Dr. Dick's Market Square Concerts Blog

Michael Brown: Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert with a Side of Snow

2012-01-22T12:57:00.000-05:00

If you chickened out because of the weather or had other commitments on a busy weekend's calendar, you missed a wonderful performance by a young pianist who's just entering the difficult and often treacherous world of the touring classical musician.

Last night's performance by Michael Brown was one of the more memorable recitals I've attended in years, especially the way he was able to draw me in to this personal sound-world to forget I was sitting in a concert hall and not, say, somebody's living room listening to Schubert himself play for a handful of friends.

Normally, I don't write reviews - if I'm representing an organization through a blog, one could claim a conflict of interests and lose credibility with a steady stream of positive reviews so as not to offend, avoiding negative comments which would be considered bad marketing.

As Private Citizen Dick Strawser, I posted my review at Thoughts on a Train.

And feel free to offer your own comments about the performance here. What did you think?

After the concert, Michael told me he had just redesigned his web-site, so if you've found links from past posts not working any more, try this one. And you can also check out his blog or follow him on Twitter. There are audio clips of some of his performances and of some of his compositions here.

After music written between 1801 and 1826, he offered a brief encore - one of his own works, an homage to Aaron Copland written in 2007 and full of reminiscences of an influential voice, particularly Copland's wonderful 1941 sonata. I was amused that, after playing this entire program from memory, he walks out on stage carrying the piano's music rack (often removed in concert) so he could play his own piece with the score.

At the moment, he's working on a suite for solo cello for a friend who's to perform it in New York next month. As he tweeted this morning, "composing on Amtrak is the way to go these days."

Michael Brown at Friday's Soundscape

This photo was taken by Ya-Ting Chang at Friday afternoon's Soundscape presentation for students at Whitaker Center, part of Market Square Concerts' educational outreach program.

- Dick Strawser

Beethoven & Schubert, Together Again

2012-01-19T12:13:00.000-05:00

Schubert in 1825

This Saturday evening, Michael Brown brings sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert to Whitaker Center.

This post is about Schubert's changing view of Beethoven. You can listen to both sonatas here and take a "walking tour" of Beethoven's "Pastoral" Sonata here.

At my other blog, you can read more detail about the summer holiday in 1825 when Schubert composed his D Major Piano Sonata, D.850, and another work that most likely became the "Great" C Major Symphony which he was working on at the same time.

In 1816, Schubert – all of 19 years old – wrote about a celebration in honor his old teacher, Antonio Salieri – yes, that Antonio Salieri – surrounded by students, many of whom had composed works specifically for the occasion (the 50th Anniversary of his arrival in Vienna).

“It must be fine… to hear in all [his students’] compositions the expression of pure nature, free from all the eccentricity that is common among most composers nowadays, [which] is due almost wholly to one of our greatest German artists; that eccentricity which combines and confuses the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings and that which is most holy with harlequinades…”

This was a not too thinly veiled reference to Beethoven who, at that same time, was working on what’s considered the first of his late piano sonatas, the A Major Sonata, Op. 101. The 7th and 8th Symphonies had been written 4-5 years earlier, and the “middle quartets” completed 6 years earlier. The 9th Symphony and the other late works – sonatas and quartets – were around the corner.

But by 1823, Schubert had started writing a symphony in B Minor in which, following Beethoven’s example, he sought to expand the forms he had been working with – sonatas, quartets and especially symphonies. Several incomplete symphonies attest to his struggles with these “expanded forms.”

His last quartet – the G Major Quartet written in 10 days in June, 1826, when he was 28 – was clearly influenced by Beethoven’s most recent quartets. The 1st movement was even premiered by Schuppanzigh’s Quartet, closely associated with premieres of Beethoven’s music. This work should have been part of Schubert’s “Middle Period” but since he died at the age of 31, we must consider this “Late Schubert.” It’s all relative.

In 1827, Schubert would be a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral.

Five days before his own death the following year, Schubert requested friends play Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131, for him during which he became so “overcome by such transports of delight and enthusiasm,” he was in such an emotional state by the end of the performance, his friends feared for his health. The story he began hallucinating about Beethoven’s grave may be a fabrication of his brother Ferdinand’s but in the end, he was buried in a grave close to Beethoven’s.

Mozart's Memorial; Beethoven's & Schubert's Graves

A Walking Tour through Beethoven's "Pastoral" Sonata

2012-01-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

If you’ve heard any Beethoven piano sonatas – and there are 32 of them, all together – you’ve no doubt heard at least the 1st movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata. The sonata Michael Brown will be opening his Market Square Concerts recital with this Saturday - 8pm at Whitaker Center - may not be as famous but it was written right after the “Moonlight” and right before another well-known one, the “Tempest.”

Now, this sonata became known as the “Pastoral” (not to be confused with his 6th Symphony he’d write a few years later), one of many nicknames that did not originate with Beethoven. In fact, it was a critic who later christened the Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27 No. 2 “The Moonlight” because the first movement reminded him of a moonlit night on a boat on a lake, but he could have listened to the last movement and heard a terrific storm and called it “The Tempest” except there already was a “Tempest” Sonata. And supposedly that one was inspired by Beethoven reading Shakespeare’s play though since the last movement of the “Tempest” Sonata was actually inspired by watching a man ride by on a horse (Beethoven immediately transcribed into a galloping rhythm that permeates the movement), that could have earned this sonata the alternate nickname, the “Rider.”

Well, whatever…

But the “Pastoral” Sonata’s nickname seems to be deserved. The whole sonata is more relaxed if not outright bucolic. But underneath that simple exterior, the work is very cleverly crafted as any abstract work earning the title “Sonata.”

If you’re wondering what a “sonata” is – even if you weren’t – it originated in the days of Mozart and Haydn and is usually a three-movement work for solo piano or an instrument plus piano with an opening movement in “sonata form,” a contrasting slow movement that could maybe be a set of variations, and a final, usually lively movement to conlcude. Four-movement sonatas became more typical in the 19th Century, adding a scherzo or some faster contrast between the slow 2nd Movement and the finale. In the 18th Century, the weight of this multi-movement piece was in the first movement, but this began to shift with Beethoven, particularly in his later works, so that very often the last movement became more significant.

(Incidentally, a symphony is basically a “sonata for orchestra” and follows the same general evolution as the sonata.)

Now, the fact that a sonata opens with a movement in “sonata form” can sound confusing – I tell my students the study of music is called “musicology” but musicologically speaking, it can often seem “music-illogical.”

The Sonata Form is basically a three-part form.

There’s a 1st Theme in the tonic key (let’s say, D Major), then a modulation to the 2nd Theme which is usually (but not always) in the dominant key (A Major). (Sonatas in minor tonic keys could have a 2nd Theme in the “relative major” – D Minor to F Major.) This is called the “Exposition” where the themes are presented (exposed). It isn’t really the Themes that define the form – it’s the keys, the tonal conflict of presenting the tonic and then moving away from it which is then resolved by returning to the initial tonic key.

(My apologies if your eyes glazed over while you were reading that paragraph. I have to admit to a sense of Geek's Revenge after having to deal with people talking about computers or cars or sports without ever feeling the need to explain their own jargon to me, but I digress...)

In the middle is the “Development” Section where the themes are taken apart, varied, changed, “developed” and the key area is very unsettled. The point is, it’s not supposed to be in the Tonic Key at all. The whole point is, having taken everything apart, to put it all back together so the third section, the “Recapitulation,” arrives back in the home tonic (D Major, in this case).

As the themes are “recapped,” everything is now (basically) in the home key – no modulations to the Dominant or whatever the Exposition did. The idea is to stress this dramatic return to Tonic. Of course, the more complicated these movements became, the more complex the key structure became with it, but that’s the generic principal. What a composer does with it may not always agree with what the textbook says it should. Any composer worth his salt knows that rules are made to be broken: it’s how you break them that counts.

So, let’s go back and listen to that performance by Daniel Barenboim as we walk our way through the sonata and listen to how it's put together:

--- --- --- ---

CLIP ONE – 1st Movement (Part 1)--- --- --- ---

Normally, textbooks tell you music should move by four-bar phrase units but this sonata, rather than being “four-square” with 4+4+4+4 bar phrases, begins [0:15] with a 1-bar intro as if it’s played on the timpani (reminds me of the Violin Concerto’s opening, written 5 years later) + 9 bars (repeated), then [0:38] 8-bars repeated and expanded to 11 bars; [1:00] 4-bars repeated and expanded) which gives it a sense of forward motion – like playing long notes followed by increasingly shorter notes (if that is “rhythm,” this use of shorter and shorter phrases in a kind of “macro-rhythm,” rhythm on a higher structural level).

Also notice how the very first chord [0:17] wants to pull us away from the tonic D Major – that C-natural wants to resolve to a G Major chord which it does but which, as it continues, stays in the D Major tonality. It gives us a feeling of harmonic “fluidity,” chords wafting on nature’s breeze, if you want to think pastorally.

At [1:58], the 2nd Theme (in the outer voices, with “whispering forest” texture in the middle) begins as expected in the dominant key of A Major, but it gets there after a build-up that began at [1:42], moving from the very unexpected key of C-sharp Minor to where it belongs!

Speaking of shortening, notice how these sustained chords at [2:12] followed by a scale-like flourish are telescoped at [2:17] rather than repeated verbatim.

The closing section of the Exposition [2:49] is almost bird-like with “hunting horns” in the left hand – notice the falling octaves in the right hand – which then quietly leads back to the quiet opening timpani introduction [3:20]. The exposition is always marked to be repeated so you can familiarize yourself with everything you’ve heard the first time – the themes, the keys, the tension that will continue to build – on the assumption you can always hear something new the second time around. But not every performer always does.

Having repeated the Exposition, we’re now at the “2nd Ending” [6:21] then, starts the Development section by lifting the main theme up into the key of G Major [6:26] (remember what that 1st chord wanted to do at the very opening? Well, here it actually goes to that implied key) but then he takes just the tail-end of the theme and turns it into an ‘almost fugue’ [6:43] with moving 8th notes in the left hand (4+4), switching registers (another 4+4) [6:50] then alternating (2+2) [6:58] then using a phrase that’s only the end “particle” [7:05] of the end of the main theme – the theme is getting shorter and shorter – building up the harmonic tension with accents and louder dynamics, repeating that “particle” in the process 33 consecutive bars – ! – before slowing down and growing quieter, but sounding likes it’s going to resolve not to D Major, not even B Minor but to B Major [7:57] – very serious!

Then, the closing theme (with its falling octave) [7:57] intrudes cautiously, hesitantly, but working itself into the proper chord so it finally does resolve to the expected D Major [8:24]. This is the Recapitulation, the return of the Exposition’s material.

--- --- --- ---
CLIP TWO – End of 1st/ 2nd Mvmt begins at 2:44--- --- --- ---

Here, the 1st Theme (in D Major) continues through what had once modulated through C-sharp Major to A Major but here, actually sort of putters around until the 2nd Theme comes in in D Major [Clip #2, 0:49], the tonal conflict resolved! After a third repetition of a little scale-like flourish [1:31-1:34] as if crowing “Back in D Major!”, the closing theme with its falling octave [1:40] reinforces D Major as the 1st Theme makes one more appearance [2:08] with four repetitions of that last little “particle” [2:21-2:30] before ending quietly on a standard dominant-to-tonic cadence, V – I. Resolved. The end.

The slow movement, beginning at 2:44, marked Andante (which really means “walking” so it’s not that slow) – opens with the left hand marked staccato (short articulation on the notes) – like pizzicato (or plucked) strings, accompanying a smoothly phrased chorale in D Minor in the right hand.

The 2nd Section [5:26] switches to D Major and returns us to a kind of pastoral sound-image – in this case, as Andras Schiff describes it, horns answered by twittering birds. This then returns [6:56] to the D Minor chorale with the “walking bass” (not to be too jazzy about it, but still…), which Beethoven now varies with a more elaborate right-hand figuration [7:26]. However, before it finally ends (with a straight-forward chorale version, 9:27 or at 0:01 of the 3rd clip, see below], the horns and birds of the 2nd Section return briefly [0:22], now in D Minor – not as bright, giving it a more melancholy tinge – as the left-hand sinks lower into the earth and the bird-call rises quietly higher and higher.
--- --- --- ---
CLIP THREE – End of 2nd Movement; complete 3rd & 4th Movements
--- --- --- ---

The simplicity of this scherzo, beginning at 1:20 of the 3rd clip, is delightful with its very simple 4-bar units. Remember the falling octave in the closing theme from the 1st Movement’s Exposition [Clip #1, 2:49]? Well, that’s where this little movement grows from – four bars, relatively long notes, answered by four bars of shorter, sprightly notes. Whimsical and certainly Beethoven with a smile. A bit of a surprise are the loud chords, just a reminder he did, after all, study with Haydn not too long ago (and Haydn was still the Grand Old Man of Vienna – his oratorio “The Creation” had been written in 1799, two years earlier, and “The Seasons” premiered in April of 1801, just months before Beethoven completed this sonata).

For some reason, the middle section of dances like minuets or the scherzo movement which grew out of them is always called “the trio” even though it has nothing to do with threes (it’s the 2nd of 3 parts, after all, and it isn’t intended to be played by three players). Anyway, this trio [2:45] consists of a 4-bar bit in B minor answered by a similar 4-bar bit that moves to D Major which then, for its second half [2:54], does the reverse. But Beethoven coyly shifts the accompaniment around to reharmonize each bit slightly differently, giving a subtle hint of variety to the expected repetition. Then it goes back and re-does the A Section again [3:07], ending on those very loud chords after such a gentle, sparkling but understated and very brief interlude.

Even though it was the publisher who came up with the title, “Pastoral,” Beethoven must have had this in mind: the last movement returns to an even more rustic sound-image of the countryside – in the left-hand: bagpipes! Not the big honking skirling Scottish bagpipes of military pageantry, but the more subtle, much smaller musettes of the peasants and shepherds. The simple theme he builds over this moves off into a series of ripples [4:27] to a 2nd Theme in A Major [4:44] that sounds like an inversion of the 1st with a hint of drama at the end before the opening returns [5:20].

This lilting or swinging rhythm of the 6/8 meter permeates the whole movement, even in the Development section [6:07] where it becomes almost Bach-like with its chromatic imitation which then increases in tension – harmonic and dynamic – until, again, we reach a storm-like fortissimo [6:33-7:01] – which then clears out with the quiet return of the opening bag-pipes in the bass [7:01], shortened and ornamented (more birds?), then bringing back the ripples [7:30] and finally the 2nd Theme now back in D Major [7:52] then doing the bag-pipe drone one more time in G Major [8:31] (remember what I’d said about the opening chord of the 1st Movement?) before we reach “the coda” [9:08].

Now, “coda” literally means “tail” as in “tail-end” and in this case, it’s a kind of rush to the last measure which pianist Charles Rosen described as being there “just to annoy the amateurs.” This sonata is not technically difficult – which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to play – but this little coda whips along at a pace few amateurs could do cleanly. It ends with a rousing affirmation of D Major: V – I in harmony-speak, “sol – do” in solfeggio-speak, “so – there!” with a wink from Beethoven.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Beethoven in 1803

Beethoven had recently completed his first six string quartets (written between 1798 and 1800), his 1st Symphony (premiered in 1800), the 3rd Piano Concerto, the Septet Op. 20 (which actually became a big hit), and in 1801, he completed the ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, two violin sonatas including the “Spring” Sonata, as well as four piano sonatas including the “Moonlight” and the “Pastoral.” The following year, he finished three more violin sonatas, three more piano sonatas including the “Tempest,” and his 2nd Symphony.

Now, after you’ve listened to this piano sonata and if you know any of the music I just mentioned, you might be surprised to realize Beethoven was suffering from early symptoms of deafness and at times so severely that, in October of 1802 while staying in the rural suburb of Heiligenstadt, he could write a heart-searing letter that reads sometimes as Last Will and Testament and at other times as a possible suicide note.

“But what a humiliation for me,” he wrote, “when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back.”

It should make us appreciate not only the music he left us – especially considering the rustic beauties of this pastoral sojourn – but also what we ourselves, in our world today, can hear and so often take for granted.

– Dick Strawser

January's Concert: Beethoven & Schubert

2012-01-17T17:50:00.004-05:00

Since I’m running a little behind schedule with… well, reality in general, I’m going to post videos of the Beethoven and Schubert sonatas that Michael Brown will be performing at this weekend’s concert – Saturday at 8pm at Whitaker Center. With any luck I’ll finish and post the articles about the background of each work tomorrow or Thursday.

This is a good time to mention, if you know of any students who’d like to attend this recital, Market Square Concerts offers $5 tickets for any college or university student. School-age students are free and an accompanying adult can purchase a ticket for $5. You can get these tickets in the ground floor lobby of Whitaker Center or at the door at other locations before the concert.

The program opens with one of Beethoven’s less-well-known piano sonatas – the Piano Sonata in D Major, Op. 28, known as “The Pastoral” – but one which has long been a favorite of mine (in fact, when I mentioned to a concert pianist friend of mine this was on the program, he said “Oh, that’s one of my favorite Beethoven sonatas”). It doesn’t have the public relations the “Moonlight” Sonata has been blessed with and it’s not the virtuosic tour-de-force the Appasionata or Waldstein Sonatas might be – nor does it plumb the depths like the Late Sonatas (but then, what else does?) – however, it’s a beautiful and beatific work written in 1801 right after the “Moonlight,” a difficult but very busy time in Beethoven’s creative life. Perhaps the relaxed nature of the piece may have been a kind of creative escape from... well, reality.

Check this post, where you can take a "walking tour" of this sonata and find out how it's put together.

Here is Daniel Barneboim performing the complete sonata live at a recital in Berlin. Due to standard YouTube editing practices, the clips do not break cleanly between movements for which I apologize.

1st Movement (Part 1)

End of 1st Movement; 2nd Movement, Part 1 (beginning at 2:44)
End of 2nd Movement; 3rd Movement begins at 1:20; 4th Movement begins at 4:02
= = = = = = = = = = = = =

Michael Brown continues the program with an early work by Frederic Chopin which you can hear and read about in this earlier post.

His program concludes with another Piano Sonata in D Major, one that Franz Schubert composed in 1825. He wrote it while on a summer holiday, visiting the spa-town of Gastein, south of Salzburg.

For this, I’ve chosen four separate performers.1st Mvmt w/Bulgarian pianist, Ivan Donchev
2nd Mvmt w/a classic recording by British pianist, Clifford Curzon

3rd Mvmt w/an unknown pianist (they abound on the internet and the person who posted this has an affinity for the artwork of Thomas Kinkade)
4th Mmvt w/a vintage monaural recording by the great Soviet pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, recorded in 1956.

= = = = = = =

- Dick Strawser

January's Concert, Part 1: Chopin - The Early Years

2012-01-17T14:52:00.000-05:00

Chopin at 28, painted by Delacroix

This weekend, pianist Michael Brown will include a work by Frederic Chopin on his Whitaker Center recital – Saturday at 8pm – not that that’s unusual. Chopin is a mainstay of many pianists’ repertoire. But this is a piece not often heard in performance.

In fact, the whole program for this month’s presentation by Market Square Concerts is “not often heard in performance,” even though the two larger works on the program are sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert. I’ll get to those in later posts.

Here’s Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder who placed 2nd in the 2010 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, playing the “Rondo a la Mazur” by Chopin, recorded live during the competition’s 3rd round.

= = = = = = =

If A-B-A is a traditional three-part format where the A-Theme makes a sandwich out of B, then a Rondo, where the A-Theme recurs with other alternating themes in between becomes A-B-A-C-A-D-A (or some variation of that) – kind of like those “Dagwood Sandwiches” – though this particular example is a not so gut-busting A-B-A-C-A.

'A'

'B' at 1:45

'A' returns at 3:50

'C' at 5:35

'A' returns at 7:46

Here, this recurring theme “A” is based on the Polish folk dance which originated in Mazovia, the region of Central Poland whose history goes back to the 11th Century, where Warsaw is located and where Chopin grew up.

So, the title basically means “Rondo in the style of Mazovia,” or, basically, a Mazurka.

In addition to the Mazurka’s traditional rhythm, Chopin employs a folk-like scale you wouldn’t traditionally hear in Western European classical concert music: a scale with a raised 4th degree or, in the key of F, a B-natural rather than the expected B-flat. To make sure you don't miss it, he accentuates it rhythmically, not just passing over it.

As you listen to this, if you’re familiar with a lot of Chopin, you may think, “well, yeah, that sounds like Chopin” even if you realize the “Opus 5” means it’s a work published very early in his career. (Opus numbers, usually assigned by publishers, are ways of cataloguing a composer’s works – ‘opus’ means ‘work’ in Latin -- but they’re not necessarily published in chronological order. As it happens, many of the works Chopin left unpublished during his life were published posthumously, meaning several early works look like they were written later than others.)

This particular work was written when Chopin was 16. And if that sounds surprisingly like more familiar works of his maturity, keep in mind Chopin was, after all, a prodigy who spent several years of his childhood improvising before he started writing things down.

It's surprising to realize in 1826, when Chopin composed this, he had just officially started taking composition lessons – more a way of taming these improvisations – and, if you look at the date, also realize that Beethoven was working on his late string quartets at the same time and Schubert, his last string quartet (the piano sonata closing this program was written the year before).

Sometimes, we tend to forget what else was going on in the music world when we listen to a composition “out of context.”

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Chopin’s father, a Frenchman and son of a wheelwright, was 16 when he emigrated to Poland in 1787 before the start of the French Revolution. After fighting in the Kosziusko Uprising in 1794 during the “second partition” of Poland, he became a tutor to the children of local aristocrats and later ran a respected boarding school for the sons of wealthy families. In 1806, he married Justyna Krzyżanowska, a woman he’d met through one of his clients. She was the daughter of a once wealthy aristocratic family which, after her father’s death, fell into debt and lost their estate.

(Her brother, incidentally, would later become the father of Włodzimierz Bonawentura Krzyżanowski, Chopin’s first cousin, who fought in the 1848 Revolution against Prussia, then fled Poland to avoid arrest, eventually settling in New York. He became a Union brigadier general during the Civil War and fought at Gettysburg in 1863, helping repel an evening assault by the Louisiana Tigers atop East Cemetery Hill.)

While the Chopin name is French, the composer’s father “polanized” his first name from Nicolas to Mikołaj. The Polish spelling of his surname would have been Szopen but this he didn’t change. As a result, I have been told by several friends who’re from Poland or traveled there, the natives do, in fact, pronounce his name “CHOPP-in” not “SHOW-pah(n).”

Frederic Chopin, the family’s second child and only son, was born in 1810 in a small country town west of Warsaw where the family moved seven months later. Between 1817 and 1827 – the time when Chopin composed the Rondo a la Mazur – the family lived in a spacious second-floor apartment of a building (see photo, above) that was part of the Kazimierz Palace where the Warsaw University had been founded. (The medallion on the 2nd floor central window is, like the car, a more modern touch.)

His father played the flute and violin and his mother, a pianist, was responsible for giving the boys of their boarding school their music lessons. As a child, Chopin was said to have wept when his mother played the piano and so, at 6, once he tried figuring out how to play the piano himself, his older sister began giving him lessons. Then he started studying with a man of limited talents (the student soon bettered his teacher) and at the age of 8, Chopin gave his first public performance at the Radziwill Palace.

Chopin’s first compositions were two polonaises which were said to rival the best of those written by acclaimed local composers, despite the fact Chopin was 7.

He also charmed the Grand Duke Constantine, the brother of Russian Tsar Alexander I (Warsaw was a province of the Russian Empire at the time), and was often invited to the palace as a playmate for the duke’s son.

During two summer vacations, at the home of a classmate north of Warsaw, the 14-year-old Chopin first heard actual folk music, not the stylized courtly dances like the Polonaise which he began “transmuting” into original compositions.

Chopin in 1826

While he had learned the basics of theory early in his studies – both at home and at the schools he attended – he didn’t start studying composition formally until the fall of 1826, around the time he wrote the Rondo a la Mazur. His teacher, Josef Elsner, “observed” rather than guided Chopin’s creativity, preferring not to constrain him with what he considered outdated academic rules, instead letting his talent develop “according to the laws of his own nature.”

Two years later, Chopin traveled to Berlin with a family friend and heard performances by Felix Mendelssohn, for instance, who was only a year older (he would soon conduct the first performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” since Bach’s death). On his return trip, they stopped at the palace of Prince Anton Radwizill, a keen amateur cellist and composer for whom Chopin composed his “Introduction and Polonaise brilliante” for cello and piano, later published as Op. 3. Once back in Warsaw, he heard two of the greatest performers of the day, the violinist Paganini and the pianist Johann Nepomuck Hummel, once a student of both Mozart and Beethoven.

Chopin at 19

At the age of 19, Chopin completed two piano concertos – the F Minor first, followed by the E Minor (they were published in reverse order, as it happened) and began composing the first of his Etudes. When he was 20, he made a successful debut in Vienna performing two separate concerts to generally favorable reviews, though comment was made of the “small tone” he drew from the instrument.

In fact, as it turned out, Chopin was not comfortable with the virtuoso’s world: during his short life, he gave about only 30 public performances.

When the November Uprising began in Warsaw in 1830, initiating a year-long war for independence from Russia, Chopin left his homeland with an urnful of Polish soil with plans to live nearby in Vienna until it would be safe to return. But Viennese life proved incompatible with his sensibilities and rather than go on to Italy, he chose to head to Paris, arriving there having received news the rebellion had been crushed (this is the presumed inspiration for the “Revolutionary” Etude).

He would spend the rest of his life in Paris, the capital of his father's homeland. Ironically, he was never able to master the French language!

A few months after his arrival in Paris, Robert Schumann, writing in his Leipzig journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The New Journal for Music), reviewed Chopin’s “Variations on La ci darem la mano” written for piano and orchestra when he was 17, and concluded, “Hat’s off, gentleman! A genius.”

And with that, Chopin’s career reached a whole new phase.

For more on this weekend's recital by Michael Brown, which also includes sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert, there will be subsequent posts.

- Dick Strawser

Did you hear about the Classical Grammy Nominations...?

2011-12-01T11:32:00.001-05:00

The Grammys announced their nominees for the 2012 awards, in case you missed the concert televised on network TV last night or read that Kanye West received seven nominations.

And even if you did watch it, I doubt you noticed there were any classical music recordings nominated. (If you're wondering, you can check my post here.)

But that's always been the case. Even on those rare occasions when a classical artist did appear on the awards broadcast live, it was met by either indifference or incomprehension (as when host Ellen DeGeneris had to pronounce Shostakovich, Gil Shaham and Zdenek Macal all in one breath).

It's always nice to look through the list, scrolling down to the very bottom to find the Classical Categories, finding artists you've enjoyed, recordings you've bought or heard, and, in the case of this blog, performers who have appeared on Market Square Concerts' programs in recent (or even distant) seasons.

But this year, I'm looking through the list and can't even find the Chamber Music Category. Doing a search on "string quartet," for instance, turns up no category and few mentions - though the Pacifica Quartet's recording of Shostakovich and his contemporaries and the St. Lawrence Quartet's recording of the John Adam quartet they played here last year were nominated under the category "Producer of the Year, Classical."

It turns out that, in April earlier this year, the Grammy Awards announced the stream-lining of their categories, either eliminating or consolidating several awards, whittling it down by some 30 categories. This mostly affected the Classical and Jazz divisions.

Chamber Music has been absorbed by the category "Small Ensembles" which can still include chamber orchestras. This year, no string quartets or comparable ensembles were nominated.

Now, solo albums must compete with artists appearing as concerto soloists. Only one solo performer received a nomination this year - pianist Ursula Oppens playing music by John Corigliano.

Classical Music in general is rarely served by the print and broadcast media across the country. The Grammys paid scant attention to classical recordings even in the past and most media outlets ignored those classical categories at the bottom of the list, unless you were reading the New York Times.

Now, the Grammys serve classical musicians, already struggling to make, release and promote new recordings, even less.

While I wish Kanye the best, but I mean really dude, the JACK Quartet's recording of George Edwards' 2nd String Quartet on Albany Records was SOOO much better...

JACK, Part 3: Well, Hello, Iannis...

2011-11-10T09:45:00.001-05:00

(The JACK Quartet performs Saturday at 8pm at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg on Front Street below Seneca Street. I'll be giving a pre-concert talk at 7:15. I've posted about the other pieces on the program here.)

You know those stories that begin something like “it was a dark and stormy night”? You usually know what to expect at least in a general if not in a specific sense: anticipation and dread, mostly.

For some, the idea you’re about to hear something “challenging” sets up mental roadblocks to enjoyment. Today, we have a fairly lame attitude to “enjoyment,” though, which implies the music we listen to (the TV we watch, the art we look at) must “entertain” us (cue the dancing girls, now).

Many listeners have lost sight of other emotional responses we might have in reacting to music, transferring the bottom line of the arts experience to “I liked it. I didn’t like it.”

For some people, listening has become a passive skill: it's on in the background while you focus on something else. But even in Brahms and Beethoven, if you listen “actively,” you’ll get more out of it rather than just letting it wash over you. That’s easy to do with something you’re familiar with. (“Active listening” is also something that will help you enjoy your marriage a little more, too.)

But with something unfamiliar and initially “off-putting,” letting it wash over you can start to feel like you’re drowning.

Take this statement, a contemporary comment but I’ll leave the composers’ names blank for the moment:

= = = = = = =
“[COMPOSER #1’s] works do not in general please quite so much as [COMPOSER #2’s] – they confirm he has a decided leaning toward the difficult and the unusual.”
= = = = = = =

This was published in London at the end of the 18th Century when Mozart’s “Haydn” Quartets were still new enough to be “New Music.” Which one of these composers do you think is going to be Mozart?

Not to pick on London critics, but here’s one from 1900 and the Dawn of 20th Century Music: which composer (and piece) do you think he’s describing?

= = = = = = =
"The [Piece by This Composer] is a work built upon dry as dust elements. It is one of those odd compositions which at times slipped from the pen of _____, apparently in order to prove how excellent a mathematician he might have become, but how prosaic, how hopeless, how unfeeling, how unemotional, how arid a musician he really was. You feel an undercurrent of… quadratic equations, of hyperbolic curves, of the dynamics of a particle. But, it must not be forgotten that music is not only a science; it is also an art. The [Piece] was played with precision, and that is the only way in which you can work out a problem in musical trigonometry."
= = = = = = =

In the first quote, Composer #1 is Mozart. Composer #2, the one who proves more pleasing to the critic (if not the audience he’s writing for) is Leopold Kozeluch. (You may need to look him up: check here.)

In the second quote, the mathematically minded composer is Johannes Brahms and the example of musical trigonometry is his Sextet in B-flat, written in 1860, forty years before that review was written.

As a famously "difficult" composer himself, Roger Sessions once said "Every composer whose music seems difficult to grasp is, as long as the difficulty persists, suspected or accused of composing with his brain rather than his heart - as if the one could function without the other."

So, considering the music of Xenakis is often labeled, for better or for worse, with mathematical attributes – regardless of whether it was conceived mathematically or not – I thought those two quotes might give a listener in 2011 something to think about.

And perhaps no better introduction to the impact his music can have on a listener would come from someone who did not at first like it.

Kevin McFarland, the “K” in JACK, wrote this for their concert’s program notes:

= = = = = = =

I first encountered Xenakis' music rummaging through my teacher's CD collection. The liner notes described his works using words such as “mathematical,” “calculus,” and “scientific,” which I found a bit off- putting. At the time, I had inherited my teacher's skepticism of the application of math to composition, even though I enjoyed math (especially calculus) often to the chagrin of my peers. The sounds I heard couldn't have been more contrary to my expectations. I would have described them as being brutal, primitive, and alien. I didn't quite know how to process what I was hearing at the time; I didn't know whether I liked it, hated it, or what.

I rediscovered Xenakis in college when reading Formalized Music, his treatise on composition. The book completely changed my approach to writing music. Influenced by the ancient Greeks, he believed that music should be treated as a science as well as an art. For example, he demonstrated the application of stochastic processes (previously used to model chaotic systems such as the behavior of gas molecules) to “clouds” of string pizzicati or the density of woodwind attacks. These techniques were very exciting to me as a composer; there existed an entire world of potential mathematical processes that seemed much more interesting than, say, twelve-tone rows.

However, at the same time, I was listening to many recordings of Xenakis' music, and the paradox of process versus aesthetic became apparent again. This was not heady-sounding music at all, but rather visceral, primal, corporeal. The process of composition was not obvious on the surface of the music. Instead, one might imagine the wailings of a mourning woman, the thunder of a summer storm, or even sexual or religious ecstasy.
= = = = = = =

Earlier this year, when the St. Lawrence Quartet performed the quartet John Adams had written for them, I was intrigued to read that Adams himself had difficulties when he first heard Béla Bartók’s 1st String Quartet which you’d think, compared to the dramatic 3rd, the structurally involved 4th and 5th, and the enigmatic 6th Quartets, would be a walk in the park. But for him, it involved a good deal of “active listening” to make sense of the piece – in the sense another composer makes “sense” of something, perhaps. He said it took several hearings to “get” it.

What does “get” it mean? To each of us, probably something different: a composer wants to understand how a piece is put together, what the composer he’s listening to did to make this piece work; a performer probably listens more to how the players are making sense out of it, handling technical aspects or projecting the structure of the piece into something audible and compelling; a listener will probably be happy enough with “enjoying” it, finding some satisfying emotional response.

Even as someone who composes music, I cringe reading composers’ program notes about “How I Wrote This Piece” using technical jargon that perhaps they expect will snow the audience into submission. That’s fine but I can drive a car without needing to understand the physics of the combustion engine.

So, rather than thinking about quadratic equations and slope formulas and other aspects of trigonometry turned into music, just listen to how it works.

Listen for the visceral, dramatic response to what the composer has created from his architectural plan just as you would look at his building and not be conscious of… whatever architectural terminology one architect would use to impress the pants off his colleagues.

To the untrained listener – the Xenakis Virgin – it may sound like they’re making this up, up there, aren’t they?

But it’s not improvised, it’s not “aleatoric” (left to chance).

Instead of the kinds of phrases and cadences and melodic shapes you’re used to from Bach through Brahms – or for that matter even Schoenberg – Xenakis is finding other ways to express the same underlying concepts.

In a way, it’s like taking a plan for a church – you have the basic idea of what a church is supposed to be, but does it look like the gothic Notre Dame in Paris, the Renaissance cathedral in Florence, the modern Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or this unidentified modern church (the joy of surfing...)? They're all churches but they each look different: different times, different places but same purpose.

You can listen for Xenakis’ musical gestures (rather than thinking of them as melodies, they’re more like shapes and cells that expand to create longer musical ideas) and hear how they contrast (just as Beethoven’s often cellular ideas grow and contrast), played first in this register or instrument, then in another, or how they sound similar here and there, giving the overall soundscape some sense of unity.

Or you can sit there, annoyed, and think of a few choice gestures of your own.

But I think, if you open your mind to the point you’re not focused on negative brain-waves at this point, you’ll walk away with a more positive (or less negative) impression.

Back in the ‘80s, the Harrisburg Symphony played a piece that is often described as “The Great American Symphony” though it’s never played that often – William Schuman’s 3rd. It is not a difficult work – compared to much music written in the 1940s – but it is not an easy work on first hearing.

Two people in front of me were applauding vociferously. I thought they “got” it but then I heard one say to the other, “I really didn’t like it, but they did a marvelous job trying to convince me.”

Live performances have a much better chance to “convince” you than listening to a recording. And a committed performance from players who are convinced what they’re doing is vital will be more likely to convince you than other performers who may only be going through the motions (though technically proficient) because they feel “hearing contemporary music is good for you” (like green beans and broccoli, not likely to be on top of the “what’s for dinner” list).

In a sense, I’m reluctant to post a video of “Tetras” for fear someone will just click on it and, after 10 seconds, exit the page and go listen to this bit of trigonometric music. But hopefully, if you’ve read this far, you’ll give it a chance.

To return to Kevin McFarland’s program note about Xenakis’ music:

= = = = = = =
Perhaps no composition better embodies this contradiction than Tetras. Written relatively late in his career, Tetras is a work of starkly contrasting textures. The piece opens with a virtuosic glissando violin solo followed by the viola in double stops and then the whole quartet in quiet echo of the solos. From there the piece moves through a handful of sections, often with little or no transition in between. The feeling I get from this work is that Xenakis had already liberated string sounds from traditional roles and was then completely free to create in the wake of this revolution. It is a work of uncompromising vision, savage brutality, and startling beauty.
= = = = = = =

Here’s the JACK Quartet recording “Tetras” by Iannis Xenakis:

If you’re not one of those immediately taken in by the whole new sound-world this may open to you and you’re thinking instead, “How do I listen to this stuff?”, listen to it again and follow these points:

Long opening violin solo (single notes, sliding up and down through different registers of the violin which may sound a bit like someone talking.

At 0:32, the answering solo in the viola (two notes at a time, still sliding, but responding, making it a conversation).

At 1:02, other instruments enter with brief swirls of colors and different textures, as if commenting on the conversation between the violin and the viola ("discuss amongst yourselves").

At 1:15 accents contrasting with quiet flurries and sudden “rude noises” like sharp chords.

At 1:48, the tension’s been increasing to a point where – suddenly – the energy is released, and this excerpt ends with sounds (you might call them ‘noises’) that punctuate the texture like an unexpectedly loud chord in Beethoven puts a period on a musical paragraph.

(By the way, you’ll notice, looking over Chris’ shoulder, the music he’s playing from is completely (and complexly) notated, not left to improvisation.)

Instead of something that might be the logical equivalent of a still-life painting with fruit and a bowl, or somebody's barn in winter, you're looking at a colorful kaleidoscope of images, or fragments of images - or the shadows of fragments of images...

If this is your first time hearing any of Xenakis’ music, I envy you the excitement of discovery but also understand how you might feel lost. Think John Adams and Bartok’s 1st – or Kevin McFarland’s first encounters with it (and here he is, playing it for you, now).

Keep in mind, it took a while for Columbus to figure out where his explorations “got” him, too.

So if you decide you don’t like Xenakis’ music, that’s fine, if you’ve made an honest attempt at listening to it. (I remember, after making a face the first time I ate an olive, my mom said “You have to eat seven olives before you’ll like them.”)

And if you decide you never want to hear Xenakis again – which is your perfect right as an individual – you can always go home and listen to your Kozeluch CDs.

- Dick Strawser

JACK, Part 2: Meet G, C and P

2011-11-09T08:29:00.001-05:00

The JACK Quartet will be performing their GPCI Program on Saturday – November 12th – at 8pm at the Temple Ohev Sholom on North Front Street in Harrisburg (just below Seneca Street) – I’ll be doing a pre-concert talk at 7:15, by the way.

G = Guillaume Machaut (c.1300-1377): Three Pieces arranged by Ari Streisfeld
P = Philip Glass (b.1937): String Quartet No. 5
C = Caleb Burhans (b.1980): Contritus (a work composed for JACK)
I = Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001): Tetras

Very often, when people go to concerts where a work by a still-living composer is performed, if they don’t like the “new music,” it’s the composer’s fault but if they don’t like the Beethoven, it’s the performer’s fault.

Most of that comes from familiarity. The Beethoven You Know, whether it’s from recordings or other performances you’ve attended, is something “measurable.”

The New Guy is not.

It’s possible you’ve never heard his or her music before, much less this particular piece. And if it’s a World Premiere, no one has a yard-stick they can measure it by so you can’t even use somebody else’s opinion – a critic or the friend who talked you into coming to this concert – to base your own reaction on.

I got a phone call one night, when I worked at the radio station after playing some music by a Living Composer (something this listener equated more with a Zombie), something he didn’t particularly like. In fact, he was arguing that it wasn’t even, really, music, much less “classical music.”

Of course, I could spend hours writing about that, alone, but the comment he made about not playing music that has not reached a certain level of popularity struck a chord with me (so to speak).

This is what I now call the Reality TV Reaction – a combination of “Survivor: New Music” and “American Composer Idol” – in which listeners essentially get to vote new pieces off the island.

He said if it doesn’t “reach” an audience, “it has no right to stand next to a great work of art like the Beethoven Violin Concerto.”

I thanked him for choosing that particular piece because he just made his own argument invalid.

I explained: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is regarded as one of the Two Greatest Violin Concertos ever written. Beethoven wrote it in 1806 and it was a disaster at the premiere (for any number of reasons: the soloist did not have enough time to learn it and was, essentially, practically sight-reading parts of the last movement). It was rarely performed because many considered it too long and too difficult to play and listen to. It did not enter the repertoire until Joseph Joachim championed it after playing it the first time in London with Felix Mendelssohn on the podium in 1844. If you’re not quick on the mental math, that’s 38 years after it was composed and 17 years after Beethoven’s death. (Oh, and Joachim was 12 at the time.)

So yes, sometimes it takes a while for a work we think of as great to “find its audience.”

As a composer, I find no more reassuring literature to read than the famous bad reviews that Nicholas Slonimsky (himself a composer and conductor of then new music) collected in an amazing little volume called The Lexicon of Musical Invective which could be subtitled “They Don’t Write Reviews Like That Anymore.”

In “classical music,” we regard what the composer wrote with all the reverence of a sacred text. Modern performances can succeed or fail on how closely they come to the composer’s intentions (whatever that is).

At least as long as the listeners are familiar with it.

One of my favorite “gottcha” moments was the fallout following a concert about 30 years ago by a famous interpreter of modern piano music – unfortunately, I’ve now forgotten her name; French, I believe – and a major Carnegie Hall recital which included works by Schoenberg and Xenakis. It was hailed as a triumph, especially the Schoenberg which, amazingly enough, she played from memory. I remember, reading the review, thinking how true it is that committed playing can win over a doubtful listener who still finds Schoenberg daunting to listen to.

Well, as it turned out, Paul Jacobs, who was a pianist also specializing in contemporary music and who’d recorded all of Schoenberg’s piano music, was sitting in the audience wondering the 1980s equivalent of “WTF?!” And he wrote a “letter to the editor” in which he voiced his opinion that very little of what she played was actually Schoenberg.

It turned out – and the pianist admitted this later, out of embarrassment – she had several memory lapses and rather than stop and start over, she kept on going, improvising “in the style of” Schoenberg and some of the most astute critics in New York City were none the wiser. (She said she’d spent so much time worrying about the Xenakis, she took her memory of the Schoenberg for granted.)

Would the same thing have happened if she’d had a similar problem in Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata?

(True story: when I was a child and first taking piano lessons, I used to improvise at the piano all the time and of course hated all the time spent practicing. I decided I wanted to become a composer because that way, I would be the only one who’d know if I was making mistakes.)

So, to give you an idea of how differently interpretations may affect how you react to it, here’s a “period instrument” version of one of Machaut’s “greatest hits,” the song, Douce dame jolie. I’m not saying either of these are “wrong” or “better” – just different interpretations of what was once on the 14th Century Hit Parade.

Here, Theo Bleckmann performs the same song: the title translates as “Sweet, lovely lady (do not think any has sovereignty over my heart but you alone).”

Ari Streisfeld, the “A” in JACK, has arranged three works by Machaut for string quartet, playing with the lines, moving parts around, making good use of the timbres available in a string quartet.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Caleb Burhans is a more recent composer – to put it mildly – born 31 years ago rather than over 700. And one I’ve not heard before, so I am definitely looking forward to discovering his music. Here’s a link to his web-site bio.

About the work he composed for his fellow Eastmaniacs in JACK – entitled Contritus – he wrote this which is included in the program notes:
--- --- --- ---

Contritus is Latin for “crushed by guilt”. In the Catholic Church there are many prayers of contrition and penance. Composed in the fall and winter of 2009, Contritus is in three sections that organically flow into one another. These sections represent three different prayers of contrition. Much of the string writing in Contritus is evocative of early music and viol consorts while still portraying a sense of modern guilt.

--- --- --- ---
When I saw the title, my first expectation was he might be finding some inspiration in medieval or renaissance church motets – or maybe not: it could also sound completely (and possibly) wildly different, a 21st Century take on a 15th Century model? But reading his comment about the piece, it seems that first expectation might be more accurate. I’m eager to find out how he translates one age into another.

Here is an example of another work of his, excerpts from “The Things Left Unsaid” for cello ensemble, composed in 2006.

Philip Glass has become one of the “Grand Old Names” in Modern Music, recently surviving the public recognition of his 70th Birthday. Glass’ music is no stranger to Harrisburg – his Violin Sonata was given its world premiere on a Market Square Concerts program at Whitaker Center, commissioned to honor Lucy Miller Murray.

Glass himself, with his ensemble, played the filmscore to Koyaanisqatsi live at Whitaker Center and though I find it difficult to sit in a room and listen to the full recording of the music, the actual experience of hearing (and feeling) it live while watching the film it was meant to accompany was astounding – riveting, in fact – and by the time it was over, I thought we had only reached intermission.

Here is a performance of the 5th Movement of the 5th Quartet which JACK will be performing Saturday night. And this is also an example of another great name for an all-male quartet – I suspect it must be pronounced in the Italian way as “tes-tahs-steh-ROH-neh”…

For Iannis Xenakis, the last composer on this program, I’ll include an introduction to his “Tetras” in a separate post.

- Dick Strawser

JACK comes to town

2011-11-07T15:35:00.001-05:00

Contemporary:
1. Belonging to the same period of time (a fact is documented by two contemporary sources)
2. Of or about the same age (Brahms and Wagner were contemporaries)
3. Current or modern (art work that is contemporary with our own times and sensibilities)

It’s the third definition we’re using to describe the music the JACK Quartet will be performing this Saturday at 8pm for Market Square Concerts, a program that will be held at the Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg at Front below Seneca Street.

There is a pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15 presented by Dick Strawser (that would be me) and I’ll try not to duplicate everything verbatim I will post here on the blog.

There are additional posts about the music on the program: Part 2 introduces the Machaut, Caleb Burhans' Contritus, and Philip Glass's 5th String Quartet. Part 3 is an introduction to Iannis Xenakis' Tetras.

Opening the season with the Juilliard Quartet brought one of the Great Quartets of All Time to Harrisburg, a group that has been performing (in one personnel configuration or another) for sixty years.

This month, Market Square Concerts offers listeners one of the newer, cutting-edge ensembles that’s only been around six years, officially forming into a quartet after they’d all graduated from the Eastman School of Music (when I was a student there in the Trying to be Wild & Crazy ‘70s, there was much talk of trying to get out from under what we called “Eastman Gothic”…).

They call themselves the JACK Quartet and the name comes from the first letters of their first names:

J = John Pickford Richards, violist
A = Ari Streisfeld, violinist
C = Christopher Otto, violinist
K = Kevin McFarland, cellist (who, incidentally, is from Lancaster PA)

(In this photograph, I guess that would be JCKA but in the photo at top, it's CAKJ though since the violinists share 'who's on first,' so to speak, it could sometimes be ACKJ.)

Tickets are available on-line through Whitaker Center, by calling (717) 214-ARTS, in person at The Box on the 2nd level of Whitaker Center or at the door prior to the concert.

Student Tickets: We also offer $5 tickets for college and university students.

School-age students are free.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Going to concerts presents a multiplicity of possibilities. As far as the composers go, consider familiar works by familiar names – Beethoven’s 3rd Razumovsky Quartet or Brahms Piano Quintet – things you’ve heard before and perhaps enjoy meeting whenever they come around. Or maybe it’s an unfamiliar work by a familiar name: let’s say it’s Dvorak but it’s not his “American” Quartet – knowing you like the familiar one, chances are good you might like another of his works.

Even if you’ve never heard a piano trio by Anton Arensky (whom you may not be familiar with), you might realize liking some of his European contemporaries or other Russian composers from the late-19th Century might mean this could be a pleasant discovery.

Of course, speaking of Russian composers, just because Cesar Cui is one-fifth of ‘The Mighty Handful’ doesn’t mean you’ll find him up there in the same league as his colleagues Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakoff.

Then, of course, there are programs where one of the names, unfamiliar or not, inspires fear. For some people, it could be Brahms. More listeners tend to suffer from contemporariphobia, anything (usually unfamiliar) which strikes them as New Music even if it’s older than their grandparents – for instance, did you know 2012 is the Centennial of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire?

I have been told that Ives and Cage are four-letter words (then, too, so is Bach).

One of my favorite composers is Elliott Carter (who incidentally turns 103 in a month and is still composing). For some, Carter is an acquired taste, but he must be doing something right to be regarded as one of the great composers of the 20th Century.

The problems some listeners have in dealing with “new music” come not so much from their lack of familiarity with it but from listening to it the same way they’d listen to Beethoven and Mozart. You would tell a Vivaldi-fan who can’t stand Wagner that you can’t judge Wagner because he’s not Vivaldi but we do it all the time with most “contemporary” music, dismissing it because it’s not Beethoven.

Listening to unfamiliar music will be one of the topics I’ll be getting into at the pre-concert talk I’m offering before the JACK Quartet’s performance on Saturday. So if you’re cautious about what’s on the program and debating whether you should go or not, I would say, yes you should go and yes you should go with an open mind as well as ear and, of course, yes you should come to my pre-concert talk ;-)

Their program opens with something not terribly contemporary – the music of Guillaume Machaut who died in 1377. Yes, the 14th Century! When you consider most concert music we hear these days rarely pre-dates 1700, this would seem a bit of a stretch, contemporaneously speaking.

Keeping in mind that Steve Reich (a leading composer in today’s so-called “minimalist” school) once said his music had more in common with Hildegard of Bingen (12th Century) than with Haydn (18th), it’s important to realize that music, first of all, is music, whatever era it comes from, and in many cases has many of the same attributes, though they may be realized differently.

There might be phrases and elements of tension and release that create cadences and form which might be easier to hear in more familiar works like Beethoven and Mozart, but you can still hear a composer like Iannis Xenakis who can create lines and forms and textures and tensions in many different, sometimes similar ways yet sound completely different from anything you’ve ever heard before.

Now, if you’ll pardon one more analogy, you’ve never had Thai food before, you know it’s spicy and you walk into the first Thai restaurant you find. You look at the menu and stab your finger at, say, a Chicken Panang Curry. After you realize you can no longer feel your lips and the roof of your mouth is melting, do you say “I don’t like this; it’s not a cheeseburger”?

Stay tuned. More posts on the way.

Dick Strawser

Mozart & Haydn: the Birth of a Musical Legacy

2011-09-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

Since the Juilliard Quartet is playing one of Mozart's "Haydn" Quartets (that is, from a set of six quartets dedicated to his friend Haydn) at their 8:00 concert on Saturday evening at Whitaker Center, opening Market Square Concerts' 30th Anniversary Season, it would seem logical I should post a little [sic] something about it.Part of the problem writing anything in-depth about any one of these six string quartets is that you would need to get into detail not only about the other five quartets but also the six quartets Haydn published as Op. 33 which inspired Mozart to begin his own set. And since Haydn published his in 1781 and Mozart completed his in 1785, that’s covering four years of a very busy time in Mozart’s life (and times).

Merely mentioning the quartets, what keys and catalogue numbers they are and what year they were written doesn’t really tell you much about what was going on behind the music. But going into detail takes on the appearance of a doctoral dissertation and risks the comment, as I do some research and look over my notes, that – to quote Emperor Joseph II’s comment about Mozart's new opera, Abduction from the Seraglio – there are "too many notes.”

One of the problems is the unfamiliarity of Haydn’s inspiring collection and the fact that, for most of the repertoire we’re familiar with in string quartet programs, Mozart’s “Haydn” Quartets are essentially the chronological starting point. While you might find the occasional earlier Haydn quartet, you rarely hear any of the quartets Mozart composed before 1781. Even though Haydn more or less “invented” the string quartet, still the most regularly programed are those from the late-1780s and ‘90s (Op. 50 to Op. 77, or #36 to #67) and of those, more likely the last dozen or so.

Like the symphonies, the typical concert-goer is still more familiar with only a few Haydn Symphonies outside the basic handful of “London” Symphonies just as one rarely hears more than a half-dozen of those Mozart wrote in the last decade of his life.

And it’s unlikely many concert-goers would know any of the first dozen or so quartets Mozart composed before the six “Dedicated to Haydn,” even the 1773 set of six written in Vienna when he was inspired by Haydn’s Op. 17 and Op. 20 sets.

So it’s a challenge for a modern listener – familiar with “Beethoven and Beyond” – who doesn’t know much about what the quartet had been like before in order to appreciate what it was Mozart accomplished in these six quartets.

Now, Haydn is generally known as the “Father of the Symphony” (the nickname “Papa” Haydn originates from a different perspective) but he also was very instrumental (pun intended) in the birth of the String Quartet.

He did not “invent” the symphony – it already existed as a form, evolving from the three-part opera overture called a sinfonia. But he may have had more to do with the “invention” of the string quartet.

During the Baroque era (especially from c.1700-1750), one of the most common musical combinations was called a “trio sonata” which included two melody instruments as a duet (more likely two violins but also possibly flutes or oboes or a combination of them) with “continuo.” For us, it’s confusing to think of a trio sonata being played by four people but “continuo” meant an instrument capable of playing chords (a keyboard instrument or a lute) with a lower register instrument like a cello or a bassoon that doubled the all-important bass line. This is a typical Baroque “sound.”

The texture of this “sound” is also significant. The melodic line was important, the two upper instruments often echoing or answering each other, sometimes one stepping into the background as the other moved into the foreground and vice-versa. The bass-line just plodded along, keeping the ear grounded in the harmony.

The harmonic portion of this “continuo,” however, was so insignificant composers didn’t bother writing it out. Performers were expected to improvise their part based on a series of coded numbers – numerical figures written under the bass-line (that’s why this theoretical detail is called ‘figured bass’) – that told him what notes were to be filled in to create the correct harmonies. Improvisation in this case didn’t mean completely winging it but, as in jazz, working within given parameters to create something out of virtually nothing more than a few provided guidelines.

In many (if not most) cases, pieces probably could be played without the keyboard part if the bass-line and the two melodic parts took into consideration proper harmonic voicing.

As Haydn later told his biographer, when he was 18 or so and a free-lance starving musician in Vienna freshly expelled from school and trying to make ends meet giving lessons, he got a paying gig with a Viennese baron who had a country estate about 50 miles outside the imperial capital. Considering the request for some music-making, the only musicians available were the baron’s pastor, his estate manager – both amateurs – and a friend of his, but no keyboard instrument. So, out of necessity, having to compose a work for four players - two violins and ‘cello without continuo - he realized he could fill in the missing harmonies by using a mid-range instrument, the viola.

And thus was born – generations of viola jokes aside – the string quartet.

Now, it’s true that Grigorio Allegri, most famous for his Miserere, had composed a piece for an ensemble of four strings before the mid-1600s. Alessandro Scarlatti had published a set of “Quartet Sonatas [as opposed to “Trio Sonatas”] for Two Violins, Viola and Cello without Keyboard” somewhere between 1715 and 1725, it was viewed as a “natural progression” from the idea of the Trio Sonata plus the occasional lack of a suitable continuo instrument like the harpsichord or organ.

But even Grove’s Dictionary says of Scarlatti’s instrumental music, “none of these shows him at his best.” Famous as a composer of over 60 operas and a great deal of church music, he is best known today as the father of Domenico Scarlatti. Since by 1686 he established the three-part form of the Italian opera overture which would later become the symphony, he should at least be remembered as the “Grandfather of the Symphony.”

So, why did Haydn become the “Father of the String Quartet”?

Because in 1750 he was probably unaware of Scarlatti’s little-known work and no one else, in the intervening decades, seemed to have followed Scarlatti's lead. Haydn’s early endeavors were successful enough to catch on. Though his first 28 quartets were originally called “Divertimenti,” his first published works were String Quartets in 1762. If the 1750-ish date for the “birth” of the String Quartet is accurate (and some musicologists doubt it), even so, Haydn didn’t compose his first symphony until 1759.

Now, the texture of this string quartet was also important to note: in Baroque music, even if 1750 is an arbitrary cut-off date made convenient by the death of J. S. Bach, though the Baroque Style was already out-of-fashion by then, the general texture of music was polyphonic – several voices (or instrumental parts) moving independently.

Here’s an example of typical Baroque polyphony, from Bach's 2nd Brandenburg Concerto.

Contrast that with the opening of Haydn’s first published string quartet, written about 40 years later.

Unlike the Bach Brandenburg Concerto where four different soloists each have their turn in the spotlight and continue playing independently as equal parts of the whole – note the background role of the continuo plus the other members of those string players in what passed for “the orchestra” in those days – Haydn’s quartet is primarily a violinist supported by three other string players where the 1st violinist gets most of the work while the cello plays the harmonic bass (sometimes not even a smoothed-out melodic line but just the ‘table legs’ of the chord progression) while the “inner parts” – 2nd Violin and Viola – play other notes in the chord to fill out the necessary harmony. (Ever wonder where the term “playing second fiddle” came from?)

This texture is called “homophony” – unlike polyphony which means “many voices,” homophony implies a single melodic voice supported harmonically by accompanimental voices. For instance, in keyboard music, it would be a melody in the right hand with some accompanimental pattern in the left, like the opening of this famous Mozart piano sonata, beloved of beginners everywhere.

It is not the only solution to the question “what to do with four players,” but it is the most common one, in one form or another. If you listen to other movements from Haydn’s Op. 1 quartets, it is still the 1st Violinist’s show.

Now, compare that with one of Haydn’s later quartets, published in 1781, that inspired Mozart: this is the opening of the B Minor Quartet, Op.33 No. 1:

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While the division of labor is still geared to the 1st Violinist, the others have more to do, their parts are a little more independent and the 1st Violinist isn’t always getting the spotlight. The other three parts are becoming both more independent and more interesting both to listen to and to play.

Enter Mozart. (Finally.)

When he was 23 years old, he heard two sets of Haydn quartets on a visit to Vienna in 1773. There hadn’t been much call for him to write string quartets as a musical employee of Salzburg’s Archbishop Colloredo, for whatever reasons. In fact, all of them, so far, had been written for other courts – his first while on tour in Italy in 1770 when he was 14, the next six for Milan during the winter of 1772-73. So these Haydn-inspired quartets of 1773 (K.168-K.173) show a considerable state of advancement over the earlier ones.

Part of that difference is what we might call “demographic targeting.” Mozart wrote the earlier set in Milan for an Italian audience whose attitude about ‘what good music should be’ required a more carefree, more melodious, generally more entertaining style. In Vienna, audiences would prefer something with a little more fiber to the texture (think more polyphony than homophony) and a somewhat more intellectual approach (though Germans in Leipzig, say, still thought Vienna was more empty-headed than light-hearted).

So when Mozart finally moved to Vienna on his own in the spring of 1781, having resigned his post with the Archbishop of Salzburg (and, yes, booted out the door by the archbishop’s chamberlain, probably Count Arco’s sole claim to fame). Not long after that, he begins work on a new opera – The Abduction from the Seraglio – the one Emperor Joseph II famously complained had “too many notes” when it was premiered in July the next year.

A month later, Mozart married Constanze Weber.

Another thing that happened to Mozart, aside from trying the life of a free-lancer with lessons and concerts, was discovering Haydn’s latest set of string quartets, the six of Op.33, known variously as the Russian Quartets because they were dedicated to the Grand Duke Paul, son of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, and Russia’s future if short-lived tsar.

Here is the opening of Haydn’s Op.33 No.3.

And though it might not sound that different to us – again, with everything that came after these works – there is a marked difference in the approach (overall) to the individual parts.

Compare that to the first of the six quartets Mozart began composing that next year: the G Major Quartet, K.387, was completed in December of 1782, four months after his wedding and their move into a newer and larger apartment. Here is the Hagen Quartet in a live concert recording – the performance actually begins at 1:20 into the clip.

Though the 1st Violinist still leads the ensemble, note that the other parts are a little more individualized and that the 2nd Violinist actually gets to state the second theme at 2:11!

Keep in mind, though we think of Mozart as a pianist, he was also a fine violinist and preferred playing viola in a string quartet – he said it was more interesting to hear everything going on around him rather than to be playing the lead. That, diplomatically or not, he left to his friend Haydn when they would gather for “quartet-playing parties” with Dittersdorf playing 2nd Violin and Vanhal playing ‘Cello, all four of them leading composers of the time and, technically, “amateur” musicians.

The one the Juilliard will be performing at Whitaker Center this weekend is actually the next-to-last of the six.

Unfortunately, I’m running out of time to find a reasonably good live performance, so we’ll go with this “audio” clip of the Quatour Mosaiques.

1st Movement:

2nd Movement:

3rd Movement:

4th Movement:

One of the trademarks of the “new” quartet-style Mozart was exploring was the contrapuntal independence of the parts which you can hear especially in the opening of the last movement. His very next work – and generally the “most famous” of the set – is the last of the group, nicknamed “The Dissonance” because of its curious opening.

Even if it sounds fairly tame by our standards (after hearing Wagner and Schoenberg), in Mozart’s day it was a rather alarming sound – notes that create unexpected harmonies that should resolve one way but move on to different chords than expected. Keep in mind “dissonance” really means “a note that doesn’t ordinarily belong to a given chord and requires some form of resolution” rather than “wow, that was nasty!”.

Once they were completed over the winter of 1784-85, Haydn first heard the quartets at two separate gatherings at Mozart's home, the first three on January 15th and the second three on February 12th, 1785. One assumes, on these occasions, he just listened, rather than playing in the ensemble himself). After hearing them all, Haydn made a now-famous remark to Mozart's father Leopold, who was visiting from Salzburg: "Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition."

- Dick Strawser

Juilliard & Stravinsky: 3 Pieces Build Bridges

2011-09-27T15:20:00.000-04:00

This weekend’s concert with the Juilliard String Quartet opens the 30th Anniversary Season of Market Square Concerts, Saturday at 8pm at Whitaker Center. The program ends with one of the quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn and will include a quartet by Leos Janáček inspired by a neurotic novella by Leo Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata” (Beethoven’s violin sonata plays a significant part in the story’s mounting tension but not in Janáček’s quartet).

You can read earlier posts about the legendary Juilliard Quartet here – founded 65 years ago, later this month, their newest member is 33 years old – and also about the Janáček that includes video clips of the complete quartet as well as background information on the piece and the novel that inspired it (you can also read more background – kind of like extra credit, if you’re interested – about Tolstoy’s novella on a post at my blog, Thoughts on a Train).

One of the things I like to do in these posts is get “behind” the music that might give a listener some different insights into the piece or the composer who wrote it, given what was going on in his life at that time in history and how it might affect how you’re listening to it. While it can certainly be appreciated and enjoyed without that background – or “context” – if you believe “the more you know, the better you’ll be able to appreciate it,” then these posts might help you understand the music a little more.

Music, of course, is difficult to “describe” in words. It is very subjective, it is gone as soon as you hear it and the impression you’re left with is more the memory of it than the music itself. How you respond to it, on what level you respond to it, will differ from person to person. Sometimes, it is just a matter of liking or not liking a piece; rarely do we have the time to react as to why you might like or dislike it. That could be because of the music itself, the performance or what you had for dinner or how your day went.

When people who love classical music but rarely get beyond 1900 except for the more “accessible” composers see the name Stravinsky on a program, they think “contemporary music” which immediately sets up certain barriers. Whatever your automatic viewpoint might be about this – “I want my Beethoven” or “ah, something other than Beethoven for a change” – I hope you’ll read this post and find a way to engage yourself during the performance of what Stravinsky rather blandly called “Three Pieces for String Quartet” which in fact are three short and perhaps confusing pieces.

What do you think of when you see the name STRAVINSKY? Probably the three great ballets he premiered between 1910 and 1913 – The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. Each of these is quite different from the others: there’s a folk-lore element common to all three and they’re all for big orchestras and full of brilliant colors and what me might call “special effects.”

The Firebird is based on an old Russian fairy tale and sounds like a direct descendant of the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff (logical, since Stravinsky was 28 when he ballet was first performed and had been a friend of the family and a student of the old master who died that year himself).

Petrushka is set in the folksy rabble of a pre-Lenten street fair with crowds of ordinary people who catch a glimpse of the private lives of puppets, the music full of Russian folk songs giving it a certain “local color.”

On the other hand, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) burst upon the world with its famous riot – caused more by Nijinsky’s avant-garde choreography than Stravinsky’s music, actually – and was full of brute-force energy in its rhythms and dissonant music: even though a heroine who dies at the end is fairly commonplace in ballet, one who dances herself to death as part of a pagan sacrifice was considered a bit much.

One of the first pieces Stravinsky composed after the premiere of The Rite of Spring were these curious pieces for string quartet. Not a vast orchestra that he could play like a color-machine, but just four string players. Nor was it comparable in any other way in terms of the technical aspects of the music: short and condensed, they often leave first-hearers with the impression, “that’s it?” It’s as if Stravinsky, having realized The Rite of Spring was about as far as he could go in that direction, consciously started exploring other ways he could express himself.

If you believe music and its creation is like a path leading in one direction, the progress from The Firebird to Petrushka to The Rite of Spring, heard in that order, seems logical, each one more colorful, more rhythmic, more “new” in terms of its sense of melody and harmony and form (those things we can grasp onto in a traditional sense): the music that Stravinsky composed after that never seems to match our expectations. Even when we talk about Early, Middle and Late Beethoven, we still hear a continuity between his first string quartets and his last, which Beethoven’s own contemporaries (who hadn’t yet heard Wagner, Brahms and Schoenberg) might not. It is difficult to comprehend the same composer wrote The Rite of Spring, The Rake’s Progress and, say, The Huxley Variations.

Stravinsky was born in Russia during the age when ballet meant dancing aristocrats and perhaps a flock of swans or dreams come to life. Tchaikovsky died when Stravinsky was 11. Part of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s circle – the famous “Russian 5” or “Mighty Handful” who, like many artists and writers, favored a “nationalist” approach to art as opposed to the Western-influenced, more abstract world of Tchaikovsky or his teacher’s brother, Anton Rubinstein – it was natural that the young Stravinsky (a late-bloomer by most classical music standards) would be influenced by story-based music built, one way or another, on folk music.

In 1910, he was in Paris, working with the impresario Serge Diaghilev and, after Anatol Lyadov (one of the largely forgotten generation between Tchaikovsky and “The 5” and the next generation that would include Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich) failed to produce a score for the Ballet Russe’s new work based on the story of the Firebird. Essentially a house-orchestrator for the ballet company, Stravinsky had yet to write a single large-scale work that anybody had taken serious notice of, yet he was given the assignment to create a full-scale ballet in a short time. Had Stravinsky stayed in St. Petersburg and never had the chance to be “in the right place at the right time,” it’s quite possible we might never have heard of Igor Stravinsky or, if we did, he might have been a very different composer.

(The photograph [right] was taken in July 1915: from left, dancer Leonid Massine (who, when this photo was taken, had just replaced Nijinsky as principal male dancer and choreographer for Ballet Russe), costume designer Natalia Goncharova (seated), composer Igor Stravinsky (seated), artistic directors of the Ballet Russe, Mikhail Larionov and Leon Bakst.)

Now, by the time he’d become a kind of enfant terrible with his ballet about pagan Russia and violent sacrifice, Stravinsky’s path seemed secure: he wrote a piece of music that the whole world was hearing and even if people walked out of its performances, either in the theater or in the concert hall, at least they were responding to the power of the music.

The riot that the Paris world premiere inspired became so legendary, that performance is often considered the “revolution” that began the 20th Century, musically speaking. (Considering that was 1913 and we are still in 2011, it might give us pause to wonder if we’ve really heard the work that will define the start of the 21st Century, but I digress…)

Aside from Les Noces (The Wedding) which he’d begun working on before the premiere of The Rite though which went through several revisions before it was finally premiered in 1923 (the same year Janáček composed his 1st String Quartet), Stravinsky’s indebtedness to folk song soon disappeared. By 1920, when he wrote Pulcinella, a ballet inspired by the puppets of Italy’s commedia del’Arte and the music of (or at least had been attributed to) the Baroque composer Pergolesi (who died two centuries earlier), it seems Stravinsky’s path had taken a 180° turn.

Enter the Three Pieces for String Quartet.

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On the surface, these are three very contrasting short pieces – all three take about 7 minutes, the first one clocking in under a minute. The titles of each piece came later, when he orchestrated them and added a fourth piece.

Listen to them once, then read this:

“Dance” is fairly obvious as a title, but the music is fragmented, repetitive and layered: the cello plays the same rhythmic punctuation, pizzicato (plucking the strings); the viola plays a long sustained single pitch, a drone, until the very end; the 2nd violin plays an unchanging descending four-note pattern, roughly played; the 1st violin plays what passes for a melody, a primitive-sounding, almost child-like ‘tune’ circling within a range of four notes. And yet they never seem to coincide into typical phrases or harmonies, as if they’re each on their own (except the poor violist).

The 1st violin’s ‘tune’ sounds like a Russian or at least East European folk song, the 2nd violin’s pattern gives it a peasant-like crudeness matched by the cello’s unsteady rhythm underneath everything, and the viola’s off-key drone gives it a kind of medieval quality. Though each of the four parts are independent and easily identifiable, it would be difficult to call this “counterpoint” in the traditional European sense of the word – independent lines working in harmony.

The folk-like quality might be the legacy of Petrushka and the independent rhythms and texture – not to mention the limited range of each part – is certainly part of the after-glow of The Rite of Spring. A few rounds around the circle and the work stops with an added note for the violist.

The second piece is called “Eccentric” and is presumably inspired by the actions of a once-famous English dance-hall comedian known as Little Tich. Here, as opposed to the “Dance,” we have a wealth of tiny little fragments that flit in and out of consciousness like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Some of these remain static whenever they recur, others expand or contract and they all create a kind of contrast as they jostle up against each other, seemingly in no particular order. This is something Stravinsky would later use, particularly in his “Symphonies of Wind Instruments” in 1920.

This became known as “moment form” – the structure of the piece formed by these different moments rather than by traditional themes and harmonies flowing in a logical order. When we describe motives or thematic fragments as “gestures,” listen to the different fragments and imagine them choreographed by the motions of a single dancer who never really needs to move from a single spot.

If you’re not familiar with Little Tich (see above, right), imagine perhaps a classic pantomime by one of Red Skelton’s clowns.

The third piece, called Cantique or Hymn, is the complete opposite of the first: rather than independent lines, the four string players form a choir moving in harmony, first a chorale-like statement (full of quiet ‘wrong-note’ harmony) that also circles around a limited range of notes, followed by an upper-register response that proceeds to expand and blossom as one alternation leads to another. Compared to the second piece, this final piece (despite its slow-motion kaleidoscopiality) seems static, almost ascetic, and again, rather than ending, merely stops.

Later on, Stravinsky would use this kind of ending for works like Les Noces(begin c.4min into this clip) or the “Huxley Variations” of 1964 (begin at 4:40 into this clip). (By the way, coincidence or not, check out this clip from Aaron Copland’s very American story of a “folk” wedding, Appalachian Spring and its ending, beginning at 3:48!)

Incidentally, Stravinsky considered the last twenty measures of the 3rd piece to be the best music he had composed up to that time.

Now, listen to the video clip again. Have you listened a little differently, now?

Stravinsky once said, exasperated by people who found his music difficult to listen to, "To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears, also."

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Musically, if Stravinsky three great ballets were the last gasp of 19th Century Romanticism – in the case of The Rite of Spring, at least with its large-scale orchestra, sense of color and its emotional impact – the new trend in music composed in 1914 and later could relate to the new shift in painting, especially with the works of Picasso and Bracque, a style known as “Cubism” which most sources say began around 1907.

This “Portrait of Stravinsky” (see left) was painted by cubist artist Albert Gleizes in 1914.

The fact these three short pieces for four players were written a year after the premiere of The Rite of Spring is one thing, but consider what that year was: 1914. This was the start of World War I.

Stravinsky, the son of Russian aristocrats, had left Paris in 1911 to return to his family’s country estate in Ukraine where he spent the time working on the new ballet originally called “The Great Sacrifice” and “Sacred Spring” before becoming Le Sacre du printemps or “The Rite of Spring.” He left Russia in the autumn of 1912 to return to Clarens, Switzerland, where he completed the ballet. It was too late to have it produced that season, so the premiere was postponed until the following summer season on May 29th, 1913.

Whether it was a result of the strain of seeing the new ballet through its performance or the riot with which it was met, Stravinsky came down with typhoid fever, spent several weeks in a nursing home. After that, he spent the rest of the summer back in Russia, returning to Switzerland early in 1914 when his wife, pregnant with their fourth child, came down with tuberculosis.

That summer, in four days, he composed the Three Pieces for String Quartet. Then, he began working on what would become Les Noces, making a quick return to his home in Russia during mid-July to retrieve certain works from his library that might come in handy during its composition.

On July 28th, 1914, a month after the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on the small kingdom of Serbia. But Russia was concerned about its influence in the Balkans which had been undergoing a series of “local” wars the previous two years, and so to protect its ally, Russia declared war on Austria two days later. With a week, Germany had declared war on Russia, France was mobilizing against Germany and England declared war on Germany. A week after that, Austria invaded Serbia, setting off a war that engulfed all of Europe until the armistice of November, 1918.

Switzerland was one of the few neutral places in Europe. And Stravinsky settled into his new home on the shores of Lake Geneva “for the duration.”

A side-effect of the war was the February 1917 Revolution that toppled the Tsar, replacing him with a provisional government. Stravinsky, from his home in Switzerland, telegraphed his mother – still living in their house in Petersburg (now Petrograd): “All our thoughts are with you in these unforgettable days of joy for our beloved Russia freed at last.” But by the end of October (November, by the old calendar), the Bolsheviks overthrew the weak provisional government and this not only made it impossible for Stravinsky to return to Russia as he had hoped but cut him off not only from his estate and its income (now confiscated) but also from any royalties he was earning from Russian publishers and performances.

In need of money and with little likelihood of engaging large orchestras and ballet companies like he had access to before the war, he wrote several small-scale works that could be played by a handful of musicians and could easily be taken on the road – works like L’Histoire du soldat (a modern-day take on the Faust story as a returning soldier sells his soul to the devil) and Renard (“The Fox,” a barnyard morality play). Naturally, these limited forces required leaner textures and the use of Russian folk music would not, perhaps, have translated as well into Western European sensibilities. Instead, there are elements of Spanish music (following a brief visit to Madrid) and even American rag-time (his friend, Ernest Ansermet, the Swiss conductor, came back from an American tour with sheet music of several rags).

Diaghilev, meanwhile, had come to him with an idea for a new and somewhat scaled-down ballet called Pulcinella along with scores of pieces written by (or at least attributed to) Giovanni Pergolesi who died in 1736. It was a success in Paris in 1920 – listen to a bit of it, here, and compare it to The Rite of Spring written just eight years earlier – and helped solidify a new movement in which many European composers began basing pieces of music of earlier, mostly unknown eras: Respighi had already written his 1st Suite of “Ancient Airs & Dances” in 1917, and two years later, Stravinsky began his newest ballet.

In this sense, these three seemingly insignificant short pieces for string quartet are more importantly a step between the three great ballets and the new post-war and post-revolution style that would become his Middle Period, usually described as “Neo-Classical,” with thinner textures, more distinct definition of melody and accompaniment and, above all, a clarification of tonality.

It became a way of returning to the control of the 18th and 19th century music – that is, “tonality” – and it’s interesting that in 1921, Arnold Schoenberg – whose Pierrot Lunaire became one of the first great works of “atonality” in 1911 and which Stravinsky, hearing it at its premiere in Berlin, admired very much – was developing another way of controlling those same textural and harmonic elements in a “system of composing with twelve tones,” later described (without Schoenberg’s approval) as “serialism.” But that’s another story…

So, in the end, listening to these pieces can give us some understanding not only into the mind of composer rethinking what and how we wants to compose, but also into the general flow of musical styles at the beginning of the 20th Century, making the transition between one century and the next.

- Dr. Dick

Janáček's 1st String Quartet: Behind the Scenes

2011-09-20T18:38:00.000-04:00

One of the works on the program opening Market Square Concerts' 30th Anniversary Season - at 8pm on Saturday October 1st at Harrisburg's Whitaker Center - is a string quartet not that well known on the average concert circuit. The Juilliard Quartet, celebrating its own 65th Anniversary, will be performing it along with Three Pieces by Igor Stravinsky and one of the quartets Mozart dedicated to Franz Josef Haydn, his String Quartet in A Major, K.464.

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If you’re looking over the program and see a string quartet by Leoš Janáček (see portrait, right) called “The Kreutzer Sonata” and you don't know it but the name sounds familiar, be warned it has nothing to do with a particular Beethoven violin sonata.

Yes, Beethoven wrote a violin sonata in 1802 which he eventually dedicated to the great French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer and consequently his Violin Sonata in A Major, Op. 47, a grand work in the heroic style, has always been known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata.

But Janáček’s first published string quartet, composed over the space of 15 days in October, 1923, when he was 63 years old, is not an arrangement or adaptation of Beethoven’s sonata nor is it based on themes from Beethoven’s sonata, at least in any explicit way.

Actually, the string quartet was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s controversial novella, written in 1889, which he called “The Kreutzer Sonata.” And yes, Beethoven’s sonata plays a kind of incidental role in the story though it’s less of a story than a lecture about the nature of love, marriage and the societal roles of men and women.

Here’s the brief summary of Tolstoy’s book:

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During a train ride, a nervous man named Pozdnyshev overhears a conversation concerning marriage, divorce and love. When a woman argues that marriage should not be arranged but based on true love, he asks "what is love?" and points out that, if understood as an exclusive preference for one person, it often passes quickly. PPPConvention dictates that two married people stay together, and initial love can quickly turn into hatred. He then relates how he used to visit prostitutes when he was young, and complains that women's dresses are designed to arouse men's desires. He further states that women will never enjoy equal rights to men as long as men view them as objects of desire, but yet describes their situation as a form of power over men, mentioning how much of society is geared towards their pleasure and well-being and how much sway they have over men's actions.

After meeting and marrying his wife when he is 30, they experience periods of passionate love alternating with vicious fights. She bears five children, and then is given contraceptives by a doctor because her health is frail and she should bear no more children.

"The last excuse for our swinish life -- children -- was then taken away, and life became viler than ever."

Moving from the country into the city, the tension relaxes briefly as they adapt to a new life-style. His wife, returning to the piano once again, has taken a liking to a friend who’s an amateur violinist, and the two perform Beethoven's “Kreutzer” Sonata together.

Pozdnyshev complains that some music is powerful enough to change one's internal state to a foreign one. He hides his raging jealousy and goes on a trip, but returns early, finds the two together and, sneaking up on them after taking his boots off, kills his wife with a dagger.

The violinist escapes: "I wanted to run after him," Pozdnyshev explains to his listener, "but I remembered it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible."

Later acquitted of murder in light of his wife's apparent adultery, Pozdnyshev rides the trains seeking forgiveness from fellow passengers.
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(Incidentally, this famous painting by René François Prinet called The Kreutzer Sonata - and long familiar to recent generations for its use in a famous perfume ad - was also inspired by Tolstoy's story in 1901.)

Now, this whole story is entirely told from the husband’s viewpoint and, in this summary, the expression “finds the two together” suggests something other than what he actually describes, how they were actually seated in the drawing room in the midst of conversation. But the implication of that expression, “finds the two together,” is what drives the husband’s rage and he vividly remembers every detail of the murder.

Janáček’s style is partly inspired by a love of folk music but more by the patterns he discovered in, for example, human speech. He often notated phrases and would use these to create more realistic sounding characters in his operas. Very often, there seems to be a kind of psychological fragmentation of something one might hear but is reflected on differently, as if one didn’t hear it the same way as others might. Often, a melodic line (or something that passes for one) might be interrupted or accompanied by often frenzied outbursts in other instruments as if there might be multiple layers to the perception of the music: what one hears (or speaks) and what one thinks as well as how others might hear it and respond. For examples of this, you only need to listen to the opening of the quartet and of the 2nd movement (at 4:00 into the first clip) and especially the opening of the 3rd Movement (beginning of the 2nd clip).

(Here, the Zemlinsky Quartet performs the four movements of Janáček’s 1st Quartet (“The Kreutzer Sonata”) in two clips. The sound is not great but it will give you a good idea of the piece.)

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But what does this lurid story have to do with Leoš Janáček and his 1st String Quartet?

He does not approach the story as a continuous narrative nor are there themes necessarily representative of specific characters or dramatic instances. Certainly, the constant nervous interjections in the background (though a common fingerprint of Janáček’s style) offer psychological commentary on the situation. The constant repetition of small motives – fragments of ideas, really – could represent the obsessive jealousy of the husband or the constant tension between the husband and wife. But this is all conjecture since nowhere did the composer say this is this and that is that.

One thing he did say is this: "I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and battered to death by her husband, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.” It is quite possible Tolstoy’s novella was only a starting point and that Janáček wasn’t really using it as a basis for the piece, only an inspiration for it.

Certainly, as we can see from Janáček’s operatic heroines, he definitely sides with the women in his stories: in fact, the only opera of his that doesn’t (his final opera, based on Dostoievsky’s From the House of the Dead) doesn’t have a main female character. Janáček has little sympathy with Tolstoy’s attitude towards women as he expressed them through his character Pozdnyshev’s socio-political rant.

Rather than focus on the gory details of the murder, he turns this intensely violent drama into such psychological turmoil, it is almost difficult to imagine what is happening where. It could be as if the music takes place all in that single moment where the husband walks in on his wife and her violinist friend and… well, sees what? What is she imagining, expecting? How does one explain the enigmatic ending: a meditation on what led to the crime? After all, regardless of the court’s decision, the husband felt he was right and justified.

But don’t forget, Janáček is “telling” this from the woman’s point of view.

Anthony Burton, writing the liner notes for the Emerson Quartet’s recording, pointed out what he saw as similarities between the opening melody of Janáček’s 3rd Movement (the start of the 2nd clip, above) and the lyrical second theme of Beethoven’s otherwise generally heroic violin sonata ( listen to 2:50 into this clip with Itzhak Perlman & Martha Argerich) though I can’t hear it, myself. Certainly, there is little of Beethoven’s heroic quality in this piece in Tolstoy’s story or Janáček’s approach to it.

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Much is made of Janáček’s late-in-life affair – if one can call it that – with Kamila Stösslová, the young wife of a young antiques dealer. They met in 1917 at a spa on a summer holiday, the wife (then 25) with her infant son (see photo, left, taken in 1917 with her son, Otto) left alone for a week while her husband is away on business. Janáček befriends her and he almost immediately notated in music a fragment of her speech. Despite the difference in years and her basic indifference to him and to music in general – even Janáček’s wife couldn’t see what he saw in her, intellectually – a long and involved correspondence developed between them, consisting of over 700 letters.

His feelings (see photo, right: the composer, taken in 1917 when he was 63) were not reciprocated. However, he himself confessed to her things that must have made her cringe (today, we would call this TMI) but he also acknowledged that his love for her inspired most of the major works he composed in the last ten years of his life.

This was not Janáček’s first affair. The success of his opera, Jenufa, in 1916, introduced him to the soprano Gabriela Horvátová, and he became enchanted by her. Revealing this new passion to his wife Zdenka – their relationship had long cooled since their first years together (see photo, below left, taken in 1881) – she tried to commit suicide. Janáček wanted to file for a divorce but after the composer lost interest in Horvátová, they agreed instead to an “informal” divorce to avoid a public scandal. From then until his death in 1928, Janáček and his wife lived separate lives in the same household.

So it would be easy to read into life’s reality something of Tolstoy’s story, perhaps. He had known Kamila for six years before he composed the work in two quick weeks in 1923, in between having written The Cunning Little Vixen which can be quickly summarized as a love story set among the animals of the forest, and then The Makropolous Case, an opera about a woman who, having drunk a magic potion as a child, lives to be over 340 years old and for whom relationships are nothing (“she is cold as ice, brrr”), which he began composing a few weeks later.

And adultery or marriage difficulties figure prominently in his earlier operas, Jenufa and Katya Kabanová. Given Pozdnyshev’s constant harping on the base animal instincts behind man’s relationship with woman – “this swinish behavior,” as he keeps calling it, this need to have sex and procreate – was this suggested by the completely natural – that is, asocial – love experienced between the vixen Sharp-Ears and her mate, the fox Golden-Skin?

It is not the first time this lurid story of a husband murdering his wife in a jealous rage, attracted the composer. In 1908, apparently, he had begun a string quartet which he abandoned after three movements which also was inspired by Tolstoy’s tale, put aside, turning it, then, into a piano trio. This is presumably lost but the implication, from statements the composer made, was that some of this material eventually found its way into the String Quartet of 1923.

(This would not be the first string quartet that got caught up in the reality of marital infidelity. When Arnold Schoenberg was in the midst of composing his 2nd String Quartet, he discovered his wife having more than a conversation with an artist friend: you can read more about that in this earlier post on my blog, Thoughts on a Train.)

But the stories in most of Janáček’s operas are told from the woman’s viewpoint, whether it’s a female fox, a woman wronged by society’s moral attitudes like Katya Kabanová or even Elena Makropolous in all her various disguises over the centuries who tires of the idea of love and eternity.

His Second String Quartet, however, will be all about Kamila Stösslová, inspired by the more than 700 letters they had written each other over the past 11 years:

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"You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. Those notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately..."
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Small wonder it’s known by the subtitle, Intimate Letters. Written in Febraury of 1928, it was premiered later that year, about a month after Janáček’s death.

But that’s a whole other story…

(Speaking of which, if you're interested in extra credit, check out this post on Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata at my blog, Thoughts on a Train.)

- Dick Strawser

Celebrating Legacies: Market Square Concerts & the Juilliard Quartet

2011-09-17T10:10:00.000-04:00

Five years ago. the Juilliard Quartet was celebrating its milestone 60th Anniversary when they helped Market Square Concerts celebrate its 25th.

This fall, Market Square Concerts begins its 30th Anniversary Season with a performance by the Juilliard String Quartet on Saturday, October 1st at Whitaker Center, just ten days shy of their official 65th "birthday."

It was on October 11th, 1946, that William Schuman, the American composer who was the president of the Juilliard School of Music then, told a 26-year-old violinist named Robert Mann he wanted him to form a string quartet that would be in residence at the school and would have a dual role as a performing ensemble and a teaching unit which could have a significant impact on the musical life of the students and the community. Though quartets had existed in history before, this was the first time one had been formed with that particular concept in mind and its success led to many other schools and music departments forming their own resident teaching and performing ensembles.

Long recognized as one of the finest string quartets in the world, they have numerous highly acclaimed recordings and quotes in their resume like “The Juilliard String Quartet remains the standard by which all other quartets must be judged” from the Los Angeles Times, a sentiment shared by many of the major critics around the world.

Robert Mann, the first 1st Violinist of the group, retired after 50 seasons with the ensemble, a tenure rare in the chamber music world – especially considering the pressure of constantly working at that level of excellence with only three other people: burn-out is a frequent ailment among quartet players and personnel issues, given the percentages, can easily become personality issues that can be devastating.

There has been surprisingly little turnover in the quartet’s history and considerable longevity in the process: five years ago (see photo, right), the new guy, 2nd violinist Ronald Copes, was celebrating his 10th season with them. Joel Smirnoff had been with them 21 years; cellist Joel Krosnick, 33 years; and violist Samuel Rhodes, 37 years.

But in the past three seasons, after Mr. Smirnoff left to become the president of the Cleveland Institute of Music, Nick Eanet joined them in 2009, unfortunately having to step down due to health reasons the following year. The new "new guy" is Joseph Lin, now in his first season with the legendary Juilliard Quartet, only the fourth 1st violinist in its history.

As the quartet officially turns 65 (see photo, left), its newest member is 33 years old.

The quartet had been here on occasions past and looked forward to coming back for that double celebration in 2006. We were very lucky to have them here on the occasion: after all, a group in demand around the world planning a huge anniversary tour and yet four days into their 60th season they’re in Harrisburg PA?!

So, having them return again is a great way to start the 30th Anniversary of Market Square Concerts which, thanks to Lucy Miller Murray (left), had been bringing ensembles like this to the mid-state since the beginning, often against all kinds of odds, despite the woes that have befallen the classical music scene and support for the arts in general, not only here but across the country.

It certainly has been a labor of love – and a great deal of both labor and love has gone into those first 25 years. She’s been recognized around the country for her work in the chamber music world as a presenter and also as a writer about issues affecting music in general but chamber music in particular (for example, her article posted at The New Music Box).

Pianist Peter Orth was the artist for the very first concert given by Market Square Concerts which were then regularly held at the Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg, an off-shoot of an occasional series of concerts being held there that was being disbanded and which she thought she’d take over. She told me recently that “I thought all you’d have to do was post a sign on the door of Market Square Church and people would just show up” which is pretty much how it went for awhile.

Over the years, she feels she’s learned to run a small business, dealing with contacting the artists and setting up the season, handling the marketing, getting the programs printed not to mention writing the program notes (she’s collected these into a volume published by Concert Artists Guild entitled “Adams to Zemlinsky: a Friendly Guide to Selected Chamber Music”), handling ticket sales, arrangements for dinners and receptions and even turning pages on-stage during the performance!

And there have been personnel changes since that Anniversary Concert - Lucy Miller Murray decided to step down as director, though she is still very active in the organization beyond writing program notes. Ellen Hughes (left), a pillar of the regional arts' scene in both music and theater as well as a column in the Harrisburg Patriot-News, stepped down at the end of last season as the director, and is also still active in the organization, passing the reins on to Peter Sirotin, the Artistic Director (below, right) and Ya-Ting Chang, the Executive Director (below, left).

Both performing musicians, they are two-thirds of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio and teach at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. Peter may also be familiar to Harrisburg audiences having shared the first stand of 1st Violins in the Harrisburg Symphony with concertmaster Odin Rathnam.

And they begin the season by welcoming an ensemble whose former 2nd Violinist, Earl Carlyss, a member of the Juilliard Quartet from 1966 to 1986, was an important mentor to them both and continues to be a role model for them.

Today, Market Square Concerts' performances can take place not only at the original "home base" of Market Square Church but also at Whitaker Center where it's one of the "ensembles" in residence; at the Rose Lehrman Center on the campus of Harrisburg Area Community College; and most recently adding Temple Ohev Sholom at N. Front & Seneca Streets in uptown Harrisburg (where the next concert will take place on November 12th with the JACK Quartet).

Market Square Concerts presents the Juilliard String Quartet -- Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet, Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 ("The Kreutzer Sonata") & Mozart's String Quartet in A, K.464 -- Saturday, October 1st, 8pm, at Whitaker Center in Harrisburg.

- Dick Strawser

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Image credits: Juilliard Qt in 1952 -- G.D. Hackett
Juilliard Qt in 2006 -- Nana Watanabe
Juilliard Qt in 2011 -- Steve J. Sherman

Summermusic: Brahms & His String Sextets - Part 2

2011-07-22T10:47:00.004-04:00

Sunday’s program with Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic Festival 2011 includes the second of Brahms’ two string sextets. Written just about four years apart, they mark an important development in his finding his own voice. The B-flat Sextet, which you can read about in this previous post, was almost a political response to the modernist credo espoused by Franz Liszt and his “New German School,” finding a path toward the Music of the Future. Brahms had found his calling not in the future but by going Back to the Past.

The 2nd Sextet is not only a more assured work, it is more concentrated, better crafted and yet all that matters little to someone listening to it from a purely emotional viewpoint over 150 years later.

Instead, this post concentrates more on the personal life behind the music.

(You can hear a complete performance of the 2nd String Sextet recorded at the LaJolla SummerFest 2007 in an earlier post, here.)

A couple of years before he had started composing the 1st String Sextet, Brahms (right) was still living in his hometown of Hamburg in 1858 when a friend invited him to come check out Göttingen, a college town about 170 miles south of Hamburg. This friend, Julius Otto Grimm, composer, teacher and music director of the local choral society, the Cäcilienverein, wrote to him, “If it would please you to have a few good voices lodged in very lovely girls, sing for you, they will take pleasure in being at your disposal. Come quickly!” Odd that Brahms had hesitated, at first.

So, in the midst of working on a serenade originally for a small group of strings and winds, he did so reluctantly, even if it was part of a holiday with Clara Schumann, her five youngest children, her half-brother, composer Woldemar Bargiel and violinist Joseph Joachim. It didn’t, however, take Brahms long to succumb to the charms of the town and especially some of the young ladies in town – one soprano named Agathe von Siebold, in particular.

In addition to having long dark hair, a lush figure, a fondness for practical jokes and a voice that Joachim likened to an Amati violin, Agathe (left) was also studying composition with Julius Grimm who once berated her for some sloppy counterpoint exercises. When Brahms agreed to play a trick on his friend, he wrote out her assignment himself which she duly handed in as her own. Grimm exploded over this “swinish mess” and when Agathe asked “well, what if Johannes had written it,” he said it would be even worse. Here, Brahms had actually screwed it up on purpose, playing a joke on both of them.

Oh, those wild and crazy musicians… such larks…

At the end of this extended vacation, Brahms returned to Detmold, about 30 miles to the northwest as the crow flies, where he was employed part of the year as a “court musician,” performing with the orchestra there and teaching music to the family of Prince Leopold III. In addition to organizing chamber music concerts, he also conducted a women’s choir for whom he wrote numerous short choral works.

In addition to playing concertos by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin (I’m trying to imagine Brahms playing Chopin, but hey…), he also conducted his first Bach (the cantata, “Christ lag in Todesbanden”) and was known to accompany Mozart violin sonatas by starting them in the wrong key to “test” his colleague’s transposition skills. As a composer, his B Major Piano Trio (the original version of Op. 8) and the G Minor Piano Quartet were received coolly.

Visiting Göttingen again in 1859, he and Agathe continued their friendship and apparently became secretly engaged. According to his friends, they seemed perfectly happy with each other.

Then he left for two performances of his finally completed D Minor Piano Concerto which was neither a success nor a failure in Hannover but which was frostily received in Leipzig five days later. After a long silence, perhaps three pairs of hands bothered to applaud before the hissing began. Critics called it “banal and horrid.”

By then, returning to see Agathe, Brahms suffered what today would be called “a fear of commitment.” When he wrote to her, "I love you! I must see you again! But I cannot wear fetters! Write me whether I may come back to fold you in my arms, to kiss you, to tell you that I love you!" she responded by breaking off the engagement.

To his friends, Brahms would admit to “playing the scoundrel” to Agathe. Over a decade later, he recalled those days, how he would like to have married but when his music was hissed in the concert hall and so icily received, he realized while this was something he himself could tolerate, returning alone to his room,

“...if, in such moments, I had had to meet the anxious, questioning eyes of a wife with the words ‘another failure’ – I could not have borne that! For a woman may love an artist… ever so much… and if she had wanted to comfort me – a wife to pity her husband for his lack of success – ach! I can’t stand to think what a hell that would have been.”

During the first months in Göttingen , he wrote several songs for Agathe to sing, many of them using a musical motif based on her name spelled out in notes

using the old German notation where B = B-flat and H = B-natural, where S (or Es) = E-flat and “As” = A-flat.

This idea of “carving” a motive out of a word or name was something he learned from Schumann who often used such motivic ideas – the “Abegg Variations” in which the name Abegg is spelled out in pitches A-B-E-G-G or the town where an old girlfriend lived, Asch, which became A–E-flat (the old German ‘Es’)–C–B-natural. There was one motive Schumann associated with his wife Clara, based on what letters could be turned into pitches: C-(L)-A-(R)-A but he would arbitrarily substitute B for L and G# for R.

There was also the “F-A-E Sonata” that Schumann, Brahms and Albert Dietrich collaborated on as a surprise for Joseph Joachim whose “lifestyle motif,” so the story goes, was “Frei aber Einsam,” Free but Lonely.

In the mid-1850s, Brahms and Joachim worked out an extensive fugue-writing correspondence. One of the fugues Brahms sent to Joachim wove together his F-A-E Motive with the pitches G#-E-A (G# = ‘gis’, A also = the solfege syllable “La”) which represented Joachim’s then-fiancé, Gisela von Arnim. (Later, Brahms would create a similar motive for his 3rd Symphony, the rising figure F-A-F for “Frei aber Froh,” Free but Happy…)

This idea was not new with Schumann, of course: Josquin des Pres did it in the 15th Century and Bach famously used his own name frequently in his music (B-flat–A–C–B-natural) as did other composers making direct references to the Great Johann Sebastian.

In the months following his break-up with Agathe, Brahms composed more songs, still occasionally employing the “Agathe Motive” but setting it to words about parting and lost love.

Brahms would use this “Agathe Motive” again in the 2nd String Sextet which he completed a few years after he and Agathe von Siebold parted ways.

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Moving ahead a few years, Brahms had completed two new piano quartets and three versions of his Piano Quintet, before writing to his Göttingen friend Julius Grimm once again, asking how things were “in all the houses where one used to go so happily… of that house and gate – ” which he didn’t need to explain was the house where Agathe von Siebold lived with her father.

Grimm told him “the old Professor had died three years ago” and Agathe had taken a job the past year as a governess in Ireland where she teaches music and German to the daughters of a rich young English family. She had to get away, he said, from “the shadowed pages of her life… what a gloomy lot is that of a girl alone.”

Brahms returned to Göttingen and stood by that ruined gate, looking at the empty house (such images typical of the lovelorn poetry of the Romantic Age). In September, he composed the devastated and exalted songs of Op. 32 which included the lines “I would like to stop living, to perish instantly, and yet I would like to live for you, with you, and never die.”

That same month, he began the first movement of the 2nd String Sextet. The second movement was based on a Baroque-like gavotte he’d written (part of a collection of tongue-in-cheek dances in the early-1850s) contrasting with a jocose middle section. The original sketch of the slow movement’s variations was written in 1855 and the overall sound is basically “wandering, empty, tragic.” The finale sounds like it might be a proper scherzo with a warm contrasting section with a bit of a dance to it: perhaps a “last dance, at the end of an affair,” as Swafford describes it.

The opening is a gem of a motive – an oscillating G-F# connecting first a G Major triad and then, unexpectedly, an E-flat triad (the G being a common pitch). It would be possible to analyze this music in terms of these two sounds (the oscillation and the G—D , E-flat—B-flat) but the most striking element, considering the theme of this post, is a motive that appears in the transition between the 1st and 2nd themes of the Sonata’s exposition:

This is Agathe’s Motive - and at its most obvious, climactic point, it is repeated five times. Yet this time, there is another note inserted within the motive – a D – which helps spell out the word “Ade” or “Adieux, Farewell.” One could even sing "Agathe, ade" to this fragment of a melody.

Brahms is certainly saying farewell to Agathe, taking his leave, musically if not emotionally. Yet in the very first song he wrote for her – Op.14 No. 1 – this “ade” motive appears when the night-watchman sounds his horn as the lovers part.

We may think of this as purely abstract music with no literary allusions or suggestions of telling a story, the sort of thing Liszt and the New German School espoused. But even Brahms must have had something on his mind, here, when he was writing this – a young girl who used to sing his songs for him and with whom he once contemplated marriage.

Yet you can still appreciate the magic of this climactic moment whether you understand the symbolism or not. It is one of those aspects of great art, regardless of its 'political' persuasion, that allows you the opportunity of discovering new things.

- Dick Strawser

Summermusic: Brahms & His Two Sextets - Part 1

2011-07-21T18:11:00.019-04:00

You can hear both string sextets by Johannes Brahms this week with Market Square Concerts' Summermusic Festival 2011 with the Fry Street String Quartet joined by Market Square Concerts' new artistic director and violinist Peter Sirotin, playing the viola this time, and his colleague from the Mendelssohn Trio and principal cellist of the Harrisburg Symphony, Fiona Thompson. The B-flat Sextet concludes Sunday afternoon's concert, at 4:00 in the Climenhaga Arts Center of Messiah College in Grantham. The G Major Sextet, which you can read about in Part 2 of this post, concludes Tuesday evening's concert which begins at 6:00 at Market Square Church in Harrisburg.

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In his day, no one would have accused Brahms of “boldly going where no man has gone before,” certainly not his colleagues Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Both twenty years his senior, they initially tried recruiting Johannes Brahms for their project, “Music of the Future: The Next Generation.” Later, Brahms would become the leading conservative composer while Wagner and Liszt led the liberal faction espousing the 19th Century's avant-garde.

In this episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Data and Friends perform the slow movement from Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major at a special concert aboard the Enterprise.

Music considered so beautiful, it could even move a Vulcan to tears – well, one Vulcan to a tear…

In the 1850s, “Music of the Future” was a pejorative term leveled at both the liberal team of Wagner and Liszt as well as Robert Schumann who wasn’t really conservative as “less liberal.” Many lesser-known composers of this era – known as “Biedermeier” in Germany (you can read more about that, here, if you’re interested in some background) – were more conservative, rallying behind their most famous representative, Felix Mendelssohn who had died in 1847, and Ludwig Spohr who was one of the great violinists of his day and, at his prime, was probably more popular than Beethoven though by the 1850s pretty well washed up.

Germany also wasn’t a nation, then, more of a culture behind a loose political federation. After the collapse of that medieval relic, the Holy Roman Empire, in 1806, Napoleon had seen to it that “Germany” stayed that way. It would take most of the 19th Century for all these little city-states and principalities orbiting around three major centers – Prussia and Berlin, Bavaria and Munich, Austria and Vienna – to come to some terms with nationhood. It wasn’t until 1871 that Prussia managed to coalesce the rest of these territories into the German Empire, now pitting itself against the Austrian Empire, the two major überpowers of German culture.

That was five years before Brahms (finally) completed his 1st Symphony.

It took Brahms some 20-plus years to finish that symphony – you can read more about that, here – mostly because Robert Schumann (pictured here with his wife, Clara), wearing his hat as a major critic and writer-about-music, had prophesied Brahms would become the Heir to Beethoven. That was late in 1853 in an article called “New Paths.” What struck people (especially those like Wagner and Liszt) as odd was the simple fact Brahms was only 20, totally unknown and so far had published nothing. Considering the struggles Wagner was still having trying to get his music heard, who was this Brahms kid that a critic like Schumann would declare him a potentially Great Composer? It wasn’t like someone could just say “Make it so” and it was.

Today, of course, there’s “Bach, Beethoven and Brahms,” the great triumvirate of Classical Music. Few of us may notice that this was originally a marketing brand innocently coined by the conductor Hans von Bülow in 1877, the year after Brahms finished his 1st Symphony (which von Bülow had dubbed “Beethoven’s 10th”).

We think of Brahms and Wagner as contemporaries with very similar styles – highly Romantic – and pay no attention to the stylistic details that fueled this bitter aesthetic rivalry. Brahms had learned early that polemics were not his style, leaving the essays and the pamphleteering to Wagner (see photo, right, taken in 1865) and his followers.

Wagner became the bold and forceful leader of avant-garde music. Brahms was regarded as the stodgy keeper of antiquity - or the upholder of aesthetic integrity that would keep music from falling into the dungheap of history.

(Surely, there’s a Star Trek episode in that?)

So while Brahms was avoiding writing that symphony – or rather, biding his time before he felt he was ready for that symphony – he composed a great deal of chamber music. Very little of it, however, ever saw the light of day.

Brahms once told a friend how he papered the walls and ceiling of his Hamburg apartment with pages from his rejected compositions – enough music for twenty string quartets, he once said, and he probably wasn’t exaggerating. He had only to lie on his back to admire his rejected works…

Of course, writing symphonies and string quartets, even in 1860, you still had to contend with “the tramp of giants behind you,” Beethoven in particular (regardless of Schumann’s article) and Brahms had early decided he was not going to write and publish any of those “on-the-job training” works like most young composers did, leaving a trail of less than perfect works that might later prove an embarrassment.

His first attempt at a symphony – one in D Minor, its theme sketched down days after Schumann’s attempted suicide in 1854 – turned itself into his 1st Piano Concerto which proved to be a dismal failure, along with a couple of serenades regarded as pre-symphonic studies in orchestration but also opportunities for Brahms to create longer forms without actually writing something as serious as a Symphony with all the historical baggage that entails.

The same thing went for string quartets.

Instead, he found himself attracted to the idea of larger combinations, richer ensembles that not only were “easier” to handle than the spare quartet sound (more orchestral, almost, by comparison), they also didn’t carry the same kind of serious quality and historical baggage the Quartet did, again thanks to Beethoven.

And with sextets, nobody was going to call him the Heir to Boccherini…

Between 1860 and 1865, then between the ages of 27 and 32, Brahms completed and “released” two string sextets, two piano quartets, a cello sonata and the Horn Trio in addition to three versions of what became the Piano Quintet (originally a string quintet, then a sonata for two pianos before combining the best of both).

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(in this video with score, members of the Berlin Philharmonic Octet perform the 1st movement of Brahms' 1st String Sextet - the 2nd Movement is posted, below)

It was around this time that Brahms began working on the B-flat Sextet which he finished the following year. It makes substantial use of traditional forms that would not have been unfamiliar to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, very clearly defined: a sonata movement followed by variations on what is actually an old Baroque dance, La Folia complete with the cello raking its bow across the strings like an old-fashioned viol, a scherzo and, to conclude, a standard rondo.

(the third movement is performed by an apparently ad hoc ensemble – they give their names in the 1st movement’s clip – and recorded in a very boomy church. It’s difficult to find reasonable performances on-line...)

(the fourth movement is from a 2011 music festival with the Prazák Quartet and friends)

To us, this would seem to be nothing more than continuity with Beethoven’s generation from 45 years earlier.

It is easy to forget that at this time there was something akin to a musical “war” brewing, a matter of aesthetics comparable to the bitterness between the serialists and the tonal composers of the past several decades of modern music.

In the one corner, as I mentioned earlier, was Wagner and Liszt – mostly Liszt (see photo, left), who seemed to thrive on the polemics, despite Wagner’s political activities in other areas. The critic Hanslick, Brahms' chief apologist, pointed out that whenever a new work appeared from either of them, it always seemed to be accompanied by a flurry of pamphlets and essays about its importance: new music had to be explained and they each had their entourage who acted as a public-relations effort – or, depending on your viewpoint, a propaganda machine.

When Brahms and Joachim (see photo, right) chose not to be converted to their followers, they, as Swafford writes in his biography of Brahms, “stewed over Liszt’s sensationalism, his rambling and histrionic music, the credo of the ‘New German School’ that music required other arts to buttress it.” In 1860, with his faith in abstract music never stronger, Brahms “itched to write anti-Liszt.” These two members of the younger generation produced their own manifesto which, unfortunately, was leaked to the rival press before any more than two other people had signed on to it.

And Liszt and his followers had a field day with it.

So, coming so soon on top of this public-relations debacle, the untried and so far unsuccessful Brahms wrote a very conservative and adamantly traditional string sextet that had no program, no revolutionary harmonic progressions or tonal schemes (though Joachim did think the opening digression from B-flat Major to D-flat Major in the first phrase was a bit much), no obfuscated formal structures, no over-the-top emotions or even any literary allusions a listener could hang on to to make sense out of the music (“but what’s it about? It was just music about music - I mean, what the heck...?")

These were things Brahms and Joachim thought spelled the death of music as they knew it. For his part, Liszt dismissed them as “the posthumous party.” Followers of both sides produced propaganda, demonstrations and even organized cadres of supporters to disrupt performances of the other party’s concerts.

Today, we listen to this music and are so overwhelmed by its beauty, all this “reality” seems impossible to imagine.

And yet, in 1900, Vernon Blackburn, a London critic, wrote

"The Brahms Sextet [in B-flat Major] is a work built upon dry as dust elements. It is one of those odd compositions which at times slipped from the pen of Brahms, apparently in order to prove how excellent a mathematician he might have become, but how prosaic, how hopeless, how unfeeling, how unemotional, how arid a musician he really was. You feel an undercurrent of surds (a quantity not capable of being expressed in rational numbers) of quadratic equations, of hyperbolic curves, of the dynamics of a particle. But it must not be forgotten that music is not only a science; it is also an art. The Sextet was played with precision, and that is the only way in which you can work out a problem in musical trigonometry."

Toward the end of his life, Brahms was still complaining about the state of music, how, after him, it was all downhill. He had had lunch with a young conductor he admired (though he didn’t think much of Gustav Mahler's music), who, as they walked past a flowing stream near the restaurant, grabbed Brahms’ arm, pointed at the water and said, “Look, Doctor, look!”

When Brahms couldn’t see what he was pointing at, Mahler said, “See? There goes the last wave!”

Brahms chuckled but insisted there was still a question whether it would end up going to the sea or into some swamp, instead.

Could he ever have imagined his music being played centuries in the future on a space ship to entertain dignitaries from a distant galaxy? Well... uhm...

It would probably as far fetched for him to realize one of those modernist composers in the not too distant future, following in the footsteps of Wagner and Mahler, would have hailed him as "Brahms the Progressive" and a significant influence on his development of his own distinct musical voice!

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Follow this link to read Part Two of “Brahms & his Two Sextets” for information about the String Sextet in G Major, which concludes Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic Festival 2011 on Tuesday evening, a concert that begins at the earlier-than-usual time of 6:00 at Market Square Church in Harrisburg.

- Dick Strawser

Summer Music Making: Dvořák & Brahms

2011-07-20T21:44:00.009-04:00

'Tis the season for summer concerts and while I’ll post separately about the two Brahms sextets on this summer’s series, I wanted to include these two videos from another summer festival, recorded at the La Jolla SummerFest, performances of works you can hear with Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2011.

The first video is a performance of the Dvořák Piano Quintet which is on our first program as Stuart Malina, conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, joins the Fry Street String Quartet for the concert Friday night at 8pm in Market Square Church.

The Dvořák Quintet may be one of the more popular of the basic piano quintets out there – and follows a direct line from Johannes Brahms’ F Minor Quintet which was directly inspired by Robert Schumann’s E-flat Major Quintet.

This performance, recorded in 2006, features violinists Lindsay Deutsch and Bei Zhu, violist Paul Neubauer, cellist Gary Hoffman, and pianist Weiyin Chen.

(Incidentally, Gary Hoffman will be performing with Market Square Concerts during the May 2012 concert, joining the Cypress String Quartet for another famous quintet, the String Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert. But more of that, later.)

Friday’s first concert of this season’s Summermusic will also include Haydn’s Quartet Op. 17 No. 6 and Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 (you can read about Bartók here and listen to video clips of the quartet in this post) along with the Duet for Oboe and Viola by American composer, Alvin Ettler.

Hey, the music will be hot but the place is air-conditioned!

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While there’s lots of talk these days about Washington’s “Gang of Six,” Cho-Liang Lin’s introduction to this video from the La Jolla 2007 summer festival of Brahms’ Sextet in G Major, may help us understand why politicians would never be able to play chamber music, as he gives you an insider’s insight into the give-and-take of making music together.

In this performance, Cho-Liang Lin is joined by violinist Sheryl Staples, violists James Dunham and Che-Yen Chen, and cellists Ralph Kirshbaum and Alisa Weilerstein.

The Fry Street String Quartet will be joined by Market Square Concerts’ artistic director Peter Sirotin playing the viola and his colleague from the Mendelssohn Piano Trio, cellist Fiona Thompson, who’s also the principal cellist of the Harrisburg Symphony.

This concert - which also includes Halvorsen's arrangement for violin and viola of a Passacaglia by Handel, Josef Rheinberger's Quartet for Piano, Oboe, Viola and Cello, and Joan Tower's "Island Prelude" for oboe and strings - takes place next Tuesday (the 26th) at the earlier-than-usual time of 6:00pm at Market Square Church.

More on the background of Brahms’ Sextets in a bit…

Meanwhile, hope you’re staying cool!

- Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2011: Bela Bartók, the Man Behind the Music

2011-07-19T11:50:00.008-04:00

Looking ahead at the week’s on-going heat-wave, it’s welcome news, in a season of out-door summer concerts, that all three of Market Square Concerts’ “Summermusic 2011” take place inside in air-conditioned comfort. The opening concert this Friday takes place at 8:00 at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg – as does the final concert, next Tuesday, the 26th at 6:00 (yes, that’s six o’clock). And the middle concert takes place at the Climenhaga Arts Center at Messiah College in Grantham, at 4:00 on Sunday the 24th.

You can also read about how people used to listen to new music in Haydn’s day, here, and how that changed in the 19th Century. The post includes some video clips of the Haydn as well as the Bartók quartets the Fry Street String Quartet will be playing in their opening program on Friday. The program also includes Antonin Dvořák’s ever-popular Piano Quintet (you can hear a video of it here, starting with the first movement).

In this post, I wanted to write about the opportunity I had earlier this year to interview Bela Bartók’s son, Peter, via Skype when the Calder Quartet played all six of Bartók’s quartets in Elizabethtown as part of Gretna Music’s Leffler Chapel series (their summer season is set to begin shortly, too).

Peter, who just turned 87 this summer, was three years old when his father composed his Third Quartet and 21 when Bartók died at the age of 64. It’s not so much the insights he might have had concerning his father’s music, but more about the man who was his father and, coincidentally, one of the great composers of the 20th Century. His book, called simply “My Father,” was published in 2002 and it’s an invaluable source for anyone interested in first-hand accounts of composers’ lives, especially if you’re a fan of Bartók’s music.

Since Bartók never really discussed the technical details of his creativity with his colleagues, it was unlikely he’d talk about these over dinner with his young son. But there are insights here that might be overlooked in more technically oriented sources that give some insights into the man’s inspiration and his character.

Bartók was interested in Nature. Peter mentioned how, when he was a child, they would have chickens in the backyard of their Budapest home (one that was relatively in the quieter suburbs) as well as rabbits and how Bartók wrote to his son (then visiting his sister’s farm during the summer) that baby rabbits had been born and how he was building wooden coops to accommodate them. Sitting in the backyard with a picnic lunch, it was not unusual for one of the hens, by that time more of a family pet than a provider of fresh eggs, to wander around through the grass.

In any of my classes that mentioned Bartók’s music, I was always told the frequent occurrence of what he called “Night Music” was an abstract rendering of various night sounds – breezes, insect noises, bird cries and the like.

Years later, listening to pianist Leonid Hambro play the suite, “Out of Doors,” Peter told him how well he’d caught the frogs from his aunt’s farm, a memorable sound from those summer holidays, much to Hambro’s surprise. “Frogs?” he’d said, never having thought what the sounds were, so explicitly, in the movement called “Music of the Night.”

I’d never considered them in, say, the slow 2nd movement of the 5th Quartet. About 10 minutes into this “audio” clip from YouTube with the Novak Quartet, you’ll hear soft pizzicato sounds, mostly in the cello: they’re two notes, but only the first is plucked, giving a kind of guitar-like sound as the cellist slurs the two notes together. Now, the movement isn’t labeled “Night Music” but when I heard the Calder Quartet play this in April, the cellist slid from the first to the second notes and suddenly I realized “More frogs!” Was that what was in Bartók’s mind? There are a lot of nature-like sounds in this movement, but like many of the folk-song elements of his earlier works, he absorbed them more abstractly into his own voice in his later pieces. Perhaps he was doing the same with Nature, here?

When he was visiting his father after he’d come to the United States at the start of World War II, Peter found him notating several bird-songs outside his window when he was staying in Asheville, NC. Later, when Bartók’s last works were performed, there, in the 3rd Piano Concerto was one of these bird-songs.

At the time of his death, following a long but largely undiagnosed illness, Bartók had been working on or thinking about a number of pieces. Peter tells how, visiting his parents at their tiny cottage in Saranac Lake where his father was composing during a respite, just weeks before he died, his mother would be cooking their simple lunch in the kitchen while his father sat at the table working on the viola concerto that had been commissioned for William Primrose. But when his wife stepped out of the kitchen, Bartók lifted up the sketches of the viola concerto he was working on to show his son another score lying underneath – a piano concerto he was writing as a birthday surprise for his wife: it was almost finished.

He completed the enigmatic 6th String Quartet before leaving Hungary in 1939 – the overall sadness of the piece stemming more from the imminent death of his mother, to whom he was very close, than a political commentary on the state of the world. He composed no major works in the next three years, mostly due to the frustrations of adjusting to American life and not having a secure footing economically or musically. But the reception of the Concerto for Orchestra (written in 55 days at Saranac Lake during the summer of 1943) prompted a resurgence of creative security, enough for him to contemplate, among other things, a 7th String Quartet. Though he did complete the Sonata for Solo Violin the next year, he was unable to officially complete both the 3rd Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto by the time he died in 1945.

When his health began deteriorating those last weeks and the doctors insisted he go to the hospital, Bartók wanted a day’s reprieve, figuring it wouldn’t make much difference. As a result, Peter explained, the last 17 measures of the piano concerto never had a chance to be filled in, something he’d felt would only take another day’s work.

Life in America was not kind to Bartók. The potential for concert performances was limited – he was not as well known here as he was in Europe – and there were problems about the royalties from his publishers in Britain. As a touring performer, Bartók had been given the use of a piano for their apartment by a company but once the concert offers dried up and he was no longer performing, the company regretfully took the piano back.

Reality 101 was a bureaucratic nightmare for the Bartóks: for instance, issued several months’ worth of food rationing coupons during the war, they used them all up at the grocery stores where unscrupulous cashiers didn’t advise them how they should be used and probably kept them to use themselves or sell them on the black market. As a result, the Bartóks were unable to buy any meat, butter or cooking oil, for instance, for several months, instead making do with a kind of improvised peasant fare from what they could. A bottle of olive oil, the gift of a friend, was treated like gold and stretched out to last most of the summer.

It seems odd, reading about Bartók railing against the soft white stuff Americans called bread – as opposed to the hearty fiber-filled home-made loaves Bartók was used to in Hungary. He even hated the smell of vanilla – more appropriately, “vanilla extract” – a pale imitation of what they had back home, and refused to eat anything made with it, including vanilla ice-cream.

He also hated commercial radio and how music was used to sell American products. More significantly, the idea of listening to radio broadcasts of classical music, he said, would destroy people’s interest in making music themselves – the old-timed parlor music generations of middle-class families shared in the evening.

Not only would it replace the need to go to a concert to hear live music, it might also lead to superficial listening, relegating it to background noise, the equivalent of “being caressed by a lukewarm bath.” And of course, it would also lower the listeners’ inhibitions, even leading them to chat during the music!

A proud man, Bartók was reluctant to accept charity. Friends had to revert to subterfuge and often failed when they tried to give him money to help with expenses. Peter, who had joined the US Navy and spent much of the war stationed in Panama, sent money home from his pay check to help his parents out, but after his father’s death, he found all of the money neatly set aside and untouched.

We think of Bartók the Composer – but he was also highly respected as a concert pianist and chamber musician as well as a teacher, a profession he not always enjoyed.

When he was a child, growing up in the suburban home in Budapest, Peter listened to his father practicing at home and playing duets with his mother, a former piano student of Bartók’s. He wrote the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion for him and his wife to play and Peter, then about 12, recounts hearing a run-through of one movement while he sat in the next room.

In addition to listening to his father composing his own music, he said he also heard him and his mother playing works by Mozart and one time when a violinist-friend was preparing a recital, Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata (you can hear a recording here Bartók made with Szigeti in 1940).

Then there was the time young Peter asked his father, apparently concerned about the public reaction to his own music, why he didn’t write music more like Mozart. If his father was wounded by this question, Peter said he didn’t show it but carefully explained how music changes with times and a composer today had to write music for today: it wasn’t a matter of writing what pleased audiences more.

If you’ve ever played any of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos as a piano student, several of them were written as pieces for Peter to play in his lessons: he tells how his father would sit down, write something out and then put it in front of him to sight-read, letting him go through the short piece first and only then going back to point out things and make corrections. Many of these teaching pieces were later published in the early volumes of Mikrokosmos.

Peter didn’t grow up to become a pianist – instead he became a recording engineer. He explains how, when he was a child, a “white-noise machine” someone devised to help mask the sound (mostly of a radio) from their neighbor’s apartment before they moved to the quieter suburbs, turned out to be more noise than the original distraction, so the machine was given to young Peter as a kind of tinker-toy. Later, Peter accidentally caused a short by inserting a bent wire in a pair of outlets, leaving the house without electricity. Instead of punishing the boy, Bartók explained some of the principles of electricity and why you shouldn’t do that. Eventually, Peter became an electrical and then a recording engineer, ultimately shepherding his father’s legacy of recordings and compositions through the modern technology with re-issues both on LP and CDs through his own label, Bartók Records.

As part of a radio interview, Bartók performed four Scarlatti sonatas as part of the live broadcast. Later, when he was told they had been recorded and they wanted to release the recording, Bartók denied them the necessary permission not because there were a few minor glitches along the way as could happen with any live performance, but because, not knowing they would be recorded, he had not prepared himself mentally for something that would be so permanent.

He gave the test recording to his son when he was 10 and, despite his father’s injunction on its release, Peter would later issue the recordings when the question of the legacy of Bartók’s performance outweighed the initial argument. (You can hear them, here, in this YouTube video.)

One last anecdote. Peter recounts how, in the 1930s, the family was in Switzerland – one of Bartók’s favorite vacation destinations (he loved mountains) – visiting the home of Stefi Geyer who years earlier was a budding violinist and the first serious love of Bartók’s life. In fact, he wrote a violin concerto for her which, after she rejected him in 1908, he suppressed, using the first movement as the idealized first of “Two Portraits,” adding a bitter second one he called “Distorted” or “Grotesque.” This concerto only came to light after Geyer’s death in 1956 and would later be published as No. 1; the famous mature Violin Concerto completed in 1938 and regarded as one of the great but less frequently played concertos of the 20th Century, then became No. 2.

In fact, this relationship so affected Bartók, he wrote to Stefi shortly after their break-up that a new work he was just beginning - his 1st String Quartet - started with what he called "my funeral dirge."

Anyway, considering her family’s disapproval of young Bartók, only still a “promising” composer (and, incidentally, an atheist), Ms. Geyer instead married a successful lawyer and then, after he died during World War I, a Swiss composer. They met again in the 1930s and renewed their friendship.

Knowing how Bartók disapproved of recordings, she had her daughter go turn off the phonograph when the composer and his family showed up to visit this one particular time. But he said he liked what they were listening to and was curious about it, so they listened to it – arrangements of George Gershwin songs played by clarinetist Benny Goodman and his band.

A couple of years later, the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti asked Bartók to compose a short two movement piece, maybe about 6-7 minutes long, something that could be recorded on two sides of a 78rpm record. It was actually commissioned by Benny Goodman and they premiered the original version of the work, called Rhapsody, at Carnegie Hall in 1939. Later, Bartók added the middle movement and joined the other two for the performance of what was now called Contrasts and its subsequent recording for Columbia – which you can hear here – in 1940, shortly after Bartók arrived in America.

So, good things can come from listening to recordings, after all!

- Dick Strawser
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Photo credits:
Top right, uncredited portrait of the composer found on-line.
Left, photo taken by Michael Murray at Gretna Music's April 8th pre-concert talk at Leffler Chapel, with Dick Strawser (left) interviewing Peter Bartók (right) via Skype and posted on Facebook.
Right, photo of Peter Bartók and his father taken in 1932 when Peter was 8 and his father 51, the year he began composing Mikrokosmos originally for his son's piano lessons.

Summermusic: Listening to Old and [relatively] New

2011-07-14T12:30:00.018-04:00

The first concert of Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic Festival 2011 - Friday, July 22nd at 8pm in Harrisburg's Market Square Church with the Fry Street String Quartet - features one of the most popular piano quintets in the repertoire (by Dvorak), a string quartet by the “Father of the Symphony” (Haydn), a major quartet by an early 20th Century giant (Bartok), and a work by a mid-century American composer you’re probably not familiar with (Alvin Etler - more on him later).

While I'll write a bit about some of the individual works on the three programs, this post is for those who might be a little skeptical about that "20th Century giant" (though 1927 might arguably be no longer "new") or who haven't really thought about how they listen to music, since this program gives you a chance to listen to three different centuries of musical style.

While we may hear less of the 20th Century in our concert-going experience compared to the 19th, I thought it might be interesting to point out a few ways people used to listen to “new music” when Haydn or Dvorak were considered “new.”

Haydn and Mozart are the two major composers of what we call the Classical Era of classical music – using the term ‘classical’ in two different meanings.

We essentially use the small-c “classical,” essentially indefinable, to refer to music of long-standing durability, music that has been around a long time and proven by the test of time (though proving what may also be indefinable) even though we can also talk about the Beatles or Elvis Presley as being “classics” since the shelf-life of popular music – usually considered the antithesis of classical music (or is it the other way around?) – is considerably shorter.

(Like most terms, this does not always create smooth sailing since one can therefore argue, in the traditional 20th Century antithetical way where there is only black or white, that classical music, the opposite of popular music, is therefore “unpopular” music. But I digress…)

In the big-c “Classical” sense, it refers to music of the second half of the 18th Century, an era in which music was regarded primarily as an abstract, intellectual craft as opposed to the emotional response that was the primary aspect of “romantic” music in the 19th Century, a dichotomy expressed in terms of the clarity of Apollo versus the… well, messiness of Dionysus. Today, this separation between logical and irrational would be defined in terms of the Left Brain versus the Right Brain, science (once again) replacing art (or religion) as a way of explaining the inexplicable.

Anyway, according to 18th Century philosophers like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, instrumental music was “a complete and regular system [filling up] completely the whole capacity of the mind so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of anything else… The mind in reality enjoys …a very high intellectual pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of a great system in any other science.”

(Keep in mind, as I often point out, the ‘classical’ Greeks had no word for creativity or inspiration, using instead the word “techne” from which we get technique and technical: you get the picture.)

“Music,” Smith continued, was no mere “pleasurable pastime for the leisured.”

Here’s the last movement of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 17 No. 6 which the Fry Street String Quartet performs on the first program of Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2011.

(You can hear the whole quartet at the Israel Haydn Quartet's website, here.)

For Burke, now considered the “philosophical father of modern conservatism,” music can “anticipate our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force” which he regarded as 'the “positive pleasure” of beauty, the result of a “mechanical” intervention of qualities evident in works of music and which included the virtues of consistency and formal balance created by resolution of contrast.’ [quoted from Leon Botstein’s essay, “The Demise of Philosophical Listening” in Haydn & His World published by Princeton in 1997).

On the Continent, Schiller’s idea of an “aesthetic education” was important to achieving a sense of beauty through music: “whatever meaning we are able to find in it is of a high order,” and is shaped by us, the listener, especially regarding the basic premise of tonality and form – the statement of ideas in a key, the digression from that key (the development section’s creating dramatic tension) and finally the resolution of that tension by returning to that key. This concept of the "sonata form" created a perfectly architectural dramatic structure that is both logical and reliant on our emotional response to comprehending that resolution.

Even though “pictorialism” – think Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Beethoven’s Pastoral – existed in the Classical Era, it transcended subjectivity because it could still operate on a purely objective level (as it does in Vivaldi and Beethoven).

In the messy years following the French Revolution when the Age of Enlightenment was eventually replaced by all-things-Napoleon, this attitude was reversed: it was the emotional response that mattered more and the architectural niceties of the previous age became less evident as architectural observation points. No longer was it necessary to know whether you were in the Exposition, Development or Recapitulation of that dramatic digression-and-return that is the soul of the Classical sonata form. A great part of that tension is created by not knowing where you are, sometimes even in relation to the initial tonality (“Is that G Major?” “No, I think it’s F Major.” “What are we doing there?” “I don’t know, shut up and listen!”)

So people who raved about Berlioz’s drug-induced fantasies in his Symphony in C Major (better known as the “Symphonie fantastique”) would find Haydn rather dull. His wit – the unexpected turns that tweeked a listener’s expectations – became funny instead of intellectually engaging (the difference between being clever and being cute). Mozart, on the other hand, managed to survive but mostly in works that were less “Classical” like the D Minor Piano Concerto and Don Giovanni which exhibited darker, almost demonic qualities more suitable to Romantic susceptibilities.

As the age of the virtuoso turned music into a business as performers and composers relied on a ticket-buying public (rather than the courtly age of aristocratic patronage), surface replaced structure as the key element for a listener to respond to – the big theme, the dashing technical display, the story told through the music – which may explain why Brahms, in his day (if not beyond) was considered old-fashioned because of his interest in abstract forms (as Wagner basically said of Brahms’ Variations & Fugue on a Theme by Handel, “it’s a good fugue as fugues go, but who would want to write one today?”).

(For those who turn up their collective noses at the mob-orientation of this Age of the Virtuoso, when, compared to Beethoven and Brahms and certainly Bach, we describe it as “vapid” or consider virtuosity for its own sake shallow – after all, how much Kalkbrenner or Moscheles or even Hummel do we hear in our concert halls today? – consider these days who the best performers are on TV (the winners of American Idol or America’s Got Talent) and which are considered the best movies (those with the biggest box office take)? But I digress…)

What do we respond to in Tchaikovsky symphonies? Not their structural clarity or his skill with counterpoint but the emotional appeal of his melodies, the tension of his climaxes and the nature of his symphonic drama ("here comes that Fate Theme again").

Along came Gustav Mahler at the end of the century, trying to write “abstract” symphonies (at the time Brahms and Tchaikovsky were writing their last works) but supplying detailed descriptions of the music in terms of a program or story either before (as in his 3rd) or after the fact (as in his 1st), essentially so the listener would have an idea what's going on in this intensely dramatic and increasingly longer pieces - then trying to remove these 'srtoies' later when he changed his mind.

By the time the 20th Century began, Arnold Schoenberg had taken Wagner’s chromatic digression from easily comprehensible concepts of tonality beyond what could be considered “tonal.” Music became either so chromatic, the listener had no idea where they were in terms of “a home key” (which is what essentially defines tonality at its simplest) or whether they were in “any” key or, if it moved too quickly from one to another, perhaps in “no” key at all (though still using traditional chords). From there, it wasn't far to go before composers started using chords other than those traditional, familiar chords that moved in familiar and expected (therefore comforting) ways.

Listeners lost this ease of being able to figure out where they are when listening to a new piece of new music because they’re unfamiliar with what’s behind the musical surface. In some cases, I think many composers might be unfamiliar with that as well: some enjoy writing dissonant music for dissonance’s sake and others understand how tension-and-release operate to be able to use that sense of dissonance to be able to create a flow that draws the listener along in much the same way a harmonic progression did two hundred years ago.

(Is it necessary to point out how a bad performance of Beethoven will be blamed on the performer but a bad performance of a new composer you've never heard of before is always the composer's fault?)

So, after hearing Haydn and his clean, clear “Classical” sensibilities and while you’re anticipating the lush tunes and dance-rhythms of a familiar work by Antonin Dvorak, there’s Bartok’s 3rd String Quartet which may sound (to some unfamiliar with it) a bit… well, messy. It’s nominally in C-sharp not that the typical listener would ever hear that, but the idea that there is a tonal center is something for the composer to latch on to in creating something to digress from and resolve to, whether the listener comprehends it or not (just as you might not comprehend every nuance of a poem on a single hearing).

The fact that chords are different, that there are a lot of “dissonant” sounds shouldn’t become the focus of what you’re listening for – like Haydn, there are elements of contrast (changes of mood, different tempos, types of texture) which Bartok handles in similar ways that would never be confused with what Haydn was doing but yet achieve the same kind of response: an intellectual response to structure (notice how many times some rising figure is mirrored by a descending figure, often at the same time) or how “melodic” ideas recur (figures might seem similar in shape or design when they recur elsewhere in the piece). But how does he go about building tension? Listen to those long, slow slides and what they ‘resolve’ to, often exploding into something rhythmic that can be hair-raising as it continues building toward a point of resolution.

If you’re not familiar with Bartok’s musical style, let me suggest listening to this clip, first. It’s from his 2nd String Quartet, written nine years earlier than the 3rd. It might be more recognizable, based on folk dances and song patterns of his native Hungary – but not the same music that inspired Brahms and Liszt in their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies (that was gypsy music and the equivalent of pop music or jazz in 19th Century Vienna). Listen to the players’ intensity (as I joked on Facebook, “you could grill hamburgers on this performance”) but also to the regularity of the phrases, the types of contrast, how one accompanies another, but above all to the rhythmic drive (and anything that interrupts it).

Now, here’s the same ensemble’s performance of Bartok’s 3rd quartet – the one the Fry Street Quartet will play at their first concert next week (and knowing them, with a name like “Fry Street,” I fully expect them to cook, as well).

By this time, Bartok has absorbed the essence of Hungarian folk music to create what is often described as “imaginary folk music” which often infuses his original (and abstract) works with the sounds we identify as, nationalistically, Hungarian.

Though you might think it’s dissonant all the way through, listen to how “relative dissonance” creates tension between sections that are more “dissonant” and less “dissonant.” Eventually, dissonance becomes a relative term.

Even though you might not sense a tonal center, the way he drives you to the piece’s climaxes are no different than what Beethoven did in his own quartets and you’re probably no worse the wear for not knowing whether you’re in G Major or B-Flat Major.

Here is the conclusion of the quartet – pardon the overlap, but it’s very difficult to chop one clip off and start the next one cold. The work is in one continuous movement divided into parts defined by senses of tempo and rhythmic drive.

But once it reaches the conclusion of this very intense 15 minutes – it’s the shortest and most concentrated of Bartok’s six quartets – you’ll probably agree that… well, at least there are things to listen for rather than just sitting there waiting for intermission.

And if you’ve already figured that out, you’ll realize it can be an exciting ride along the way, however you choose to listen.

- Dick Strawser

Summertime Music Making

2011-07-11T11:12:00.005-04:00

Before long – eventually, one can only hope – summer will be a memory and we’ll all be complaining about how cold it is and dreading the possibility of another weekend snow storm.

But before it comes to that, put Market Square Concerts “Summermusic Festival 2011” on your July calendar.

Two thirds of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio (see left), Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang, are the new directors of Market Square Concerts – it became official on July 1st – and they will be among the performers of this summer's festival, along with their colleague Fiona Thompson, joining the returning Fry Street String Quartet (see below, right), oboist Gerard Reuter and frequent visitor pianist Stuart Malina, a.k.a. conductor and music director of the Harrisburg Symphony.

There are three concerts – as usual – but this year, none of them will be held at the Glen Allen Mill as in the past. While the mill was a lovely setting, the festival was just outgrowing the space that was available there – and since weather is always a gamble with any summer performance, the idea of having all the concerts inside an air-conditioned space was not unwelcome.

The first program is Friday, July 22nd, at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg, beginning at 8pm. The concert begins with a Haydn quartet – Op. 17, No. 6, not one of the one’s you’d expect to find – along with Bela Bartók’s Third Quartet, and in between, a duet for oboe and viola by American composer Alvin Etler. The program closes with one of the most popular piano quintets, the one by Antonín Dvořák.

In the past, the series was set up for a Wednesday evening, with two more concerts on the weekend, but this year the schedule’s a little different, too.

The second program takes place on Sunday, July 24th at 4pm and will be held in Poorman Recital Hall of Messiah College’s Climenhaga Arts Center in Grantham, and opens with a Beethoven rarity (‘rarity’ and Beethoven not usually found together): a set of variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni for oboe, violin and viola. A work many might feel isn’t heard nearly enough is Franz Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor for piano duet (two on a bench) and the program concludes with the first of Brahms’ two string sextets, the one in B-flat Major. In between is a delightful pair of waltzes from the pen of Broadway legend, Stephen Sondheim.

The third program returns to Market Square Church on Tuesday, July 26th and it begins at a slightly earlier time than usual – 6:00pm. This program includes the other string sextet by Johannes Brahms, the “late” one in G Major along with Johann Halvorsen’s “arrangement” of a Handel passacaglia for violin and viola, the quartet for piano, oboe and cello by Josef Rheinberger, a contemporary of Johannes Brahms’, and a work inspired by a Caribbean island vacation, “Island Prelude” for oboe and strings by Joan Tower.

I’ll be posting more, shortly, about the music on each program.

For ticket information, call 717/214-ARTS or go to the Whitaker Center Box Office. Check the website for more information about the series. Tickets for all three programs are $80 each ($70/seniors) and individual program tickets are $30 each ($25/seniors).

The series is generously supported by contributions from the Jason Litton Memorial Fund and Dr. Linda Litton. The festival sponsor is the Orthopedic Institute of Pennsylvania and the season sponsor is Capital Blue Cross.

Beethoven with Miriam Fried & Jonathan Biss

2011-04-07T11:25:00.001-04:00

If it seems that spring will never get here, April showers aside, let me point out Market Square Concert’s last program of the season is Tuesday, April 12th, at Whitaker Center when violinist Miriam Fried and pianist Jonathan Biss will perform four Beethoven violin sonatas – including the “Spring” Sonata.

That concert begins at 6:00 pm, earlier than the traditional starting time, so let me stress that 6pm is not a typo.

Why? Well, every now and them someone wonders if it wouldn’t be a good idea to have something available earlier in the evening so people leaving work at 5:00 would have a concert they could go to after work but before they go home and get settled in for the evening, putting off the homeward-bound rush-hour traffic. We’ve tried it a couple of times for the SummerMusic series and it seemed to work.

But this is the first time with one of the subscription series and, in this case, the reason’s a little different.

Concert dates are determined by what artists the presenter wants to present, trying to find a date in the mutual calendars of the presenter’s series and the artist’s schedule. This can often be a tight fit, depending on availability (and this is why winter concerts are such a bear because we can’t just postpone it till next week because of snow because, quite possibly, the artist will be playing in California or England that night and so isn’t available).

Ellen Hughes really wanted to bring young pianist Jonathan Biss and one of the great violinists in the world today, Miriam Fried, to Harrisburg and the only time it could work out, wouldn’t you know, was in between other engagements. Mr. Biss is substituting for Murray Perahia in a Chicago Symphony-sponsored recital there on Monday and has to be in Boston for a rehearsal on Wednesday morning with the Boston Symphony, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto there – and in order to get there in time, he has to catch a flight from Harrisburg Tuesday evening, hence the earlier-than-usual start time. (I suspect this means there probably won’t be any time for an encore…)

This may be the first time Jonathan Biss appears in Harrisburg but it is not the first time Miriam Fried has been here: I last saw her in January of 1984 – speaking of snow dates. She played the Beethoven Violin Concerto on a very snowy night and it was one of those occasions where – aside from being unable to postpone the Tuesday night concert – two players in the orchestra were unable to make it. Unfortunately they were the bassoon section which meant the William Schuman Symphony No. 3 sounded a bit funky, especially in the long bassoon solo in the last movement’s fugue where we heard 8 measures of silence before the bass clarinet came in.

This presented a problem in the Beethoven concerto because not only are there some wonderful bassoon solos for the principal player, there’s a lot of wind section texture where the second bassoonist plays the all-important bass part. Lacking both of them would sound very strange and so I spent the first half of the concert conflating both bassoon parts into a single bass clarinet part – a solo here, the bass of the wind band there – and then Jim Dunn, our bass clarinetist at the time, sight read the part. It may have been the oddest sounding Beethoven Violin Concerto Miriam Fried ever played but it would’ve sounded odder with those missing bits… oh, well…

Jonathan Biss is Miriam Fried’s son, but this will also be a chance for me to hear the third generation of this musical family. In March of 1963, I attended my first Harrisburg Symphony concert when cellist Raya Gárbousova played the Dvořák Cello Concerto. She was the cellist for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto and an artist Pablo Casals once called “the best cellist I have ever heard.” Her son, violist Paul Biss married Miriam Fried.

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For their Market Square Concerts program (did I mention it begins at 6:00?), they will be performing a program of four violin sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven:

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op.23
Sonata No. 10 in G, Op. 96
Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 12, No. 2
Sonata No. 5 in F, Op. 24 (“Spring”)

Unfortunately for us, Beethoven’s interest in the violin sonata didn’t match his creative output throughout his career like his symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas. The first nine sonatas were all written in a four-year period early in his career and then one more came along as a “special occasion” during his Middle Period. His most famous (if not his greatest) sonata was for an African-English violinist named George Bridgetower – they gave it its premiere (the composition so hurried that Beethoven had to summon his copyist at 4:30am to have the violin part ready in time) but then later had a falling out (a disagreement over a woman, the story goes), so when it was published a few years later, it was dedicated to the great French violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer who, it turned out, never played the piece. Beethoven had been hoping for some exposure as a result of this dedication.

That sense of marketing is also behind the dedication of the first set of violin sonatas which appeared in 1799, composed over the two years before that, and dedicated to the highly esteemed composer Antonio Salieri, one of the most powerful musicians in Vienna’s very tight musical world. We think of Salieri today (wrongly) as Mozart’s Murderer (great theater, though it is) but in his day he was a leading court composer and his approval meant good things for young musicians, especially a young 28-year-old from the German provinces. Beethoven studied briefly with Salieri – the art of setting Italian words to music – and these sonatas (although nothing to do with what he learned from the man) could be seen logically as dedicated out of gratitude to his one-time teacher. And, after all, the first set of six string quartets, written around the same time, were dedicated to Franz Josef Haydn, his primary teacher but also a wise move, politically: it was as if, having accepted the dedication, these great artists were putting their stamp of approval on the young composer who was just beginning his career.

Unlike Mozart, who wrote spontaneously, Beethoven’s was a creative struggle, judging from his notebooks. Sketches for the Op. 12 Sonatas appear in some notebooks going back to 1795, meaning he was thinking about if not actually working on them a few years before they were completed and sent to the publisher.

The first and last sonatas on this program form one of Beethoven’s contrasting pairs – for instance, the dramatic 5th Symphony followed by the bucolic 6th, justifiably nicknamed the “Pastoral” which he worked on at the same time and which were premiered together (their numbers, reversed). These sonatas were intended to be Op.23, Nos. 1 & 2, but due to an engravers error were each given separate numbers.

The A Minor is the dramatic one, turbulent and dark at times with more lyrical contrasts that usually end up subsumed by the drama.

The F Major is the “bucolic,” more relaxed one, if not exactly Pastoral in mood. Its sense of lightness and benign qualities have earned it the nickname “Spring,” a reminder that Beethoven enjoyed his summer trips to the countryside in order to compose in peace.

Both of these works were written more or less simultaneously in 1801. It is interesting to note that a year later, Beethoven would spend much of the summer and fall in the Viennese suburb of Heiligenstadt which any reader of concert program notes would immediately recognize as the place where Beethoven wrote his heart-rending “Heiligenstadt Testament,” describing his fears of losing his hearing: the symptoms had been increasing over the past few years, yet this never seemed to affect his music.

The last sonata to be composed came 10 years after its predecessor, the “Kreutzer.” It is usually overlooked because it does not seem to be an advance on the magnitude of the concerto-like 9th Sonata but there may be a practical reason for this. For whatever reason Beethoven did not continue writing violin sonatas as he did piano sonatas, the 10th was written for another French violinist, Pierre Rode, who was visiting Vienna in 1812 – a fateful year for Beethoven as well as Napoleon – and who, apparently, requested a sonata from the now well-established Beethoven.

It was written at the end of the year Beethoven completed the 7th and wrote the 8th Symphonies, during which time he (we assume) wrote his letter to the Immortal Beloved (whoever she may have been), met her (we assume) at a spa in Bohemia that summer and (we assume) broke up with her before he returned to Vienna (stopping off, by the way, to annoy his brother who was living with his girl-friend without having married her: you can read more about how Beethoven’s personal life intertwined with his creative life that year in this post at my blog, Thoughts on a Train).The bust (see right) was made by Klein in 1812, the likeness taken from a "life mask."

He returned to Vienna in November, then wrote the G Major Sonata for a concert in late December with Rode, aware that Rode, though four years his junior, was somewhat past his prime (as the story goes). The composer Ludwig Spohr, a great violinist in his own right, indicated when he was in Vienna in 1812 that Rode was already past his prime, finding later that Rode’s technique had deteriorated substantially that the man put aside playing the violin to focus on teaching and composing.

This may explain the lack of bravura in Beethoven’s last violin sonata. He wrote to his patron and student, the Archduke Rudolph, that “I did not make great haste in the last movement [of the G Major Violin Sonata] for the sake of mere punctuality, the more because, in writing it, I had to consider the playing of Rode. In our finales we like rushing and resounding passages, but this does not please R and — this hinders me somewhat.”

However, Spohr, who was in Vienna at the same time – essentially competing with Rode for audience – did leave an account of his acquaintance with Beethoven that would also lead us to believe that, because of his deafness, the composer was past his prime as a performer: Spohr heard a private performance of Beethoven playing the “Ghost” Trio that was “by no means an enjoyment.”

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“…in the first place, the pianoforte was woefully out of tune which, however, troubled Beethoven little, since he could hear nothing of it, and, secondly, of the former so admired excellence of the virtuoso, scarcely anything was left, in consequence of his total deafness. In the forte, the poor deaf man hammered in such a way upon the keys that entire groups of notes were inaudible, so that one lost all intelligence of the subject unless the eye followed the score at the same time. I felt moved with deepest sorrow at so hard a destiny… Beethoven’s almost continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me now.” – Ludwig Spohr (Autobiography)
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Conversing with Beethoven, when they met at a restaurant, was unpleasant as Spohr had to speak “so loud as to be heard in the third room off.” They met frequently, both at Spohr’s home and at the restaurant. He found Beethoven “a little blunt, not to say uncouth; but a truthful eye beamed from under his bushy eyebrows.”

After Beethoven had been absent from the restaurant for several days, Spohr inquired if he had been ill? Beethoven replied, “My boot was and as I have only one pair, I had house-arrest.”

Such was Beethoven’s life at the time he composed this pleasant, genial violin sonata written for Rode – Spohr’s “rival” – but which, like the Piano Trio in B-flat Major written the year before, was dedicated instead to the Archduke Rudolph who, we should remember, was the only patron Beethoven had who always supplied him with funding even in difficult economic times like 1812.

- Dick Strawser

Last Concert of the Season: Beethoven, Biss & Fried

2011-04-04T12:34:00.003-04:00

The final concert of Market Square Concerts 2010-2011 season is Tuesday night, April 12 at 6 p.m. at Whitaker Center.

(Yes, that’s 6pm – as in SIX p.m. – and that is not a typo! It is earlier than the usual start time of 8:00, so be warned!)

This recital features the charismatic and accomplished violinist Miriam Fried and her son, Jonathan Biss, whose career as a recitalist and orchestral soloist has taken off into the stratosphere. Jonathan Biss is coming to Harrisburg from Chicago, where he's substituting on Sunday for Murray Perahia in a Chicago Symphony sponsored recital.

Our concert on the 12th begins at 6 p.m. because he has to bolt to Boston immediately afterwards, where he'll begin rehearsals the next morning to play Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto with the Boston Symphony.

It’s Beethoven on the program in Harrisburg, in between – Fried and Biss will play four of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano, a rare opportunity to enjoy a juxtaposition of examples of this music in a single recital.

I’ve posted more information about the music on the program here.

As Ellen Hughes writes in the press release, “This is the last concert with me as Market Square Concerts' Executive Director. My successors are the young, energetic and talented couple Ya-Ting Chang and Peter Sirotin as Executive and Artistic Directors respectively. Although they officially begin July 1, they'll be at the concert for you to meet on the 12th.

“The board of Market Square Concerts invites you to have a glass of bubbly to celebrate this happy transition at a reception after the concert. Brochures about our next season will be available at the concert."

Oh, and did I mention the performance begins at 6:00pm?

Lee Hoiby (1926-2011): Where the Music Came From

2011-04-04T12:23:00.001-04:00

A week ago – Monday, March 28th, 2011 – Ellen Hughes forwarded an e-mail to me announcing that American composer Lee Hoiby had died that afternoon at the age of 85.

If you attended the Market Square Concerts program in March, 2009, you heard Hoiby’s “Sextet for Winds & Piano” with Stuart Malina joining the Dorian Wind Quintet and perhaps had a chance to meet the composer who’d driven down from his Catskill home for the performance. Most people I talked to after that concert were convinced his birth date in the program was a typo – no way was this jovial, vital man 83 years old!

You can read the post from Sequenza21 here which includes the official obituary, and a reminiscence by a friend in this post at New Music Box, here.

In addition to being a composer I have long admired, Lee was a friend whom I’d corresponded with occasionally since I was in high school, but I haven’t been able to bring myself around to writing about it on my own blog – soon, perhaps.

But you can read my accounts of his visit to Harrisburg two years ago here with a follow-up post about other works by Lee Hoiby I'd recommend for people in the audience who, liking the sextet, wondered what else was out there they could listen to. Also, these posts about dinner with Lee before that concert and then this one about some inspiring songs for composers or listeners, including one of Lee’s more famous songs, “Where the Music Comes From.”

As often happens when composers die, their music lives on – as if they’ve never really left us. It’s just sad knowing there will be no more music coming from where that music came from…

- Dick Strawser

The Bach Choir of Bethlehem in Harrisburg

2011-03-16T12:38:00.005-04:00

This weekend, one of the great choirs in America comes to Harrisburg. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem – not so far away, after all – may be the “oldest Bach choir in America,” founded 113 years ago and internationally renowned for their performances and recordings of Bach’s works, they also perform music by other composers on their programs: in addition to one of Bach’s great motets, “Singet dem Herrn,” their Market Square Concerts program includes Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and Benjamin Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” as well as a new work by a composer whose name doesn’t begin with a B – Stephen Paulus, who wrote “A Dream of Time” as a commission for the choir’s celebration of conductor Greg Funfgeld’s 25th year as its artistic director and conductor.

The performance is at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 8:00 and there’s a special pre-concert talk given by conductor Greg Funfgeld beginning at 7:00, which is free to ticket-holders.

The program is entitled Songs of Hope – “From the Psalms of David to 18th century poetry by Christopher Smart written in an English lunatic asylum, and 20th century poetry by Carl Sandburg written in depression-era Chicago, the texts of our ‘Songs of Hope’ are moving affirmations of hope in the face of adversity” – appropriate given the current world news with the political unrest in the Middle East, the devastation in Japan following the recent earthquake there last week and our own concerns about extreme weather and the economy – and their performance here is in preparation for their newest CD which they’ll begin recording the following week.

Several people have told me they plan on going to the pre-concert talk just to get a good seat for the 8:00 performance. There’s been quite a buzz about the choir’s appearance here in the mid-state, so the attendance is expected to be very good.

The choir has its own blog and you can read more about their spring concerts here - with links to each work on the program – about the Bach motet, Britten’s cantata, “Rejoice in the Lamb,” Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” and the new work by Stephen Paulus, setting words of Carl Sandburg, “A Dream of Time.”

Joining the 60-voice choir will be the 8-member chamber orchestra, the Virtuosi of the Bach Festival Orchestra, as well as vocal soloists Rosa Lamoreaux (soprano), Daniel Taylor (countertenor), Benjamin Butterfield (tenor) and William Sharp (baritone), familiar names from previous performances and recordings made by the Bach Choir.

Conductor Greg Funfgeld talks about their spring program – this one specifically for their concert in Bethlehem the day after their performance with Market Square Concerts in Harrisburg.
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Here is a video by another famous American choir of another work by Stephen Paulus – his “Pilgrim’s Hymn” performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

Update: this is annoying - the video embed code from their website doesn't always seem to work in here, so here's a link to their page, instead. It's a beautiful piece, so please check it out!
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While for me it’s always a thrill to hear great music well performed, there is a personal connection here I am also looking forward to. William Sharp who frequently appears as a soloist with the Bach Choir and has recorded and performed around the country, in addition to teaching at Peabody Institute in Baltimore, was a grad student at the Eastman School of Music my last year there (his wife and I were among those struggling through their doctoral defenses at the same time). It was during a brief time when the great bass, Hans Hotter, best known for his Wagnerian roles and performances of Schubert songs, was in residency there – perhaps for a week. In addition to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, he gave daily master classes (which I think were primarily about Schubert songs) for the school's voice students.

While he worked with all of the students who performed for him, Hotter took an especial interest in Bill, hearing him every day to the point Bill was often preparing new repertoire for the next day's class, even (if I recall) sight-reading when Hotter wanted to hear more. Basically, it amounted to "public" lessons with one of the greatest singers in the world, invaluable experience, no doubt, but also a chance for those of us who sat in on the classes to hear Bill sing and, even in that short time, develop as a sensitive and intuitive performer.

So there’s a certain amount of “I-knew-him-when” pride every time I’d hear a new CD of Bill’s – beginning with the “AIDS Quilt Songbook” or any of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem recordings – and now, another chance to hear him live.
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This program with Market Square Concerts and the Bach Choir of Bethlehem is partially supported by a grant from Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, a program developed and funded by The Heinz Endowments; the William Penn Foundation; the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency; and The Pew Charitable Trusts; and administered by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Season sponsor: Capital BlueCross. Market Square Concerts is a resident company of Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts. Support is also received from the Cultural Enrichment Fund and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
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photo credit: header photo by Paul Pearson, from the Bach Choir's blog; photo of William Sharp from his biography page at Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

The St. Lawrence Quartet with Mozart, Mendelssohn and John Adams

2011-02-06T11:26:00.004-05:00

Can you guess which composer this critic is talking about?

"[This composer's] works do not in general please quite so much as [those by someone else]... [These works] confirm... he has a decided leaning towards the difficult and the unusual. But then, what great and elevated ideas he has too, testifying to a bold spirit!"

If this composer "leans toward the difficult and the unusual," your first reaction is probably some highly intellectual "contemporary" or at least early 20th Century composer like Schoenberg.

Actually, it's from an anonymous London critic writing in 1789 about Mozart's new set of six string quartets, dedicated to Haydn.

(Incidentally, when a Viennese publisher sent them to Italy for publication there, the copies were sent back because "the engraving is full of mistakes.")

The second of these quartets, the one in D Minor, K.421, opens Market Square Concert's program this week with the St. Lawrence Quartet.

(Oh, and the "someone else" whose quartets were more pleasing? Those by Leopold Kozeluch. When was the last time you ever heard a quartet by Kozeluch in a concert? Or, for that matter, any of his 33 symphonies or 22 piano concertos? Just sayin'...)

Also on the program is the first published quartet by Felix Mendelssohn and a more recent work composed especially for the St. Lawrence by one of America's leading composers today, John Adams, which they premiered in 2009.

Following that premiere, Allen Kozinn of the New York Times wrote that it was a “stylistically fluid extended fantasy, with the players moving seamlessly through a colorful sequence of episodes.”

This concert takes place at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg, Thursday evening at 8:00. The temple is located at 2345 N. Front St., Harrisburg, and there is plenty of parking available.

I'll be offering a pre-concert talk at 7:00.

(Now, all we have to do is pray for good weather!)

The St. Lawrence String Quartet, one of the best known quartets from Canada, was founded over 20 years ago, and has long established itself among the world-class chamber ensembles of our generation.

Alex Ross of The New Yorker magazine writes, “The St. Lawrence are remarkable not simply for the quality of their music making, exalted as it is, but for the joy they take in the act of connection.”

They are Ensemble-in-Residence at Stanford University and all live in the San Francisco area. They have a busy touring and festival schedule, and we are fortunate that they are able to return to Harrisburg for another concert this season.

Tickets are $30, $25 seniors, $5 college/university students. School-age students are free. Tickets are available at 717 214-ARTS or at the door.

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Mozart wrote his "Haydn Quartets" – or less confusingly, the "Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn" – between 1782 and 1785. Unlike many of his works which seemed to be written down in rough draft already complete and finished (complete as in already fully conceived; finished as in not needing any revisions to reach their final form), the sketches for these quartets show a long and (for Mozart) laborious process of trials and corrections.

The story goes that Mozart was so intrigued by what Haydn was doing in the String Quartet Medium with his latest published set – the six quartets, Op. 33 – which came out the year Mozart arrived in Vienna at the age of 25.

Also unusual for Mozart, who seems to have sprung Minerva-like fully formed without formal training, was this need to "study" someone else's music. So taking Haydn's music and studying it to "learn the art of quartet writing" might seem odd, in hindsight. Mozart had written quartets before and could no doubt have continued writing quartets as easily as he wrote symphonies, concertos and operas without "studying" anyone else's music to find out how to improve his craft.

However, that deference may also be a mark of maturity. Haydn, then over twice Mozart's age, after all, was the avowed "Great Composer" of the day – not just a popular one, like Kozeluch. Whatever Mozart was looking for when he arrived in Vienna – primarily, to make a living as a free-lancer rather than be stifled as a court musician in provincial Salzburg – he also realized he could benefit from learning what Haydn (himself, largely untaught) had already accomplished.

It's no small statement to say Mozart's six "Haydn" Quartets are among the finest of the 18th Century – even if they made difficult listening for some people more attuned to works by Kozeluch and other, equally forgotten but once popular composers.

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Both learning and a sense of homage are behind Mendelssohn's first published quartet, as well. Beethoven's last quartets were still new – in fact, so new, if it's true that the opening of the A Minor Quartet was inspired by Beethoven's Op. 135, the "Muss es sein? Es muss sein! (Must it be? It must be!)" statement that opens the last movement, Mendelssohn studied the score even before it had been given its world premiere performance! It was written as a direct response to the news that Beethoven had died on March 27th, 1827.

While his next quartet – the one in E-flat Major – may show less direct influence from Beethoven, Mendelssohn began this quartet at home in Berlin in 1829 but completed it in London in September while on the tour that was the inspiration for what became the "Hebrides Overture (Fingals' Cave)" and the "Scottish" Symphony.

Because the publishing of music does not always reflect the chronology of its composition, I need to explain that the 1st String Quartet was written two years after the 2nd String Quartet which in fact were both published before two works he'd composed a few years earlier.

Confusing? Yeah...

Op. 12 – String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat Major (1829, aged 20)
Op. 13 – String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (1827, aged 18)
Op. 16 – Octet in E-flat Major (1825, aged 16)
Op. 18 – Overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1826, aged 17)
Op. 26 – "Fingal's Cave" or "The Hebrides" Overture (conceived 1829, completed 1830)
Op. 56 – Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, "Scottish" (begun 1829, completed 1842)

There is also a String Quartet in E-flat Major that he composed when he was 14 but it wasn't published until over 30 years after his death. Like the early string symphonies, it's regarded as a "student work" and was never given an opus number and is generally listed as "Quartet in E-flat (1823)" to distinguish it from the two quartets in the same key he did publish (No. 1 and No. 5).

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John Adams is regarded as one of the most important composers writing today. (He turns 64 next Tuesday, by the way). While his musical style is rooted in the "minimalism" of the 1970s and '80s, it's not a fair description of his music, just as not all of Debussy's music is "impressionistic" and Debussy and Ravel are no more identical for being branded "impressionists" than Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams are identical for being branded "minimalists." Yet it's convenient and it won't go away.

As a medium, the string quartet comes with considerable historical baggage – the repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok and Shostakovich being not just the greatest of the quartets but some of the greatest music ever composed.

This is not the first time Adams has composed a work for string quartet but it's the first time he's called it simply that – no fanciful title, just an abstract indication of a willingness to face up to this historic legacy.

It's essentially a two-movement work, though the first movement encompasses both the standard opening, more intellectual argument of a sonata movement and a contrasting slow movement.
The String Quartet was commissioned jointly by the Juilliard School for its Focus Festival and by Stanford University's "Lively Arts" and the Banff Center, written for the St. Lawrence Quartet who premiered it at Juilliard in January, 2009.

It was not an arbitrary pairing of composer and performer. Like many composers, he was inspired by hearing his performers playing something that so impressed him, he was suddenly taken by the idea of writing for them.

From an interview on NPR:

'When he heard them play, Adams said he was reminded of how much the sound of the string quartet is like "elevated human discourse ... like speech brought to the highest, most sublime level."

'Adams, like many composers before him, was hesitant to write a string quartet. But after he saw the St. Lawrence Quartet play Beethoven, he turned into what Nuttall describes as a "kid in a candy shop." All kinds of possibilities were suddenly open, and he began writing.'

Here are comments from reviews of the premiere:

“Like a perpetuum mobile, motion sweeps through the parts: it hums and purrs on the stage. The Canadians play the work as a scherzo with few points of repose. Electrified, like music which is in a constant current. The lively, rhythmically-charged, wild style of playing suits the 20-year-old ensemble, for which Adams has written the perfect work.” Ruhr Nachrichten

“A stunner…the piece boasts all the attributes audiences have come to associate with Adams’ best music… Its controlled restlessness yields to tremendous fervency, from the ‘ghostly’ elements of the first part to the second, with its ascending lines that rise and shimmer like heat off a highway…Adams at his most gripping, and the St. Lawrence players gave the work a fierce, go-for-broke reading.” Mercury News

And here is a YouTube audio (recorded from the NPR interview with its in-studio broadcast) of the final movement of John Adams' String Quartet with the St. Lawrence Quartet.

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January with Ching-Yun Hu, Beethoven, Ravel & Carl Vine

2011-01-19T10:28:00.004-05:00

This weekend, Market Square Concerts presents a recital by pianist Ching-Yun Hu at Whitaker Center – Saturday evening at 8pm.

The program includes sonatas by Beethoven and Australian composer Carl Vine, Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and two works by Chopin - the Barcarolle in F-sharp Minor and the Polonaise in A-flat, Op. 53, usually known as the "Heroic" Polonaise.

Tickets (available in the downstairs lobby at Whitaker the night of the performance or by calling 717/214-ARTS) are $30, seniors $25, college & university students $5. Tickets for school-aged children are free! (Concert sponsor is Keefer Wood Allen & Rahal, LLP.)

Described as "dazzling" and called "a pianist with the soul of Chopin," Ching-Yun Hu captured the top prize at the 2008 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv, where she was also awarded the Audience Favorite Prize, She then won the 2009 Concert Artists Guild International Competition.

Deeply impressed and equally moved by her artistry, a prominent music critic in Israel wrote, "This young woman brings with her the secret, the mystery and the style. She has the suspense of Brendel, Perahia's lyricism and Barenboim's depth. Are we witnessing the birth of a new Martha Argerich?"

Her Market Square Concerts program opens with one of Beethoven's earlier piano sonatas, published as Op. 2 in 1796, though several other, less daring works pre-date it. At the time, most sonatas were written for "household consumption" or the "amateur market." In an age when every young lady was expected to play the piano or sing, amateur (or, in German, "liebhaber") meant "having a love" for something compared to the professional, more knowledgeable expert (in German, "kenner" or "knower" of something) and, at least then, had no reflection on the level of talent involved.

Each of the three sonatas in this set, Opus 2, have different characters. This sonata was intended for the concert artist more than the household amateur, in days before famous concert artists roamed the halls of Europe performing for a living.

This brilliance – especially relying on Beethoven's skill as an improviser – may have accounted for the reservations Beethoven's teacher had about the pieces – and may also explain why Beethoven published these sonatas and not the earlier ones, their dedication to the old-fashioned Haydn notwithstanding. This dedication was a political formality as it was personal: Beethoven was then unknown but Haydn's name on the title page acted as a kind of endorsement.

Alfred Brendel plays the opening movement of Beethoven's C Major Piano Sonata, Op.2/3.
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Carl Vine might be a slightly less familiar name to American audiences. Born in Perth, Australia, in 1954, he switched majors in college from physics to composition and began his career as a composer of music for the dance. He has gone on to become one of Australia's most prominent composers and wrote his 5th String Quartet in 2007, his 7th Symphony in 2008, and a Violin Concerto that will be premiered this year.

His 3rd Piano Sonata was composed in 2007. According to the composer's web-site,

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This work is constructed in four sections that are to be played without breaks between them: fantasia – rondo – variations – presto.

The Fantasia introduces several ideas which reappear in various guises in all of the other movements, but also includes some undeveloped declamatory material. The Rondo explores a simple rhythmic motive while the Variations develop the chordal theme that opens the work. The Presto is a self-contained ternary structure that echoes thematic components from much that preceded it.

Piano Sonata Nº 3 was commissioned by the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and the Colburn School, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The recipient of the 2004 Gilmore Young Artist Award, Elizabeth Schumann, gave the world premiere performance at Zipper Hall, Los Angeles, California on 11th May 2007.
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Hearing the brief sample (go to his website, click on the "piano music" link in the introductory paragraph, scroll down till you see the information on the Piano Sonata No. 3 and click on the 'speaker icon'), it has the energy and edge that reminds me of, say, a Prokofiev toccata (I was thinking somewhere between the finales of the 3rd Piano Concerto and the 7th Sonata) with that kind of stylistic integrity that makes me wonder "why haven't we heard more of this guy's music?"

Speaking of toccatas, here's the second half of his 1st Piano Sonata: it'll give you an idea.

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In addition to the two works by Chopin, a composer considered by many the "soul" of the Romantic repertoire, there is also one of the masterworks of early 20th Century piano music, Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, first heard in 1909. The first of its three movements depicts the water-sprite, Ondine, who longs for human contact, a well-worn subject of 19th Century romanticism heard both in music (sometimes called Melusine, she's the subject of a tone-poem by Mendelssohn and, as Rusalka, an opera by Dvorak, among others) and literature (think Hans Christian Anderson's tale of the Little Mermaid). The middle movement is a dark and eerie landscape called "Le gibet" or "The Gallows" with its "bell tinting at the walls of a city under the horizon and the carcass of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun". The final movement evokes the ghostly goblin, Scarbo, who pirouettes and scampers through the darkened recesses of your home (or your mind) in the middle of the night – terrifying enough to play the piece!

Here is Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Scarbo.

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Sweet Sounds with the Dolce Suono Trio

2010-11-17T22:28:00.006-05:00

If you're like me, you might have taken a look at the calendar and realized, "OMG, Thanksgiving is next week!" and soon you might start freaking out about Christmas being just around the bend (though in some stores, its presence has been around for weeks).

For me, blame it on having spent most of October sick with the flu and then spending November with NaNoWriMo ("National Novel Writing Month") when the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel's first draft in thirty days.

That's when it dawned on me the next performance with Market Square Concerts is THIS WEEKEND!

Sunday afternoon in fact, November 21st at 4pm at HACC's Rose Lehrman Arts Center. At least the forecast looks like it should be a seasonal fall day. Sorry about losing that Daylight Savings Thing, though...

The ensemble is a trio called "Dolce Suono" which means "Sweet Sound" in Italian, a pleasant name for a pleasant combination of instruments – flute, cello and piano. The Philadelphia Inquirer called them "a stunning ensemble."

A PRE-CONCERT TALK
We're trying something a little different with some of the concerts this season: pre-concert talks. Mimi Stillman, the flutist and founder of the ensemble, will be giving this one, beginning at 3:00 and it will be held in the "Black Box," the studio theater that's down at the end of the hall on your left as you walk in the front entrance to the Rose Lehrman auditorium.

STUDENT TICKETS AVAILABLE
Tickets are $30, $25 for seniors - College/university age students can purchase $5 tickets and school-aged children get in FREE. Regular concert tickets are also available at 214-ARTS.

About the Program
There's not a lot of music written for this combination which makes programming a challenge. Unlike string quartets or more standard piano trios, there are no great masterpieces by Beethoven or Mozart written for it, but there is a wealth of lesser-known works that prove to be... well, "sweet," like the "Three Watercolors" which Philippe Gaubert composed in 1915 that's on the program (one of them is, appropriately, "Autumn Evening").

The program ranges from Haydn, writing in 1790, to a work composed last year to celebrate Haydn's life during the Haydn Year (officially, the Bicentennial Anniversary of his Death), called "Laus D" and composed by the ensemble's pianist, Charles Abramovic. Incidentally, the title is a play on "Laus Deo (Praise God)" which Haydn traditionally inscribed at the end of his compositions. The music pays tribute to specific works by Haydn as well as his musical spirit.

Carl Maria von Weber may be best known for his opera, Der Freischütz (without which it would be difficult to imagine a Romantic giant like Wagner), but he wrote at least a few works for the more intimate world of chamber music. His last completed chamber work was the G Minor Flute Trio, written two years before Freischütz around the same time Beethoven was getting ready to embark on what would become his "Late Period."

Like many ensembles who find themselves limited by a repertoire not many composers wrote for, the Dolce Suono Trio has made an effort to add to their repertoire by commissioning 21 new works in the past six years. Their most recent world premiere was Richard Danielpour's Remembering Neda.

The composer – who had a work commissioned by Concertante that was premiered in Harrisburg this past May – sat down for a conversation with flutist Mimi Stillman to talk about the piece prior to its world premiere in Philadelphia last month:

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In the program notes, he wrote, "I have kept much of my personal history at a distance from my work as a composer - until now. 'Remembering Neda' is a cry for understanding in this most troubled place in the world. It is a lamentation for the losses incurred during this dark time in Iran. And it is a prayer of hope that this most unfortunate of situations will one day change."

The New York Times wrote this about the composer: "Mr. Danielpour's soothing eclecticism is like an attentive host seeing to his guests' every need." The San Jose Mercury calls him "a brilliant composer who is unafraid to let his emotions show."

Here's the Dolce Suono Trio performing the first movement of the Flute Trio by Ned Rorem (it's not on the Market Square Concerts program, just an example of their playing):
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I hope you'll be able to join us at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center on the campus of the Harrisburg Area Community College, to hear the Dolce Suono Trio this Sunday afternoon at 4:00 -- and please come an hour earlier for the pre-concert talk!

- Dick Strawser

Trio Solisti Opens the New Season

2010-09-30T10:27:00.002-04:00

Market Square Concerts opens its new season with the return of one of the great piano trios in the classical music world today. Trio Solisti performs at 8pm, Saturday, October 9th at Harrisburg's Whitaker Center.

The New York Times called them “consistently brilliant" and The Washington Post referred to their “unrelenting passion and zealous abandon in a transcendent performance.”

A composition they'd commissioned from Paul Moravec, his "Tempest Fantasy," received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004. They later recorded the work and performed it in Harrisburg – that was one of those blizzard concerts (a "will-it-or-won't-it" weekend) and unfortunately not heard by too many listeners, though everyone in attendance was glad they'd braved the weather.

The good news is – not only is another work by Paul Moravec on this program (they'll be performing his 'Passacaglia'), the weather is likely to be a lot better than that last time...

Perhaps you've heard them at Gretna Music where they've played in past seasons as well, and if you're a fan of Concertante, performing regularly at Harrisburg's Rose Lehrman Arts Center, you already know one of the performers: cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach.

She'll be joined by her colleagues, violinist Maria Bachmann (who appeared a few seasons ago in a recital program, with the world premiere of Philip Glass's new Violin Sonata) and pianist Jon Klibonoff.

The "major work" on the program will be one of Dvořák's piano trios – while the famous "Dumky" Trio may be more frequently performed, the F Minor Trio was a more significant work in Antonin Dvořák's development and is usually considered one of his finest and most heartfelt pieces. (You can hear a recording by the legendary trio with Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and Leonard Pennario, here.)

Rachmaninoff may be better known for his piano concertos and works for solo piano, so a piano trio by him (even a fairly short one-movement work like his Trio élégiaque No. 1) may seem unusual. Written when he was 19, it's still full of the beautiful melodies and lush harmonies that make all of his music an incredible listening experience. (You can hear the beginning of the trio, performed by the Borodin Trio, here.)

Leonard Bernstein's Piano Trio was also written by a 19-year-old – when Bernstein was a Harvard student studying with Walter Piston. You can hear Central Pennsylvania's own Newstead Trio playing the 2nd movement, here.

Paul Moravec (right) has a long history with Trio Solisti and violinist Maria Bachmann, for whom he's written a number of works. He composed the Passacaglia that's on their Market Square Concerts program in 2006, two years after the Pulitzer-prize-winning "Tempest Fantasy." While I couldn't find an on-line link to the Passacaglia, you can hear Trio Solisti performing his "Tempest Fantasy" here.

A visit to Argentina rounds out the program with "Le grand Tango" by Astor Piazzolla, the "King of the Tango" (considering Johann Strauss was the Waltz King and John Philip Sousa was the March King, why not a Tango King, especially when Piazzolla wrote most of the best ones around?) Most of his music is available in different arrangements – here's one for viola and accordion (and I'm not joking)!

Tickets for Trio Solisti are $30 (seniors $25) with tickets for college and university students $5. School age children are free, thanks to a generous grant from the Derek and Margaret Hathaway Foundation.

The opening concert of Market Square Concert's new season is sponsored by Lois
Lehrman Grass, honoring the memory of Dr. Robert E. Dye.

Sunday at the Mill

2010-07-25T02:06:00.002-04:00

It may have been one of the hottest performances at the Glen Allen Mill in recent memory - not just because of the playing: Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir of Florence" sizzled for any number of reasons but it didn't lack for fireworks in case any one was expecting the 1812 Overture to end this summer concert, instead.

But there's one more performance at the mill - Sunday afternoon at 4pm - and the forecast is supposed to be "cooler" than Saturday's near-record high of 95° (though one thermometer in the vicinity of the mill was unofficially reading 98°), somplete with a mind-boggling heat index of 103°. According to some, it could be "around 90°" while other sources say "92°" on Sunday and by comparison to Saturday's temperature, that's definitely cooler (it's all relative).

The heat frustration didn't seem to dampen the players' enthusiasm or the listeners' enjoyment.

The Fry Street String Quartet is back for their 7th season with Market Square Concerts' SummerMusic and they were joined Saturday night by oboist Gerard Reuter and by Harrisburg Symphony musicians Peter Sirotin, the orchestra's associate concertmaster (playing viola in this performance), and principal cellist Fiona Thompson.

On Sunday, pianist Stuart Malina, music director and conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, who'll perform the Oboe Sonata by Camille Saint-Saens with Gerard Reuter as well as Beethoven's C Minor Piano Trio (Op. 1, No. 3) and the Piano Quintet by Robert Schumann with the quartet.

The Glen Allen Mill is located on McCormick Road between Bowmansdale and Lisburn: From Rt. 15 South, take Rossmoyne Rd exit, turn left at light – continue on Rossmoyne Rd to Lisburn Rd – turn right onto Lisburn Rd – a few hundred yards later, bear right at the fork onto Arcona Rd – follow Arcona Rd until it dead ends at McCormick Rd – turn left onto McCormick Rd – the Mill is ¼ mile ahead on the right. Parking is in the meadow behind the Mill – follow the road over the creek – the entrance is on the right.

It's Time for some Summer Music

2010-07-13T13:56:00.004-04:00

Summer is definitely here. We've had the 4th of July Weekend, our first heat wave of the season and the awakening of the cicadas (nature's vuvuzelas) to prove it. With any luck, the weather will be less hot and less humid next week.

Why?

Because it's time for Market Square Concerts' SummerMusic 2010 beginning July 21st.

In addition to cook-outs and holidays, Summer also means summer music festivals. This year's SummerMusic series includes three programs – one at the home-base of Market Square Presbyterian Church in Downtown Harrisburg, along with two weekend performances at the Glen Allen Mill along the Yellow Breeches Creek.

Tickets for any or all of the concerts – honoring the memory of Jason Litton – are available by calling 717 214-ARTS or at the Whitaker Center Box Office. Remaining tickets will be available at the door.

Space for seating inside the mill is limited so I'd recommend getting there earlier rather than cutting it close to curtain-time.

The Fry Street Quartet and oboist Gerard Reuter return for the series along with Stuart Malina, stepping over from his podium with the Harrisburg Symphony, to play chamber music along with two of his colleagues in the orchestra, associate concertmaster Peter Sirotin and principal cellist Fiona Thompson.

The first concert is Wednesday evening (July 21st) at Market Square Church and begins at 6:00 (yes, that's not a typo – hang around after work, if you're in-town or stop by on your way home).

The program opens with an oboe concerto by Bach – this one in F Major (BWV. 1053 for those of you who keep score by the Complete Works Catalogue) – and continues with a relatively early work of Beethoven's from his first set of string quartets, the D Major, Op. 18 #3.

On the second half, it's a delightful set of Romances for oboe and piano by Robert Schumann and then some very serious music by Felix Mendelssohn, a composer you normally associate with “delightful” (think “Wedding March” or the Italian Symphony). This is one of his very last works, the String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80, and written in memory of his sister Fanny who'd recently died – he called it his “Requiem for Fanny” – and little did anyone know that less than two months later, Mendelssohn himself would be dead at the age of 38. Now, that may sound like a bummer for a summer concert, but this music is very powerful and impassioned rather than somber – an emotional thunderstorm, perhaps – a cathartic moment from a composer's world that yielded a personal solution to the question “how does an artist turn Life into Art?”

Incidentally, to help you digest all that, afterward consider going across the square to Bricco and The Hilton Patio which will be offering 20% off food following the concert (have your ticket stub or program booklet handy).

Then the series moves to the banks of a beautifully pastoral tree-lined stream flowing past an old mill originally built in the 18th Century (see top photo).

Saturday evening's concert – July 24th at 8pm – will feature Mozart's Oboe Quartet, the Serenade for String Trio by Erno Dohnanyi and a serenade for six strings by Tchaikovsky better known as “The Souvenir of Florence,” a very Russian-sounding work despite the location of its inspiration (the work is actually based on themes that came to him while on holiday there, jotted down in a note-book since they didn't fit into the opera he was working on at the time).

Sunday afternoon's concert – July 25th at 4pm – includes another early work by Beethoven (actually, his first completed piece to be published, even though it's No. 3 from the set of Piano Trios, Op. 1), a work that Camille Saint-Saëns wrote when he was 85 (his oboe sonata, Op.166) and a work that Robert Schumann wrote in a flurry of chamber music creativity one summer that saw not only three string quartets, the piano quartet and several other smaller works for various combinations, but also the Piano Quintet they'll be playing that afternoon (one of Schumann's most popular works).

And I should point out it IS air-conditioned after a fashion: they've managed to rig up window-units in the mill to keep it cooler – but it's summer so definitely, the dress-code is casual.

The concerts are inside the mill, so they'll go on rain or shine. If the weather permits, you can picnic along the Yellow Breeches from 6pm on Saturday or after the concert until 8pm on Sunday.

Directions to the Mill which is located on McCormick Road between Bowmansdale and Lisburn: From Rt. 15 S, take Rossmoyne Rd exit, turn left at light – continue on Rossmoyne Rd to Lisburn Rd – turn right onto Lisburn Rd – a few hundred yards later, bear right at the fork onto Arcona Rd – follow Arcona Rd until it dead ends at McCormick Rd – turn left onto McCormick Rd – the Mill is ¼ mile ahead on the right. Parking is in the meadow behind the Mill – follow the road over the creek – the entrance is on the right.

Zuill Bailey's New Bach CD Party in Harrisburg THIS WEEK

2010-05-02T23:08:00.002-04:00

Back in February, one of our more memorable blizzards in years managed to put the kaibosch on the original CD Release Party to celebrate Zuill Bailey's just-then-released Telarc disc of the six Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, a major accomplishment in any cellist's repertoire.

The party has been rescheduled for this Wednesday evening, May 5th. The weather promises to be much better - a sunny day with a predicted high of 84°.

The party will be held at the Mid-Town Scholar Book Store at 3rd & Verbeke (a.k.a. Broad) Streets in Harrisburg, across from the Broad Street Farmers Market.

Presented in collaboration with Market Square Concerts and HACC-Midtown, it begins at 6:00 and Zuill will start playing some excerpts from the Bach Suites at 6:30.

A $5 donation is requested. Hors d’oeuvres prepared by HACC’s culinary students and liquid refreshments will be available.

As refreshments for the soul, Zuill will play selections from the Bach Suites. He comes to Harrisburg from other CD release parties in San Francisco and New York, then goes on to Baltimore and other hopefully less snow-challenged locations.

After his November recital here, we're very lucky to have him back in Central Pennsylvania again and especially honored that he chose to have the CD-Party here. His new Bach CD will be available for purchase on the night of the party.

These six suites, some of the most significant repertoire for a cellist, were recorded each in one sitting over a period of one week at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, following years of preparation by Mr. Bailey. He calls the process of recording these suites “such a personal journey for me.”

Zuill was just here this past November for a program at Whitaker Center with Market Square Concerts: you can read about it here and here.

Celebrate the Bard's Birthday with Market Square Concerts

2010-04-16T15:45:00.003-04:00

Join us for the last concert of the season as Parthenia presents a program of music and poetry from the days of William Shakespeare. The performance will be held Saturday, April 24th, at 8pm in Harrisburg's Market Square Church.

"Parthenia, hailed by the New Yorker as 'one of the brightest lights in New York's early-music scene,' is a dynamic quartet exploring music from Tudor England to the court of Versailles and beyond. Known for its remarkable sense of ensemble, Parthenia has been presented in concerts across America and produces its own lively and distinguished concert series in New York City.

In the Elizabethan world, poetry and music were inseparable; poetry was conceived as song and music took its forms and phrasing from poetry. In Parthenia’s concert, dramatic readings of the poetry of Shakespeare and Donne are interspersed with instrumental and vocal musical vignettes.

In addition to her work as a member of the world famous vocal quartet Anonymous4, mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek has a reputation as a versatile and accomplished soloist. Paul Hecht made his Broadway debut in 1968 and has had a varied and successful acting career in theatre, film and television, including “Kate and Allie” and “Law and Order.”

Here's the program for their concert on April 24th... Notice that it's a short but very sweet program on what is believed to be the day after Shakespeare's actual birthday. I hope you find the prospect of hearing words and music from Elizabethan times as exciting as I do."

- Ellen Hughes

PARTHENIA
Rosamund Morley, treble viol; Lawrence Lipnik, tenor viol; Beverly Au, bass viol; Lisa Terry, bass viol
with guests:
Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, mezzo-soprano
Paul Hecht, actor

When Music and Sweet Poetry Agree
Shakespeare, Donne and their Elizabethan musical contemporaries
(This program will be performed without intermission)

Prelude and Voluntary - bby William Byrd (c. 1539-1623)
The Triple Foole - by John Donne (1572-1631)
It was a lover and his lass - by Thomas Morley (c. 1557-1602)
The Good Morrow - by Donne
Fantasia á4 - by Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger (c. 1575-1628)
Go and Catch a Falling Star - by Donne
Galliard: The Fairy Rownd - by Anthony Holborne (1545-1602)
Come live with me and be my love - by William Corkine (fl. 1610-1620)
The Bait - by Donne
Fantasy on 'All in a garden green' - by John Jenkins (1592-1678)
The Flea - by Donne
A Mery Conceit: The Queenes delight - by Hume (c.1569-1620)

Can she excuse my wrongs - by John Dowland (1563-1626)
Sonnet XCI: Some glory in their birth - by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Ah, dear heart, why do you rise? - by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)
A Lecture Upon the Shadow - by Donne
A Gigge: Doctor Bull’s my selfe - by John Bull (c. 1562-1628)
Sonnet XXIII: As an unperfect actor on the stage - by Shakespeare
Farewell, dear love - by Robert Jones (c. 1577-1617)
Fantasia á4 - by William Byrd
Sonnet CIV: To me, fair friend, you can never be old - by Shakespeare
The Fair young virgin - by Byrd
The Apparition - by Donne
So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse - by Alfonso Ferrabosco (c.1580-1628)
Fantasia á4 - by Giovanni Coprario (c. 1570-1626)

The Relic - by Donne
Harke, Harke - by Tobias Hume
Death be not proud - by Donne
Hugh Ashton’s Maske - by Hugh Ashton, attrib. (c.1485-c.1558)
Sonnet XXIX: When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes - by Shakespeare
Now, oh now I needs must part - by Dowland
Sonnet LXXI: No longer mourn for me when I am dead - by Shakepeare
Pavan: Paradiso - by Holborne
The Valediction: Forbidding Mourning - by Donne

Jennifer Higdon Wins the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music

2010-04-12T17:05:00.004-04:00

This afternoon, the winners of the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The winner of the Music Prize is Jennifer Higdon, receiving the award for her Violin Concerto, composed for Hilary Hahn and premiered by her in February 2009.

You can read the announcement as it was posted at The New Music Box where I found it through Facebook.

You can also read her own response to winning a Pulitzer, here, also posted at the New Music Box.

I've also posted more about the Violin Concerto on my blog, Thoughts on a Train, including some comments I'd jotted down while listening to the on-line broadcast of the concerto last June.

This past January, audiences in Harrisburg got to hear two works by Jennifer Higdon. With Market Square Concerts, the Cypress Quartet performed "Impressions," a string quartet that Higdon composed for them. Ms. Higdon was here to talk about the piece before the performance and to meet the audience.

The following week, the Harrisburg Symphony performed the opening movement of "CityScape," a lively overture called 'SkyLine.' In previous seasons, they also performed the Percussion Concerto (a work that won her a Grammy earlier this year) and one of the most frequently performed new orchestral works in the United States in recent years, her Blue Cathedral.

Congratulations to Jennifer Higdon on her Pulitzer Prize!

- Dr. Dick

Photo credit: Candace diCarlo.

A Picnic Concert (of sorts) in Reading

2010-04-07T15:08:00.005-04:00

Every now and then, I like to pass along some concert info about performers who've appeared recently with Market Square Concerts who are performing elsewhere in the area.

Matthew Bengtson, a Philadelphia-based pianist and harpsichordist who played Bach's Goldberg Variations and several contemporary works (including some by Elliott Carter and Jeremy Gill) for Market Square Concerts in January of 2009, will be performing a harpsichord concerto by Francis Poulenc with the Reading Symphony conducted by Andrew Constantine this Saturday evening, April 10th, at 8:00 in Reading's Sovereign Performing Arts Center.

As Matt explains, Poulenc's concerto “requires a harpsichord in the early 20th century style. I will be playing a William Dowd harpsichord (see left) [that is] the largest Dowd ever built, with eight pedals enabling rapid changes of timbral registration. This instrument formerly belonged to Rosalyn Tureck,” one of the great American harpsichordists of the previous generation.

Francis Poulenc wrote his Concert champêtre in the late-1920s, its title redolent of a rustic picnic in the French countryside, though the composer admits the most 'rustic' he ever got would be considered 'suburban' today. He wrote the work for Wanda Landowska, the great Polish harpsichordist who is credited with bringing the instrument back into modern awareness with her performances in the early decades of the last century, and she gave the concerto its world premiere in 1929.

It's composed in an appropriate mix of styles more native to the instrument's baroque and classical heritage with a touch of 20th Century harmonic spice: at one point, Poulenc may evoke the sounds of the great French keyboard works of Rameau or Couperin, a delicious sicilienne of Italian vintage and a headlong romp straight out of Handel's “Harmonious Blacksmith” (you can hear the final movement here, with Aimee van de Wiele, the Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire conducted by Georges Prêtre.)

Reading's whole season is a musical journey and even though the first half of this concert is a leisurely stop in France, the main destination is Germany for Beethoven's 7th Symphony.

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Soon, I'll be telling you about the last program in Market Square Concerts' current season with music and poetry from the time of Shakespeare – in fact, it's even on Shakespeare's birthday, April 24th.

Join us that evening at Market Square Church as actor Paul Hecht and soprano Jaqueline Horner-Kwiatek (one of the original voices of Anonymous4) join Parthenia, one of the bright lights of New York City's early-music scene.

Also, don't forget, looking ahead to next month, that Zuill Bailey's “CD Release Party” for the Bach Cello Suites has been rescheduled from February's blizzard to May 5th at 6pm at the Midtown Scholars Bookstore on 3rd at Broad Street. Chances are pretty good the weather's bound to be better!

Also, dates are up for SummerMusic2010 – so reserve July 21, 24th and 25th for some great summertime chamber-music-making.

More to come!

Dr. Dick

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photo credits: 'relaxed' portrait of Mr. Bengtson by David Aretz, from the performer's website; of the Dowd harpsichord, supplied by Mr. Bengtson.

A Flute Recital with Claire Chase, March 24th

2010-03-19T08:11:00.001-04:00

Ellen Hughes, Director of Market Square Concerts, writes about the next program in the series this Wednesday, March 24th at 8pm at Whitaker Center, "One of the first things I did when I began my involvement with Market Square Concerts was to attend the finals of the Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York in October, 2008. Claire Chase was among those finalists, and when I heard her perform with pianist Jacob Greenberg, I knew I wanted to bring them to Harrisburg this season.

"She went on to win First Prize in the competition. I loved the way she played, her communicative style with both the audience and her accompanist, her confidence and comfort with her instrument. She's a breath of fresh air. Her program is mostly traditional, but you will hear some new sounds too, and if you are able to come to this concert I believe you will never think of flute music in the same way again."

I was thinking the program would fit into the category of "Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed..." (except I can't find anything particularly blue...). It includes Bach's Flute Sonata in E (BWV.1035), two of Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis and a Suite of Hungarian Peasant-Songs by Bela Bartok; the newer works would be the 1947 Sonatine by Pierre Boulez and a short work by Franco Donatoni called "Filli."

The "borrowed" part would be transcriptions of two works you don't normally find on flute recitals: the 24th Caprice by Nicolo Paganini (one of the great show-cases for solo violin) and Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (famous as an organ war-horse but perhaps originally for solo violin, but here arranged for not just a solo flute, but an amplified solo flute).

A reminder that tickets are $28 and available at the door or in advance at the Whitaker box office,in person or by calling 214-ARTS.

We also offer $5 tickets for college/university students. School-age students are free; you can get those tickets also in the ground floor lobby before the concert.

If you are able and interested, please come to the "Soundscape" educational outreach program designed for school students at 1pm and also at Whitaker Center. This free program will provide you with an introduction to that night's program.

And at 2:30 that afternoon, WITF-FM (89.5) will broadcast an interview with Claire Chase and pianist Jacob Greenberg; they'll be playing excerpts of some of the music on their recital that evening.

Confit French Bistro has offered to provide samples of their French Country Cuisine in the lobby of Whitaker Center before the concert, so you might want to arrive a few minutes early!

Hope to see you there!

- Dr. Dick

Franz Schubert's "Death & the Maiden" Quartet: Up Close & Personal

2010-02-16T12:04:00.012-05:00

This weekend, Brooklyn Rider will be performing a concert of new, very new and old music at their Market Square Concerts performance, Saturday evening at 8pm in the Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. You can read earlier posts about the ensemble and about Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante which will be given its world premiere at this concert. This post is about the “old” music on the program: Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor, D.810.

It's called the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet not because of any specific story being told in its music but because Schubert used part of his song, “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden,” D.531, written in February 1817 when he was 20 years old) as the basis for the variations movement in his D Minor String Quartet (D.810, written mostly in March 1824 when he was 27).

He had ocassionally taken material from some works and used them in a few other works, most famously the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) in the Quintet in A Major for Piano and Strings generally called “The Trout Quintet” and, less well-known, the song “Sei mir gegrüßt” (“I greet you”) which he used for the variations embedded in the Fantasy in C for Violin and Piano. A phrase from his song, “Der Wanderer” (D.493), has a prominent if largely overlooked role in the second movement of the Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, known as the “Wanderer Fantasy.” A theme from his incidental music for the disastrous play, “Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus,” also became the basis for variations in the D Minor Quartet's companion, the A Minor String Quartet he'd finished the previous month, and so it also is usually known as the “Rosamunde Quartet.” Recycling, you see, is not necessarily a new concept.

While I'm convinced the quotation in the “Wanderer Fantasy” has some personal significance to the composer (see below), the appearance of “Die Forelle” in the quintet was a request from the amateur musician who asked him to write the work, since it was his favorite of Schubert's songs and he thought it would lend itself to a marvelous set of variations. That logic may perhaps be what's behind the selection of the themes used in these two quartets rather than any deeper, psychological reason.

Perhaps.

The D Minor String Quartet, however, is more than just its variation movement, just as the Trout Quintet is more than that one famous movement. But let me begin by describing the song which he'd written just days after he'd left his teen-aged years behind him.

First of all, Schubert is regarded as one of the greatest composers of songs or specifically of the German Lied (pronounced “leed”) - keeping in mind that “song” means a setting of a text to be performed with voice and (generally) piano and not in the sense many people use it today to describe any musical composition. When Schubert composed piano pieces, his models were Beethoven or Mozart; when he wrote symphonies and overtures, his models may have been Haydn and Mozart or, more likely, the many contemporary composers who followed the same style but are largely forgotten today. But there really were no role models for a composer of songs: though Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote some, they did not have the depth of emotion and character that was more in style during the early decades of the 19th Century.

While many of Schubert's early piano and orchestral works strike us as derivative, he could be more daring in his songs. It was here that he found his own voice (no pun intended) and it may be why we are surprised to discover, by comparison to the instrumental works he wrote at the same time, these were written by someone so young. Perhaps his most famous songs, “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,” D.118) and “Der Erlkönig” (“The Erl-King”, D. 328), written when he was 17 and 18, sound like a much more mature composer than the Symphony No. 6 in C Major (known as the “Little C Major”) which he finished shortly after his 21st birthday.

Another curious thing about the songs is how many of them are so assuredly dramatic and yet Schubert, who wanted more than anything to succeed at writing an opera (it's where a composer's fortune could be made, in those days), could not sustain a sense of drama over a longer span of time. Of all the operas he composed (and many were left incomplete), none has as much drama or character insight in them as a song of a only a few minutes' length like “Gretchen am Spinnrade” or “Der Tod und das Mädchen.”

“Death and the Maiden” is a short poem in two parts. The first is the anguished cry of a young girl, anxious at the thought of dying. The second part is sung by Death itself, by contrast serene and welcoming, not to be feared.

Here is a “video” of a recording made with the legendary American alto, Marian Anderson, accompanied at the piano by Franz Rupp, in Schubert's song, “Der Tod und das Mädchen.” I'm not sure when it was recorded: some time in the 1940s, I think.

(That final note she sings, by the way, is a Low D – almost a full octave below Middle C, far lower than female voices can usually manage, in fact a note often considered “low” for tenors!)

It is the second half of this song – Death's consoling serenade – that Schubert uses in the second movement of his String Quartet in D Minor which then gives it the nickname “The Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Here is a “video” of the variation movement, performed by the Takacs Quartet.

Here's a fairly literal (and unpoetic) translation of the text of this passage Schubert used in the Quartet:

Give me your hand, you beautiful and sweet image:
I am a friend and do not come to give you pain.
Be of good cheer. I am not harsh.
In my arms you shall gently sleep.

Now, we might think Schubert chose this “melody” (it's hardly much of a tune) because of its potential for variation or because he liked it and it was a popular song of his, no doubt helping with recognition and marketing (things he did, incidentally, keep in mind at times).

But I'm not so sure there isn't more to it.

Schubert had first exhibited the symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as syphilis when he was 25 in the autumn of 1822. He had begun the dark and brooding B Minor Symphony (which for some reason he left unfinished after two incredible movements) and then, in the weeks after starting the symphony's full score, he composed the anguished “Wanderer” Fantasy. The music he used from his song “Der Wanderer” is a fragment setting lines in which the wanderer describes the sun as cold, blossoms withered, life old and he himself a stranger everywhere.

Considering this is not a memorable melody or even something that might catch your attention as fodder for variations, what is the implication of the text, given what was going on in Schubert's life at the moment he was writing this?

Whatever the dangers may be of mixing psychology and creativity, knowing what the text was to the music he used here changed the “meaning” of the piece for me: I no longer hear it as simply virtuosic piano-writing but a deeply personal, dramatic catharsis.

Perhaps there is something of that in the Unfinished Symphony as well, written in these gloomy months when it looked like his life would be changed forever, if he would survive at all. Perhaps that might explain why he abandoned the symphony after trying to write a light-hearted scherzo after those two intense movements? Conjecture, of course, since we have no proof anywhere that that was what he said or thought. But how could a young man of 25, given the sentimental age he lived in, not be affected by these thoughts, the Romantic idea of the suffering artist that also plagued his contemporary Beethoven who spent much of his life dealing with his deafness?

While it might be simplistic to say that Schubert “recovered,” his health had seemed more on the mend a year later, in the fall of 1823. Friends wrote that he was more himself, was seen more often (once again) in the company of his friends but usually accompanied by a Dr. Bernhardt, hired by Schubert's friend Spaun to make sure Schubert didn't “over-do it.” The “dratted doctor” (as Schubert described him in a letter) was also an amateur poet who had submitted an opera libretto to him for his consideration. Schubert, having dealt with the debacle of “Rosamunde” that same season (the amateur poet Helmine von Chezy's play was universally reviled though some critics thought to mention the music was nice) and his on-going failure to get not one but two of his recent operas staged, rejected it, no doubt having had enough of the theater and of amateur poets for a while.

But not long after New Year's Day, 1824, and his 27th birthday party (which saw Schubert unconscious before it broke up around 2:30am), he became ill again. Dr. Bernhardt prescribed a strict diet of cutlets one day and a pastry made of flavored bread and water the next, all washed down with vast quantities of tea. It was during the following month he composed the Octet in F and the first two of what he had planned as a trio of string quartets: the two he finished were the ones in A Minor and D Minor.

The A Minor Quartet was played soon after it was finished by Ignaz Schuppanzigh (see right) and his quartet at a concert for the Society of the Friends of Music, while Schubert continued working on the D Minor Quartet. It's also interesting to note that Schupannzigh, a friend and champion of Beethoven, had premiered the Razumovsky Quartets in 1808 and had arranged for another Russian nobleman, Prince Nikolai Galitsin, to commission some new string quartets from Beethoven in 1823. It was in 1824 that Beethoven would begin composing the Quartet Op.127, the first of his "Late Quartets."

But during this time, Schubert's state of mind appears to have verged on what was until recently called “manic-depression.” In a letter written on March 31st, 1824, to a friend then staying in Rome, he writes,

“I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again and who in their despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have come to nothing, to whom the joy of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to vanish, and ask yourself, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”

He then quotes a line of poetry:

“My peace is gone, my heart is sore; I shall never find peace again, never again.”

That is a famous line from Goethe's poem, “Gretchen am Spinnrade” which he used as a refrain, setting it to music ten years earlier.

He concludes this paragraph with

“I may well sing [this] every day now, for each night, I go to bed hoping never to wake again, and each morning only tells me of yesterday's grief.”

While the letter goes on with news that “I have tried my hand at several instrumental works... two quartets... an Octet and I want to write another Quartet; in fact that is how I want to work my way towards composing a grand symphony.” (By that, he meant a large-scale symphony: no mention of the B Minor he had left unfinished...)

His plans are hardly those of one who expects to die any day now, but still, it is difficult to read some of this without wondering how it affected the music he was composing at the same time, especially the reason he may have chosen the consoling words of a comforting Death as the basis for his current quartet's slow movement. The whole quartet is certainly a dark and dramatic work from beginning to end, but it is the balance Schubert finds between his pain and his hope that keeps the tragedy from becoming unbearable.

It should also be noted that the recipient of that March 31st letter wrote to his fiancé and summed it up by saying “Poor old Schubert complains to me that he is ill again,” and leaves it at that.

Here is a “video” posted at YouTube of the Takacs Quartet's recording of the first movement of Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor, the quartet known as “Death and the Maiden.”

How much of the quartet was finished in that first month of March 1824, we don't know. The Otto Deutsch catalogue (which lists Schubert's music with the letter D and a number: for example, D.810) lists the work as composed between March 1824 and January 1826, then adds it "was finished or revised in January 1826."

Schubert usually composed very quickly, so any work left unfinished would probably never be returned to, given his past history. We should also notice the letter I'd quoted above, written on March 31st, 1824, that said "I have tried my hand at several instrumental works... two quartets... an Octet..." which would imply that by then these two quartets were already complete.

We know he attended rehearsals for the quartet on January 19th and 30th, 1826, so the possibility of some revisions would make more sense than his coming back to finish the work at that time.

The quartet was given its first performance on February 1st in a private concert at the home of tenor Josef Barth, a member of the Court chapel choir (he lived in an apartment in Prince Schwarzenberg's winter palace) but an old friend of Schubert's. A little later, the work was given another private performance, this time at the home of composer Franz Lachner, another old friend from Schubert's school days, and now conductor of one of the major theaters in Vienna. (Presumably, the quartet was not performed by Schuppanzigh, this time: his name would certainly have been mentioned if it had been.) The first public performance of the quartet, however, didn't take place until five years after Schubert's death.

About some of the pictures: The header photo is a famous watercolor portrait of Schubert by his friend, August Wilhelm Rieder, painted in May, 1825, about a year after he began the D Minor Quartet. The story goes that Rieder lived in a house once lived in by the great composer, Christoph Willibald von Gluck and Schubert told his friend how inspiring it would be to be able to compose there. Unfortunately, Rieder did not own a piano. So he went and "hired" a new square piano and put it in one of the rooms, telling Schubert if he came by and saw a particular window's curtains open, he could come in without knocking and go straight to the piano; if the curtains were closed, Rieder was busy painting and did not wish to be disturbed.

The two images of "Death and the Maiden" are from different eras: Hans Schwarz's woodcut dates from 1520, and Marianne Stokes' lunette from 1900.

- Dr. Dick

Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante: A World Premiere in Harrisburg

2010-02-15T11:43:00.009-05:00

The string quartet that calls itself “Brooklyn Rider” will be performing a program this weekend at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg ranging from the 1820s to the newest of the new, the world premiere of a work commissioned by Market Square Concerts just for this occasion. Philip Glass's 2nd String Quartet (“Company”) from 1984 adds to a program that includes “Achilles' Heel” by the ensemble's second violinist, Colin Jacobsen, and “Lachrymosa” by the Uzbek-born composer Dmitri Yanov Yanovsky.

The program concludes with one of the great quartets from the 19th Century, the Quartet in D Minor by Franz Schubert, known as the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet because it quotes from one of his songs as the basis of a set of variations in the slow movement.

To give you a little information about the world premiere – Graffiti dell'amante by Lisa Bielawa – I'll just quote from Ellen Hughes' press release about the concert.

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Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa’s Graffiti dell’amante will receive its world premiere in a concert by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider with Ms. Bielawa as vocal soloist at 8 pm on Saturday, February 20, 2010 presented by Market Square Concerts at Market Square Church (20 S. 2nd St., Harrisburg, PA).

Written in Rome, where stories of love echo across centuries of art and poetry, Graffiti dell’amante is an open-ended song cycle for string quartet and soprano, in which the segments (called “Figures”) that are performed at each concert are selected by the audience members.

Ms. Bielawa explains, “Originally inspired by Roland Barthes’ playful yet poignant collection of poems A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the piece uses various declarations of romantic Love to enact what Barthes calls the “Figures” of the Lover (“Absence,” “Devotion,” “Ravishment,” “Remembering,” etc.). The poems describe a great variety of subjects and narrators: male poet writes to a female Beloved; male poet writes a love poem from a woman’s point of view; female novelist (with a male pseudonym) writes dialogue for a male character in love; male poet secretly writes taboo love poetry to another man. The Lover declares him/herself to, from, and through so many faces!”

Each performance of Graffiti dell’amante can include a different subset and arrangement of the Figures, resulting in a different piece every time – which might be any length, containing any combination of possible predicaments in any order.

Because the audience selects the Figures to be performed, the piece will become a portrait of that group’s combined attitude toward love at that moment.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and is based at the American Academy in Rome until August 2010. Ms. Bielawa has written numerous works for voice, including her piece Chance Encounter, conceived with the soprano Susan Narucki, for twelve migrating instrumentalists and singer. Chance Encounter uses overheard speech and is meant to be performed in public places. It was premiered by Ms. Narucki and The Knights in Manhattan’s Seward Park, and was performed again at the Whitney Museum in February. The work has been recorded by Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse for release on the Orange Mountain Music label.

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Ms. Bielawa has also been blogging from Rome - Lend Me Your Ears - not entirely about the composition we'll be hearing but her wide range of topics and interests will give you an insight into the time she was writing it and experiencing life in the Eternal City. The posts are at the WQXR website but they don't have a single link to the entire blog, so here are the four posts, listed in chronological order:

When in Rouen (November 16, 2009)
Extravagant Stories (November 30, 2009)
Voices from Above and Beyond (December 18, 2009)
Musicians Without Borders (January 25, 2010)

Okay, you might be thinking "that's not a lot of blogging," but after all she was living in Rome and supposed to be spending most of her time composing!

Brooklyn Rider: Commuting to Harrisburg

2010-02-15T11:13:00.006-05:00

This weekend – which according to the weatherguessers looks like it might be snow-free - a string quartet called “Brooklyn Rider” comes to town. They'll be performing at the Market Square Church this Saturday at 8pm. An added bonus is the OPEN REHEARSAL, free and open to anyone, between 1:30 and 3:30 at the church that afternoon!

They'll be performing some very new works – including one so new it's the World Premiere, a work commissioned by Market Square Concerts. I'll be telling you more about Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante in a separate post. In addition to works by quartet violinist Colin Jacobsen and a Silk-Road colleague, Dmitri Yanov Yanovsky, there's Philip Glass's 2nd String Quartet ("Company," written in 1984) and one of the great quartets by Franz Schubert, the one known as “Death and the Maiden” which will also be the subject of a subsequent post.

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Considering it's probably the first thing an audience gets to know about a new ensemble, a group's name is a very important part of its identity.

It used to be easy to name yourself after your location or home-base (the Budapest or Tokyo Quartets) or after a famous violin maker (the Guarneri Quartet), perhaps a favorite composer who was a feature of your repertoire (the Beethoven or the Amadeus Quartets), a benefactor (the Juilliard Quartet, founded by and in residence at the school of music) or, less commonly in these days of greater equality, after the quartet's first violinist (the Busch Quartet).

But once many of the best or most obvious names have already been taken, then you need to go a little further afield. The Emerson Quartet chose the New England poet because of a common bond with his transcendental aesthetic.

More recently, the Daedalus Quartet took its name from the inventor in Greek mythology who fashioned wings that allowed him to fly and thus obtain his freedom, so it's a good metaphor for an artist looking to soar through this wonderful creation we call art (on the other hand, I don't believe anyone has ever called themselves the Icarus Quartet).

The Enso Quartet takes its name from a Japanese zen painting of a circle “that represents... perfection as well as imperfection, the moment of chaos that is creation, the emptiness of the void, the endless circle of life, and the fullness of the spirit.”

Names, then, become a kind of mission statement. Many of them create a sense of mystery (“I wonder what that means?”), something hopefully catchy in this age of intense marketing and box-office accountability.

The string quartet calling itself “Brooklyn Rider” (and not, at least officially, the “Brooklyn Rider String Quartet”) combines the obvious and the metaphysical. Yes, they're from Brooklyn but even if “The Brooklyn Quartet” wasn't already taken, it didn't really seem to cut it with a group that had its roots in Yo-Yo Ma's “Silk Road Project.” Their repertoire spans all styles and centuries of the quartet's legacy, standard and otherwise, infused with a sense of world music and international guests they'd worked with on “the road.” And since “Musicians Without Borders” already belongs to another organization, they had to find some middle-ground between the historical context from the 18th and 19th Century string quartet to its present-day relevance in the 21st Century.

So, is the “Rider” in deference to a Haydn quartet by that nickname? Not exactly. Is it evocative of the New York City subway system because they are frequent commuters between home and performance venues (as most musicians in New York City are)? No. Despite the fact it makes it sound like an Indie Rock Group, it's actually updating an early 20th Century interdisciplinary concept promoted by a Munich-based group of eclectic artists who combined painting and music, calling themselves “The Blue Rider” or “Der Blaue Reiter” which in turn took its name from a 1903 painting by Wassily Kandinsky. One composer associated with them was Arnold Schoenberg, who was both composer and painter (later, you can read my post about his ground-breaking 2nd String Quartet and its relationship to paintings as well as his not-exactly-suitable-for-Valentine's-Day personal life).

In this spirit, Brooklyn Rider has created an art gallery on their website showcasing the work of some of their friends in which the proceeds are used to support new commissioning projects.

While more traditional quartets might add a pianist for the Brahms Piano Quintet or another cellist for the Schubert C Major String Quintet, “Brooklyn Rider” is more likely to add one of their colleagues from “The Silk Road Project,” like the Chinese pipa virtuoso, Wu Man or the Persian composer and kamancheh player, Kayhan Kalhor. They also draw inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artistic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place they also call home.

I hope you'll be able to join us for the wonderful, wide-ranging program Saturday at 8pm at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg. And please consider taking advantage of that open rehearsal – it's free, too – especially considering it gives you the opportunity to become a little better acquainted with brand new and very likely unfamiliar repertoire.

Dr. Dick

Zuill Bailey's New Bach CD - A Party in Harrisburg! POSTPWND

2010-02-08T10:15:00.006-05:00

UPDATE on TUESDAY - THE CD RELEASE PARTY HAS BEEN POSTPONED

Given the impending forecast for the possibility of another foot of snow by Wednesday evening, Ellen Hughes sent out this e-mail this morning:
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Dear Friends -

After speaking to many of you, it's clear that the prudent decision is to reschedule tomorrow's CD release party in light of the forecast. Although there is no date in mind for the moment, we're talking about sometime in the spring.

Many thanks to all of you for all of your good advice and willingness to help. It's too bad that the weather is the only element that has not cooperated.

I'll be in touch as soon as we can settle on another date, with the hopes that it will fit in to everyone's schedule.

Regretfully,
Ellen

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Given the recent snowfall in Central Pennsylvania, I thought this particularly spring-like photograph of Zuill Bailey would not only remind us it's only 41 Days till the Spring Equinox, Zuill's new CD Release Party is just days away - Wednesday, Feb. 10th, beginning at 6pm. POSTPONED (2-09-2010) NEW DATE TBA...

Zuill's new CD is a Telarc recording released just last week of the six Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, a major accomplishment in any cellist's repertoire.

The party will be held at the new location of the Mid-Town Scholar Book Store at 3rd and Verbeke (Broad) Streets in Harrisburg, across from the Broad Street Farmers Market.

Presented by Market Square Concerts in collaboration with HACC-Midtown, it begins at 6:00 and Zuill will start playing some excerpts from the Bach Suites at 6:30.

A $5 donation is requested. Hors d’oeuvres prepared by HACC’s culinary students and liquid refreshments will be available.

As refreshments for the soul, Zuill will play selections from the Bach Suites. He comes to Harrisburg from other CD release parties in San Francisco and New York, then goes on to Baltimore and other hopefully less snow-challenged locations.

After his November recital here, we're very lucky to have him back in Central Pennsylvania again and especially honored that he chose to have the CD-Party here. His new Bach CD will be available for purchase on the night of the party.

These six suites, some of the most significant repertoire for a cellist, were recorded each in one sitting over a period of one week at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, following years of preparation by Mr. Bailey. He calls the process of recording these suites “such a personal journey for me.”

While Valentine's Day is around the corner and it's only 42 days till Bach's Birthday, don't forget the next concert with Market Square Concerts will be the first appearance in Central PA of Brooklyn Rider, a string quartet who'll be playing Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, Philip Glass' 2nd String Quartet ("Company") among other new works including the world premiere of a piece written by Lisa Bielawa. She's been in Rome as a winner of last year's Rome Prize writing a new work commissioned by Market Square Concerts. You can hear this exciting concert on Saturday, February 20th at 8pm at Market Square Church. There will be an open rehearsal between 1:30 and 3:30 that afternoon.

I'll be posting more about that concert in the near future.

- Dr. Dick

GRAMMY WINNERS with Market Square Concerts Connections

2010-01-31T21:46:00.002-05:00

Jennifer Higdon, in town last week for a Market Square Concerts performance of her "Impressions" with the Cypress String Quartet, won a Grammy Award tonight in the Classical Music category "Best Classical Contemporary Composition" for her Percussion Concerto, a recording conducted by Marin Alsop with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and soloist Colin Currie, for whom the work had been composed. The Percussion Concerto had been performed in March 2008 by the Harrisburg Symphony with conductor Stuart Malina and the orchestra's principal percussionist, Chris Rose, the soloist.

The winner of the Best Chamber Music Recording is the Emerson Quartet, frequent visitors in past seasons with Market Square Concerts, for their Deutsche Gramophon CD of Janaček and Martinu quartets called "Intimate Letters."

For a list of the winners of the Classical GRAMMYs, go to Thoughts on a Train.

- Dr. Dick

Meeting Composers: Jennifer Higdon Comes to Town

2010-01-20T09:34:00.004-05:00

This weekend, you get to hear a real live composer when she joins the Cypress Quartet for Market Square Concerts, Saturday evening at Temple Ohev Sholom.

So far, mid-state Pennsylvanians have heard Jennifer Higdon's music live with “Blue Cathedral” and her Percussion Concerto with the Harrisburg Symphony and the 2nd movement of “CityScape” entitled “river sings a song to trees” with the Lancaster Symphony in the past few years. The opening movement of “CityScape,” called “SkyLine” opens next week's Harrisburg Symphony concert, January 30th and 31st at the Forum. Several of her recordings, including "Blue Cathedral" and the “Concerto for Orchestra,” had been heard on WITF-FM including interviews with her on “Composing Thoughts” and “New Releases.”

The Telarc recording of the Concerto for Orchestra had been nominated for three Grammys including Best Contemporary Composition and won one for Best Engineered Recording. This year, the London Philharmonic's recording of the Percussion Concerto has been nominated for Best Contemporary Composition: we'll find out Sunday night when the Grammy winners are announced. (I'll be posting the winners on my blog, Thoughts on a Train.)

In addition to these two large-scale works, I've also heard the premiere of “Singing Rooms,” a very unusual combination of violin concerto and choral work. This past year, there've been two new concertos premiered, a Piano Concerto and a Violin Concerto (written for Hilary Hahn, which I heard in a radio-internet broadcast from the BBC when it was performed and recorded in London). There was a concerto for the cross-over group, the classically-trained Bluegrass string trio calling themselves “Time for 3,” a work she called “Concerto 4-3.” She's writing another concerto for the new music ensemble, “eighth blackbird,” which is set to premiere this June and there's an opera on her work-desk, due for a premiere in San Francisco in 2013!

Judging from that list of works, all composed within the past 8 years, you might be surprised that she writes a lot of chamber music, too. And that's how we'll hear her this weekend.

Jennifer Higdon is one of the most performed living composers writing today. Ellen Hughes described her as “the busiest composer on the planet” when she announced Jennifer Higdon's string quartet “Impressions,” written for the Cypress Quartet, will be on their program when they perform with Market Square Concerts – and not only that, the composer, despite her busy schedule, will be here to talk with the audience about the piece, what it was like writing it.

That program is this weekend – January 23rd, Saturday evening at 8pm, at the Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg, located on Front Street a few blocks above the Governor's Mansion.

Claude Debussy and Samuel Barber, whose quartets are also on the program, regret that they will be unable to attend.

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You don't often get a chance to hear a live composer talk about the music he or she has written (well, true, you never get to hear a dead one, either, but you know what I mean). With music from the past, there are people who've written about the composer, about the music, about the times they lived and created in. But they can't usually tell us what was going on in composers' minds when they were composing those pieces.

New music – and “Impressions” was written in 2003 so that certainly still qualifies as “new” in the Art World – usually takes a few years or generations before that body of “context” can be... well, for lack of a better word, “historicized.” The context for New Music is all around us: it was written in our own time, times most of us have experienced and remember, it reflects things going on in our world (either artistically or historically) today.

In many cases, composers can be an esoteric bunch and there can be very little more boring for most people than listening to a composer talking to other composers about the “expert” details that lie beyond the comprehension or interest of most listeners. It would be the same, though, if you wanted to hear about space travel from a famous scientist who's come to town and ends up talking to other scientists about the finer points of physics. For most of us, the mind would probably quickly glaze over. (Actually, that happens to me when I hear “experts” talk about baseball, but hey...)

One of the things that I've always liked about Jennifer Higdon since I first met her back at the premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra in 2002, is how genuine she is as a person and how direct she is as a communicator, both reflected in the way she writes her music and in the way she talks about it.

(As an example, you can watch this video in which she and Hilary Hahn talk about the Violin Concerto.)

There is none of this scholarly mumbo-jumbo meant to impress other experts nor is it so vague (as others try to peel away the mystery of creativity) as to be pointless. Her music appeals to a broad range of listeners without being difficult enough to leave people wondering what they're listening to nor simplistic enough (as we expect genuinely popular works to be), empty of intellectual content for someone who wants something to sink their brain into.

If the role of an artist is to make it look easy, making us forget how much hard work and talent (not to mention luck) goes into what they do, listening to Jennifer Higdon talk about how she composed a piece of music might even leave you thinking, “Hey, I could do that!”

And she'd tell you, “you know, you're right!”

If only...

True, we all have the spark of creativity within us – it just takes some coaxing to bring it out and turn it into something. But there is still something intangible about turning it into something so tangible as a work of art.

So I hope you'll take this opportunity to come hear one of the best composers I know and one of the most talked about and performed composers today – you'll hear her music and find out that she hasn't so far, like so many dead composers, been turned into a marble bust fit only for reverence. She's just another normal human being. Who happens to write incredible music.

Dr. Dick

Claude Debussy's Quartet: Up Close & Personal with the Cypress Quartet

2010-01-18T22:06:00.005-05:00

The Cypress Quartet will be playing in Harrisburg this Saturday evening at 8pm – not at the usual downtown locations for Market Square Concerts but at Temple Ohev Shalom in uptown Harrisburg at Seneca and Front Streets, a few blocks above Maclay Street and the Governor's Mansion.

The program will include two “only” string quartets – the only one written by Samuel Barber (the original home for his Adagio for Strings, better known in its version for full string orchestra) and the only one written by Claude Debussy.

In between, there's a more recent work written in 2003 specifically for the Cypress Quartet by Jennifer Higdon who will be present to talk about both her work and its relationship to Debussy's Quartet since she was called upon to write a “response” to it. Its movements are entitled "Bright Palette," "Quiet Art," "To the Point," and "Noted Canvas," all painterly terms (well, you get the impression...).

"Watch This Space" for an up-coming post about Jennifer Higdon and her string quartet, too.

This post is specifically about the Debussy Quartet, recycling an earlier post from Thoughts on a Train following a performance the Cypress Quartet gave at Lebanon Valley College in September of 2008.

Here they are, performing the first movement of Debussy's Quartet in G minor:

The Debussy Quartet was on their very first program twelve years ago, violinist Tom Stone had said in remarks before they played it. There was so much in the piece they discovered while first working on it – though he said jokingly, looking back at his colleagues, “that first performance was... uh, was kinda rough...” And ever since they’ve kept coming back to it and discovering more.

However many times they’ve played it in the years in between - and recorded it - this was the first time I’d heard them play it. It sounded to me like they were approaching it with the same excitement they’d have after having just discovered it for the first time. Except for one thing: they weren’t playing it like everybody else. They were bringing to this overly familiar war-horse something that often gets lost in the “yet-another-performance” syndrome that affects many performances and listeners – the “here-we-go-again,” “dig-out-the-tried-and-true” approach that, regardless of technical flawlessness, never manages to get beyond the surface of the music.

It’s not one of those things you can easily put a finger on, much less describe in words (not that that’s going to stop me). Without a score in front of me, could I say they were doing it correctly when others were not? Or were they adding things not in the composer’s written-down intentions that other groups hadn’t thought of? How much of this was their own interpretation – and how much “interpretation” is beyond what the composer called for or, at least, implied?

Ever since I was a kid learning to play the piano, I’ve heard the expression “the music lies between the notes.” It’s not just getting your fingers in the right places at the right times, playing the right notes in the right rhythms. Learning how to make music out of all that, finding what’s between those notes, is the performer’s real challenge, and then completing the equation by communicating that to the listener.

Rather than examine the score (the printed music, what the composer wrote), too many performers today listen to recordings (how what the composer wrote is interpreted) and then pick and choose what they feel best suits them. Imitating a performance might let a student know how it could go – since there’s really no single way it SHOULD go – but it doesn’t help a student figure out WHY it could go that way.

That’s what I liked about what I heard the Cypress Quartet doing with the Debussy.

Too many performances and recordings I’d heard play the piece as a lushly romantic wash of pretty sounds: Debussy, after all, was an Impressionist, a pigeon-hole he never liked but since it reminded people of those Impressionist painters of the day, there was no way to avoid it.

Debussy (see right, a photograph taken in 1893, with the composer at the piano, the year he wrote his Quartet) was also a slow, painstaking composer who agonized a long time over whether to use this chord or that chord. It’s got to be more than he was just unwilling to make a commitment: he was probably looking for the best sonority for that moment, not just slap-dashing notes down on the page because “oh, that sounds nice!”

Debussy has never been an easy composer for me to love: certainly, I like a lot of his music but it never really spoke to me. Part of this may be because he is, despite his dislike of the painterly term, most often inspired by the visual element and I am not. Most of his pieces have titles that suggest or prompt certain images in the listener’s mind, whether it’s a garden in the rain or a child’s toy. I am not a visually oriented person so it’s quite possible that’s why much of his music eludes me. As a like-minded friend of mine once put it, “I like La Mer: every time I hear it, it’s like hearing it for the first time,” but in the context and tone of voice implying it is also immensely forgettable.

But his only String Quartet, written in 1893 (the same year Brahms was writing his last piano pieces, Op. 118 and Op. 119, by the way) is simply that – an abstract string quartet where the movements are indicated by tempos like Animé et très décidé, not “Reflections of Moonlight on the Steps of the Temple.” But then, this is considered “Early Debussy” despite the fact he was 30 – making, I guess, derivative juvenalia like his Piano Trio written at 17 “Pre-Early” – yet all that is fairly relative when you consider when he wrote two of his more famous pieces: the piano piece Clair de lune from the Suite Bergamasque predates the quartet by four years; the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was written the following year. Between these picturesque pieces, a string quartet, considered a German form in late-19th Century France, could seem the Odd-Piece-Out.

The Sonata Form was also essentially a German Form. And French composers felt, perhaps out of patriotism as much as anything, that it needed to be adapted their own way. French taste shied away from such Germanic things as fugal counterpoint (what Satie called “sauerkraut”) and the obsessive development one finds in so much German music: they preferred melody and color, perhaps, over rigidity of form and harmony.

But this is also part of the French Personality, more laid back and laissez-faire compared to the German (and specifically Prussian) attitude toward detail, exactness and promptness (a friend of mine from Berlin would be pointing excitedly at his watch because we were now two minutes late) . Ned Rorem would break everything down to be either French or German along similar guidelines, even other national stereotypes: the Japanese, to him, are German and the Chinese, French! (Think about it...)

So the French took their Sonata Form and put less emphasis on the development section and crafted memorable melodies that would come back in other movements – forgetting that Beethoven had done the same thing in a few key works like his 5th and 9th Symphonies – something they called “cyclical form,” even though it’s not really a form but a structural device to unite a multi-movement work. Part of the problems Germanic listeners have with this technique is that “it’s just the same tune!” They expected something to have “happened” to the theme by then, becoming transformed – you know, the way Mahler does in his symphonies (“good German symphonies, Mahler,” you could almost hear them adding).

So it’s surprising to realize that Debussy builds almost everything in this four movement work out of four basic pitches – G -F - D- F# – a motive which lies behinds the themes rather than being the theme itself. Consciously or not, these various themes will all sound different but still connected. There’s a subtly here that manages to create a great deal of variety while using the same material – things keep coming back in slightly different ways but it all sounds like something cut from the same cloth.

Debussy was famous for having flunked his harmony class at the Conservatoire – giving generations of students, including mine, the courage to say “if Debussy could do it...” What these same students forget is that his teacher, after marking up his papers with tons of corrections and comments, could still admit “everything is wrong but he is talented, there can be no doubt about that,” a qualification that could not always be made about my students who also forgot that at the time Debussy was 12. He had, certainly, even then, his own ideas about things, but that doesn’t mean he discarded the use of Rules completely, just Those Rules.

People sometime object, consciously or not, to the “impressionistic” music of Debussy because it doesn’t sound like the music they’re more familiar with, not that it’s “ugly and dissonant,” just “unsettling.” Dissonant, perhaps, but in the sense that chords that (according to the old rules) need to resolve in certain expected ways do not. When you are using a scale that is not the same as the traditional major or minor scale, you create harmony that does not move in the same expected ways: if it’s the whole-tone scale which doesn’t include that interval, the perfect fifth, which is at the root of all Classical Harmony, you create chords that don’t even sound like they need to go ANYwhere. And so performers create a sound that becomes static and directionless, as if “forward motion” in music could not be accomplished in other ways.

What the Cypress Quartet does, examining the printed music in front of them, is find the ways that Debussy replaces these traditional “classical” expectations with his own, how he moves the harmony forward by creating certain consistencies (whether or not he’d think of them as “rules”) and how he builds toward climactic points, using rhythm, tempo, texture, even the register the instruments are playing in and of course elements of contrast. Suddenly I’m hearing “structure” where before it was just pretty shapes and images, as if this “skin” were not holding together muscles and bones.

And I’m sitting there thinking, “huh, Debussy with structure! Who knew?!” This is the first time I’ve heard the piece where I thought it was worth listening to. (But then, there may have been some “French” listeners in the hall who were squeamish because to them it was too pedantic, too... German!)

It’s not like this is a revolutionary way of looking at music. “Analyzing” is a term I dislike because it implies the psychological obsession with detail (as in “he’s so totally anal”) that so often loses the overall picture to focus on the minuscule. It’s not like other groups don’t do this: they just find something different or maybe, if they find nothing compelling, they just play it the way they’ve heard other people play it.

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You can hear them perform the Debussy Quartet along with Jennifer Higdon's “Impressions” and Samuel Barber's Quartet on Saturday, Jan. 23rd, at 8pm at Temple Ohev Shalom in uptown Harrisburg with Market Square Concerts.

- Dr. Dick

Two Events in the Near Future in the New Year

2010-01-08T18:41:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the New Year – a whole new Decade, for that matter!

Now that the various holidays are past – from Hannukah in mid-December to Orthodox Christmas this past January 7th and everything in between (including, perhaps, many New Year's Resolutions) – it's time to get life back onto a normal schedule, if that's ever possible.

Two things to think about are some up-coming events with Market Square Concerts.

First of all, the next concert on the schedule – coming up in just a few weeks – features the Cypress String Quartet, returning to Central Pennsylvania once more but for the first time with Market Square Concerts. I'll be telling you more about them, their program and the composer who'll be joining them for that concert – Jennifer Higdon – in a future post.

The concert is Saturday, January 23rd at 8:00 and instead of the usual downtown haunts, it will be held at an uptown location, Temple Ohev Sholom at North Front and Seneca Streets, just a few blocks above Maclay Street and the Governor's Mansion.

They'll be playing Samuel Barber's String Quartet – better known as the original home of his Adagio for Strings – along with the String Quartet by Claude Debussy, one of the leading exponents of what's usually called “Impressionism,” and a work written especially for them by Jennifer Higdon as a response to the Debussy Quartet. She'll be attending the performance and will be telling us how this work came about: not only will you get to hear another piece by this exciting and very busy composer, you'll get some insights into how a composer works and thinks, something that, for many listeners, is a complete mystery.

Considering Debussy's musical style, she called her quartet, appropriately, “Impressions.” Written in 2003, it's in four movements: Bright Palette, Quiet Art, To the Point and Noted Canvas. The Cypress Quartet recorded it later that year for the Naxos label.

Speaking of recordings, the CD of Higdon's “Percussion Concerto,” a work many of you might have heard with the Harrisburg Symphony recently, has been nominated for a Grammy in the category “Best Classical Composition” (read more about it here). We'll find out on January 31st if she's a winner.

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The other event features another frequent performer in the mid-state, Zuill Bailey, whose Market Square Concerts program this past November featured sonatas by Debussy, Mendelssohn and Brahms. He has a new recording out – Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello on the Telarc label – and you can attend a “CD Release Party” for it right here in Harrisburg.

It's on Wednesday, February 10th at the recently relocated Midtown Scholar's Book Store at 3rd and Verbeke (Broad) Streets in midtown Harrisburg, across from the Broad Street Market. It will begin at 6pm and Zuill will start playing excerpts from the suites at 6:30.

The newly released disc will be available for sale there. There's a $5 requested donation for the event, complete with hors d’oeuvres prepared by HACC’s culinary students along with some liquid refreshments.

Hope to see you at both of these exciting events!

- Dr, Dick

Grammy Nominees with a Market Square Concerts Connection

2009-12-02T23:18:00.000-05:00

Composer Jennifer Higdon has been nominated for another Grammy Award! Her Percussion Concerto which you might have heard when it was performed recently by the Harrisburg Symphony was recorded by the London Philharmonic conducted by Marin Alsop – and it's on the nominee's list for Best Contemporary Composition.

One of the busiest composers on the planet these days, Ms. Higdon will be in Harrisburg for a performance with the Cypress String Quartet, Saturday January 23rd at 8:00, a Market Square Concert that will be taking place up-town at Temple Ohev Sholom. They'll be playing a work she'd written for them called “Impressions,” a response to Claude Debussy's Quartet which opens the program. And she'll be here to talk about the piece at the concert, so you'll have a chance to not only hear her music but also meet a live composer!

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Other nominations of interest can be found in the category “Best Chamber Music Performance.” There's the “Hungarian Album” with the Guarneri Quartet – they played the Kodaly 2nd Quartet from this album on their final performance here in Harrisburg with Market Square Concerts in April 2009.

Frequent visitors to Market Square Concerts, the Emerson Quartet was nominated for their performance of Janáček Quartets, an album on Deutsche Gramophon taking its name from the second of the works, “Intimate Letters.”

And relative newcomers to this starry pantheon of frequently nominated legendary quartets like the Guarneri and the Emerson, the Enso Quartet who've played for Market Square Concerts in past seasons was also nominated - for their Naxos recording of the complete quartets by Argentine composer, Alberto Ginastera!

Glad I don't have to vote for this category!

I've posted a complete list of the Classical Music Grammy Nominees at my blog, Thoughts on a Train.

Dr. Dick

Survey: Zuill Bailey & Robert Koenig's Recital, Nov'09

2009-11-17T20:00:00.009-05:00

For those of you who attended the recital Tuesday evening, November 17th, at Whitaker Center with Zuill Bailey and Robert Koenig, please take a moment and fill out our short survey and let us know what you thought:

Click Here to take survey

I've adjusted the "other comments" field if you'd like to add something: they should be 400 characters or less to be able to fit. If there's more you'd like to say, you can write a comment to THIS POST (see COMMENT link, below).

But still, 400 characters or less - that's more than you get to twitter!

Thank you, very much!

- Dr. Dick

Brahms & Friends

2009-11-15T20:47:00.004-05:00

There are two works by Brahms on the program with cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Robert Koenig, this Tuesday at 8pm at Whitaker Center as Market Square Concerts' season continues. (You can read more about the concert, here.)

Brahms wrote two cello sonatas, the first finished in 1865 and the second in 1886. The second one, Op. 99 in F Major – the same key as his 3rd Symphony which he'd written three years earlier – is usually considered the “brighter” of the two, compared to the E Minor Sonata, Op. 38, which is darker in sound, mostly because of its concentration in the cello's lower, darker register.

It must have been a very contented summer when he wrote the F Major Cello Sonata that concludes Zuill's recital. That same summer, Brahms also composed his 2nd and 3rd Violin Sonatas, plus the 3rd Piano Trio.

And while modern audiences regard the F Major Cello Sonata as “brighter” and cheerier, it didn't exactly meet with much success at the beginning.

Arnold Schoenberg wrote that the opening of the sonata – with its arching cello melody over strong tremolo chords in the piano, very similar to the opening of the F Major Symphony – was “indigestible” to the Viennese audience when he was a teen-ager. (Schoenberg, a budding cello-player himself, loved Brahms' music and much of his own early music – before Verklärte Nacht – shows Brahms' spell.)

Even one of Brahms' closest friends, Theodore Billroth, “confess[ed] the first movement was somewhat dubious to me... But you always know the right way to the purely musical.” He liked the 2nd Violin Sonata much better. Billroth had also had problems when Brahms played through his new 4th Symphony a couple of years earlier.

This 2nd Sonata was written for the cellist in Josef Joachim's string quartet, Robert Hausmann.

(This photograph taken with Brahms and cellist Robert Hausmann probably dates from the 1890s when Brahms was past 60. The woman behind the piano is Maria Fellinger: she and her husband were close friends of Brahms: it was something of a habit that the composer would eat Sunday dinner with them almost every week. The painting on the easel, by the way, is a portrait of Clara Schumann.)

Brahms often took to a musician's sound, not so much to the instrument. It was how the musician played the instrument and how the two components sounded together that was more important than what the instrument could do.

This was not unusual in Brahms' life. Hausmann would prove instrumental in the creation of another work which probably began life as a cello concerto. But while Brahms might have had reservations about pitting the cello against a modern symphony orchestra (keep in mind, there were few cello concertos in the repertoire then and most of those fairly light in texture: Dvořák's was finished eight years later), his reason for turning this into a concerto for both cello and violin may have had more to do with his old friend Joseph Joachim.

They'd been estranged for a few years (you can read about their life-long friendship, its ups-and-downs and more about how the Double Concerto came about in this post I wrote last year) and had he written a new concerto for someone in Joachim's quartet that wasn't Joachim, it might have been looked upon as one more slight to overcome.

After the first run-through of the concerto with the composer at the piano and playing it for Clara Schumann, Brahms remarked “Now I know what has been missing from my life these past few years: the sound of Joachim's violin.”

With that sound back in his ear, Brahms began sketching a new violin concerto, but the public reaction to both the 4th Symphony and now the Double Concerto stifled him and so he destroyed it, along with sketches for not one but TWO additional symphonies, even a second Double Concerto – all consigned to the flames because of his insecurities.

Clara Schumann didn't think the Double Concerto had much of a future. Even his good friend Billroth had called it “sterile.” Brahms, feeling terribly old-fashioned, was beginning to think perhaps he'd written himself out.

After he had decided to retire from composing at the age of 57, Brahms was coaxed back to writing again by the sound of another musician who had captured his imagination: clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld for whom he wrote a trio and a quintet, both in 1891, and a few years later, published two clarinet sonatas with him in mind. When the Clarinet Trio was first performed, Robert Hausmann was the cellist.

While Brahms wrote only two sonatas for the instrument, the cello often got a lot of his finest tunes: all you have to do is think of the third movement of his 2nd Piano Concerto or the opening of the slow movement of the C Minor Piano Quartet.

But Brahms did NOT write the other cello piece of his that's on Zuill Bailey's program, ending the first half of the concert – well, not as a cello piece. A much earlier work than the 2nd Cello Sonata, the Scherzo or “Sonatensatz” (literally, Sonata Movement) in C Minor was originally written for violin and piano but like the 3rd Violin Sonata also works well when transcribed for the cello and who's to argue against a persuasive performance?

When he introduced himself to Robert and Clara Schumann in late September, 1853, Brahms was just 20 years old. In October, the Schumanns' friend Josef Joachim, already a close friend of Brahms, came to town for a performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Schumann's own Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra. Robert was going to conduct.

The rehearsal had been a disaster, Schumann sometimes getting so engrossed in the music he stopped conducting. The concert was a fiasco (only later would they realize it would be the last time Schumann would conduct in public), but the next night there was a special party for Joachim in which he was given a new violin sonata written just for him by a committee of friends.

On Schumann’s suggestion, the thematic tie that binds the work together was a motive based on what Joachim called his “life motto” – Frei aber einsam, “Free but lonely” – turned into the musical pitches F, A and E. Consequently the work is known to history as “The F.A.E. Sonata.”

Among the guests at the party was Bettina von Arnim, who'd been a friend of both Goethe and Beethoven and who was the widow of the collector of the folk tales known as “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (the Youth's Magic Horn). She was there with her daughter Gisela von Arnim from whom Joachim was recently “free (but lonely).” In what must have been a rather awkward moment, Gisela, dressed in a peasant costume, presented Joachim with a gift basket of flowers in which they'd hidden the copy of the sonata. Sight-reading it with Clara at the piano, he was supposed to guess the identities of each movement's composer. He figured it out quite easily: Albert Dietrich, a close friend and associate of Schumann’s, wrote the first movement; Schumann himself, both the Intermezzo and the Finale; and Brahms, the Scherzo. Brahms' share of the piece was the only movement from this composite work that would survive in the repertoire.

- Dr. Dick

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photo-credit: Zuill Bailey's photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Cellist Zuill Bailey Returns to Harrisburg on Nov 17th

2009-11-07T22:13:00.006-05:00

Not too many years ago, Central Pennsylvania was introduced to Zuill Bailey as part of the "Next Generation Festivals" that Ellen Hughes organized with pianist Awadagin Pratt through WITF with support from numerous schools, contributors and organizations across the region.

Since then, he's performed on some other stages you may have heard of, like the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, not to mention also Carnegie Hall.

He has gotten great reviews around the country, like"Bristles with rare virtuosic fire" - Chicago Tribune; "Nothing short of transcendent" - Buffalo News; and from Lima, Peru's El Comercio, "One of the premier cellists in the world."

Announcing that Zuill Bailey has just been signed to an exclusive contract with Telarc Recordings, the company's president, Robert Woods, commented: 'Zuill's musical talent is world-class, and he is a delightful throwback to artists who possess charisma and entertain an audience while being true to music in every way."

Joined by pianist Robert Koenig, Zuill Bailey will be playing works by Stravinsky, Mendelssohn and Brahms on Tuesday, November 17th, at 8pm on the stage of Harrisburg's Whitaker Center.

The program opens with Claude Debussy's Cello Sonata, one of the last works he composed but a work that is, despite his illness and the time he wrote it in (surrounded by the bad news of World War I), full of humor. It's not what we normally think of with Debussy and his "Impressionism" - it's actually a very spare work, Neo-Classical in style.

Given the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn this year, if one needs an excuse to program his music, his 2nd Cello Sonata concludes the first half of the program.

From the classically-lined works of Debussy and Mendelssohn, then, the concert concludes with two full-blooded Romantic works by Johannes Brahms: an early work, the Scherzo he wrote for the F.A.E. Violin Sonata (arranged here for cello and piano) and a fairly late piece, his 2nd Cello Sonata in F Major, Op.99. (I've written more about these pieces, here.)

In this video, a TV interview from WUSA in Washington DC, he talks about his cello, made in 1693 by Matteo Goffriller and formerly owned by Mischa Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet. It's an instrument that was 17 years old when Bach wrote his cello suites. Then he plays the Prelude to the G Major Suite by Bach.

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Here's another video, this one from Telarc, promoting Zuill's most recent recording "Russian Masterpieces" which was released earlier this year. He talks about the influences of the great cellist Rostropovich and the music of Tchaikovsky (his Mozart-inspired "Rococo Variations") and Shostakovich (his 1st Cello Concerto). Based on the little clip of the Shostakovich I heard in this video, I plan on adding this disc to my own collection: it's a very dramatic, incisive work and I think he hits everything just right in his approach to it, both musically and emotionally.
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As Ellen wrote to concert-goers on the e-mailing list:

One of my first acts as new director of Market Square Concerts was to arrange for Zuill Bailey to come to play his cello in Harrisburg. I'd met him when he played chamber music in WITF's former Next Generation Festival, and I was impressed, not only with his phenomenal strengths as a musician, but also with his ability to communicate that music visually. He's a fabulous argument in favor of attending live performance because of his communicative gifts as well as his musical ones.

I hope you will be able to come to his concert on Tuesday, November 17 at 8 at Whitaker Center. His accompanist is Robert Koenig, much sought-after as a collaborative pianist with a following of his own. They'll be playing sonatas by Debussy, Brahms and Mendelssohn, and you can find out more about it at our website, marketsquareconcerts.org.

Tickets are $28 and are available at the BOX that night or in advance at 717 214-ARTS. For this concert we are able to offer $5 tickets for college/university students and faculty. School-age students are free.

A lot of people want to know how to pronounce Zuill's name. It rhymes with cool!

- Ellen

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I'll second that! Hope to see you there!

- Dr. Dick

Poll for the Parker Quartet Concert, Oct. 11, 2009

2009-10-11T15:00:00.001-04:00

Let's try this and see if it works (I'm such a Luddite, anyway).

If you attended the Parker Quartet's concert that opened Market Square Concerts 2009-2010 Season, let us know what you thought by filling out this brief survey:

Click Here to take survey

If you'd like to leave a comment about the concert or the program, click on the post's title, then write in the comment form at the bottom of the post. These will appear on the blog once they've been approved.

Thanks!
Dr. Dick