First of all, if you’re not familiar with Kerson Leong, the artist playing our first concert of the New Year, here’s something that might fill you in on what you’ve been missing.
Recorded in Montreal four years ago, he’s playing Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s “Grand Caprice” on Schubert’s The Erlking, which, as any pianist can tell you who’s accompanied the song, is a tour-de-force of sheer stamina for the left-hand with its pounding repeated octaves representing the hoofbeats of the horse riding through the storm (a father carrying his young son in his arms tries to reach the safety of home, pursued by the malevolent spirit known as the Erl-King). Transferring Schubert’s sheer Gothic terror – along with the singer’s melody and all the detailed harmonic nuances and contrasting moods – to the four strings of a single violin is a tour-de-force of its own. Playing it is considered a challenge only the most secure violinists can bring off.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1997, Leong won the grand prize at the Canadian National Music Competition at the age of 8 and returned to win four more grand prizes there in successive years. The list of prizes and competitions he has won since then is an impressive list of some of the most prestigious honors available. In 2021, the concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony (and before that, the Montreal Symphony) called him not just one of Canada’s greatest violinists “but one of the greatest violinists, period.”
Incidentally, the violin he’s playing is by one of the greatest violin-makers of all time, Guarneri del Gesu, however much he might be overshadowed by his neighbor and rival in Cremona, Antonio Stradivarius (no less than Jascha Heifetz loved the 1740 Guarneri he played for most of his career even though he owned “several” Strads). The one on loan to Leong is known as the “Ex-Bohrer” from 1741, named for its one-time owner Anton Bohrer, a student of Rodolphe Kreutzer, the Kreutzer to whom Beethoven dedicated his famous violin sonata.
While Ernst’s retelling of Schubert’s Erlking is not on Leong’s program for Harrisburg this week, two other composers who are had also owned Guarneri violins which have been named after them: Ysaÿe and Kreisler, along with the dedicatee of one of the Ysaÿe sonatas Leong will play, Georges Enescu.
The concert will be held at St. Michael Lutheran Church on State Street (between Front & 2nd Streets) on Wednesday night at 7:30. The program – all works for solo violin – will include two of the six sonatas by Eugene Ysaÿe, Fritz Kreisler’s Recitative and Scherzo (Op. 6), the C Major Sonata and the Chaconne in D Minor by Bach. The program also includes two transcriptions of works for guitar: Francisco Tarrega’s famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra (“Reflections of the Alhambra,” arranged by Ruggiero Ricci) and Augustin Barrios’ Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios (“An Alm for the Love of God,” arranged by Kerson Leong).
Kerson Leong discusses why he decided to record all six of the Ysaÿe sonatas for his first release:
I’ll get to the Ysaÿe a little later. But first, some Bach!
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While one of my early teachers may have been disproved – that “everything begins with Bach” – Bach is certainly one of the most important “roots” of Classical Music. We mostly think of him as a composer and organist, but he was also, apparently, at least in his younger years, quite a violinist, if he wrote those Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin for himself to play. At the time – this would be in the early-1720s – he was the director of music at the court of one of Germany’s many little principalities, the Prince of Anhalt in Köthen.
Typical of Bach throughout his career – he would’ve been in his late-30s when he wrote these – it wasn’t just a matter of writing a series of contrasting works like, say, Beethoven (or anybody else back-in-the-day) writing his six Op. 18 String Quartets. Each work is different in some way and each work explores different ways to write for the solo violin. Writers often describe these works – or the 48 Preludes & Fugues of The Well-Tempered Klavier or “The Art of Fugue” – “encyclopedic.” It’s not very different from Chopin, say, writing his Etudes as an exploration of his pianistic technique; Debussy, in 1915, was more specific, subtitling each one as, say, for specific intervals (“for thirds,” “for sixths” and so on) or “for repeated notes” or “opposing sonorities.” Bach may not have been so literal as to define what each piece was doing (and a particular technical challenge may not have been limited to one piece or movement), but anybody who could learn to play them would certainly have learned a great deal about the art of playing the violin! It is no exaggeration to say a violinist learns Bach as a young student and then continues to learn and re-learn them throughout their life, always discovering something new no matter how long they’ve been playing them.
If
you’ve never heard these works before (or seen the score), you may
simply wonder how an instrument with only four strings can play the
sheer amount of notes on the page, not to mention the number of
musical lines we call “polyphony.”
True, you can play
two pitches on two adjacent strings – something called double-stops
– but triads would involve three strings (since you can't play two
notes on one string), and a four-note chord is challenging enough
even if one of those notes involves an “open” (or un-stopped)
string.
The ability of a modern bow to cover three or
four strings, though, is a physical impossibility. It wasn't until
fairly recently the “baroque bow” of Bach’s day came into use
again, since the bow-hair is less tight than a modern bow and could
“bend” a little to accommodate the strings.
The real
challenge is playing not just the number of notes at one time, but
keeping distinct musical lines going over a period of time where one
is a melody and the other an accompaniment or, as in a fugue, where
there might be two or three independent lines moving
contrapuntally (each one its own melody).
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In this set of six works, there are three sonatas and three partitas. Like the two volumes of 24 Preludes & Fugues of “The Well-Tempered Klavier,” they are not intended to be performed as a single work, though the concentrated effort of both playing them and listening to them is quite something to experience. And yet they offer enough variety that, taken as a whole, the process does not sound tedious.
The sonatas are the weightier, more intellectual of the set, each one in four movements with the standard pattern of slow–fast–slow–fast, unlike the more familiar sonatas of the Classical and Romantic eras which were generally of three movements, fast–slow–faster.
The first half of the C Major Sonata is much “weightier” than the second: what sounds like a slow introduction to the Fugue balances the lyrical slow movement which is then followed by a rapid-fire perpetual motion.
The sonata opens with the mesmerizing repetition of simple notes in dotted rhythms that gradually expand to wider and more intense harmonies: already by the fourth measure, the violinist is already playing simultaneous notes on all four strings.
The second movement is the monumental Fugue, full of all manner of contrapuntal tricks. The subject (or “theme”) is combined with a chromatically descending line. Then it appears in stretto (where statements of the subject succeed one another ‘too rapidly’ rather than at the standard number of beats). Then, about halfway through, this subject is inverted (here, ascending steps become descending steps, and vice versa). Near the end, everything is combined: the “regular” fugue, the “stretto” fugue, and the inverted fugue! It’s a compositional tour-de-force to say nothing of an even greater challenge for the soloist.
After the chordal and polyphonic complexities of the first half, the third movement is a simple melodic line accompanied by simple, by comparison “intermittent” harmonies. The finale is a joyful romp in “perpetual motion” mode, usually a “single line” but one that forms a variety of widely spaced chords as it sweeps back and forth across the strings.
In this video-with-score, Augustin Hadelich – who has appeared with the Harrisburg Symphony in previous seasons – plays the Sonata No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violin:
Each partita – a word synonymous with “suite” – consisted of various dance movements which usually alternated tempos and moods and differed from suite to suite. In general, they were considered “lighter” and more “entertaining” (for those who thought something “intellectual” was not). The second of these partitas, in fact, ends with a chaconne (originally a slow dance) that is longer than the first four dance-movements combined – speaking of weight and balance. A chaconne (or ciaconne in Italian) is a set of variations on a repeating harmonic progression (the bass-line of these chords can be expressed as a line but it is not a “theme”). (Let’s skip the quibbling over the difference between a chaconne and a passacaglia which often seem to be used interchangeably: as most composers would say to most theorists, “what do I care about you and your little dictionary?”)
Bach builds an immense structure out of these simple chords introduced in the first four measures, turning them into a vast three-part work that lasts about 15 minutes! When you think it’s exhausted its possibilities, Bach begins the second part, turning it from this dark, dramatic D Minor into a bright and magical D Major, before returning to D Minor and a long, tense passage with a reiterated A on the open string which builds to the final final cadence and a restatement of the opening chords to bring it full-circle.
The Chaconne has been arranged many times and many ways, but Johannes Brahms transcribed it for piano left-hand and, after finishing it, wrote to Clara Schumann, that here, “on one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
Once again, I’m using Augustin Hadelich’s performance with the score cued up to begin the Chaconne that concludes the Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin:
It is interesting to note the title page of Bach’s manuscript bears the Italian title SEI SOLO which is usually translated as “Six Solos [sic]” since to be grammatically correct, it should’ve been SEI SOLI. Did Bach not know his Italian? Or is Bach being cryptic by writing what would be correct Italian for “YOU ARE ALONE”?
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Two centuries later, the Belgian violinist and composer Eugene Ysaÿe heard Joseph Szigeti play all six of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, then set about writing six sonatas of his own for solo violin and dedicated each of them to a fellow violinist. All six sonatas were written in July, 1923, when Europe was still in the aftermath of World War I's devastation, trying to pull itself out of the rubble.
As Ysaÿe explained, "I have played everything from Bach to Debussy” – who had died only in 1918 – “for real art should be international." In these sonatas, Ysaÿe used now familiar fingerprints of early-20th Century style ranging from Debussy's whole-tone scales, dissonances that might be familiar from the earlier works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók. It's not so much up-dating Bach for the 20th Century since Bach doesn't need to be “made relevant,” but reflecting Bach into the 20th Century and adding his own style and fingerprints to the mix of influences available to a modern-day composer.
But virtuosity is not just the ability to play fast notes flashily. Ysaÿe employed virtuoso bow as well as left-hand techniques throughout, believing “at the present day the tools of violin mastery, of expression, technique, mechanism, are far more necessary than in days gone by. In fact they are indispensable, if the spirit is to express itself without restraint.” So, just as Bach did so significantly two centuries earlier, Ysaÿe's set of sonatas places high technical demands on its performers. Yet Ysaÿe recurrently warns violinists that they should never forget to play instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing."
Naturally, the first sonata was dedicated to Szigeti. The second, for Jacques Thibaud, “riffs” on the famous Dies irae motive as a humorous tribute to Thibaud’s well-known hypochondria (nice…). The last sonata, for the Spanish violinist Manuel Quiroga who may be overlooked today, makes use of habanera and tango rhythms.
Of the third sonata, a single-movement “fantasia”dedicated to the Romanian violinist and composer Georges Enescu, Ysaÿe wrote “I have let my imagination wander at will. The memory of my friendship and admiration for George Enescu and the performances we gave together at the home of the delightful Queen Carmen Sylvia have done the rest.”
Subtitled Ballade, it is in two parts, a slow recitative-like introduction with motives or hints of themes to be heard in the second or main section of the piece. Ysaÿe makes use of Debussy’s whole-tone scales and a fair amount of “chromatic dissonance” to remind us things were changing in this decade since Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Marked Allegro in tempo giusto e con bravura , agitated dotted rhythms and double- and triple-stops abound (nothing without the influence of Bach, to be sure) with a contrastingly calm middle section before the dotted rhythms return and the piece – all six minutes of it – ends with a brilliant coda.
Here, Kerson Leong plays Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 3, recorded in a church in Quebec in October, 2020 (and I guess, yes, a program of solo violin music during the Pandemic Lockdown satisfies both our need for art and for staying safe).
Speaking of inspiration from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Bach’s “broken chords” haunt the sonata Ysaÿe dedicated to Fritz Kreisler. With references also to Bach’s A Minor solo sonata, reportedly Ysaye was saying (either directly or indirectly) “if you can spoof Baroque music, so can I,” referring to Kreisler’s famous habit of writing original works “in the Baroque style” which he passed off under various assumed names, some real, some imaginary. However, Ysaÿe also pays homage to Kreisler’s own Preludium and Allegro in the final movement, with a whiff of Viennese nostalgia in the slow movement, a tribute to Kreisler’s birthplace.
Here, Kerson Leong plays Ysaÿe’s 4th Sonata at an opening concert “garden party” as part of the 2018 MuCH Waterloo Music Festival in Belgium.
While Eugene Ysaÿe dedicated his sonata to Kreisler in 1923, Kreisler had dedicated his Recitative & Scherzo, Op. 6, to Ysaÿe in 1911. Once again, here is Kerson Leong performing the Kreisler at a music festival in Riems, France, in 2017.
That leaves two shorter works to discuss, both of them transcriptions of pieces written for guitar. Leong opens the program with Francisco Tarrega’s famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra… written in 1899 as a “Memory” of his visit to the palace in Granada. It was originally entitled Improvisación ¡A Granada! Cantiga Árabe (Improvisation To Granada! Arab song) – many composers can come up with great music but not so great titles – and features a fiendishly difficult tremolo technique where one note (on one string) is played by three fingers in such quick succession it creates a blur of a sustained pitch.
Speaking of titles, the great Paraguayan-born guitarist Augustín Barrios Mangoré came up with perhaps his most famous work which he called Una limosna por el amor de Dios (An Alm for the Love of God). Actually, as the story goes, he did not call it that. It was one of his last works and while it was complete, the manuscript did not have a title. Once, while giving a lesson (this was 1944 in Brazil), he was interrupted by a knock at the door and when Barrios answered it, it was an old woman who stretched her hands out, begging for una limosna por el amor de Dios. Barrios gave her the few coins he had in his pocket, then returned to his student, announcing he had always wanted to write a “tremolo piece,” and he just had an idea for it, telling the student about the old woman’s visit. When the manuscript was found after Barrios’ death, the student told this story and so it was decided to call the piece Una limosna por el amor de Dios. It was also called “The Last Song,” but really, given the inspiration, isn’t the old woman’s call a better title?
Here,
recorded in a church in Quebec in 2020, Leong plays the Barrios,
and, recorded in Halifax in 2019, Ruggiero Ricci’s transcription of Tarrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra.
It doesn’t have to be fast and loud and full of notes to be virtuosic. The hardest part is making it sound so effortless…
- Dick Strawser
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