching its climax in a pulsing stream of repeated 16th notes before slowly saying farewell to each of its constituent motives in a quiet farewell.

The Allegro third movement is a one-to-the-bar scherzo with a contrasting Minore middle section in place of a trio. Its mood is good-natured rather than overtly joking or rambunctious, as future Beethoven scherzos would turn out to be. The middle section picks up the pace with swirling runs in the first and second violins but this minor-mode merriment is tinged with the furrowed brow and secret sorrow of the Gypsy fiddler.

The quartet finally comes out of its shell in a Presto finale giddy with excitement and bubbling over with merriment. Its constantly bouncy rhythm and breathless pace make a joke out of every little ‘dumb’ pause—and there are many. Contrapuntal hi-jinx blend so effortlessly into the mix that even a thorny fugato section is tossed off like a walk in the park. Sealing the deal for Beethoven’s first four-voiced essay in musical wit is the ending, tossed off with the dry delivery of a stand-up comic.

 

Anton Webern
Langsamer Satz

Anton Webern is a composer known chiefly for his short, delicate, exquisitely concise atonal works written using the serial techniques developed in the early 20th century by what came to be known as the Second Viennese School, of which he was part—the ‘First’ School being that of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert a century earlier.

Celebrated as he is for the pristine, intellectually rigorous miniatures of his maturity,
we must remember that even this most cerebral of atonal composers was once young, and in love. And to express the torments and transports of young love there is nothing quite like good old tonality, especially the wildly yearning chromatic tonality of the late- Romantic period.

Webern’s utterly ravishing Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) for string quartet is deeply romantic (with a small r) and dates from June 1905, when the 21-year-old composer went on a five-day hiking tour of the picturesque Austrian countryside with Wilhelmine Mörtl, his cousin and future wife, with whom he was besotted.

Described by some as “Tristan und Isolde compressed into 11 minutes,” this work still counts as the longest that the famously laconic composer ever wrote. Perhaps because it was a student work—Webern had just begun studies with Arnold Schoenberg the year before—it was not performed publicly until 1962, when it was premiered by the University of Washington String Quartet at an international Webern festival in Seattle.

Longtime Webern wonks will no doubt note the sophistication of motivic manipulation in the work, especially the inversion of the opening theme that foretells one of the basic procedures of 12-tone composition. But for now let us take this work for what it was at its inception: the spontaneous creative outpouring of Young Anton in Love.

 

Franz Schubert
String Quartet in G major, D. 887

When faced with a string quartet lasting two full periods of National League hockey, it were vain to skirt the debate dividing rival Schubertian factions as to whether the mimeographic profusion of ideas in this composer’s works should be qualified as “heavenly length” or “earthy tedium”. The man does seem to go on, and on, and on.

No less a scholarly titan than Carl Dahlhaus has proposed that Schubert operates according to a different sense of psychological time. Some of his colleagues stress the trance-like quality of Schubert’s musical thinking, likening him to a musical somnambulist who bids us enter an enchanted world of involuntary dream-filled wandering. Others, while encouraged by how much sleep Schubert seems to be getting, still bemoan the way in which his practice of open-ended variation hijacks the tradition of concise formal argument established by Mozart and Haydn, and betrays the expectation of propulsive forward drive created by Beethoven.

Fortunately, Schubert’s String Quartet in G major—his last, written in 1826—silences all critics, rendering moot their musings as to whether it is Schubert, or his listeners, who have the greater claim on the ministrations of Morpheus. Here is an arresting work that, for all its length, constantly engages the listener directly and viscerally. It is a work of symphonic dimensions, particularly orchestral in its use of tremolo. Schubert lays on the tremolo with a liberal hand: to beef up the weight of sound to create an orchestral-style tutti, to add a touch of hushed tenderness or an air of deepening mystery, or simply

to render long-held notes more sonically pliable and expand their range of expressive effect.

The first movement Allegro molto moderato opens with a major chord that swells in sound over two bars to emerge like a primal scream—in the minor! No lack of drama here. What follows combines the emphatic pomp of a Baroque French overture with the suspenseful hinting at things-to-come of a sonata movement’s slow introduction. The first theme, when it arrives, mixes great leaps with jagged dotted rhythms over a slowly descending bass-line, continuing the tone of epic grandeur announced at the outset. A lilting second theme could not be more contrasting. Rocking back and forth within a small range, it does everything it can to de-emphasize the first beat of the bar. While the development section is tumultuous and intense, the movement’s two themes start duking it out long before that, interrupting each other, even in the exposition, in a continuous alternation of tranquil lilt and surging protest that plays out through the movement in the flickering shadows of quicksilver changes between major and minor modes.

No respite from turmoil arrives with the Andante con moto, a movement of impressive dimensions and intense emotional drama. Beginning innocently enough with a dignified little minor-mode tune in the cello, more musing than mournful, it plunges six times into high drama when the jagged dotted rhythms of the first movement return and fretting tremolos vibrate with a sense of fear and foreboding.

It is left, then, for the Allegro vivace scherzo to lighten the mood and finally bring relief from the pall of anxiety and tension that has so far dominated the work. Continuous patterns of repeated notes mark this movement with a fleetness of foot that would soon become Mendelssohn’s trademark. Here the tremolos are written out in full, emphasizing their role as individual pulses of rhythmic intensity rather than furry blurs of sound. Antiphonal echo effects abound, with the barrage only interrupted by a delicious Ländler melody in the trio.

High-contrast drama, often verging on comedy, returns in the Allegro assai finale, a perpetual-motion sonata-rondo of kaleidoscopic moods. The opening tarantella theme, glinting alternately between major & minor tone colouring soon gives way to a perfect parody of an opera buffa patter aria à la Rossini. This is one Schubert movement that is so much fun, you wish it would go on forever.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

Program Notes: Leif Ove Andsnes

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Jean Sibelius
Kyllikki, Three Lyric Pieces for Piano Op. 41

Finland’s national composer, Jean Sibelius, has earned an honoured place in the modern canon chiefly on the merits of his orchestral works, notably his seven symphonies, the Violin Concerto, and the tone poem Finlandia. Less celebrated are the composer’s more than 150 miniatures for piano, 115 of which were published in his lifetime, grouped into sets of varying size.

Writing in the early 20th century against a modernist backdrop of increasing
atonality, Sibelius continued to compose in the tradition of tonal key centres, albeit with a harmonic vocabulary considerably expanded from that of late 19th-century Romanticism. While rooted in the German tradition, his scores, like those of Janáček, often evoke the folk idiom of his native country in textures resonant with pedal points and pulsing with ostinato patterns, occasionally tinged with the timbral vibration of the katele, the traditional Finnish dulcimer.

Kyllikki, composed in 1904, presents a triptych of lyrical scenes possibly linked pictorially with the adventures of a character from Finnish folklore. Its sequence of pacing and moods parallels that of a traditional three-movement sonata. The opening Largamente is heavily textured and projects an aggressive, Lisztian boldness of utterance, its virtuoso pose projected in flying octaves and sweeping arpeggios that alternate with turbulent patches of modal melody swimming in dark pools of tremolos.

The Andantino ‘slow movement’ opens with a grave evocation of stunned grief in a succession of short phrases low in the register that sigh with the fatalist resignation of the Volga Boat Song. More sanguine sentiments pervade the animated middle section, but standing apart from these contrasting moods of despair and renewed hope is a mysterious dulcimer-like trilling, commenting from afar like a bird singing in the woods. By contrast, the Commodo last movement is a leisurely salon-style piece of the utmost clarity of intention, chatty with coy intimations of the dance.

Sibelius’ Op. 75 ‘tree’ pieces are as much about the Finnish landscape as the sturdy botanical specimens that inhabit it. The Birch bends in the wind, a drone bass rooting
it firmly in its native soil as it hums a jaunty little folk tune. The Spruce obviously
grew up in a palace park somewhere in the Austrian capital. In a reverie of nostalgic reminiscence, it recalls those warm summer nights when, as a sapling, it learned to sway to the strains of the Viennese waltz.

The Five Esquisses Op. 114 are Sibelius’ last works for solo piano, each a portrait
of some aspect of nature. The Forest Lake ripples in continuous 8th-note motion,
its disturbingly dark harmonic colouring impervious to the concerns of the human observer. Song in the Forest poetically journeys to the centre of a shaded wood to find a hymn-like melody amid the lush overgrowth of Scriabin-like tritones tracing patterns of light and shade far above. Spring Vision is a walk in the park to the beat of a gentle little Schumannesque march rejoicing in the arrival of April.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in E flat major Op. 31 No. 3

Beethoven’s 18th sonata, written in 1802, is a remarkably relaxed work from a composer better known for his turbulent musical impulses and revolutionary spirit. More rambunctious than rebellious, it quarrels little with the pose of classical poise expected in a traditional four-movement sonata, seeking instead to engage its listeners through expressive tenderness and mischievous merriment.

The work opens with a coy serving of bite-sized motives: two wistful sighs (falling 5ths), answered by solemn chords below, concluding in an anticlimactic cadence that seems to say: “Just kidding!” Unfolding with devil-may-care breeziness, it arrives at a chipper second theme pertly singing out over a left hand accompaniment churning with bustle. The development section sets out frowningly in the minor mode but soon lightens up and joins the fun as motives get tossed, in comic opera style, between a gruff growling bass and a chirpy echoing treble. A perfectly normal recapitulation wraps up the movement with few surprises.

The second movement Scherzo eschews the muscular vigour, relentless energy, and even the ternary (A-B-A) form characteristic of the most famous Beethoven scherzos in favour of a return to the original Italian meaning of the term: a “joke”. Unexpected pauses and sudden outbursts abound to great comic effect, both sly and slapstick. Beethoven’s humour is very dry here, with a chorale-like marching hymn in the right hand playing out deadpan against a constant left-hand patter of 16th notes, trotting in mock-military precision. Peppery fanfares and “oops-a-daisy” glissando-like pratfalls add to the fun.

Beethoven reveals his immense gifts as a melodist in a Menuetto of the utmost dignity and lyrical grace, worthy of a noble aria by Gluck. The register-leaping Trio ensures that the movement’s smoothness doesn’t devolve into smarminess.

The Presto con fuoco finale is an exhilarating moto perpetuo that has been variously called a gallop or a tarantella. Its breathless pace, prominent horn-call motives, and slightly off-kilter rocking pattern in the left hand, reminiscent of horseback riding, have given the sonata as a whole the nickname The Hunt.

 

Claude Debussy
La Soirée dans Grenade from Estampes

Claude Debussy’s first book of “prints” or “engravings” (Estampes) dates from 1905 and features stylized musical postcards of exotic locales and memorable landscapes, assembled from the musical traces they have left in the composer’s imagination.

The second musical portrait in the series evokes an evening spent in the Spanish city of Granada. The soul of the city is summoned up first by the lilting rhythm of the habañera (DUM-da-dum-dum) that echoes through every octave as the piece opens. Soon the spicy Arab scale, with its augmented melodic intervals, comes into earshot, mixed with the strumming of a Flamenco guitar. The piece ends in a drowsy sonic haze as these aural emblems of Iberian life fade into memory.

Études 7, 11, and 5 from Douze Études

It might appear surprising that a composer such as Debussy should deign to write piano etudes, a genre associated since the time of Czerny with pedagogical drudgery and musical monotony, since the time of Liszt with Napoleonic narcissism and shamanistic showmanship. Debussy’s personal aesthetic emphasized imaginative refinement more than mechanical perfection and his public persona was light years removed from the exhibitionist egotism of the Romantic-era virtuoso.

So his Douze Études (1915) are more than mere push-up punishment at pianistic boot camp, a means of building endurance for when it is needed in “real” music. Each is a musical tone poem testing a new kind of pianism, based on fingertip sensitivity and finely filtered pedaling. Each poses problems of sonority and texture that mere digital dexterity is insufficient to solve. And each, in the end, challenges the pianist to hit that sweet spot to which all French music tends—charm.

Etude 7 Pour les degrés chromatiques is a perpetual motion study of playful character featuring a squirrelly right hand scurrying in small 4-note chromatic groupings, out of the sound-swirl of which emerges, in the left hand, brief snatches of smooth diatonic melody. Unfolding in a constant purr at low volume, it mimics the sensation of changing dynamic levels by means of changes in register and changes in the number of voices active in the texture. Remarkable (for an etude) is the way the piece combines brilliance with lyricism.

Etude 11 Pour les arpèges composés is a study in delicacy of touch and subtly nuanced shades of tone-colouring at widely varying dynamic levels. Its tracery of “composite arpeggios” (i.e., multi-octave chord patterns with added tones) is written as grace notes enveloping simple melodic fragments found floating amid the tonal ripples and timbral sparkle.

Etude 5 Pour les octaves finds Debussy in the most extroverted mood, summoning up the spirit of the waltz in voluptuous eruptions of sound echoing up from the bass, reminiscent of Ravel’s La Valse or Scriabin at his most manic. The undulating mix of octave leaps both large and small requires a jack-hammer hand in a velvet glove.

 

Frédéric Chopin
Impromptu in A flat Major Op. 29

Spontaneity is the feature most prized in the genre named for it, the impromptu. Chopin projects an air of extemporaneous improvisation in his Impromptu in A flat (1837) by means of swirling arabesques of triplets spun effortlessly out of a simple harmonic pattern, the very image of a bubbling fountain of inspiration. Deeper waters are plumbed in the more pensive middle section in F minor, but here, too, the notion of fresh musical thoughts, spontaneously imagined, is upheld by the lavishly decorative, operatic-style ornamentation of a starkly simple melody.

Étude in A flat Major from Trois Nouvelles Études

In 1839 Chopin composed three etudes for inclusion in the Méthode des méthodes (1840), a comprehensive piano instruction manual published by the Belgian music educator François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871) and the Bohemian pianist Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870). By no means as technically challenging as the composer’s daunting Op. 10 and Op. 25 sets, these “new” etudes assigned the aspiring pianist tasks of a more concentrated, distinctly musical nature: how to maintain interest in a melodic line set within accompaniment patterns that vie with it for the listener’s attention.

In the Etude in A flat an expressive, vocally-inspired melody floats freely within a two-against-three pattern of gently pulsing figuration, outlining melt-in-your-mouth harmonies of a delicate, sometimes aching poignancy. With melody spilling luxuriantly out of all voices in the texture, Chopin in this etude blurs the line between harmony and melody, between melody and accompaniment.

Nocturne in F Major Op. 15 No. 1

Chopin’s early Nocturne in F major Op. 15 No. 1 (1830-31) is a study in contrasts. Its tender opening melody, warmly doubled in the mid-range by the tenor voice, floats serenely over sympathetic harmonies in pulsing triplets, the pure soul of innocence in song. But then, like a daydream broken off by the intrusion of a stray thought,

it pauses… and plunges into a nightmarish middle section in F minor boiling up in turbulence and torment from the bass. This too gradually ebbs, however, and we drift back to the opening melody, as if waking from a bad dream. There is something eerie, almost surreal, about both daydream and nightmare in this piece.

Ballade No. 4 in F minor Op. 52

Chopin’s ballades are the first known works written for piano under this name, likely meant to summon up associations with traditional folk tales recounted in a popular style of storytelling. Formally, the ballades bear some relationship to sonata form, with contrasting 1st and 2nd themes in different keys. Unlike sonata form, however, they

are end-weighted: the story they tell increases in dramatic intensity as it goes along, culminating in either a grand apotheosis or, in the case of the Ballade in F minor (1842- 43), in a bravura coda that storms to its conclusion in a whirl of fiery figuration.

To hear the innocent bell-like opening of this work, there would be little to predict its end. A blissful peace seems the order of the day but the melancholy little waltz that arrives as the work’s 1st theme tells another story. Here the repeated bell tones of the opening carry real pathos, made more plangent, and then more urgent, upon repetition with a countermelody in the alto.

The second theme, a lilting barcarolle with the solemnity of a chorale, brings consoling relief and even a touch of gaiety to the story, until the first theme’s haunting presence begins to hover again. But then… magic! The very first bars of introduction return, in
a different key, and we enter a kind of suspended animation as the narrative stops to gaze up at the sky.

But the first theme’s lament returns, circling round itself introspectively in close imitation (imitative counterpoint, in Chopin!) before setting off on yet another thematic variation, this time more turbulent and more expansive. The second theme follows,
but it too finds itself riding on wave after wave of left-hand turbulence culminating in
a showdown of keyboard-sweeping arpeggios and cannonades of block chords until… magic again! Another pin-dropping pause.

After what seems like a reprieve—five angelic chords descending from heaven—all hell breaks loose and the work rides its fury to a final, fateful conclusion.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

 

 

 

 

Program Notes: Arcanto Quartet

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This evening the Arcanto Quartet offers us a chance to explore chamber music from the end of the 17th century to the recent past, sampling music for four players by Henry Purcell (1659–95), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).

 

Henry Purcell

Long before the primacy of the string quartet, consort music for viols was a pre- eminent genre of instrumental music. Sixteenth century British composers such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis wrote impressive polyphonic compositions for three, four, or five performers. Slightly over a hundred years later, the young Henry Purcell became the last major figure to explore this particular format. His early fantasias and in nomines for viols—compositions based on a particularly popular chant fragment—were created at the transitional moment when the older viol family of instruments was giving way to the more brilliant timbre of the violins.

Purcell’s reputation as the first homegrown British composer to truly master the Baroque style is unassailable. Much of his music is indebted to Italian practice, yet his 13 fantasias demonstrate an implicit conservatism—close to the last gasp of an indigenous British string tradition.

What Purcell might have made of the sound and timbres of the modern string quartet is anyone’s guess. But modern interest in the unique charm of Purcell’s music has encouraged contemporary string quartets to program these varied and delightful compositions. Purcell had no more sincere admirer than Benjamin Britten, who adapted his Chacony in G minor for string quartet as early as 1948, in part to familiarize players and audiences with his distinguished predecessor’s music.

 

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten’s purely instrumental works have been somewhat eclipsed by the splendour of his creations for the opera stage, but his string quartets—written, conveniently, in “early,” “middle,” and “late” career—are gradually finding their way into the standard repertoire of the world’s great quartets.

His first quartet, conceived in 1928, when the composer was 14, was a substantial four-movement affair immediately withdrawn, and not published until the 1990s. The “official” First Quartet dates from 1941, created during the composer’s unsatisfactory self-exile in the United States. The Second Quartet was written four years later, just as Britten’s first great opera, Peter Grimes, was being premiered in war-torn London. Characteristically, it pays extravagant homage to Purcell with an astonishing concluding Chacony.

Creating the Third Quartet had to wait until the final months of Britten’s life. Commissioned by the Amadeus String Quartet in 1974, it is very much a final summing up and a farewell. Some of its musical materials were quarried from Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice, but it is by no means just a suite of best bits or recycled out-takes from that stage work.

Like Shostakovich, his composer friend of later years, Britten filled his music with coded references and intentional ambiguities, though it might seem that choosing to base an opera on Thomas Mann’s tale of infatuation and the end of a life devoted to art is fairly unambiguous.

Whatever its sources, the Third Quartet is chamber music of the highest quality, rife with allusive references to the historical idea of the string quartet. Its five-movement structure, with such operatic focuses as “duets,” “solo,” and “recitative,” relates to similar five-movement structures in two of the 20th century’s other quartet masters, Bartók and Shostakovich, and reflects a conscious desire to push beyond the conventional classic four-movement quartet format. The use of Lydian mode in the second movement inevitably brings to mind Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132, with its “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity”—a fairly unpleasant

bit of irony given the precarious state of Britten’s health when he was writing the piece. The Burlesque evokes Mahler, one of Britten’s abiding heros, and his embittered scherzos.

Then comes the finale. Britten made a final pilgrimage to Venice in November 1975, where he created much of the music heard at the end of the quartet. It is his last use of the passacaglia/chaconne type of variations, an old pre-classical structure he

employed with spectacular variety throughout his work. In opera Britten uses the form to underscore moments of great seriousness and drama, making it a potent symbol as well as a musical structure. In abstract contexts such as the finales of both the second and third quartets, it is left to the listener to ponder extra-musical meanings.

Britten heard a private run-through of the piece at the end of September, 1976, but died a few weeks before the quartet’s premiere by the Amadeus in The Maltings, the concert hall Britten created near Aldeburgh, in mid-December 1976.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven

By the time Beethoven turned his hand to the “Razumovsky” Quartets in the middle of the first decade of the 19th century, he was accepted as one of the major composers in Vienna. His flashy early years were over, and he was well-advanced into what scholars generally call his middle period, a compositional phase where he focussed on pushing boundaries and exploring new ideas.

Beethoven’s three Opus 59 string quartets are central to the development of the string quartet as chamber music’s most important genre. Beethoven accepted the four- movement sequence standardized by Mozart and Haydn—weighty first movement, slow movement, Minuet, and fast finale—but he expanded the classic idioms with his own unmistakable textures, formal devices, and harmonic language.

The nickname “Razumovsky” refers to one of Beethoven’s patrons, Count Andrey Razumovsky (1752–1836), a Russian diplomat at the Austrian court. A player as well as a connoisseur, Razumovsky maintained a resident quartet (apparently sitting in occasionally as second violin) and commissioned Beethoven to write the three quartets that have kept the count’s name alive long after his career as a powerful figure in the complicated world of international diplomacy has been forgotten.

Beethoven did remarkable work in the three Opus 53 quartets, but not all his contemporaries got the point; indeed at least one writer recorded his reservations. An 1807 observer for the weekly music publication the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described the compositions as “very long and difficult.” The writer was by no means entirely negative, adding, “They are profoundly thought through and composed with enormous skill,” before concluding “but [they] will not be intelligible to everyone.”

This mixed review did not extend to the C major quartet, however—“Which by virtue of its individuality, melodic invention and harmonic power is certain to win over every educated music lover.” As it has to this day.

 

 

Program Notes: Caroline Goulding & Wenwen Du

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Johann Sebastian Bach
Sonata in A major, BWV 1015

Before taking up his post as Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1723, Bach served as Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen (1694-1728). The young Prince was of the Calvinist persuasion, and thus had little need for church music, but he was also an avid music-lover and a competent viola da gamba player who spent lavishly on a musical establishment, his Kapelle, that Bach directed from 1717 to 1723. And so it was that during his tenure there Bach composed the majority of his works for violin, including a good half-dozen sonatas for violin and keyboard.

The four movements of the Sonata in A major are laid out in the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of the ‘church’ sonata (sonata da chiesa), so named for its generally abstract style, considered more suitable for performance in a solemn setting than the dance-dominated ‘chamber’ sonata (sonata da camera). In this work Bach writes in the prevailing style of the trio sonata—normally featuring a lead solo instrument accompanied by clearly subordinate harmonic in-fill on the keyboard and bass reinforcement by some low-sounding instrument—but he enriches the genre by creating three independent melodic lines on two instruments: the violin and the two hands of the keyboard player.

This is evident in the warmly gracious first movement (without tempo indication) which opens with a luxuriantly long-limbed melody, deliciously ambivalent in its rhythmic pulse (is it 6/8 or 3/4?), answered immediately in the keyboard’s right hand, and then again in the left. The deliberately varied mixture of note lengths and beat patterns encourages you to forget the passage of time while gracious details such as simultaneous chains of trills in both instruments add a decorative element of Roccoco refinement to the texture.

The Allegro assai second movement is much more strongly rhythmic and features the propulsive motoric rhythms of the concerto grosso, with the keyboard often taking the lead in a constant chatter of 16ths while the violin trots blithely along commenting in a uniform pattern of 8ths. The violin’s breathless volley of rapid-fire arpeggios in the middle section is reminiscent of a Brandenburg Concerto cadenza.

Gentle pathos and lyrical introspection mark the Andante un poco third movement in the minor mode. Plaintively vocal in style, this movement is nevertheless structured with astonishing rigour. Listen for the strict two-voice canon between the violin and keyboard’s right hand.

The final Presto is in two-part form (with repeats) like a dance movement, but elaborated in a free three-voice fugue texture in each half. In this concluding movement Bach manages to gift his pleasure-loving prince with a finale that combines regal dignity and courtly decorum with the toe-tapping cheerfulness of a folk tune suitable for whistling.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in C minor, Op. 30 No. 2

In this sonata we catch Beethoven at the top of his game in a work of remarkable coherence, despite its wide variety of moods and wildly divergent styles of expression. Its outer movements, in particular, are chock-full of emotional mood swings while its inner movements simply wade ever deeper and deeper into the emotional tone they establish at their outset.

The piano is more than a full partner in the proceedings and its tone dominates the sonata as a whole. All four movements open with solo statements from the piano, and while the violin participates fully in the presentation and development of themes, it merely adds to, but never overshadows, the piano’s potential to create sonic theatre on its own terms. The piano purrs and growls in this work. It skips, it hops. By turns it whistles a merry tune and then tenderly pleads for understanding. The work of giving a place to the keyboard in the violin sonata, begun by Bach, is complete in this C minor sonata.

Of course, the key signature of C minor in Beethoven is tantamount to an in-flight announcement to fasten your seat-belt and expect turbulence. And Ludwig van B. does not disappoint. The work opens in a mood of mystery and quiet urgency with a furtive chordal motive in the piano that turns into a menacing murmur surging up from the bass at the entry of the violin. Strident, sabre-slashing chords mark the transition to the second theme that (anticlimactically) turns out to be a pert little military march, reminiscent of Non più andrai, the bass aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro evoking Cherubino’s future life in the army. The opera parallel continues as this theme then moves to the bass to rumble around in classic opera buffa style. Throughout the movement high drama plays out next to good-natured buffoonery, interspersed with passages of sheer rhythmic exhilaration. Beethoven clearly loves his material here and won’t let it go, plunging into an almost developmental coda of some length before the final chords of this movement.

The Adagio cantabile that follows paints a noble portrait of deep-seated emotion lacquered over, and held in check, by aristocratic restraint, its opening gesture of pleading repeated notes suggesting far more than the elegant, balanced phrases of its melody can express. Violin and piano become ever more texturally entwined as the movement progresses, with the piano eventually contributing a rich carpet of sweeping and swirling figurations beneath the cantilena of the violin above.

The Scherzo simply oozes with personality of a goofy, knuckle-headed sort that wins you over immediately. Its chirpy high spirits and galumphing rhythm, with phrases neatly cut up into bite-size pieces, bespeaks the country yokel but its playful toying with the metrical accent gives a hint of a winking intelligence lurking behind this pose, especially when the trio turns out to be in canon.

The sonata-rondo finale returns to the arena of high-tension theatre, beginning with its very first bars: a bass rumble that crescendos to explode into an exclamation point in the higher register, followed by hushed chords tiptoeing through the mid-range. It is hard not to think that in the many contrasting sections of this rondo, in its quicksilver alternations of major and minor mode, its deadpan changes of mood between high drama and skippy-dippy cheerfulness, Beethoven might well be having a laugh at the expense of sonata form itself.

 

Claude Debussy
Sonata in G minor

The sound of Debussy’s music confounded many of his contemporaries. How, they asked, could what he composed actually be called music? After all, it had so little of what, since the 1600s, had been the operating principle of Western music: tonal tension. Tonal tension was that feeling that certain chords wanted, needed, felt the inner urge to proceed to other chords, and that when they did so the music went from a state of tension to one of relaxation—in other words, that dissonance had resolved to consonance.

Debussy didn’t just break the established rules of harmony. He ignored them. His use of parallel streams of identically structured chords blurred the distinction between harmony and melody. His textures seemed like lush exotic gardens of sound, with each melodic phrase a flowering plant swaying in the breeze, combining with others to create an overall impression. The comparison with the emerging school of Impressionist painters was all too obvious.

And yet, for all his painterly credentials as a musical pictorialist, we find Debussy at the end of his life writing sonatas, the most rule-laden form (apart from fugue) that Western music had produced, the genre most associated with the musical Establishment. The Sonata for Violin and Piano, Debussy’s last major work, was composed in 1917 as part of a projected set of six sonatas for chamber instruments, of which only the first three were completed before his death.

It has been suggested that the title ‘sonata’ is equivalent here to ‘Untitled’ as the title of a painting. It simply refers to an absence of acknowledged subject matter, meaning that there was no ‘picture’ in mind when writing it. Others see Debussy as returning to the time of Rameau, when the term ‘sonata’ was used to mean simply a purely instrumental piece, something played rather than sung, but not necessarily a work following a prescribed formal plan.

Whatever the significance of the label, we find Debussy’s trademark sense of understatement everywhere in this work, which unfolds in a subdued atmosphere of soft to medium-soft dynamic levels, imbued nonetheless with considerable emotional warmth. Phrases tend to be short and often unpredictable, either coquettishly playful or tender and pensive.

The Allegro vivo first movement opens in a manner strikingly similar to that of the Franck Violin Sonata in A major, laying down a reflecting pool of keyboard colour over which the violin enters with a melodic motive of slowly rocking 3rds. This melodic rocking motion—in 3rds, in 4ths and then in 5ths— repeats often in the more active sections of the movement, which on the whole is nevertheless warmly melodic in tone.

The second movement tips its hat to the traditional sonata scherzo in a playful movement of wide melodic leaps and their opposite: insistent patterns of repeated notes.

The finale, Très animé, opens with a display of piano bravura, answered in the violin with the opening melody of the first movement. The breathless pace continues throughout, relieved only briefly in its middle section by the appearance of what one commentator has called a “drunken waltz”.

 

Béla Bartók
Rhapsody No. 1 Sz. 87

Bartók was not only a gifted composer and an accomplished pianist but also a dedicated ethnomusicologist who travelled deep into the rural outback of his native Hungary and surrounding regions to make recordings of villagers singing and playing the traditional music of their local areas. The authentic, raw-edged musical culture of turn-of-the-century peasant life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire is captured in these recordings, but it is also heard in the many works that Bartók composed based on the melodies and rhythms collected on these ethnomusicological field trips.

His first Rhapsody for Violin and Piano, composed in 1928, is one of these. Structured in two movements in the slow-fast (lassú-friss) pattern of Hungarian folk music, this work seeks to meld the disparate worlds of Eastern European village fiddling and Western European concert life. The style of violin playing is heavily influenced by the capricious improvisatory showmanship of Gypsy fiddle-playing while the piano, resonant with dense tone clusters, jangles with the metallic timbre of a rag-tag village band.

The first movement Lassú presents a strutting rising-scale melody in the Lydian mode (think: C major scale with F# instead of F) over a plodding piano part rife with drone tones, often more a sonic drum-beat than a melodic line. A middle section offers lyric contrast with a plangent lament derived from a Transylvanian folk tune, full of rhythmic ‘snaps’ in a quick short-long pattern.

The Friss is a series of dance tunes with no overall formal structure other than that of continually building up excitement, accelerando, till the end. The violin in this movement is pushed to ever greater exertions of virtuosic showmanship in pursuit of its rhapsodic goals. (Is it just me, or is the first tune not a dead ringer for the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts”?)

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

Program Notes: Raphaël Sévère & Paul Montag

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Alexander Borodin
Sonata for Cello and Piano in B Minor
(adapted for clarinet & piano by Raphaël Sévère)

The role of the noisy neighbour in music history is an unjustly neglected theme for research but well worth considering in the case of Alexander Borodin’s Sonata for Cello & Piano in B minor (c.1860). Deeply imprinted on this work, from its first bars to its last, are the memorable strains of the fugue subject from Bach’s Sonata in G minor for unaccompanied violin BWV 1001, which Borodin kept hearing coming through the walls of his apartment during an extended stay in Heidelberg.

Adapting Baroque thematic materials to the needs of 19th-century sonata form can be a tricky business, so after a bare-bones literal statement of Bach’s punchy, door- knocking theme, Borodin wastes no time in massaging its motivic play-dough into something more closely resembling a lyrical Russian folksong for his second theme.

Here, in the wistfully falling phrases and exotic harmonies of the Russian folk idiom is where Borodin finds the beating heart of his first movement, and he stays in touch with its lyrical pulse throughout in a constant flow of singable melodies and lush carpets of rolling harmonic underlay.

The Pastorale second movement strikes an even more intimate tone with a tender melody of the utmost innocence and simplicity, temporarily darkened by more troubling thoughts in a middle section that features a solo cadenza.

The finale opens with a ponderously solemn statement of Bach’s original fugue subject, but after a rhythmic makeover and a change of pace, it takes off as a sprightly drawing- room dance tune in the style of Mendelssohn. Cutting in, from time to time, is an achingly sentimental tune simply surging with a breast-heaving need to share. Bach’s fugue subject looks in again about halfway through to see how everyone is getting on, and after getting dragged into the party, finally gets the last word.

 

Witold Lutosławski
Dance Preludes

Witold Lutosławski’s engaging collection of dancelike pieces is written in the modernist idiom of Bartók and Stravinsky, using folk melodies popular in the north of Poland. Thinly scored and sparse in texture, this collection features frequent changes of time signature that evoke the improvised quality of village dance music. The suite is arranged in an alternating pattern of fast and slow movements.

The opening Allegro molto seems inordinately proud of the arpeggiated E-flat chord that it trumpets at the outset, but then oscillates continually between major and minor, chasing its own tail in a staccato game of “What’s my key?” The same ambiguity is present in the pensive Andantino but here a long-legged melody creates a sustained mood of elegy and reflection.

The Allegro giocoso returns to the village playground with a skipping beat that straddles the divide between exhilaration and humour, unlike the following Andante, in which the clarinet mopes in the low range of the instrument while the piano marks time in even quarter notes. The concluding Allegro molto moves upbeat again, adding a note of merry taunting with its obsessive repetitions in the clarinet that seem to say to the piano: “I’m in E flat and you’re not!”

 

Claude Debussy
Première Rhapsodie

In 1909 Paris Conservatoire director Gabriel Fauré asked Debussy to write a clarinet piece for the next year’s student performance exams. The result was the First Rhapsody, a vigorous test of the clarinetist’s ability to project a lyrical singing tone and demonstrate command of technical challenges ranging from quicksilver chromatic runs to chains of trills and rapid changes of articulation, all the while scrupulously following Debussy’s sometimes-fluid, sometimes-florid rhythmic patterning—without the aid of unseemly foot-tapping, of course.

This work is far more than a simple étude, however. Its balanced sectional contrasts and ingenious construction around the opening motif announced by the clarinet, developed thorough a panoply of moods from dreamy reverie to scherzando friskiness, reveal how Debussy’s burgeoning interest in structure was replacing the pictorialism of his earlier works.

 

Alban Berg
Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano Op. 5

The so-called Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg (the First School being that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven) formed at the beginning of the 20th century in reaction to the diminishing aesthetic returns being pocketed from the smouldering remains of Late Romanticism, with its chronic chromaticism and

severely weakened sense of tonality. At base atonal, and eventually coalescing around the abstract compositional procedures of the 12-tone system, its proponents existed on a continuum of extremes, from the grandiose, hair-pulling, dental-procedure expressionism of Schoenberg to the almost-Canadian-level politeness of musical gesture in the silk-spun miniatures of Anton Webern. Of the three, Alban Berg was the composer who ranged most freely among the options presented by the new movement, even venturing back, at times, into a 19th-century sense of tonality.

In his early Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, composed in 1913, we catch him opting for a Schoenbergian atonal vocabulary and embrace of extreme dynamics (from fff down to pppp) but with a Webernian concision and clear sense of dramatic shaping.

This is music for close listening, especially the endings, which recede into a sonic horizon too distant for words. What these pieces lack in shower-humming tunefulness they amply make up for in atmosphere, and an almost indefinable Viennese charm.

 

Leonard Bernstein
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano

The prodigious musical gifts of pianist, conductor, composer, and music educator Leonard Bernstein can already be heard in this, his first published work, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, written between 1941 and 1942 while he was still a young twenty- something student attending the Tanglewood summer music school where Paul Hindemith taught.

Hinting at the astonishing diversity of musical styles that Bernstein would later adopt as his own, this sonata moves confidently between the rarefied language of mid-20th- century “serious” composition and the more direct appeal of the musical vernacular. It has been described as

a haunting work whose sonorities remind one alternately of religious incantation, the opening theme of Stravinsky’s Firebird and smoke-filled jazz clubs.

The first movement opens with a wandering clarinet tune chaperoned by modernist counterpoint in the piano part, reminiscent of Hindemith. As the pace picks up, the piano’s chugging rhythmic ostinato give us the first clues that West Side Story is only a decade away. While the movement’s formal outlines are quite loose, and development kept to a minimum, this movement’s melodic lines evoke a kind of cool yearning that presages the composer’s urbane Broadway creations of the 1950s.

An austere lyricism marks the opening of the second movement Andantino, which achieves intimacy by means of its slow tempo, steady pace, and sparse, almost spooky scoring.

The nimble pulse of Latino-inflected jazz (Vivace e leggiero) soon makes its appearance, however, and these two modes of musical appeal—the soulful and the syncopated—play alternately for the listener’s attention until both the clarinet and the piano get into it in a big way, trading riffs and taking their increasingly exuberant dialogue up to the high register for an exclamation-point ending.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

Program Notes: Jeremy Denk

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Johann Sebastian Bach
English Suite No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 808

Bach’s keyboard suites are a remarkable amalgam of the florid keyboard idiom of the French, the lyrical gift for vocal melody of the Italians, and the sober contrapuntal rigour of his fellow Germans. The suites which posthumously (and illogically) came to be labelled “English” were composed sometime before 1720 and are thought to be his earliest keyboard dances.

In imitation of French practice, Bach begins his third suite in the set with a Prelude, but written in the style of an Italian concerto grosso, with motoric rhythms driving relentlessly forward in a non-stop rush of 16th notes, during which the opening pecking motif not infrequently pops its head above the fray.

A more conversational tone is offered in the following Allemande with left and right hand trading the same material back and forth, thematically inverted in the second half. The Courante is a marvel of contrapuntal bravura, with its three self-confident voices pursuing independent melodic objectives while the underlying rhythmic pulse often “goes duple” on its nominally triple 3/2 time signature.

The rhythmically stark but harmonically rich outlines of the Sarabande are simply made for ornamental in-fill and Bach provides his own ornamented version for each   half of this intense, but sombre interlude. As galanteries, the optional dances inserted between sarabande and gigue, Bach offers a major-minor pairing of gavottes, the most rhythmically dancelike pieces in the set. A quietly droning Gavotte II in the major mode is sandwiched between twin renditions of the merrily twinkling Gavotte I in the minor, while the Gigue finale serves up a toe-tapping two-voice fugue that, like the Allemande, turns its theme on its head for the second half.

 

William Byrd
Ninth Pavan and Galliard from Lady Nevell’s Book

Western music’s first great genius of keyboard music was the English court musician William Byrd. It was he who first established the idea of a rhythmically regular, harmonically-based contrapuntal keyboard idiom that the Baroque era went on to adopt as its own. The collection of his best early pieces, copied in manuscript for the music-loving Lady Nevell in 1591, is a compendium of the major genres of instrumental music of his day and includes a number of dances in the traditional pairing of pavane and galliard.

The pavane was a solemn, snooty, and minimally aerobic processional dance in duple time, unlikely to require a lathering of deodorant amongst even its most fanatical practitioners, while the more athletic galliard in triple metre was quite the stuff of sweatbands and lululemon stretch pants: all leaps, jumps and hops.

Byrd structures his Ninth Pavan and Galliard as a set of variations on the bass line and implied harmonies of the well-known Italian dance, the passamezzo, hence its anglicized moniker “Passing Measures”.

 

THE MUSIC OF RAGTIME

In the late 1890s a new genre of piano music arose in the United States that combined the syncopations of African-American dance music with the formal proportions, orthodox harmonies, and rhythmic beat of a John Philip Sousa march. The almost comical pairing of a chuckling right-hand melody constantly bobbing in and out of synch with a straight-up oom-pah beat in the left produced a delightfully off-kilter, ‘ragged’ sense rhythm that gave the new genre its name: ragtime.

Being essentially a written genre, fully composed in score and distributed in sheet music, ragtime thrived in the period before the arrival of radio broadcasting. Gradually supplanted after WWI by a more improvised style of jazz, it experienced various nostalgic revivals, most prominently in the 1970s when Marvin Hamlisch’s score to the hit film The Sting (1973) re-popularized the music of Scott Joplin.

Stravinsky’s quirky-jerky Piano Rag Music (1919) is more cubist in inspiration, presenting characteristic fragments of the ragtime genre (syncopation, stride bass) in a succession of modular blocks with irregular metres and jagged angular melodic gestures until it settles down into an eerie ostinato-fuelled impression of a broken music-box. This is Picasso’s grand piano descending a staircase.

“You want syncopation? You can’t handle syncopation!” is what Paul Hindemith seems to be saying in his thuggishly muscular Ragtime, the last movement of his Suite 1922 composed in—well, guess the year. Creating a rat-a-tat sound-world that foretells the tumultuous final pages of Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata (1951), he suits up the ragtime genre as Robocop-on-Red-Bull, instructing the performer to “play this piece wildly, but always very strictly in rhythm, like a machine.” Be prepared to take cover.

Sunflower Slow Drag (1901) is a collaboration between Scott Joplin and his younger contemporary (and in-law) Scott Hayden. It displays many of the features of the classic piano rag, with a four-bar introduction and a syncopated melodic line alternating octaves and single notes, driven relentlessly onward by colourful chromatic inflections in the harmonic texture.

Conlon Nancarrow’s favourite musical structure was the canon, a fancy word for a round (think: Frère Jacques, Row, row, row your boat). He was especially fond of prolation canons, in which identical melodies run at different speeds, as in the second of his Canons for Ursula written in 1988 for the American pianist Ursula Oppens (b. 1944).

The 379 bars of this canon feature two voices percolating along at speeds in the ratio of 5:7 (this is not a piece for the math- challenged musician). The left hand enters first, at the “5” speed, followed by the right hand 69 bars later at a slightly peppier “7” rate of progress, dropping out 39 bars before the end, so that in this Pythagorean version of Aesop’s Tale of the Tortoise & the Hare, the hare wins, hands down.

American composer William Bolcom’s touchingly intimate Graceful Ghost Rag (1971) was written in memory of his father. With its unusual minor-key colouring and Brahmsian moderation of pace, it achieves an aching poignancy in a genre generally known for its upbeat mood and restless rhythmic bustle.

Donald Lambert was among the finest exponents of Harlem stride piano, with a southpaw savvy that left his fellow musicians agape in admiration. His uniquely personal 1941 arrangement of the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Wagner’s Tannhäuser accomplishes the impossible. It manages to replace that swelling in the breast, that urge to stand up and salute the flag that Wagner’s stirring anthem seldom fails to inspire, with the contrary urge to sit down, loosen your collar, and order a cocktail. There’s a reason why this piece comes just before the intermission.

 

Franz Joseph Haydn
Fantasia in C Major Hob. XVII:4

Haydn’s C major Fantasia (1789) is not only one of his most virtuosic piano works— with its runs in double thirds, octave glissandi, and volleys of Wimbledon-speed hand-crossings between registers—it is also one of his wittiest, as well. When not arpeggiating its way across vast swathes of the keyboard, it divides its time between a bouncy repeated-note motive as a first theme and a second thematic idea in cheery horn-fifths.

Structured as either a ‘rondo-ish’ sonata or a ‘sonata-ish’ rondo, it upsets formal expectations at every turn with quick dives down the rabbit hole into unexpected keys followed by surreptitious chromatic creepings back up to tonal ground zero. Its sudden and rapid changes of dynamics between forte and piano are the perfect dramatic foil for the work’s almost laughably long pauses, during which pianists of whatever degree of comedic gift will have only sidelong glances and Kabuki eyebrow theatre with which to keep their audiences enthralled.

 

Robert Schumann
Carnaval Op. 9

Robert Schumann’s kaleidoscopic mini-drama of scenes from a masked ball, composed in 1834, features a colourful cast of the real and imagined characters that dominated his personal and artistic life. There are stock characters from Commedia dell’ arte (Pierrot, Harlequin, Pantalone, Columbine), his two love-interests (Ernestine von Fricken & Clara Wieck), fellow musicians (Chopin & Paganini), and even the two sides of his own split personality (dreamy Eusebius & extrovert Florestan). Completing the line-up is the patriotic marching band of the Davidsbund (League of David), the youthful defenders of ‘real art’ and sworn enemies of fossilized musical culture.

Cleverly woven into the score are cryptographic clues equating alphabetic letters with the names of musical notes (in German notation). Thus Asch (Ernestine’s home town) is spelt out in the pitches A-Eb-C-B, and the composer’s own name, S-C-H-um-A- nn is represented by Eb-C-B-A.

As we enter the ballroom we hear the Préambule’s proud fanfare, followed by the sounds of bustling guests, fragmentary waltzes, and the breathless excitement of the masked revellers. The first character we meet is Pierrot, the sad clown. His downcast mood is rendered in chromatic wanderings regularly interrupted by a jolting three-note figure as he perhaps keeps stubbing his toe. The nimble Arlequin (Harlequin) then enters with a display of ac- robatic leaps and comic tumbles until the time comes for the first waltz, a Valse noble, grandiloquent and gracious by turns.

But who is that standing off in the corner? It’s Eusebius, languorously musing to himself—until his flip-side, the passionately sociable Florestan, emerges talking a mile a minute of this and that, ever the charmer. A Coquette flirts into view, her fan all a-flutter, tossing her head back as she fills the room with coy laughter. Ah, now a suitor has pulled her aside with his Réplique (reply) to her provocative glances, pleading his amorous attentions against the backdrop of her silvery laugh.

Meanwhile the Papillons (butterflies, i.e., revellers) are whirling about the room at breakneck speed. Even the letters ASCH— SCHA begin to dance out their cryptic messages, until Chiarina (Clara) strides imperiously into view with a grave and haughty waltz. Chopin takes to the keyboard to restore calm with an achingly poetic melody over swimming arpeggios, but then Estrella (Ernestine) makes her entrance, setting the room a-boil once again. The heart of every swain is now set beating at the thought of winning her Reconnaissance (acknowledgement).

But what’s this? The lecherous old Pantalon and Columbine, Pierrot’s girlfriend, are playing out a comic scene. Why is he chasing her around that table? No matter, a seductive Valse allemande (German waltz) draws everyone to the dance floor, interrupted briefly by Paganini who offers an impromptu display of his dazzling pizzicato technique before the waltz returns. Meanwhile, sitting apart, a suitor whispers his intimate Aveu (confession of love) to a young woman, who very much likes what she is hearing.

Whew! What a press of people. Time for a Promenade out in the garden for a bit of people-watching amid the curious who stroll and the stand-offish who strut. But a commotion breaks out during a Pause in the dancing. In comes the paramilitary youth wing of the League of David in a Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins, to the spluttering dismay of the Old Fogey faction, stung at being labelled “Philistines”. They quickly get the orchestra’s bass players to strike up the dusty old Grandfather’s Dance that traditionally ends such festivities—a tune simultaneously being parodied by these impudent youngsters in the treble—but to no avail. The upstarts want the ball to end musically as it began, with the music of the Préambule, and they get their way, triumphant to the end.

Donald G. Gislason 2015

 

 

Program notes: Maximilian Hornung & Benjamin Engeli

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Robert Schumann
Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102

Long before Martha Stewart made middle-class home furnishings a “thing,” the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) ushered in a bourgeois age of cozy home interiors that celebrated domestic family life and gave music a prominent place within it. Biedermeier Europe enjoyed the blessings of peace after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 much as the Eisenhower era did in North America after WWII. But instead of washers, dryers, and TV sets, the European ‘mod con’ most in demand was the piano, an instrument that afforded middle-class families the luxury of home music-making once reserved for the wealthier classes.

As a consequence, the market for Hausmusik (music for amateur performance by small ensembles in the home) expanded considerably. This market had its peaks of refinement in the works of Schubert and Mendelssohn, and its valleys of vulgarity in the variations and potpourris of lesser composers, as annoyingly popular in Biedermeier drawing rooms as YouTube cat videos on computer screens today.

Robert Schumann, after spending the 1830s composing solo piano music exclusively, made up for lost time at the end of the 1840s with a bumper crop of Hausmusik including his Five Pieces in Popular Style (1849), his only work for cello and piano. The simple “popular style” (Volkston) of these pieces is evident in their simple three-part (A-B-A) form, their strongly profiled melodies with little emphasis on development, and in their prominent use of drone tones in the bass.

Schumann was not engaged in a form of musical “slumming” by evoking the musical idiom of the rural countryside. This was not Dolly Parton arranged for chamber ensemble. For him, the folk music of a nation was emblematic of its very soul, providing a bulwark against the cheapening of musical taste that “fashionable” music threatened to enact on an unschooled public. Hence, the codas of these pieces reveal flashes of sophistication that see them end more artfully than they began.

The first is entitled Vanitas vanitatum (from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”) and is likely a humorous depiction of the drunken one-legged soldier in Goethe’s well-known poem of the same name. It has a heavy peasant swing to it but, like many an engaging tippler, is not without occasional touches of sly whimsy.

The drowsy second piece may make you yawn. Its long-held bass drone foreshadows Brahms’ famous lullaby. The third begins with an aura of mystery, its ‘sombre waltz’ opening yielding to more lyrical effusions remarkable for the high register of the cello in which they are set, and for the use of double stops in 6ths.

The fourth piece alternates between a nostril-expanding march and an equally breast-swelling lyricism while the fifth, the least ‘amateur’ and most developed of the set, pairs a piano part full of scampering double thirds with a wide-ranging and restless cello line of steely determination and wilful exuberance.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata for Cello and Piano in A major, Op. 69

The furrowed brow of care is nowhere to be found in this remarkably sunny and serenely confident sonata from Beethoven’s middle period. Composed between 1806 and 1808, it overlaps the composer’s work on the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies yet evinces none of the disruptive tumult of the celebrated C minor Symphony nor the wondrous, walk-in-the-woods pictorialism of the Pastorale. It seems perfectly content to live in its own world, a world characterized by an almost Mozartean sense of balance and equilibrium: between formal sections, between instrumental entries, and between the motivic units used to construct each phrase.

Consider the opening. A rhythmically tranquil theme, beginning with a rising 5th, is presented by the solo cello in the manner of a fugue subject, its balanced mix of open and stepwise intervals symmetrically arranged on either side of the home-key note of A. This gesture then finds the perfect continuation of its thoughts in the luxuriantly relaxed and songful reply of the piano that drifts as high in its register as the cello ended low.

The second theme of the movement is similarly tongue-in-groove with the aforementioned, being a mirror image of the opening theme, inverting its rising interval to a pair of falling intervals with the same rhythmic imprint. And throughout it all, cello and piano bask in a honeymoon of mutual admiration and support, even when touring through quite a bit of minor-mode drama and Italian-style pathos in the development section.

The second movement scherzo makes up for the first movement’s overall stability of pulse with a serving of jumpy syncopations and offbeat accents, enlivened by a large helping of contrapuntal side-chatter and imitative cross-talk. The two appearances of the movement’s much-less-skittish trio provide a measure of relief from the twitching, but in the end, even they get caught up in the general mêlée.

The third movement Adagio cantabile holds more surprises in store, however. Like a marathon runner who smiles at the press at the starting gun and then, after rounding the first turn, takes a cab to the finish line, this movement calls it quits after a mere 18 bars of lyrical reflection, proceeding directly to the last movement.

Cellist Leonard Rose thought this regrettable, but Glenn Gould saw it as part of an emerging pattern in Beethoven’s later works: a tendency to break down the walls between movements, to write sonatas as a single continuous thought:

It’s almost as if he wanted to write on one plane and one plane only, that of an allegro mood from beginning to end… to make things all of a piece.

Whatever the reason, the Allegro vivace last movement, in sonata form, is as toe- tapping a finale as could be imagined, its chuckling good humour kept bubbling by an almost constant 8th-note patter in the piano. And because this sonata lives in a thematic hall of mirrors, its main theme is an inversion of the piano’s delicious opening phrase in the first movement.

 

Leoš Janáček
Pohádka for Cello and Piano

Leoš Janáček is a one-off in music history. His is a voice of visionary ecstatic utterances, of mysterious murmurings evoking the folk music of his Moravian heritage, all tinged with the blurry soft hum of its favourite instrument, the cimbalom. As American conductor Kenneth Woods puts it:

Janáček comes from nowhere and leads to no one. There is simply no music before or after Janáček that sounds like his. His music is infinitely easy to recognize and completely impossible to replicate.

Janáček was fascinated by the study of speech rhythms and his music, while often misty and atmospheric, is strongly imprinted with the rhythm of the human voice. Utterly indifferent to the compositional conventions of his time, he creates his textures out of short bursts of melody that shimmer with sudden changes of modal colouring. These build to powerful emotional climaxes by the repetition of ostinato fragments that rarely seem to start on the strong beats of the bar.

Janáček’s Fairy Tale (Pohádka) for cello and piano dates from 1910, and after numerous revisions, reached its final form in 1923. Like much of his instrumental music, this three-movement work is programmatic, loosely based on scenes from The Tale of Tsar Berendyey by the Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852).

While the story is long and convoluted, the gist is that the handsome young Tsarevitch, Prince Ivan, has had his soul promised to the King of the Underworld, Kashchei, but on mature consideration decides that he would much rather run away with the grumpy King’s fetching young daughter, Maria, a decision which leads to an adventure-filled chase over hill and dale until the two lovers finally reach safety and live happily ever after.

Just how Janáček’s score relates to the events of the tale is not really clear, but many interpreters see the cello in the role of the young prince, with his signature dotted- rhythm motif announced at the outset, and the piano as Maria. Steven Isserlis offers a very suggestive version of how the music illustrates the story, as follows.

The first movement, he says, opens with the dreamy setting of a magical lake where Ivan and Maria first meet. Enraptured by each other’s company, they fall into a love duet, but then big bad Kashchei arrives and they have to escape to the pounding of horses’ hooves.

The second movement is full of magic. In a nearby palace Ivan gets a spell put on him so he will fall in love with someone else and in a fit of pique Maria turns into a blue flower, prompting an achingly lyrical outpouring in the middle section. But a magician who does house calls finally releases them both and they rejoice in their good fortune in each other’s arms throughout the final movement.

 

Richard Strauss
Sonata for Cello and Piano in F major Op. 6

While some people’s children are perfectly content to play in the mud for as long as the sun shines each day, taking only small breaks to tip over a vase or torture the household cat, others—the young Richard Strauss comes instantly to mind—prefer to while away their infant hours composing German lieder or small character pieces for piano, commensurate with their limited handspan on the keyboard.

To say that the composer of Til Eulenspiegel and Der Rosenkavalier was a prodigy is to state the obvious. Reportedly able to read musical scores before he could decipher the alphabet, Richard Strauss began his ‘mature’ period as a composer at an age when most of us were preparing for the high school prom. His Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 6 was begun when he was only 17 and completed two years later in 1883.

It is a radiantly confident work marked by boundless exuberance, passionate lyrical intensity, and no mean degree of compositional skill, its phrases driven forward with an irresistible harmonic momentum, parcelled out with consummate formal mastery. The cellist encounters a score extending over the entire range of his instrument while any pianist with a hand smaller than a catcher’s mitt will need to arpeggiate many of the work’s Brahmsian left-hand chords.

The first movement Allegro con brio opens the work with a heroic introduction leading to a first theme of rhapsodic sweep beginning high on the fingerboard over an undulating piano accompaniment, and this is followed by a sombre second theme, just as passionate, rising up from the lowest string. The development section percolates along, bubbling with imitative motivic play, until unable to hold off the urge to burst into a full-on fugato. Call this boy a show-off if you will, but he sure can write imitative counterpoint.

The second movement Andante ma non troppo is a richly hued but dark collection of ruminative melodies over which the lyrical spirit of Mendelssohn hovers benevolently, as it does over the Allegro vivo finale, with its mixture of coy drawing-room coquettishness and scherzo scamper.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

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