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Program Notes: Sir András Schiff performs the Goldberg Variations

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Bach’s Clavier-Übung  (1726-1741)

The works on this evening’s recital are selected from Bach’s collection of keyboard pieces published in four parts between 1726 and 1741 under the collective title Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercise). In this collection Bach systematically lays out for amateur and professional keyboard-players alike his mastery of the genres, compositional techniques, and national styles used in the keyboard music of his time.

Bach’s self-financed publishing project from the first half of the 18th century has much in common with the promotional strategies of contemporary musicians today who establish a YouTube channel to make their music more widely known, to establish their ‘brand’ in the mind of the public, and to ‘monetize’ their talents in the wider marketplace.

This evening’s recital presents the second and fourth instalments of Bach’s Clavier-Übung series. Part II explores the national styles of France and Italy in the Overture in French Style and Italian Concerto. Part IV gives us a monumentally exhaustive exploration of the variation form in the celebrated Goldberg Variations.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach
Italian Concerto in F major  BWV 971

Baroque music was all about national styles and Bach learned the Italian style by copying out and transcribing the works of composers such as Vivaldi, Albinoni and Torelli during his early years of employment in Weimar (1708-1717). It was this knowledge that he applied in composing his Concerto nach Italienischem Gusto (Concerto after the Italian Taste) included in the second part of his Clavier-Übung published in 1735.

To compose a concerto meant reproducing in some way the textural contrast between the solo instrument (or instruments) and the orchestral tutti on which the ritornello form of the Italian concerto relied for its forward progress. It was for this reason that Clavier-Übung II was written exclusively for the two-manual harpsichord with its possibility of creating dynamic contrasts by means of hopping up and down between keyboards. This could be done with both hands at once, or one hand at a time, allowing for a wide range of effects to be achieved.

The two protagonists in Bach’s Italian Concerto are clearly audible in the first movement, in which the ‘orchestra’ which opens the movement is given a fuller more resonant texture by dint of block chords and a wider range in the bass while the part of the ‘soloist’ is written in a smaller range, higher up, peppered with smaller note values and occasional ornamentation.

The distinction is even clearer still in the slow movement in which the role of the ‘orchestra’ is given entirely to the left hand, its ostinato pattern of repeated thirds and long pedal notes a strangely austere accompaniment to a right hand ‘soloist’ spinning out long strands of highly ornamented melody.

The Presto finale returns to the ritornello form of alternation between the louder, fuller texture of the ‘orchestra,’ obsessed with its dramatic octave leap downwards and swift follow-up run, in continual dialogue with a more nimble ‘soloist’ more occupied with broken chord passagework and harmonic sequences.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach
Overture in French Style in B minor  BWV 831

The 11-movement Overture in French Style from Clavier-Übung II counts as the longest suite that Bach ever wrote. Beefing up its imposing heft is the grand and imposing French overture movement that opens the work and gives it its name. Brilliantly encrusted with the bright ornamental flourishes that characterize the French school of harpsichord playing, the French overture lurches between chordal ‘poses’ in a jerky sequence of dotted and double-dotted rhythms, linked together by exhilarating run-ups and other fast-darting upbeat embellishments. The tone is one of pomp and grandeur that then yields to the more animated and playful—but learned—texture of its fugal middle section. Bach adds weight to the movement as a whole by repeating this middle section and its following reprise of the opening material.

The 10 dance movements that follow are comparatively slender by comparison, but remarkable for their variety of moods and their sheer number. Each is in binary form, comprising two roughly equal halves. Repeats of each half allow the performer scope to vary the performance on a second run-through and tastefully ‘riff’ on the printed score. Additional opportunities for varied repetition come in the ‘double dances,’ the passepieds, gavottes and bourées, which appear in contrasting pairs, the second dance acting as a kind of ‘middle section’ between the presentation of the first dance and its reprise at the end.

Needless to say, these are not pieces meant to accompany dancing but rather imaginative recreations of these dance genres that reproduce the general character and identifying rhythmic signature of each. That said, the dancelike quality of the slower more serious dances can be hard to discern beneath the thick contrapuntal weave of polyphonic conversation in which they are set. This is especially true of the flowing but irregularly phrased Courante and the harmonically rich but melodically wayward Sarabande.

A more toe-tapping pulse and regularity of phrase structure is generally to be found in the ‘double dances,’ and especially in the light skipping steps of what would normally be the final piece in the set, the Gigue. But Bach gives us a bonus piece to close off this suite, a strutting and punchy Echo intended to tickle the ear with rapid-fire alternations of soft and loud ‘echo’ effects.

These were to be created by means of daring leaps between the two keyboards of the dual-manual harpsichord for which this suite was written. But given that the modern concert grand has only one keyboard, contemporary audiences will have to use their imaginations to experience the dare-devil, Cirque du Soleil thrill of the acrobatic ending that Bach had in mind for the performers of his day.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach
Goldberg Variations  BWV 988

Bach’s Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen vors Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen was published in 1741 as the final instalment of his Clavier-Übung series of keyboard works. This monumental exploration of the variation form ranks as the largest single keyboard composition published in the 18th century, in which Bach displays his command not only of the popular musical styles of his day, but also of the most advanced virtuoso techniques for playing the harpsichord, not to mention his genius in the arcane skill of writing canons at any given interval.

After its publication, a change in musical taste toward simpler, more transparent textures meant that the Goldberg Variations were largely forgotten, although Beethoven appears aware of them when composing his Diabelli Variations and Brahms his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. They entered the 20th century as the privileged domain of the feathery flock of harpsichordists, with Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), who first recorded the set in 1933, as Mother Hen to the brood.

For big-name pianists, though, the scaled-down, intellectually concentrated sound world of the Goldberg Variations, with their ‘sewing machine’ rhythms, probing explorations of chromatic harmony and awkward hand-crossings, was considered too ‘antiquarian’, too ‘esoteric’ for the piano repertoire. Until June 1955, that is, when a 22-year-old Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, walked into the New York studios of Columbia Records to record his debut album—an album that became one of the best-selling classical albums of all time.

What Glenn Gould revealed, in a career bookended by his landmark recordings of the Goldberg Variations, was the emotional richness and feverish excitement that lay hidden in this much-neglected work. Like an art-restorer cleansing the Sistine Chapel of the grime and haze that had built up over centuries, in his 1955 recording Gould brought to a public inured to the warmly pedalled sound of Romantic piano music a dazzling clarity of texture and kaleidoscopic range of tone colours, accomplished by the fingers alone. In his 1981 recording, in which the tempo of each variation is regulated by a “constant rhythmic reference point,” he revealed the intellectual depth of the work, and the breadth of interpretive possibilities which it offers to the performing pianist.

Glenn Gould single-handedly placed Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the standard repertoire – and not only of the piano. According to the Goldberg Variations Discography website, since 1955 there have been more than 600 recordings made of the Goldbergs, including versions for organ, for string trio and for saxophone quartet. While performance by a historically informed recorder ensemble would no longer be a novelty, a breathless world has still not heard this work on kazoos or in car commercials. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.

The Aria

The theme that Bach wrote for his variations is a sarabande tendre, identified by its stately rhythmic profile, recurring emphasis on the second beat of bar, and highly expressive style. Floridly ornamented in the French manner, its 32 measures unfold in the traditional two-part form of a dance movement, with each half repeated. These repeated sections, as in a dance suite, provide an opportunity for the performer to vary the performance by means of changes in dynamics, articulation and ornamentation.

The harmonic rhythm of the Aria is deliberately slow, one chord to the bar, which allows for maximum freedom in spinning out a wide variety of variations, since these are based not on the melodic content of the Aria, but rather on its bass-line and underlying harmonies, in the manner of a chaconne.

The Variations

There is a large-scale symmetry in the way that Bach arranges his variations. First of all, the set is rounded out by the Aria’s appearance both at the beginning and at the conclusion of the work. Secondly, the set divides evenly into two halves. The first half ends on an enigmatic open 5th at the conclusion of the plaintive Variation 15. The second half begins anew, with a bang, on a robust G-major chord that begins the No. 16 French overture variation. (Many a performance will see a pause inserted at this juncture, emphasizing the contrast between the two halves of the work.)

Thirdly, the 30 variations are organized into ten groups of three, each group containing: (1) a dance or genre piece, (2) a virtuoso display piece, bright in mood, and most often featuring a number of hand-crossings, and (3) a two-voice canon, which is to say a round, in which a melody is accompanied by itself, entering a set number of beats after its initial appearance, and beginning a set interval above its initial note. In keeping with Bach’s systematic approach, these canons, spaced out every three variations, begin at the unison and progress to the ninth in Variation 27 (the only canon not accompanied by a running bass line by way of harmonic support). Such a layout ensures variety in the succession of variations, and is aided by the extraordinarily wide range of meters used:  3/4, 2/4, 6/8, 12/8, 9/8 etc. There is even one variation, No. 26, in which one hand plays in 3/4 while the other is in 18/16.

The display-oriented virtuoso variations feature two kinds of hand-crossing: the Italian type, à la Scarlatti, in which one hand crosses over and above the other to catch a note perilously distant from its home turf (e.g., Variations 5 and 14); and the French type, à la Couperin, in which the running melodic lines of the two hands cross over each other in the same patch of keyboard terrain, risking a digital derailment of both (e.g., Variations 8 and 11). The latter are usually indicated by Bach as being played on both manuals of the harpsichord, but alas! such an expedient is not available to the struggling pianist.

The inclusion of canon variations helps to mask the recurring regularity of the Aria’s four-bar phrases and ground bass, repeated in various degrees of elaboration in each variation. Moreover, the canons are not always straightforward rounds. Variations 12 and 15 each feature a canon inversus, in which the leading voice is accompanied by itself – turned upside down!

The emotional heart of the work comes in Variation 25 in the minor mode, described by Wanda Landowska as the work’s “crown of thorns.” At an Adagio tempo, it is the longest of the set, although it has the same number of measures as the other variations. Its extraordinary expressiveness and aching beauty derive from the combination of its plangent melodic leaps, agonizing chromaticisms and halting syncopations.

After this variation begins a build-up in energy as the work races towards its climax, with sonorous written-out trills invading the inner voices of Variation 28 and hammering fists of chords chopping between the hands in Variation 29.

The Quodlibet & Aria da capo

According to the pattern already established, one would expect a canon at the 10th in Variation 30, but here Bach surprises us with musical joke, a quodlibet (Latin for “what you please”) that fits two popular ditties into the harmonic scheme of the Aria.

The two overlapping folk tunes that Bach shoe-horns into service over the ground bass of his Aria are the urgent love lyric Ich bin solang nicht bei dir g’west, ruck her, ruck her (I have been away from you so long, come here, come here) and the anti-vegetarian anthem Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben, hätt mein’ Mutter Fleisch gekocht, wär ich länger blieben (Cabbage and turnips have driven me away, had my mother cooked meat, I would have stayed longer).

Coming just before the end of the work, there is something of the chorale in this final variation, something good-natured and healing that gathers all hearts in song, as at the end of a church cantata or Lutheran religious service, to which the final Aria da capo provides a contemplative and serene postlude.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih

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Reynaldo Hahn
Variations chantantes sur un air ancien

The Venezuelan-born French composer Reynaldo Hahn is best known for his contribution to the French song repertoire with his more than 100 mélodies published between 1890 and his death in 1947. He is equally well known as the sometime romantic partner of writer Marcel Proust, whose epic novel À la recherche du temps perdu paints in perfumed prose the social rituals and creeping decadence of a society ripe with elegance but rapidly approaching its best-before date.

Hahn was a perfect fit for this Proustian Parisian world of the Belle Époque (1871-1914).  His musical aesthetic was refined, but conservative and essentially backward-looking, especially in matters of harmony.

Witness his 1905 Variations chantantes sur un air ancien (Singing variations on an ancient air), which exhibit not even a whiff of modernism and could easily have been composed 50 years earlier. Situated in the rear-guard of musical developments of the time, this work offers no hint of the colourful dissonances and convulsive rhythms that within a few years would astonish Parisian audiences in the revolutionary ballets of Stravinsky: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).

Instead, Hahn reaches back for his musical inspiration to the 17th century, taking as his variation theme the aria Beato chi può (Blessed is he) from the opera Xerxes (1655) by Italian composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676). In Act IV scene 6 of Cavalli’s opera a high court official laments the tiresome rituals and constant intrigues of the Persian court and longs for a simpler life of ease and pleasure.

In keeping with the original operatic setting, Hahn’s Variations chantantes begin in an elegiac mood with a melody of dignified beauty lyrically sung out by the cello, a melody both courtly and sentimental. This theme remains clearly recognizable throughout the variations that follow, merely decorated with simple melodic filigree or slightly altered in rhythm.

Two musical motives from the original aria are highlighted throughout: an expression of longing conveyed by numerous two-note sigh motives, and the expectation of happier times in an oft-repeated four-note rising scale figure shared by cello and piano alike.

*                      *                      *

Steven Isserlis relates in a press interview that while he had long been aware of this work, he was unable to find a printed copy of the score for many years. Until, that is, “after a world-wide search” he discovered it close to home in the library of London’s Royal College of Music, where he discovered as well “that he was the first to borrow it in seventy years!”

 

Gabriel Fauré
Sonata No. 2 in G minor  Op. 117

Gabriel Fauré is a composer of what the French would call ‘discreet charm’. His discretion, composition-wise, is easy to spot in his Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano, composed in 1921 near the end of his life. The work features the pared-down style typical of late Fauré, a style in which there are fewer things for the ear to keep track of while listening.

The texture, for one thing, is simple and transparent, the emphasis being on single-line melodies in both instruments, with few multiple-stops in the cello or thick chordal sonorities in the piano. The rhythmic patterning is relatively bland, with large sections proceeding at a steady underlying pulse, meaning that the major ‘action’ in the piece happens in the shifting shades of its pastel harmonies and the subtle chromatic inflections of its melodic lines.

Providing a steely underpinning to this work’s unruffled sonic surface is a surprising degree of academic rigour – not surprising from this Paris Conservatoire professor who counted Ravel, Enescu and Nadia Boulanger among his students.

The first movement Allegro, for example, begins with a simple scalar theme in canon between cello and piano, a theme rendered all the more intriguing by its many syncopations. A second theme, of considerably emotional warmth, is introduced in octaves by the piano, structured in a series of descending 3rds. The development section draws its urgency from its many chromatically climbing lines but issues into the recapitulation so ‘discreetly’ that you barely notice it’s happening until it is well underway. Hint: it’s the cello that introduces the canon this time, reversing the order of entry in the exposition.

The Andante slow movement is the star attraction of this sonata, having provided its creative impetus in the first place. You see, in 1921 Fauré had been commissioned by the French government to compose a funeral march for a commemorative service at Les Invalides in Paris marking the 100th anniversary of the death of the Emperor Napoleon. Unwilling to let this chant funéraire become a one-day wonder, Fauré re-used it in this slow movement, girding it in full chords in the piano part in imitation of the orchestral scoring of its first performance. Fauré’s chamber version retains the solemn character of the original setting with a slow trodding accompaniment in steady quarter notes accompanying a melody line expressing downcast grief and noble resignation with its many falling 5ths.

A lighter mood springs out of the Allegro vivo finale which features two contrasting themes. The first presents a polite disagreement between the instruments as to whether the melody should go up or go down. The piano keeps presenting rising melodic material while the cello insists that descending scale patterns are the way to go. But just as they are about to reach agreement on the matter, a four-voice harmonized chorale-like melody comes to the fore to change the subject. As these two themes are discussed throughout the movement a kaleidoscopic series of modulations keeps the conversation colourful.

 

Thomas Adès
Lieux retrouvés

Thomas Adès must surely rank as Britain’s leading contemporary composer, and one of its most imaginative – ever. This contention is amply demonstrated by his tour-de-force Lieux retrouvés, written for Steven Isserlis in 2009 as a co-commission from the Wigmore Hall, the Aldeburgh Festival and Carnegie Hall.

Adès is a great fan of Marcel Proust, whose perfumed prose captured like no other French writer the essence of moments in time and places visited. Each of the four movements of Lieux retrouvés (places rediscovered) conjures up in Proustian style an authentic sense of place, to create a concert piece that Steven Isserlis readily admits is one of the most technically challenging he has ever attempted.

This work has garnered the unstinting praise of critics such as Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, who wrote: “The purely musical elements of the work are what grabbed me: the rippling figures for piano and cello that spin out in crazed, cyclic riffs; the crystalline piano harmonies that sound as if wind were rustling the chimes in a pagoda; the feisty, industrialized propulsive bursts in the finale.” (New York Times, 21 March 2010)

Steven Isserlis describes it this way: “What can one say about this extraordinary work? Not only can Adès’s work as a whole not be categorized, even this piece cannot be pigeon-holed in any way. He takes influences from everywhere—from Offenbach, from jazz, from the French baroque, even from minimalism—and creates his own individual language within this one composition.”

Thomas Adès describes the work as follows:

“Les Eaux. The movement of the waters is recreated in flexible fluid counterpoint which eddies and flows according to how each line responds to the other current, whether in similar forward motion or opposition, or swirling around, or inside, an obstacle.

“La Montagne. In three parts: first, a harmonized tune marked “Tempo di Promenade”, presented in canon with itself at two different speeds. Then, a Ländler-trio with a new tune. Finally, the return of the Promenade tune of the first part, also eventually in canon, with the trio tune superimposed. There is a short coda of mountain air and then a flag is planted in A major.

“Les Champs. Slow movement.”

To which Steven Isserlis adds: “The slow movement takes us to a peaceful field at night, the animals at rest, their breath rising to heaven – rather riskily represented by the highest notes I’ve ever had to play lyrically.

Thomas Adès continues:

“La Ville – Cancan Macabre. Liszt wrote a marvellous late piano piece called Czárdás Macabre. This however is a galop, taking the most famous galop – Offenbach’s Cancan – as a model. There is also a Trio section, entirely in a high register.”

 

Robert Schumann
Adagio and Allegro  Op. 70

Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro Op. 70 was written in 1849, and for horn, not for cello. Intended as a piece of Hausmusik (art music written to be performed in a domestic setting by amateur performers), it sought to take advantage of recent advances in instrument design that had allowed the horn to play in precise semitone steps by the use of valves.  This, of course, is not a problem for the cello, violin or oboe, which are listed on the title page of published scores as alternate instruments for the piece.

Marked Langsam, mit innigem Ausdruck (slowly, with intimate expression) the Adagio is written in the sentimental Biedermeyer style of the period, with numerous languid sigh motives built into the melodic line and a frequent exchange of loving phrases between the instruments.

The love-fest gets an abrupt wake-up call, however, when the Allegro breaks out, marked Rasch und feurig (fast and fiery). Here the cello has its work cut out for it to reproduce the piercing fanfare timbre of the horn. But Schumann’s scoring of the piano part allows the solo instrument to shine when it needs to while providing a palette of rich harmonic support rising up from the bass regions of the keyboard. This is especially true in the contrasting middle section where the solo instrument gets to sing out in its mid-range as it recalls the introspective mood and tender tone of the opening Adagio.

 

Johannes Brahms
Sonata No. 2 in F major  Op. 99

The Sonata in F major Op. 99 is an adventurous work combining the restless energy characteristic of the young Brahms with the lyrical luxuriance of the composer in his mature years. Composed in the summer of 1886 while the 53-year-old Brahms was vacationing in the Swiss countryside, it breathes the clean fresh air of the mountain slopes and often echoes with hints of rural folksong. The sound palette is full and resonant, especially the piano part, which is written with a symphonic sonority in mind.

This is especially true of the orchestral sweep that characterizes the sonata’s opening, with its rich carpet of tremolando figuration in the piano supporting bold fanfares in the cello line, a melody line that seems to be shouting important news in all directions, like a town crier. The second theme, announced by the piano, is by contrast a more smoothly connected melody. The tremolo figuration of the opening is not just sonic filler: it functions as a stabilizing counterfoil to the disjointed character of the sweeping opening theme and plays a major role at the opening of the development section as well. Especially noteworthy in this movement is the magical passage that prepares the recapitulation, a passage in which time seems to stands still as the cello plays tremolo while the piano enacts great leaps from the bottom of the keyboard to the top.

The Adagio affetuoso second movement in simple ternary form carries the major emotional weight of this work. It opens with a procession-like tune in the piano setting the scene for the cello to emerge in full-throated glory, singing out a richly chromatic but ever-so-lyrical melody that shows off the instrument to advantage in its high range. A middle section in the minor mode gives the piano a place in the sun, as well, but the pool of light on the stage in this movement goes to the cello, which returns in the third section to wax lyrical once again, enveloped by an even more lavishly decorative piano accompaniment.

If the second movement belongs to the cello, the propulsive energy of the following Allegro passionato scherzo is driven by strongly assertive piano writing. Cresting and subsiding in waves of sound, the opening section builds up sound resonance through the frequent use of pedal tones in the bass combined with a constant chatter of eighth-note motion above. Adding to the intensity of effect are the typical Brahmsian techniques of 2-against-3 rhythms, and syncopations that recall the opening of the scherzo from the composer’s Quintet in F minor. Where the cello emerges more clearly is in the trio middle section, in which it hums a wistful melody configured in simple note values. Its irregular phrase lengths suggest the influence of folksong, but a number of odd melodic turns indicate that it has more on its mind than it is letting on.

The sonata ends with a fourth movement rondo much in the relaxed vein of the last movement of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83. Gentle and tuneful, its principal theme alternates with a short series of contrasting episodes, none of which spoils the overall mood of contentment that characterizes the movement as a whole.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Filippo Gorini

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Johann Sebastian Bach
The Art of Fugue  BWV 1080

By the 1740s Bach had largely withdrawn from composing new church music for Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, devoting his creative energies instead to a series of large-scale projects that responded more directly to his own personal and professional interests. These monumental works were encyclopedic in scope, systematic in design, and concentrated in focus.

That focus was the practice of canon and fugue, the two most intellectually challenging musical genres of his time.

The year 1744, for example, saw the publication of the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a companion to the first book of 1722, both sets of which made the case for equal temperament in keyboard tuning by providing a collection of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys. Each of the 48 individual fugues in this two-volume work was composed with its own individual fugue subject, demonstrating, as Bach surely intended, the wide variety of theme types to which fugal procedure could be applied.

Most of the other major works from this decade take the inverse approach, showing the variety of contrapuntal techniques that can be applied to a single theme or motive.  These ‘monothematic’ works include the Goldberg Variations (1741), the Musical Offering (1747) and the Canonic Variations on ‘Von Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her’ (1747).

But crowning this series of learned essays is Die Kunst der Fuge, a collection of 14 fugues and 4 canons that illustrate the range and variety of contrapuntal techniques available to the serious composer, from the elementary to the arcane. In the manuscript each fugue is labelled contrapunctus, in Latin, to enhance the magisterial authority of the project. The work was largely complete by 1742 but Bach continued to revise it and add movements throughout the decade, leaving it, at his death in 1750, with its final massive fugue incomplete. The manuscript was edited by his sons and published in 1751.

 

The Motto Theme

Running through The Art of Fugue is a theme of Bach’s own invention that acts as a kind of ‘motto’ for the work as a whole. The unique inner architecture of this theme is specifically designed to maximize the potential for ‘motivic echoes’ in whatever texture it appears.

Its triadic opening, affirming D minor as its stable tonal centre, sounds almost fanfare-like, enabling the theme to stand out in a multi-voice texture by virtue of its easily recognizable intervals: a rising 5th and two falling 3rds.

The remaining portion, however, presents the exact opposite, moving in scalar fashion, by step, to outline an unstable interval: the diminished 4th C#-F. This implied dissonance requires a resolution on the tonic (D) that arrives in the 5th bar.

In support of this harmonic resolution is an accelerating rhythmic pattern as the theme moves along – from half notes to quarter notes to 8th notes – providing a slingshot-like release of momentum driving the theme home to its conclusion.

Bach’s theme is a miniature masterpiece all on its own, but what he manages to do with it in The Art of Fugue is nothing less than miraculous.

 

The Simple Fugues:  I to IV

The Art of Fugue is organized so that the fugues presented illustrate fugal procedure in increasing order of intellectual and compositional complexity: from the simplest to the most intricate. The ‘simple’ fugues present the theme — called the subject in fugue parlance – in a texturally clear manner that allows it to stand out at every appearance. In the simple fugues there is a clean division between single entries of the theme and background contrapuntal detail, so that the ear is never confused as to what to listen for.

Contrapunctus I seems to emerge from the depths of time, its key of D minor evoking the austere severity of a work in the Dorian mode from centuries past. A persistent 8th-note rhythm soon comes to dominate its onward progress with lively interchanges between the voices in sequential repetition occurring frequently in the episodes, i.e., the sections in which the fugue subject is not sounding in the texture.

Contrapunctus II takes a stylistic turn towards France by adding a dotted rhythm to the subject, a clear reference to the French preference for instrumental pieces with a jaunty, dance-like character.

In Contrapunctus III the fugue subject appears in both its inverted and right-side-up forms. But the emotional character of this fugue is dominated by the slip-slide-y nature of its highly chromatic countersubject, the term for a secondary theme that accompanies the subject virtually every time it appears.

Contrapunctus IV uses the inverted form of the subject, combining it a constant stream of motivic chatter that merrily repeats two fragments of the original right-side-up version. The first comes from the four descending 8th notes at the tag-end of the original theme, the second from the falling 3rds of its opening triad – which in their sequential repetition many scholars have thought sound like cuckoo calls.

 

Canon alla ottava

Four two-voice canons are found in Bach’s The Art of Fugue, each based on some variation of the motto theme. Filippo Gorini has judiciously placed these canons on his program as ‘boundary markers’ to set off the five principal groupings of fugues in the work.

A canon, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply a round. Its answering voice, however, need not enter on precisely the same pitch as the leading voice, as it does in such round songs as “Frère Jacques” or “Row, row, row your boat.” Canons take their full technical name from the interval at which their answering voice does enter. “Frère Jacques” or “Row, row, row your boat,” then, would be referred to as all’ unisono (at the unison).

The first round in this work is alla ottava (at the octave) and it uses an elaborated version of the motto theme in which many single melody notes are transformed into triple 16ths while others are shortened into staccato 8ths. The resulting dance-like rhythm is almost gigue-like.

 

The Stretto Fugues: V to VII

In his second grouping of fugues Bach ups the intellectual ante a notch by introducing procedures that significantly increase the density of motivic reference in the fugal texture. He does this in two ways.

First, he introduces stretto, which is to say the close overlap of different voices singing out the same melody. The effect is like that of hearing a marching band playing a tune that echoes back from nearby buildings a beat or two later.

Second, he presents the fugue subject not just upside-down, i.e., inversion, as in previous fugues, but in augmentation (double note values) and diminution (half note values) as well. Being able to follow these various versions of the fugue subject presented at different time scales – often addressing the ear simultaneously – requires a degree of eyebrow-knitting concentration that not all listeners are born to achieve. Give yourself extra points if you notice how the opening statement of the subject in all three of these fugues is inverted in the answer.

Contrapunctus V uses a dotted-rhythm version of the motto theme with passing notes filling in many of its intervals. With all this passing motion the texture becomes creamy smooth but intensity builds up as the distance between overlapping entries in stretto is gradually reduced to a single beat.

Contrapunctus VI is another fugue in the French style, but not the French dance style. The abundance of heavily dotted rhythms, rushing 16th-note figures and ringing trills suggests more the pompous stop-and-go character of a classic Lullyan French overture. The same filled-in version of the subject is used as in the previous fugue, in both upright and inverted forms, both regularly paced and in diminution.

Contrapunctus VII is denser still in its tossed salad of motivic references, with the fugue subject working its way in plodding augmented note values from the bass all the way up to the soprano, in both right-side-up and inverted versions. There are virtually no episodes in this fugue since almost every bar is frothing, churning or gently burbling with some version of the subject.

 

Canon per augmentationem et in contrario motu

This canon sounds almost modern with its jagged melodic lines, ecstatic leaps and sudden chromatic detours. The contours of its two voices in canon are derived from the principal notes of the motto theme, but the answering voice is the inversion of the leading voice – in augmentation (!). This has the effect of making it sound like a ‘walking bass’ to the jazzy-sounding meanderings above.

Then, just to make things interesting, the two voices switch roles halfway through, the ‘walking bass’ becoming the ‘walking treble’ and the former soprano line going squirrelly in the nether regions of the keyboard.

 

The Multiple-Theme Fugues:  VIII to XI

Bach’s next step up in complexity is to write fugues with more than one principal theme, each theme getting its own exposition (the term for the opening section of a fugue in which all voices present the fugue subject in turn).

Contrapunctus VIII is a triple fugue, i.e., a fugue with three separate thematic subjects. The opening theme is full of open intervals, wandering chromatically to outline the melodic descent of an octave. The second, coming after a resolute cadence, is a whinging lament in continuous 8th notes clearly audible in the texture by virtue of its insistent rap-tap-tap of repeated notes. Finally a third subject, a segmented descendant of the motto theme, exhales into the texture like laboured breathing, three quarter notes at a time, with a rest on the first beat of each bar. These three subjects are introduced in successive expositions, after which they constantly bump into each other until, mirabile dictu (wondrous to report), they all get combined together at a final gathering of the clan to create a climactic ending.

Contrapunctus IX, by contrast, is a peppy double fugue with an opening fugue subject that begins with an octave leap, making it instantly recognizable in the texture. This is eventually paired with an augmented version of the motto theme to create a merry-go-round of toe-tapping excitement so infectious, that this fugue has even been recorded by the Swingle Singers.

A mood of calm reflection returns in the double fugue of Contrapunctus X, which opens with a theme in sighing three-note cells, as in Contrapunctus VIII, and which later encounter a dotted version of the motto theme with filled-in passing notes. A small number of motives is presented in a seemingly endless variety of guises, unfolding in a constant flow of varied melodic lines.

The mighty triple fugue of Contrapunctus XI uses the same three subjects as animated Contrapunctus VIII, presenting them first in their inverted form and then in their original upright versions. But the emotional character of this fugue is much different, more profoundly searching in its advanced chromaticism, a chromaticism that seems to be reaching out to the furthest edges of the sound world.

 

Canon alla duodecima, in contrapunto alla quinta

This canon bubbles over with ear-tickling rhythmic effervescence, presenting an elaborated version of the original motto theme  constructed out of roiling sextuplets that alternate with duple-value 8ths. The interval of a falling diminished 7th adds rhetorical drama to the melodic line.

 

The Mirror Fugues

Not content to have merely created two separate fugues in Contrapunctus VIII and Contrapunctus XI from the original and inverted forms of the same fugue subjects, Bach sets himself the challenge of writing pairs of single-subject fugues in which not just the fugue subjects but all the individual voices, and the textures as a whole, are exact mirror images of each other.

So the bass line in the first fugue of each pair become the soprano line of the matching second fugue, but with its intervals inverted, and similarly with the tenor and alto lines.  The vocal lines and the textures they embody perform this switch in the middle of each so-called “mirror” fugue.

Contrapunctus XII preserves the melodic shape of the original fugue subject exactly, but puts it in triple meter to create a gently lilting rhythmic feel in both fugues of the pair.

Contrapunctus XIII alters the theme considerably with filled-in triplet 8th notes and a perky octave leap, that combined with this fugue’s pervasive dotted rhythms makes you actually forget what a dazzling intellectual feat is unfolding in your ear.

 

Canon alla decima, in contrapunto alla terza

The appeal of this utterly charming canon lies in its simplicity and easy-to-follow melodic lines, which mix long notes with innocently swaying triplet 8ths. Bach seems to depart from his austere pose as the learned composer of intellectually rigorous textures by offering the performer a bit of freedom at the final cadence with the indication cadenza – an invitation for the performer to improvise a bit of fancy fingerwork of his own to end the piece in style.

 

The Last Fugue

Bach’s final fugue in this series remained unfinished at his death in 1750 and the specifics of its overall architecture have been the subject of debate amongst Bach scholars. Given the systematic increase in intellectual complexity and contrapuntal skill demonstrated in successive groups of fugues as the work progresses, it is reasonable to assume that this 14th fugue was meant to crown the set by displaying Bach’s absolute mastery of the form in some way.  But how?

The answer seems to lie in the three themes that Bach chose for this multiple-subject fugue, themes that sum up in one final work the different styles of melody presented so far and the emotional characters they evoke.

The first subject is a near relative of the motto theme, concentrating in long note values on the principal tones of the D minor triad. Proceeding at an even quarter-note pace, it recalls the austere mood of Contrapunctus I.

The second subject presents another kind of melody, ornamenting the motto theme in a continuous stream of 8th notes that twist and wind in a pattern that contrasts with the placid calm of the opening section.

The third subject increases the musical tension significantly, moving chromatically within a small range around the notes B-flat, A, C and B natural – not coincidentally the German musical spelling of the composer’s own name: B-A-C-H. And it is just at the point when Bach begins to combine all three subjects together that the manuscript suddenly ends, leaving us breathlessly bereft of what contrapuntal marvels might have come in the bars to follow.

 

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But is it ‘music’?

The extraordinary feats of contrapuntal skill displayed by Bach in his Art of the Fugue have given rise to bewildered push-back amongst astonished commentators, prompting them to ask: Is this really music? The mere act of posing such a provocative question implies an answer in the negative and is motivated by two distinct lines of thought.

The first sees the work as purely didactic, as Augenmusik (music for the eyes) intended merely for silent study by aspiring contrapuntists rather than as a work intended for the enjoyment of audiences in live performance. This, however, is a false dichotomy, as the artistic merit of Chopin’s Études, Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Bach’s own Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach amply prove.

A second, more serious objection to the work’s suitability as concert music is a reproach often levelled at 12-tone serial compositions: that the essential structuring elements of these works is beyond the capacity of human perception to appreciate. And admittedly, the likelihood that even the most alert listener – with perfect pitch and a fresh injection of espresso – might remember the initial scoring of one of Bach’s mirror fugues well enough to notice its complete textural inversion halfway through is remote indeed.

And yet, as the saying goes in software development: this is not a bug, it’s a feature.

In the worldview of early-18th-century religious thought, which Bach shared, God was immanent in all Creation. All things on earth were imbued with the presence of the Divine, and manifested that presence in all its astonishing variety of forms and its underlying unity of purpose. To be bewildered by this astonishing variety and unity of purpose was to engage in an act of worship.

Bach, whose many manuscripts are marked with inscriptions betokening deference to the greater glory of God, conceived of his creative musical output as a sonic parallel to the variety and orderliness of the created world, a world that must inevitably surpass all human understanding.

So every fractal echo in his fugal textures of motives from the original motto theme – every rising 5th, every falling 3rd and every melodic phrase in stepwise motion – is a theological statement, standing proxy to echoes of the Divine in the natural world. In this regard, experiencing bewilderment at the dazzling complexity of Bach’s fugal textures is as natural as feeling overwhelmed with awe when contemplating the patterns of the stars in the night sky.

By ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8788068

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Golda Schultz

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Clara Schumann
Liebst du um Schönheit | Warum willst du andre frage | Am Strande | Lorelei

Clara Schumann (née Wieck) was a major figure in nineteenth-century music. As a child prodigy, she toured Europe with her father and teacher Friedrick Wieck, meeting Goethe in Weimar and Paganini in Paris. After her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840 she balanced her role as super-mom to the eight children she bore with that of an internationally celebrated pianist—while still finding time to compose a considerable number of works for piano and chamber ensemble as well as more than two dozen songs.

Her love marriage to Robert Schumann was the central sustaining element in her emotional life before his death in 1856. Almost all of her songs were composed as Christmas or birthday gifts for her husband, who along with Schubert was a major influence on her compositional style. Like her husband, she wrote accompaniments that included preludes, interludes and postludes to the vocal line, making the piano into a musical commentator with an interest in the poetic text equal to that of the singer.

Their mutual sympathy in compositional style is no better demonstrated than in the joint publication of the song collection featuring their lieder entitled Zwölf Gedichte aus F. Rückerts Liebesfrühling with dual opus numbers (her Op. 12 and his Op. 37), published in 1841. Love’s Spring by the German poet Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) was a collection of love poems written during his courtship of Luise Wiethaus, whom he married in 1821. The attraction the newly-married Schumanns must have felt for this collection of poems is obvious.

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Liebst du um Schönheit is the second song in the Schumanns’ joint publication. It poses the question of what is worth looking for when looking for love. Is it mere beauty, or youthfulness, or material wealth?  No, the poet replies, love is its own reward.  The pedal drone and gently rocking figures in the accompaniment are reminiscent of Chopin’s Berceuse but here they stand emblematic of the constancy that characterizes real true love.

The eleventh song in the collection, Warum willst du andre fragen asks how true love can be found and identified. And the answer is always the same: it’s in the eyes where the look of love is always unmistakable. The ‘four-squareness’ of Clara Schumann’s setting, with its uniform four-bar phrases, is offset by a harmonic inventiveness that maintains the listener’s interest from stanza to stanza.

Am Strande (1843), with a text by Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) translated by Wilhelm Gerhard (1780-1858), reminds us that Clara Schumann was a piano virtuoso of the first rank. Her piano accompaniment to this lied churns up the keyboard in imitation of the churning sea that separates the lovers of the poem’s text.

Lorelei by poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) tells the tale of a siren-like maiden haunting the banks of the Rhine River who tempts distracted river voyagers to their deaths with her bewitching murmurs. Clara Schumann is reported to have possessed an autographed copy of Schubert’s famous lied Erlkönig, which evidently provided the model for the drumbeat of repeated notes, expressing the anxiety of the scene, in the piano accompaniment of this song.

 

Emilie Mayer
Wenn der Abendstern die Rosen | Du bist wie eine Blume | Erlkönig II

The New Grove describes Emilie Mayer as “the most prolific German woman composer of the Romantic period” and it is easy to see why. Drawn to the larger compositional forms–which in that period only men were considered capable of mastering—her output includes numerous orchestral works (eight symphonies and four overtures), an opera, dozens of instrumental sonatas, eight string quartets, and numerous solo piano works, as well as nearly 130 songs for solo voice or vocal quartet.

Her talent and skill were honed in studies with some of the leading figures in German music, including song composer Carl Loewe (1796-1869), with whom she studied composition, and theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), with whom she studied counterpoint and fugue. Her works were widely performed in Europe during her lifetime but suffered eclipse after her death and are only now being re-discovered.

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Wenn der Abendstern die Rosen is a setting of a poem by Helmina von Chézy (1783-1856), the librettist of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe (1823) and playwright of Rosamonde (1823) for which Schubert wrote incidental music. In this poem the female speaker is enticed into passionate thoughts of love at nightfall. The highly decorated vocal line and oom-pah-pah rhythm of the piano accompaniment evokes the style of an opera aria by Bellini.

The bel canto singing style is even more evident in Mayer’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s Du bist wie eine Blume, a poem gushing with tender sentiments of love and longing, communicated by the many sigh motives in the vocal line and the occasional outburst of virtuosic display. The piano accompaniment is more than a discreet witness to the singer’s emotions, and pulses with the excitement of a heartbeat at the word Herz (heart) in the text. Mayer’s expressive use of harmony in this lied is exceptionally refined.

Goethe’s spooky folk ballad Der Erlkönig describes the theft by an alluring nature spirit of the soul of a young boy as he rides through the forest in the arms of his father on horseback. This poem has been set more than 130 times but Emilie Mayer appears to be the only composer to set it twice. Her second setting, composed 30 years after her first, eschews the classic depiction of galloping horse’s hooves to concentrate on the wind whistling through the trees, melodramatically portrayed by creeping minor scales in the bass and anxious tremolo trill figures in the mid-range. Her varied depiction of the four voices in the poem (narrator, boy, father and spirit) is utterly masterful.

 

Rebecca Clarke
Down by the Salley Gardens | The Tiger | Cradle Song | The Seal Man

Rebecca Clarke was a pioneering British composer and professional violist who spent much of her creative life in the United States. She was one of the first female students of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) at the Royal College of Music in London and one of the first female professional orchestral players. Best known for chamber works such as her much-recorded Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921), she also composed 52 songs in a variety of styles throughout her life.

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William Butler Yeats’ poem Down by the Salley Gardens is the lament of an impetuous young man in love with a young woman who bids him to “take love easy.” But he, “being young and foolish,” persists in his ardour and pays the price in emotional pain. The simplicity and folksong-like character of the text is reflected in the sparseness of accompaniment and modal harmonies of Rebecca Clarke’s 1919 setting of this poem.

William Blake’s famous poem Tiger, Tiger stares fascinated in horror at the destructive power residing deep in the unconscious of every living thing that moves, as symbolized by the tiger. Remarkable in Rebecca Clarke’s dark expressionist setting of 1927-1931 is how completely divorced the piano ‘accompaniment’ is from the singer’s questioning persona. The piano is the tiger, ranging menacingly up and down the keyboard, seeming ready to pounce at any moment. Particularly chilling are the piano-tiger’s final growls in the closing bars.

Her treatment of Blake’s Cradle Song from 1929 is very different. Here the texture is quite simple and transparent, dominated by streams of parallel chords in the piano accompaniment, evocative of both the innocence of childhood and a child’s drowsy drifting into sleep.

The Seal Man is drawn from English poet John Masefield’s re-telling of the Celtic myth of the seal creature that takes on human form to lure women to their deaths in the sea. Rebecca Clarke’s setting is vividly dramatic with numerous atmospheric touches such as the ‘wet’ figurations in the piano that open and end the song, framing the action as a ‘sea story’ from start to finish. The vocal line is raw and dramatic, often declaimed without any piano accompaniment at all, but in the end it is the haunting overtones of the piano that devour the listener’s attention, just as the sea swallows up the poor young girl in this eerie tale about the dangers of love.

 

Nadia Boulanger
La mer est plus belle | Prière | Élégie | Cantique

French composer, pianist and conductor Nadia Boulanger studied composition with Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire but she is best known as a music educator. Her students have included some of the leading composers, arrangers and performers of the 20th century, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Burt Bacharach, Quincy Jones, Dinu Lipatti and Astor Piazzola, to name but a few.

She composed works for orchestra and for chamber ensembles, as well as over 30 songs. Her compositional style is similar to that of Debussy in many ways.  Like Debussy, she uses whole-tone or modally-tinged scales and ambiguous but vividly coloristic harmonies in sequences of parallel chords, stabilized by long pedal tones in the bass.

La mer est plus belle by symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) pays tribute to the immense power of the sea, a quality conveyed in the massively sonorous waves of piano sonority Nadia Boulanger sends sweeping over the keyboard, much in the manner of Chopin’s ‘Ocean’ Etude, Op. 25 No. 12.

Henry Bataille (1872-1922) was a very successful French playwright whose plays explored how the instinctive passions of his characters bumped up against the social norms of polite society. His poem Prière is an open-hearted enquiry into the meaning and significance of a personage such as the Virgin Mary. The opening melody’s small range, its recurring leaps of a 5th and the way the melody circles hypnotically around that leapt-to note all recall medieval religious chant, as do the drone tones at the bottom of the piano accompaniment. Passion of an almost operatic intensity erupts in the central section, however, as more vivid tonal colours and thicker textures are applied to support the singer’s expanding emotional awareness.

Albert Samain (1858-1900) was a French symbolist poet much inspired—if that is the right word—by the morbid mentality and dissolute life habits of his fellow poet Charles Baudelaire. Nadia Boulanger’s rather pretty dressing-up of Samain’s darkly nostalgic poem Élégie (the exact meaning of which is anyone’s guess) strikes the listener as typically French in its emphasis on tone colour and what classical parodist Anna Russell called French “wispiness”. Who else could set the phrase Un paradis s’est écroulé (a paradise has come crashing down) so blithely and innocently?

Cantique is a poem that appeared in the second act of the play Soeur Béatrice (1901) by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), the author of the play Pelléas et Mélisande which Debussy adapted to create his opera of the same in 1902. The protagonist in this text is a nun meditating on the disappointments of love. Nadia Boulanger’s exquisitely tender melody line and discreet accompaniment of sympathetic chordal harmonies in the piano are utterly ravishing.

 

Kathleen Tagg 
This Be Her Verse
After Philip Larkin | Wedding | Single Bed

Concluding this recital of songs by women about women’s experiences is This Be Her Verse, a new song cycle commissioned by Ms. Schulz from friends she first met when studying at Juilliard in New York.

Her fellow South African Kathleen Tagg is a composer-pianist whose work revolves around issues of identity and interpersonal connection. She has performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center but is equally at home in unconventional smaller spaces – a fact that comes across clearly in the cabaret-style intimacy of this new work.

Multi-talented dramatist Lila Palmer is a classically trained soprano with a first-class degree in history from Cambridge University. She knows our city well, having twice been a vocal fellow of the Vancouver International Song Institute. Her first libretto, for the chamber opera Harbour, brought to the stage the experience of Scottish Highlanders displaced by their English overlords.

This Be Her Verse is written in a sparkling tonal idiom, with some interesting reach-into-the-piano effects in the keyboard accompaniment. Limelight Magazine notes that this song cycle “explores a very contemporary version of womanhood, with the centrepiece, Wedding, incorporating COVID in its premise.”

But The Guardian probably sums it up best in describing these new songs as “deft, upbeat, sharp and true, a celebration of the single bed and clean sheets.”

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Steven Osborne

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Franz Schubert
Impromptu No. 1 in F minor  D. 935

The impromptu is just one of a number of small-scale instrumental genres arising in the early 19th century, known under the collective title of character pieces. Cultivated by composers in the emerging Romantic movement, these pieces presented a simple musical idea in an intimate lyrical style with the aim of evoking a particular mood or moment of personal reflection, spontaneously experienced and communicated.  The eight impromptus that Schubert composed in late 1827 are classic examples of the genre, and indeed are the first pieces bearing the name impromptu to establish themselves permanently in the repertoire.

Schubert was a pianist, but he was not a touring virtuoso. His audiences were small, familiar, and local, and pieces such as his Impromptus Op. 142 reflect especially well the social setting for which they were composed. One hears in them the sounds of Viennese popular music, dance music in particular, and occasionally the close-position chordal textures of recreational part-singing.

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The Impromptu in F minor Op. 142, No. 1 is a simple A-B-A-B-A rondo with a mock-stern ‘Beethovenian’ introduction featuring jagged melodic gestures and cadences that promise weighty things to come. But instead, we are led into a Schubertian world of gentle pathos and delicate sentiment, framed in the kinds of buoyant, fluttering keyboard textures that tended to ‘speak’ well on the light-actioned Viennese piano of Schubert’s day. A subsequent theme in repeated chords evokes the lilting rhythms of music in the Austrian capital.

The texture of Schubert’s B-section is utterly enchanting. He uses rippling arpeggios to create a purling stream of piano sonority in the mid-range of the keyboard, across which velvety dreaming voices in the treble exchange loving phrases with tender baritone echoes in the bass, undergoing wondrous modulation-induced changes in tone colour as they go.

 

George Crumb
Processional

American composer George Crumb is known for his haunting, mystical, almost surrealist scores that explore unusual instrumental timbres. Crumb’s Processional (1983) focuses our attention on incremental changes in tone colour by laying down a constant patter of eighth notes, configured as dense tone clusters, within which a six-note descending melodic line emerges as a principal motive.

The harmonic language is ambiguous, sometimes appearing to be based on the whole-tone scale, at other times traditionally tonal or modal. Like many of Crumb’s works, the piece unfolds at a low dynamic level (beginning and ending ppp) and its constant pulsing in a sonic space densely saturated with overtones has the hypnotic effect of suspending our sense of time.

Crumb describes the work as “concerned with the prismatic effect of subtle changes of harmonic colour and frequent modulation”, while contemporary music specialist Jeffrey Jacob describes the work as follows: “The basis of the piece is a series of repeated chords which very gradually move toward or away from major climaxes. The mesmerizing effect of the chordal repetition is countered by the rising and falling dynamics.”

 

Claude Debussy
Étude retrouvée
Douze Études  Livre II

It might appear surprising that a composer such as Debussy should deign to write piano études, a genre associated since the time of Czerny with musical monotony, and since the time of Liszt with Napoleonic-level narcissism and circus-inspired 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, the aim of which is to build endurance for when it might be needed in ‘real’ music. Each is a musical tone poem testing a new kind of pianism, based on fingertip sensitivity and finely filtered pedalling. Each poses problems of sonority and texture that mere digital dexterity alone is insufficient to solve. And each, in the end, challenges the pianist to hit that sweet spot to which all French music tends—charm.

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Debussy’s Étude retrouvée was ‘found’ (hence the title) amongst the composer’s papers in 1977 and it appears to be a 13th étude which the composer decided not to include in his published set of 12. The chief technical difficulty addressed is that of bringing out scattered fragments of lyrical melody floating atop an absolute riot of shimmering multi-octave arpeggio figurations that at times involve both hands simultaneously.

The second book of Debussy’s Douze Études begins with Étude 7 Pour les degrés chromatiques, a perpetual motion study of playful character featuring a squirrelly right-hand scurrying in small 4-note chromatic groupings. Out of this sound-swirl, brief snatches of smooth diatonic melody emerge in the left hand. 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 étude) is the way the piece combines brilliance with lyricism.

Étude 8 Pour les agréments (ornaments) has, in the words of Debussy, “the form of a Barcarolle on a rather Italian sea.” And indeed there is a kind of ‘watery’ feel to the texture, at times reminiscent of the composer’s L’Isle joyeuse. The ‘ornaments’ with which this étude’s melodic content are encrusted are not just your regular mordents and trills but mostly chordal arpeggios that delicately rain down on their melody notes like sprinklings of sonic mist.

Étude 9 Pour les notes répétées is marked scherzando, a mood created not only by its effervescent texture of peppery repeated notes but also by its scampering melodies and quixotic stop-and-go changes of mood, all at a piano dynamic level.

Étude 10 Pour les sonorités opposées gets to the heart of the Debussyan sound world. This is an étude more for the ear and pedal-foot than for the fingers, featuring multi-layered sonorities spaced out over as much as five octaves, rich in dark pedal tones low down in the bass to be balanced against iridescent tonal accents high up in the treble and murmuring melodies emerging out of the mid-range.

Étude 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’ (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.

Bold, exuberant and flashy, Étude 12 Pour les accords (chords) seems to be simply screaming with exclamation points. It has been called “a barbarous dance” and indeed it has no shortage of élan with its beastly difficult pattern of wild leaps in opposite directions playing out counter-metrically in duple groups across its triple-metre bar lines. A radically relaxed middle section almost makes you forget what all the excitement was about until the springboard rhythms of the opening slyly work their way back into the texture to end this gymnastic étude as acrobatically as it began.

 

Franz Schubert
Sonata in B-flat major  D. 960

Schubert’s last piano sonata, written in 1828 a scant few months before his death, exemplifies in one single work the full range of his gifts as lyric melodist, serious musical dramatist, and refined exponent of the light, dance-besotted musical style of Vienna.

The first movement, Allegro moderato, is typically generous in its bounty of themes. It opens with a softly whispered melody, humbly small in range and accompanied by a repeated pedal tone in the left hand, like a pulsing human heartbeat. This opening theme has a sweet yearning quality that gives it an ineffable, almost nostalgic charm, urging it to burst more fully into song, which it soon does. A second theme introduces a tentative note of worry, but Schubert’s constant harmonic wavering between the major and minor modes prevents the emotional tone from becoming downcast. A third theme of a triadic stamp scampers over the full range of the keyboard, in both hands, to re-establish a more directly buoyant emotional tone, disturbed only by a recurring low trill in the left hand that acts as a sectional marker within the movement. The development is where all the drama lies, as Schubert passes his melodic material through a harmonic colour wheel, building to an intense climax that acts as a rare moment of sonic emphasis in the centre of what is, essentially, a movement of delicate shades of nuance.

Much more starkly dramatic is the Andante sostenuto slow movement which features an introspective melody in the mid-range of the keyboard, surrounded by sonic ‘echoes’, both above and below, implying that this lonely plaintive voice is pleading its mournful case in a vast, but empty enclosure. It is hard not to think of the more militant middle section as an attempt to take heart, an attempt that inevitably fails as the opening mood returns to conclude the movement.

The third movement scherzo, Allegro vivace con delicatezza, is indeed ‘delicate’ if judged by the standards of Beethoven’s ‘rough-house’ humour. More typically Viennese in its subtlety, it generates good-natured humour from its frequent changes of register and twinkling grace notes. A steady interchange of material between the hands creates the impression of a dialogue between two real musical ‘characters’. The contrasting trio in the minor mode is much more sedate, sitting in the middle of the keyboard and shifting its weight around in gentle syncopations.

Still in a humorous frame of mind, Schubert begins his rondo finale, Allegro ma non troppo, with a mock ‘mistake’. Starting off in the minor mode, he then ‘remembers’ that he wants to be in a major key and makes a mid-course correction at the end of the first phrase. This joke of changing dramatic masks from the serious to the comedic is played out frequently during the movement, with intervening episodes of songful respite in between. This is a finale filled with congenial joking of the most sophisticated kind, created by a true Viennese pianistic ‘sit-down comic’.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Daniel Hsu

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Robert Schumann
Kinderszenen  Op. 15

The character piece, a short work expressing a single mood or illustrating an idea suggested by its titling, was a typical product of the Romantic era, and Robert Schumann was a major contributor to the genre. In 1838 he composed 30 such works, publishing 13 of them in a collection that he called Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood).

Explaining the title in a letter to his future wife Clara he wrote:

Perhaps it was an echo of what you once said to me, that ‘Sometimes I seemed like a child’ … You will enjoy them—though you will have to forget you are a virtuoso.

And indeed the childlike simplicity and artlessness of these pieces is their main alluring feature. Schumann’s Kinderszenen were not written for children, but rather for adults about children. They are imbued with a nostalgia for a time of life that in many ways represents the Romantic imagination itself, with its wide-eyed sense of wonder, its lack of preconceptions and acceptance of new experiences, its intuitive affinity with an inborn human nature lying beneath the acquired behaviours of ‘civilized’ adult life.

Here we find the poetic spirit of Schumann’s compositional style in its purest unmediated form, without the framing artifice of literary devices such as the masked balls of the Papillons Op. 2 and Carnaval Op. 9 or the fictional League of David of the Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6. Schumann here is speaking through the voice of the universal childhood of every listener—which perhaps may explain why this was the first of his keyboard cycles to enjoy popular success.

Most of the pieces in this collection are in a kind of miniature three-part (ABA) form. Their melodies sit in the mid-range of the keyboard—the range of the human voice—and very few rise above a piano dynamic level, giving them a special kind of intimacy.

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Anyone who has entertained the pleasant thought of getting on a plane and travelling somewhere far away will identify with the daydreaming mood of Von fremden Ländern und Menschen (Of foreign lands and peoples). The melodic profile of its opening notes, a rising 6th and a four-note falling figure (B-G-F#-E-D), appears in several subsequent pieces as well, acting as a unifying motive for the cycle as a whole. Schumann’s rippling arpeggiations in the mid-register and wide chord spacings in the left-hand accompaniment create an understated but quietly sonorous backdrop for this piece’s carefree and eminently hummable melody.

In the perky dotted rhythms of Curiose Gedichte (A curious story) we hear Schumann’s eternal fascination with turning every stirring emotion into some kind of a march. But into the bargain we also get pleasing little snatches of imitation and a multi-layered texture with many moving parts, especially active in the middle and lower voices.

The scene illustrated in Hasche-Mann (Catch me if you can) is as pictorial as keyboard music gets, with children musically portrayed as racing around in a game of Blind Man’s Bluff, each ‘tag’ being indicated by a sudden sforzando on the keyboard.

Bittendes Kind (The pleading child) is full of coy questions and many a phrase that ends with a rising, questioning intonation. But are the questions answered? The last chord, a dominant 7th (with the 7th on top), leaves the issue hanging in the air.

Glückes genug (Happy enough) is a charming duet between left- and right-hand voices in close imitation—making the point that ‘chumminess’ is indistinguishable from happiness for a young child.

More march-like dotted rhythms greet us in Wichtige Begebenheit (An important event). But the repetition of the same phrase over and over again in various transpositions evokes the naïveté of a mock-serious parade of toddler soldiers with wooden swords and moustaches painted on with Magic Marker.

Träumerei (Reverie) is arguably Schumann’s best-known composition, made justly famous as an encore piece by pianist Vladimir Horowitz and even sung in a choral version at the annual May 9th Victory Day commemoration of Russia’s war dead. Its sequence of introspective moments is carried forward from thought to daydreaming thought by repeated re-harmonizations of the opening melodic phrase that never seem to tire in the ear.

Biedermeier coziness and contentment is the theme of Am Camin (At the fireplace), conveyed by its unpretentious melody and the gentle, cushiony off-beat pulses of its accompaniment.

The accenting of the last beat of every bar in the Ritter von Steckenpferd (Hobbyhorse knight) marks the hoof-fall and play-gallop of a young would-be warrior charging about his playroom.

The title of the following piece, Fast zu ernst (Almost too serious) is curiously vague. Every note of its serene right-hand melody, from start to finish, sings out on the off-beats, a 16th note out of phase with a metrically regular left-hand accompaniment of widely-spaced chordal arpeggiations.

Fürchtenmachen (Catching a fright) alternates passages of innocent thoughtfulness with episodes of frenetic panic and confused anxiety, a cautionary warning to the wandering child in us all that “if you go out in the woods at night, you’re in for a big surprise.”

After all this excitement, it starts getting towards nap-time for our Kind im Einschlummern (Child falling asleep) lulled into slumber by the hypnotic drowsy-making repetition of the same small motive, over and over. In a brilliant poetic touch, Schumann allows us to witness the moment that deep sleep finally arrives, when this piece in E minor ends on an A minor chord, without a final cadence.

Finally, we withdraw from the poetic world of childhood, to enter the adult mind of the poet who has been imagining it for us. Der Dichter spricht (The poet speaks) is a soliloquy of tender reflections offered up in broken phrases and plaintive recitative, an elegy reminding us, as did Wordsworth, that “the child is father of the man.”

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata No. 31 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-and-accompaniment 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 off-beat 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 continues in an affecting lament of considerable intimacy over soothing & 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 Liszt
Sonata in B minor  S. 178

“This is nothing but sheer racket … it’s really awful,” wrote pianist Clara Schumann on first hearing Liszt’s B minor Sonata, dedicated to her husband Robert. The pre-eminent Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick couldn’t have agreed more. Blending high dudgeon with feigned condolence, he scornfully sneered: “whoever has heard that, and finds it beautiful, is beyond help.” Suffice it to say, Liszt’s piano sonata was not welcomed into the canon with open arms, but something more akin to raised pitchforks.

The problem may well have been that in writing this sonata, completed in 1853, Liszt was going ‘against brand’. Long known for his programmatic works—each with a story to tell, and thus a built-in framework for interpretation—Liszt had shocked many in the musical world by composing a piece of absolute music, a work based purely on the interplay of abstract musical ideas. His Sonata in B Minor came across as an impenetrably dense musical hairball of intertwined motives, in a single-movement format that seemed to combine the characteristics of both a sonata-form movement (exposition, development, recapitulation) and the four-movement layout of a complete sonata (sonata allegro, slow movement, scherzo, finale). In this he was undoubtedly influenced by Schubert, whose Wanderer Fantasy with a similar unified design he had recently arranged in a version for piano and orchestra.

Binding Liszt’s sonata together is the process of thematic transformation, i.e., changing the character of musical themes while retaining their essential identity, their melodic outline. The multiple personalities of the idée fixe theme in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is an early example, and Wagner’s use of leitmotif is a later development of the same technique. So, to follow what Liszt is doing in this sonata, you need to follow the four major themes he is shape-shifting as it proceeds.

The first three are spelled out on the first page of the score. The work opens with a pair of slow, descending scales of an exotic stamp. Then comes a forthright theme hammered out in double octaves beginning with a bold downward leap and ending with a diminished 7th arpeggio. Finally, the bass gruffly growls out a rascally little motive down low, rife with repeated notes.

The transformations begin immediately as these three themes spawn passage after varied passage of keyboard textures, all motivically interlinked, until a solemn, chorale-like fourth theme of slowly rising melody notes arrives over a pulsing carpet of sonorous chordal harmonies to complete the line-up.

In the course of this sonata the list of ‘transformations’ seems limitless. The gruff growling theme of repeated notes is transformed, among other things, into a dreamily delicious, Liebestraum-like lyrical melody in the ‘slow movement’ section. The bold theme in double octaves is tamed and brought to heel as the subject of an extended fugato in the following ‘scherzo’. And the chorale-like theme abandons its dignified ‘churchy’ solemnity and acquires major rhetorical muscle, elbowing its way into your eardrums as an important protagonist in the piece. Meanwhile, the slow descending scales that opened the work recur as boundary markers delineating major sectional divisions.

Liszt’s B minor Sonata is now recognized as one of the most important keyboard compositions of the 19th century, and the very complexity of its structuring—the quality that caused so much antipathy at its first publication—is now the chief reason it is so widely admired.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Jerusalem Quartet and Hila Baggio

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Yiddish – A new viewpoint

When we were approached by harmonia mundi to think of a concept for a ‘different’ album, an album that would challenge our standard repertoire, we took great care to find a subject that we had a natural connection with, but that would be interesting for the general public. Naturally we gravitated to Jewish music.

It is quite fashionable today to revive cabaret music from the Weimar Republic. But the Jewish connection to this music is rarely underlined. We feel that the irony, the word games and the interest in ‘lowbrow’ subjects reflect a direct influence of Jewish culture, which until 1919 was mostly barred from integrating with general German culture. This inspired us to create a project highlighting Jewish culture as an important influence on much of today’s western culture as a whole.

Until 1939, Poland was the centre of the Jewish world. It housed the world’s largest Jewish population, with a thriving cultural scene that included theatre, literature, music, opera, and even one of the biggest film industries of the time. After the Second World War, few Jews remained in Poland. Worldwide, Yiddish was replaced by Hebrew, and the few institutions dedicated to Yiddish culture now treat it mostly in a historical sense. For us, Yiddish is the language our grandparents spoke behind closed doors, and Yiddish music is something that exists in the deep background of our childhood.

This program sets out to show that Yiddish culture did not die in the Holocaust, but rather spread and influenced much of wider western culture. For example, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe transformed Vaudeville into the Broadway we know today, and Hollywood was largely founded by Jewish immigrants and refugees.

To symbolize this, we chose five songs as the heart of our album. The songs were written by different composers/lyricists and would have been performed in Poland between the wars in a cabaret setting. Together, they come together to paint a picture of Jewish street life in Warsaw between the wars. We aimed to create a ‘current’ viewpoint on this music, not one through the lens of the calamity that followed. To set these songs for soprano and string quartet, we approached Leonid Desyatnikov, whose innovative writing for strings captured our imagination.

To frame these five songs in a broader context, we picked two wonderful pieces by composers who are emblematic of Jewish artists and their general cultural contribution. Erwin Schulhoff was Czech, but was highly successful in Germany between the wars. As a communist and a Jew, he was deported to a concentration camp where he died of tuberculosis. His Five Pieces for String Quartet is in its own way cabaret music. Erich Wolfgang Korngold perhaps represents German and Austrian Jews who chose to assimilate with the general culture. He was invited to Hollywood to write film scores and ultimately became the foremost film composer of his time, which saved his life.

We dedicate this program to our grandparents.

-Ori Kam

 

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Erwin Schulhoff
Five Pieces for String Quartet

Erwin Schulhoff was born to a Jewish family in Prague in 1894 and showed musical talent from an early age. The composer Antonín Dvořák advised him to pursue a career in music. Schulhoff began to study at the Prague Conservatory in 1904, continued to take piano lessons in Vienna from 1906, and from 1908 studied composition in Leipzig with Max Reger and subsequently in Cologne with Fritz Steinbach. In the meantime, he had laid the basis of a career as a pianist. In 1918 he was already known as a composer and received the Mendelssohn Prize for his Piano Sonata Op. 22.

His music up to the First World War had shown influences ranging from Brahms and Dvořák to Strauss, Debussy and Scriabin. Following his service in the Austrian army, he adopted a more radical stance both artistically and politically. In the next few years, he composed in a more expressionistic idiom he had learned from Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. In addition, he was influenced by the radical style of the Dada school espoused by Georg Grosz, whose advocacy of jazz was to find its way into much of Schulhoff’s music from that period.

During the late 1920s, Schulhoff managed to create a rapprochement between these competing aesthetics which can be seen in a number of his chamber works and concertos, the First Symphony, the ballet Ogelala, the ‘jazz oratorio’ HMS Royal Oak and his opera about Don Juan entitled Flammen (Flames), which was a failure at its Brno premiere in 1932. In that year he also composed his Second Symphony in a clear-cut neo-Classical style. Soon after, he composed the cantata Das kommunistische Manifest (The Communist Manifesto), in which he expressed his political beliefs, setting texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of the socialism and communism. Looking to the Soviet Union for a solution of the political and economic problems in central Europe, he focused on the symphony as the best medium through which to communicate his ideology and emotions. Schulhoff composed six more symphonies between 1935 and 1942, though the Seventh and Eighth remained unfinished. He lived in Prague during most of the inter-war period, working as a pianist in theatre productions and radio broadcasts, but found himself without any means of support after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. Having taken Soviet citizenship, he was arrested before he had completed the process of emigration to the Soviet Union and was then reported to a concentration camp in Wülzburg where he died in August 1942.

Schulhoff was no stranger to the string quartet medium, having written a Divertimento in 1914 and a full-length Quartet Op. 25 some four years later. His official String Quartet No. 1 was composed between the years 1920 and 1924 and was a great success. Schulhoff had been encouraged to write another work for string quartet. This is how the Five Pieces for String Quartet were composed in 1923. The work was first performed in Salzburg on 8 August, 1924. Although the work follows the outlines of a Baroque dance suite, each of the pieces is a self-contained miniature that emulates a particular dance style in a manner which unashamedly recalls the popular music of the era.

  

Leonid Desyatnikov
Yiddish – 5 Songs for Voice and String Quartet

The Five Songs for Voice and String Quartet is a piece based on Yiddish songs that were performed in Poland between the two world wars. The composer Leonid Desyatnikov chose five songs representative of Yiddish cabaret style, which portray the lives of Jews in urban Poland, their joy, their suffering and hope. Jewish musicians and performers were dominant in popular music in Poland and collaborated in composing Polish and Yiddish songs. Their works influenced cabaret music throughout Europe as well as Hollywood film music and Broadway theatre music in the United States.

Desyatnikov chose these songs to commemorate the life of Jewish cities before the Holocaust. As he writes: ‘Yiddish – 5 Songs for Voice and String Quartet – are based on the material of cabaret songs that circulated in Warsaw and Łódź between the two world wars. “My cycle is a series of free transcriptions of such songs. Usually, this type of music is assigned to the “lowbrow” area. It is the eclectic culture of the assimilantes, the lumpenproletariat and the outsiders, the culture of cheap chic, and at the same time – in its best forms – a brazen, talented culture full of self-irony and latent despair. The strict, staid sound of the string quartet transforms this music into an exquisite gravure.”

The first song is a nostalgic paean to the city of Warsaw, and the second a parody of an American song that relates the fate of a Jewish prostitute. The third and fifth songs are from the repertory of Yiddish ‘thieves’ songs’, reflecting marginal groups of the Jewish underworld. The fourth song is a duet between a man, Yosl, and a woman, Sore-Dvoshe, who live in poverty but dream of having a large family and enjoying life in the big city.

Yiddish was a vernacular and literary language of the Jews of Europe from the twelfth century onwards. We know of Yiddish folksongs as early as the fourteenth century. During World War Two, hundreds of songs were composed and sung, but many were lost forever. After the Holocaust, Yiddish did not continue to be a living language of Jewish communities in Europe, and became an academic, historic language. Thus the song cycle, in its new and sophisticated arrangement, brings together ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow’ cultures of language and music with a bitter smile and humanity.

 

Erich Wolfgang Korngold 
String Quartet No. 2  Op. 26

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in 1897 in Vienna, the second son of a high-ranking music critic, Julius Korngold, who wrote for the Viennese newspaper Die Freie Presse. Erich’s prodigious musical talent placed him and his family at the centre of high art society at a time when a parallel avant-garde society of cabaret, film and small theatre was growing in popularity and prestige. Both societies expressed disquiet over the future of their cultural heritage. The means of their expression would prove indicative of where the fissures within that culture lay.

Korngold’s life spanned the two world wars, which proved for some to be an undeniable force for radical change to the artistic idiom. Composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith and Krenek became absorbed in creating and promoting new tonalities which could be aligned with older traditions. Korngold was one of many exceptions in that he remained true to his contemporary idiom, described by himself as an extension of natural evolutionary processes. Initially promoted by his father as the only truly natural use of tonality, Korngold’s musical style is attributed equally to his unique character and to his musical mentors, Gustav Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss. Erich never wavered from his belief that music should cope with the horrors of his time by serving to elevate the soul rather than drag it down. When the possibility of delineating creative development into early, middle and late styles was still an officially recognized measure of the true artist, Korngold’s musical style merely matured while remaining intact, essentially romantic, effusive, luxuriant and, most significantly, harmonious.

In 1934 Korngold was invited by Warner Brothers to compose music for the film A Midsummer Night’s Dream in America – in retrospect, this proved to be the lifeline that saved him and his loved ones from the gas chambers in occupied Europe. Behind this invitation stood his friend the theatre and film director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), who later also emigrated to the United States. Korngold went to America in 1934 but returned to Europe in 1937 to conduct and resume his career as an art music composer. However, within a few months he received another invitation to compose a film score; his acceptance of this offer actually saved his life and those of his family in 1938, just before the German occupation of Austria.

Korngold composed many film scores for full symphony orchestra and became one of the pioneers and leading exponents of film music. He won two Academy Awards. After the Second World War, in 1949, he attempted to resume a European career but this was not a success, and after a few concerts and premieres he returned to Hollywood in 1951. He died a few years later, at the age of sixty, believing that he had been forgotten in Europe.

Korngold is most closely associated with large-scale works, his operas and film scores, but throughout his career he composed chamber music and an impressive collection of songs. In February 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to look for a country of residence in Europe. During this year he conducted operas and composed chamber music, including his four-movement Second String Quartet Op. 26, which was premiered by the Rosé Quartet in Vienna on 16 March 1934, just before he left for America.

Though far less known than the First Quartet (1920-22), the Second presents a self-assured composer who knows how to combine Schoenberg’s expressionism with Romantic sonorities, and a complex chromatic language reminiscent of Richard Strauss with his own confident handling of timbre, colour, and a broad emotional range which is characteristic of his musical language. In this quartet the music of the countryside of Korngold’s native Austria is expressed in ripe Viennese sensuality.

 

– Gila Flam

 

Program Notes: Nicolas Altstaedt

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Henri Dutilleux
Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher

Swiss conductor Paul Sacher (1906-1999), founder of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, was an immensely important figure in 20th-century music. With a family fortune based on a controlling share of the Hoffman-LaRoche pharmaceutical empire, he commissioned works from some of the century’s greatest composers. These commissioned works include Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for string orchestra, Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings, and Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings.

In 1976 Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich set about to celebrate Sacher’s 70th birthday by commissioning new works for solo cello from 12 of the Western world’s leading composers: Conrad Beck, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Wolfgang Fortner, Alberto Ginastera, Cristóbal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Klaus Huber, Witold Lutosławski … and Henri Dutilleux.

Each piece was to use the dedicatee’s name spelled out ‘musically’, i.e., with each letter representing a musical pitch – Es being the German notation of E flat, H being B natural and R (re in the language of solfège) as D. The spelled out musical motive to be used was therefore:  E flat-A-C-B flat-E-D.

In his works Dutilleux had a tendency not to introduce his thematic material in complete form right away but rather to slowly unveil it, as he does at the opening of the first movement of his Trois strophes. First we hear E flat, then E flat-A, then E flat-A-C-B natural, and then finally the entire series of pitches making up the ‘musical spelling’ of the name Sacher. He also likes to ‘anchor’ his musical gestures around stable recurring pitches, from which his gestures depart and to which they constantly return, as is the case in this movement with the augmented 5th B flat – F# at the bottom of the cello’s pitch range. (The cello’s normal range extends down only to low C, but for this work Dutilleux has the instrument tuned down to low B flat.) Near the end of this movement he introduces a short quotation in quivering 32nd-note double-stop tremolo from Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, yet another work commissioned by Sacher.

The second movement, marked Andante sostenuto, explores the rich low register of the cello, but for most of its duration only hints obliquely at the intervals making up the musical spelling of Sacher’s name, which is revealed in six bold strokes just before the end.

This musical cryptogram also inspires the Vivace last movement, but it is buried in the intervals of the whirling pattern of triplet 16ths of the opening and in various transpositions and transformations of these pitches throughout.

While the pitches corresponding to the name Sacher may be the point of departure for this work, Dutilleux’s real ‘subject’ in these three movements is the resonance of the cello itself, and the range of possible ways for summoning it up and manipulating it.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach
Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor  BWV 1011

The six cello suites were written between 1717 and 1723, when Bach was employed as Kapellmeister to the music-loving Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen. But after Bach’s death, they seemed to have gone underground, passed from hand to hand among musicians of an antiquarian bent until the first printed editions began to appear in the 1820s. But even during the 19th century they were viewed more as studies for practice in the studio rather than masterpieces for performance in the concert hall.

All that changed in the 1930s as a result of the pioneering work of one man, the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973), who did for the Bach Cello Suites what Glenn Gould did for the Goldberg Variations. Intrigued by a 19th-century edition he found in a thrift shop in Barcelona, Casals began performing them in public and by 1939 had produced the first complete recording of the whole set.

From this point on the Bach Cello Suites joined the repertoire of cellists around the world, leading to another milestone in their history: Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of the complete set that won him a Grammy Award in 1986.

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The Baroque suite, a collection of dances from across Europe all in the same key, was normally comprised of the moderately-paced German allemande, the more animated French courante, the slow and stately Spanish sarabande, and the leap-loving English jig, or to use its posh French name, gigue. All of the dances are in two-part binary form, with each part played twice. Harmonically, the first part moves from the home key to end in the dominant, with the second part moving back to cadence in the home key again.

Optional dances were often inserted to ease the transition between the normally grave sarabande and the frequently raucous gigue. These included the courtly minuet, the hot-trotting gavotte, and the heartbeat-quickening bourrée. They often occurred in contrasting pairs, with the first minuet, gavotte or bourrée being played again (without repeats) after the second, to give a rounded A-B-A form to the whole. Many suites also began with a prelude, meant to establish the key in listener’s ear, and to allow the performer to warm up his fingers by playing passagework in a stable rhythmic pattern.

*                      *                      *

Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor BWV 1011 is somewhat unusual in having its Prelude in the form of a French overture, i.e. with a slow, pompous and dead serious opening section constructed in phrases that lurch forward in dotted rhythms, followed by a quick section with a fugal texture. Bach’s opening section establishes a mood of gravitas with its triple- and quadruple stops on many of the section’s downbeats. But as for the ‘fugue’ meant to follow, how to write polyphonic music on a single-line instrument? Bach solves this problem by writing such a bouncy, well-balanced and catchy fugue subject that listeners end up ‘hearing’ the other voices in their head.

This is the Central-Bank magic of quantitative easing applied to harmonic voice-leading. It’s the fluttering veils of Gypsy Rose Lee suggesting far more than the eyes of her audience are actually seeing. And Bach was an unsurpassed master at this compositional sleight-of-hand.

The Courante employs the same multiple-stop emphasis on downbeats as in the Prelude, but the effect is more dance-like because instead of dotted rhythms this movement uses ‘running’ notes, as its name implies, to keep things moving between points of rhythmic emphasis.

The emotional heart of this suite is its Sarabande, which contains no multiple-stop chords at all, just a steady stream of 8th notes in a single melodic line roving restlessly over more than two octaves of sonic space. While its rhythmic surface is flat, the great leaps and many sighing phrases in its melodic line create a state of continuous harmonic tension as implied dissonances hang in the air, to be resolved only in the final cadence arrived at in each section. This is the art of saying much by saying little. The stark beauty of this movement and its indomitable will to move forward, step by step, no matter the pain, made it the work chosen by Yo-Yo Ma to play on September 11, 2002, at the first anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks, as the names of the dead being honoured were read out, one by one.

The two strong upbeats leading into the following Gavotte establish us firmly back on the rough rhythmic terrain of country dancing. In this and the following triplet-obsessed Gavotte II, a constant 1-2, 1-2 pulse makes counting easy, and toe-tapping inevitable.

The concluding Gigue, with its leap-friendly dotted rhythms, agreeably balanced phrases and easy-to-follow repetitive sequences of melody and harmony, ends the suite in a mood of unbridled merriment, despite the ‘serious’ key of C minor in which it is written.

 

Zoltán Kodály
Sonata in B minor for solo cello  Op. 8

“In twenty-five years no cellist will be accepted into the world of cellists who does not play my piece,” boldly declared Zoltán Kodály of his Cello Sonata in B minor Op. 8. And he was right. When composed in 1915 this work represented the most important contribution to the solo cello literature since the Bach cello suites of the early 18th century. But because of its extraordinary technical difficulty and innovative musical language, it struggled to find an audience until Hungarian cellist János Starker (1924-2013) recorded it in 1939, winning a Grand Prix du Disque for his efforts. And as its fame grew, he went on to record it again – three more times.

The sonata’s roots lie deep in Hungarian folk music, which Kodály had studied in his travels through the Hungarian countryside with Béla Bartók in 1908. Specifically, the Sonata inhabits the sound world of the Hungarian folk lament, with which it shares the same improvisatory feel, parlando rubato (free reciting) performance style, and downward-seeking melodies. Its harmonies are non-functional but rather modal, with a preference for the pentatonic scale. And yet Kodály manages to fit these non-standard features into the formal structures of traditional Western-European art music.

This is a powerful piece, a piece that grabs you by the throat and impresses itself on you. The reason is easy to see. As Kodály says: “What musical features are characteristic of Hungarian music? In general, it is active rather than passive, an expression of will rather than emotion. Aimless grieving and tears of merriment do not appear in our music. Even the Székely [region] laments radiate resolute energy.”

This resolute energy is on full display as the work opens. It begins with two quadruple-stop B minor chords, followed by a defiant theme in a sarabande rhythm, heavily weighted on the second beat of the bar. Motivic elements announced in these opening bars will permeate the movement. The sonata’s second theme is much quieter and features a recurring murmur of neighbour notes that continually shadow its melody lines. The development deals almost exclusively with the first theme and climaxes in an orgy of trills, leading to a recapitulation which, by compensation, deals mostly with the second theme. Each section in this movement clearly opens with quadruple-stop chords, giving a degree of formal clarity to the whole.

The second movement Adagio comes closest in this sonata to imitating the sound of the human voice. Beginning its low lament deep at the bottom of the instrument’s register it is soon accompanied by the echoing ornate melody of a shepherd’s pipe and a plucked low drone, as if from a lyre, that acts as an anchoring pitch for much of the movement. Playing both arco and pizzicato at the same time, the cello imitates a solo voice in company with a fitful instrumental accompaniment. The emotional outpouring reaches a height of improvisatory frenzy in a middle section rife with quivering tremolos and rapidly accelerating figurations, before returning to the darkly contemplative mood of its opening bars.

The third movement Allegro molto vivace is a major test of endurance for the performer. It contains some of the most challenging technical passages in the cello repertoire as the instrument is called upon to imitate a wide range of folk instruments, from the jangling timbre of the cimbalom or hammered dulcimer, to the bagpipes (with drone 5ths in the bass), and plucked instruments such as the lyre. Unfolding as a series of textural variations, it alludes strongly to the repertoire of verbunkos melodies, played by gypsy bands in the 19th century to accompany town recruitment drives into the army. And the ‘flashiness’ of gypsy fiddling is everywhere apparent in variation after variation as this movement drives to its frenetic conclusion.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Evgeny Kissin

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Johann Sebastian Bach
Toccata and Fugue in D minor  BWV 565 (arr. Tausig)

While keyboard transcription and political debate might at first blush seem to be radically different fields of endeavour, one justly famous incident on American television stands emblematic of the risks run, in both disciplines, for those who would engage in rhetorical posturing.

In the vice-presidential debate of 1988, the Republican candidate, linguistically accident-prone Sen. Dan Quayle, in attempting to wrap himself in the glory of a martyred former president, made so bold as to cite John F. Kennedy as a model for his own political outlook, only to receive his comeuppance in a stinging riposte from his debate opponent, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen.

One might well imagine a similar exchange taking place across the centuries between Johann Sebastian Bach and those 19th-century virtuoso pianists daring to claim their own instrument as being in a direct line of succession from the 18th-century church organ and thus a worthy instrument on which to perform his mighty Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565. To such pretenders to the throne of musical majesty Bach might well have replied: “I know the organ. The organ is my friend. The piano is no organ.”

Whether they intuited such a rebuke or not, those attempting this feat of transcription have been legion. IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project, lists no fewer than 11 transcriptions for piano solo, as well as arrangements for the wildest assortment of other instruments. Supporters of the underdog Jamaican bobsled team will no doubt have adopted the version for solo harmonica – seriously, there is one – as their sentimental favourite.

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The appeal of this work is not hard to see. In its pairing of the two contrasting genres of toccata and fugue it offers an opportunity to showcase both brawn and brain: brawn in the toccata’s flashy passages of digital dexterity, and brain in the intellectual rigour of the fugue’s contrapuntal complexity.

The work gained a popular 20th-century audience following its appearance in Walt Disney’s Fantasia in 1940, and its reputation was further enhanced in the 1970s by its starring role in the Dionysian sonic orgies of superstar 20th-century organist Virgil Fox (1912-1980) celebrated in mega-venues with rock concert lighting under the heading “Heavy Organ.”

Its arresting opening gesture, an inverted mordent followed by a dramatic scalar plunge down the space of a diminished 7th, is by now instantly recognizable, even by popular audiences with little knowledge of classical music. As is its fugue theme, a tick-tock moto perpetuo of 16ths outlining the notes of the D minor scale in alternation with a repeated drone tone on the dominant.

On the contemporary recital stage this work is performed by pianists in two well-known versions. The most popular is that of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), an adaptation that attempts to reproduce the architectural acoustic of an organ resounding within the vast echoing interior of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach worked.

The less-frequently-heard version that Mr. Kissin has chosen to play is by Carl Tausig (1841-1871), a student of Franz Liszt. Tausig, a leading proponent of the ‘juggling chainsaws’ school of pianism, created a much heftier, more note-heavy transcription, substantially thicker in sound than that of Busoni. Seeming to believe there was little point in writing one note where four notes would do, his version of the Bach score is more muscularly pianistic in conception. But his ear for the timbral possibilities of the piano is truly impressive. He paints the various sections of the score in a wide range of tone colours unique to his instrument, with their alternation imitating changes in timbral stops on the organ.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Adagio in B minor  K. 540

Mozart’s eerie Adagio in B minor (1788) is as remarkable for its choice of key as for its daring use of chromatic harmony. B minor was a key quite sparingly used by composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and likely for very practical reasons. The simple act of modulating to the dominant – the key of F# major, with six sharps – would instantly turn the score into a furry forest of accidentals, eyebrow-knittingly difficult for performers to read, and tricky for orchestral players to tune.

B minor, then, became something of a ‘spooky’ key, evoking abnormal psychological states and foretelling dramatic, perhaps even tragic musical events to come. One has only to think of the Bach B minor Mass, the Liszt Sonata in B minor, the Chopin B minor Scherzo or Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) to get the idea. And in his Adagio in B minor K. 540 Mozart in no way shies away from these associations, but rather leans into them with a will.

A sense of drama is evident right from the start. After a solo melodic line in the right hand outlining the B minor triad, the first harmony chord we hear is a startling diminished 7th, one of many that will occur in the course of the work. What follows is a virtual compendium of the most emotionally expressive rhetorical devices used in the Classical era: plangent appoggiaturas, yearning suspensions, dramatic silences and sudden rapid contrasts of forte and piano dynamic levels.

Although composed in unimpeachably orthodox sonata form, with balanced symmetrical phrases and a motivically concentrated development section, the work seems to ‘lurch’ forward in short quasi-improvised bursts of jagged, instrumentally-conceived melody, as in a fantasia. The lovely operatic-style melodies that often grace the piano sonatas are nowhere to be found.

But most arresting to the ear are the chromatic harmonies used, especially in the development section, which seems to roam mysteriously around in tonal space. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz believed that in this work Mozart pointed the way to the harmonic language later used by Chopin, Wagner and Verdi. He points out how the opening of Mozart’s Adagio parallels the mood, texture and simplicity of the Prelude to La Traviata and this fully justifies a Romantic style of performance for the work.

It will be most interesting to see if Evgeny Kissin agrees.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Sonata No. 31 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-and-accompaniment 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 surprizes, 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 off-beat 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.

 

Frédéric Chopin
Mazurkas Opp. 7, 24, 30 & 33

Chopin’s mazurkas are stylized imitations of the folk dances of his native Poland and come in a wide variety of moods and tempi from the melancholy to the exuberant, moods and tempi often boldly juxtaposed in the same piece. They contain no actual folk tunes but rather use traditional melodic and rhythmic formulas to evoke the spirit of village life in the Polish countryside.

The mazurka is in triple metre with rhythmic emphasis ‘fleeing’ the downbeat in short notes to land instead on the second or third beats of the bar, where stomping or heel-clicking gestures often occurred in performance. Drone tones in the bass are sometimes used to imitate the bagpipes and melodies might be written in exotic scales using a raised fourth scale degree (e.g., F# in C major).

The melodies themselves tend to be “modular,” constructed out of repeated one- and two-bar units of rhythm with recurring melodic motives. Repetition is a prominent feature of the genre, especially at the bar and phrase level.

Using these simple ‘rustic’ features of compositional design, however, Chopin manages to compose salon pieces of considerable elegance by creating melodies richly bejewelled with ornamentation, by subtly playing up ambiguity between duple and triple metrical groupings, and by his use of chromatic harmony.

The boisterous Mazurka in B-flat major Op. 7 No. 1 opens with the ‘dotted downbeat’ typical of many mazurkas. The wide leaps in its melody line seem at times to land on the ‘wrong note,’ giving the impression of a drinking song sung by a tipsy reveller. The contrasting middle section, with its drone 5ths in the bass and oriental-sounding scale patterns in the treble, seems to come from another world.

Polish soulfulness is at the centre of the Mazurka in G minor Op. 24 No. 1, which unfolds in the manner of a daydream. Its reflective tone is given an Eastern European flavour by the augmented 2nds in its minor-mode melody line. Intimations of the dance do occur in passages in the major mode, but they are more nostalgic than joyous.

The Mazurka in C major Op. 24 No. 2 is a village celebration with many characters. First, we hear the band warming up in a series of I-V chords, with open 5ths in the bass, rocking back and forth to establish the key.  Then a high whistling flute or fife chirps out a bird-call kind of tune answered by the band in four-part harmony. Lilting dance melodies sprout up in abundance, some in the Lydian mode (with a sharpened 4th note of the scale) until a radical change of key introduces a call-and-answer dance, in which phrases of delicate piano melody and forte stomping chords alternate in quick succession. Notable is how the left hand takes over the melody to lead back to the opening bird-call. This mazurka ends poetically in a long fade out, with the opening I-V chords rocking quietly into the distance.

The Mazurka in C minor Op. 30 No. 1 is another sadly reflective piece, one of the shortest of the group and perhaps the most enigmatic. The lack of strong downbeats in the opening section gives a kind of ‘lost’ feeling to this mazurka. Its alternation of piano and forte phrases bespeaks a kind of wavering indecision while the buzzing of bass drone tones throughout evokes the sound of village music-making. Remembered joy arrives in the middle section, but it is short-lived.

In a sign of how teasingly ambiguous is the rhythmic structure of these mazurkas, the French opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer once got into a heated argument with Chopin over the metre of his Mazurka in C major Op. 30 No. 3. Meyerbeer said that it was in duple time, while Chopin insisted that it was in triple. However you hear it, this mazurka lives up to its performance indication, Semplice (simply). Innocent and unpretentious in mood, it sways throughout, but coloured with a faint tinge of melancholy. Its middle section features an amiable duet in 3rds and 6ths.

The Mazurka in B minor Op. 33 No. 4 is a dramatic work, full of bold contrasts of mood. Although marked Mesto (sadly), there is little sadness and considerable elegance in the catchy opening tune with its merrily twinkling mordents and Scotch snap phrase endings over a gently lilting oom-pah-pah accompaniment. This section is actually a duet in a call-and-response phrase structure with a baritone voice in the bass responding genially in the major mode to the treble’s warbling call. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, comes a passionate outburst of pianistic bravura, until the opening duet returns. Another contrasting section occurs later in the form of an exquisitely charming and poised salon melody in the mazurka rhythm. Both of these contrasting episodes have a clearly defined mood and character. And yet the exact mood and character of the opening section, which acts as a refrain linking them together, remains till the end teasingly out of reach.

 

Frédéric Chopin
Andante spianato and Grande polonaise brillante  Op. 22

In the early part of his career Chopin wrote a number of works for piano and orchestra designed to show off his skills as a pianist-composer. In addition to the two piano concertos these include the Variations on La ci darem la mano from Mozart’s Don Giovanni Op. 2, a Fantasia on Polish Themes Op. 13 and a Rondo à la Krakowiak Op. 14.  The last of these works, published in 1835, was his Andante spianato and Grande polonaise brillante Op. 22, now a staple of the repertoire most often performed in the version for solo piano.

The Andante spianato is a thing of rare beauty, entirely devoted to enchanting the ear with the soft glow of warm piano tone. The gently rippling accompaniment pattern laid down in the opening bars, an extended arpeggiation of the G major chord, makes clear the meaning of the unusual Italian indication spianato (smoothed out, level). Floating atop this smooth, level sonic surface comes a shy little melody yearning with appoggiaturas at the end of each phrase, a melody that is gradually enhanced with ever more elaborate forms of ornamentation and bathed in great washes of iridescent tone colour coming down from the highest reaches of the keyboard. A chordal ‘trio’ of sorts provides a brief pause for reflection before the smooth rippling texture of the opening returns, the right hand joining in now with the left, in the final section of the Andante.

The mood changes dramatically with the arrival of the Polonaise, which opens with a bombastic fanfare (originally played by the orchestra) leading to the entry of the proud and aristocratic polonaise theme. One could well imagine a primo ballerino leaping onto the stage to this music and doing any number of grands jetés. The theme is of course supported in the left-hand accompaniment by the polonaise’s characteristic prancing rhythm: TUM tuh-tuh TUM-tum TUM-tum.

This is keyboard writing in the grand manner, meant to impress with its daring leaps, double trills, long ‘fly-fishing-type’ spun-out melodic extensions and its cascades of gazillions of notes chattering down from the high treble with every phrase response – a polonaise indeed both grande and brillante.

As he displayed so well in both of his piano concertos, Chopin is able to write melody lines spanning two and three octaves with no loss of musical coherence, and a considerable gain in élan. By dint of endless coy variations in the melodic line, he manages to project a musical personality in this polonaise both heroic and flirtatious – no mean feat.

And while the pose of bravado is generally maintained throughout, things do calm down a notch in the contrasting middle section in the minor mode, a smoky, brooding and soulful meditation on a new theme still pulsing with the polonaise rhythm. Unbridled joy returns with the reprise of the opening theme, leading to a spectacular coda in which ear-tickling piano figuration glitters up and down the keyboard like a birthday party of over-excited children running amok with sparklers in their hands, until finally a great swirling wave of arpeggios sweeps this Grande polonaise brillante to an equally grand and brilliant conclusion.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

Program Notes: Danish String Quartet II

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Franz Schubert
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor D. 810 (Death and the Maiden)

Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is a sombre work, with all four of its movements set in a minor key. It takes its name from the composer’s lied Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817) that provides the theme for the quartet’s slow movement, a set of variations. The poem’s depiction of Death coming to claim a young life may well have had personal resonance for the 27-year-old Schubert, since in 1824, when this quartet was written, symptoms of the disease that would kill him four years later had already begun to appear.

Despite the despairing backstory, or perhaps because of it, the first movement of this quartet is unusually muscular in its scoring, thick with double-stop accompaniment patterns and punchy triple- and quadruple-stop chords at important cadences. This orchestral quality is evident from the startling salvo of string sound that opens the work, comparable in its dramatic abruptness to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This fanfare-like call to attention announces the serious tone of the movement while at the same time introducing the descending triplet figure that will be the principal motive of its first theme, presented immediately following. The other important motive dominating the movement arrives in the work’s second theme: a small grouping of notes ending in a lilting dotted rhythm, lovingly offered up in thirds, Viennese-style.

Schubert’s treatment of these two motives in this movement displays his more ‘relaxed’ notion of the structural principles underlying classical sonata form. While composers in the era of Mozart and Haydn considered their key choices and modulation patterns to be the harmonic pillars and load-bearing walls of a sonata-form movement’s musical architecture, Schubert, by contrast, was more interested in interior decorating than structural engineering. Rejecting sonata form’s traditional concentration on just two tonal centres – the home key presented at the outset and its alternate, presented in the second theme – he preferred to spin his tonal colour wheel more freely so as to choose just the right tonal accent for this little motive here, and the right tonal shade to paint that broad thematic space there.

While not ignoring the form’s three-part division into exposition, development and recapitulation, Schubert lets this pattern out at the seams to create a more vibrant palette of harmonic possibilities. The tonal drama that interests him happens at a moment-by-moment pace, riding forward on waves of harmonic colour. The triplets that appear so portentous as the movement opens, when cast in different tonal colours, become a daisy-sniffing, walk-in-the-park hummable tune. And the lilting dotted-rhythm motive, so gracious at its first appearance, becomes worrisome when constantly repeated in the minor mode.

Schubert’s treatment of his musical material in the following slow movement is much more regular and formally proportioned. The theme for this movement’s set of variations is in two parts, each repeated. The first is a direct quotation of the piano introduction to the Death and the Maiden lied, with its plodding funeral-march rhythm and mournful repetition of melody notes evoking the sorrow that death brings. The second part maintains the processional rhythm but is more hopeful, ending in the major mode to reflect the lied text’s depiction of death as the Great Comforter. Most of the variations decorate the theme with an elegant application of melodic embroidery in the first violin. But the third variation breaks this pattern with its frightening acceleration of the theme’s processional rhythm, a pacing that some have compared to the galloping of Death’s horse.

The Allegro molto scherzo is of a rough Beethovenian stamp, predicated on the play of small, repeated motives, frequent syncopations, and sudden contrasts between piano and forte. Its Trio middle section is a gently swaying Ländler that counts as one of the few moments of sustained lyrical repose in this quartet.

The rondo finale, marked Presto, is a kaleidoscope of seemingly contradictory emotional states. Alternating between the driving vehemence of its tarantella refrain in the minor mode and the almost celebratory spirit of its major-mode episodes, this movement is bound together by its boundless energy alone, an energy that seems to transcend major-minor distinctions. Witness its whirlwind coda, that clearly signals an intention to end the work in the major mode, only to switch back to the minor for its last hurrah, yet with no loss of breathless exuberance.

 

Lotta Wennäkoski
Pige

Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski began her musical education studying violin in Budapest before taking up studies in composition, first at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and then at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, studying under composer Louis Andriessen.

Having begun her career writing scores for short films and for radio plays, her compositional instincts tend towards the picturesque and the accessible, with textures immediately understandable in terms of musical gesture. She is the diametrical opposite of a ‘brutalist’ composer, preferring to lure rather than berate the listener and she has even been called a ‘lyricist’ amongst contemporary composers.

While she enjoys an international reputation, having received commissions from conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen as well as from the BBC Symphony, she also likes to perform at daycare centres, singing songs with the children and explaining to them the language of modern music.

As a composer of both string music and songs, she is uniquely qualified to compose a work responding to Schubert’s lied Death and the Maiden, especially since many of her compositions for voice deal with issues affecting women. Among these are her song cycle Naisen rakkautta ja elämää (The Love and Life of a Woman) from 2003, based on Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song collection, and her recent opera project, Regine (2021), about the wife of Danish philosopher Søren Kirkegaard.

She describes herself as a timbral composer, with a fascination for changes in tone colour. Slip-slidey glissandi are a recurring feature in her string scores and her music often has a strong sense of pulse, communicated in ostinato patterns, against the background of which melodic fragments poke out on the surface of the texture.

Most importantly, her music is fundamentally optimistic in outlook: “I belong”, she says, “to a generation of composers who see the outside world as an opportunity rather than as a threat.”

Composer’s remarks:

Something fierce, something soundless, so have I written in my notebook when planning the string quartet Pige. It has been an inspiring task to write a work to be paired with the Death and the Maiden quartet by Franz Schubert. The “Doppelgänger” idea was greatly feeding my imagination from the very beginning. It’s also been an honour to write music for the hugely expressive musicians of the Danish String Quartet.

The first movement Vorüber, ach, vorüber! is based on the first half of Schubert’s lied that lies behind his Death and the Maiden quartet. This “maiden’s song” has not found its way to his string quartet, so I wanted to use its material in mine. The second movement Daktylus borrows its idea from the haunting pulse of Schubert’s chant of Death. Something fierce and something soundless can be heard here – along with other aspects to the dactyl rhythm.

Schubert’s quartet is wonderful music and of course an unmissable boulder, and “death and the maiden” is a tempting and gloomy motif in art history. On the other hand, I just couldn’t help seeing the motif also as the never-ending image of a dirty old man desiring the young female body… The third movement thus turns its gaze to the girl herself. Pigen og scrapbogen, “The Girl and the Scrapbook”, is joyful textural music – compiled of fragments and freely handled quotations that might spring to mind when thinking of a vital girl’s life.

Pige is Danish for girl. I wish to thank the Danish String Quartet and the co-commissioners for the opportunity to write this music.

– Lotta Wennäkoski, March 2022

 

Franz Schubert
Death and the Maiden
(arr. Danish String Quartet)

Schubert’s lied Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817) is a setting of a two-stanza poem by German poet Matthias Claudius (1740-1815). Like Schubert’s previous lied Der Erlkönig (1815), it features an emotionally dramatic, high-stakes conversation about a coming death, but in this lied the Grim Reaper himself takes part in the conversation, in person.

While he is not the first to speak, his presence is strongly intimated in the opening 8-bar slow introduction, whispered out pianissimo in the monotonous TUM tum-tum rhythm of a funeral march, impassive and virtually devoid of melody, evoking the silence and stillness of the grave. This introduction, which provided the theme for the 3rd movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet, is itself a kind of musical Doppelgänger, echoing another dramatic scene of death foretold – in the same droning monotone, the same key of D minor, and in a virtually identical rhythm – when the Commendatore arrives to escort Don Giovanni down to Hell in the last act of Mozart’s opera of 1787.

The voice of the maiden enters in bar 9. She pleads with Death to let her go, as if he were some kind of lecherous elderly suitor making inappropriate advances to her.

In the lied, her melody line rises gradually in pitch to underline her growing sense of concern:

Pass by, oh pass by!
Go, you wild skeleton-man!
I’m still young! Go, then,
And touch me not
And touch me not.

The second stanza gives Death’s cunning, seductive and bittersweet reply:

Give me your hand, you lovely tender thing!
I am your friend, I’m not here to make you suffer.
Don’t be afraid. I’m not a wild man.
You’ll sleep gently in my arms.

The lied ends with the return of the introduction as a postlude in the major mode, its steady unchanging rhythm transformed from a portent of death into a gentle consoling lullaby.

The intertwining of love and death, brought to the stage earlier in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and later in the Liebestod of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is expressed with elegant simplicity in this short German lied by Schubert.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2022

 

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