All-American with the Lark Quartet & Stephen Salters

The Lark Quartet

This Saturday, Market Square Concerts returns to Market Square Presbyterian Church for a program that includes five American composers and works for voice and string quartet. Joining the Lark Quartet - who then style themselves the Lark Quarte+ when adding someone to their programs - will be baritone Stephen Salters.

The program opens with rags by William Bolcom and closes with songs by George Gershwin: in between are three works about identity: the east coast premiere of Bolcom's Billy in the Darbies, as a young man sentenced to death contemplates his life; a work describing an outer-space alien's attempts to figure out what an American is in Theodore Wiprud's American Journal; and a love-story told in music by Elena Ruehr in the best boy-meets-girl/boy-loves-girl/boy-loses-girl tradition except in this case the girl is a silkie, a legendary seal-woman who comes ashore and sheds her seal-skin to fall in love with a man only to return to the sea.

Composer Theodore Wiprud will be attending the concert and speaking to the audience before the performance of his work.

I'll be doing a pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15.Here are my program notes for this concert:

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For those of you who enjoy pondering Unanswerable Questions, this program offers you four composers writing in the United States between 1970 and 2010—plus some Gershwin from the ‘20s and ‘30s—that may spark a discussion about “What is an American Composer?”

Is it being born in America, or does it mean writing in an American style – and if so, what does that mean?

Antonin Dvořák, when he taught in New York City, advised students to look to their folk music to find their “natural” voice. But what did that mean, for a nation made up of many cultures? What influences composers in today’s world? How do they make it their own?

Here are a few examples:

Born in Seattle in 1938, William Bolcom began studying composition when he was 11, then with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. While studying and working in France and Germany during the 1950s, he composed in the standard serial style du jour influenced by Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio. After returning to the United States in 1962, he found little sympathy for the latest avant-garde techniques from Europe. Eventually, he started exploring a more eclectic approach, developing a love for popular styles that he then sought to integrate into his “serious” music. He has said his main goal was “to erase the boundaries between popular and art music.”

 Bolcom’s catalogue ranges from operas like McTeague and A View from the Bridge to cabaret gems like “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise,” and includes eight symphonies, eleven string quartets and numerous stage works and song cycles. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a set of Twelve New Etudes for piano in 1988. Until he retired in 2008, he taught at the University of Michigan.

In the late-1960s, someone told Bolcom about Scott Joplin’s little-known ragtime music (beyond the “Maple Leaf Rag”), particularly mentioning the unfinished opera, Treemonisha. This whetted his appetite as he began tracking down what music he could find, contacting several friends who, likewise enthusiastic, began recording it. The Joplin Revival was in full “swing.” From the “ragged” rhythmic style of its right-hand melody over a steady stride bass, ragtime originated as a basically honky-tonk keyboard style, a synthesis of African syncopation and American dance-hall tunes descended from European popular music. It influenced several European composers like Eric Satie, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky and was considered by some the American equivalent of Chopin’s mazurkas or Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, stylized evocations of folk or urban popular music.

Bolcom immediately started writing his own rags, looking at them originally as “my mazurkas.” Later, he arranged some of them for various combinations. The first of this set, Poltergeist, contains several unexpected twists, turns and ghoulish special effects – some (we assume) made by the performers. “It was written in a converted garage next to a graveyard in Newburgh, NY,” says the composer Graceful Ghost is one of Bolcom’s best known works, an elegantly melancholy tune full of wistful harmonies, dedicated to his father’s memory.

pianist Paul Jacobs plays William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost
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While the first two are from the 1970 set called “Ghost Rags,” the third one written in 1967, less well-known independently, could serve as a peppy theme song for the City of Harrisburg’s economic revival. It’s called Incineratorag.

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While the traditional route for a composer had been to teach in a university music department, Theodore Wiprud, born in Washington DC in 1958, bases himself in New York where he is a composer as well as “concert presenter, educator and musical executive,” working with the New York Philharmonic as Director of Education and bringing music to classrooms and community venues across the city. Following a degree in biochemistry from Harvard even though his lifelong dreams involved music, he had a lucky encounter with composer David del Tredici which led to a Master’s degree in composition in 1983. With several works inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, much of his music deals with spiritual experience whether in vocal or instrumental works. His Violin Concerto “Katrina,” premiered last October, was written for Ittai Shapira, familiar to Harrisburg audiences as a member of Concertante.

Robert Hayden (1913-1980), raised in the Detroit ghetto, became our first African-American poet laureate in the late-70s. His American Journal first appeared in 1978. In 2000, Wiprud began collaborating with baritone André Solomon-Glover, the first part ready for performance the following year. But after Solomon-Glover suffered a stroke, the project was put on hold. “I continued writing scenes in between other projects,” Wiprud says, “and finally completed the entire work in the summer of 2007 for a 2008 premiere on Victoria Bond's Cutting Edge Concerts. During these seven years, I have seen the relevance of the poem grow with every day's headlines. What, indeed, is an American?”

Hayden's “American Journal is a remarkable piece of social commentary,” the composer writes, “the alleged journal entries of an extraterrestrial visitor studying America undercover. Full of both wit and a tragic view, the poem raises questions without answering them. The alien’s awkwardness as he tries to fit into American society in various guises suggests a host of interpretations. Where one might find an allegory of race in America, or a Cold War commentary, I also read a reflection on the position of the intellectual. The alien writes, ‘much here is beautiful,’ and ‘i am attracted to the vigorous americans,’ but he is at the same time repelled and frightened, and certainly not accepted. He cannot figure these Americans out, but comes to identify more with them than with the purely rational ‘Counselors.’”

At this performance, we’ll hear a new, compact version utilizing three of the original scenes plus parts of the prologue and epilogue.

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Words have been an important part of William Bolcom’s output. He set 45 poems from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence & Experience,” a vast work for soloists, choruses and orchestra (a recording of the complete cycle won three Grammys in 2006). In addition to the cabaret texts that may be more familiar, he has also set texts by WaltWhitman and turned works by Frank Norris and Arthur Miller into operas.

Stephen Salters, baritone

In one of his most recent works, Bolcom turns to Herman Melville’s unfinished novella, Billy Budd, setting the poem known universally as “Billy in the Darbies,” the starting point for Melville writing the story and then becoming the final chapter of the manuscript.

Billy is an innocent, pressed into service by a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars in 1797, who, though revered by his shipmates, lashes out at the ship’s Master at Arms, John Claggart, and accidentally kills him. Circumstances notwithstanding, Billy is condemned to hang from the yard-arm. The poem, told as a sentimentalized ballad after the fact, describes Billy’s meditations in his cell (“Darbies” is a slang term for handcuffs) before his execution the next morning.

Written for the Lark Quartet and Steven Salters, it received its world premiere at Stanford University on February 12th, 2012.

This performance will be its second performance, the East Coast premiere.

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Elena Ruehr, born in 1963 and raised on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, later studied at the University of Michigan with William Bolcom, then at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti . She now lives in Boston, teaching at MIT since 1991. Enriching her classical background, she has also played in a gamelan orchestra and studied West African drumming. Opera News described her as “a composer to watch,” her music written “with heart and a forceful sense of character and expression” (The Washington Post). Gramophone magazine called her music “unspeakably gorgeous.” She has written six string quartets, three of them commissioned by the Cypress Quartet who will be performing her 5th Quartet, “Bel Canto,” inspired by Ann Patchett’s novel, when they perform with Market Square Concerts two months from now.

The Song of the Silkie, setting a text by playwright Laura Harrington, was commissioned by the Rockport Chamber Music Festival and premiered in 2000. Ruehr was asked to write a piece about the sea and chose a story that stems from the same branch of folk legends that have given us water sprites like Undine and Melusina or Anderson’s Little Mermaid. In Celtic versions of this story, a “silkie” is a female seal who comes ashore and sheds her skin to become a woman in order to mate with a human male. After she resumes her sealness, she returns to the sea and the bereft man is left to hunt the seas to find his wife. The poem is a dialogue between the man James and the silkie, named Sula—the baritone sings both parts, taking the role of the silkie into a higher, falsetto range.

As blogger Tom Schnauber of the Boston Musical Intelligencer described it, “Darkly shimmering, watery textures alternate with jig- and reel-like rhythms turned inside out to create a half-moonlit-shanty effect that the Quartet vividly brought to life. These textures support the daring vocal part that serves as the expressive core of the piece.”

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George Gershwin, an iconic American voice, is often considered the quintessential cross-over composer, beginning in the realm of popular music in the age of Tin Pan Alley and almost by accident discovering the world of classical concert music when Paul Whiteman asked him to write something for piano and jazz band that became Rhapsody in Blue. It is unfortunate he did not live long enough to write more than a few pieces for the concert stage and the opera, Porgy & Bess.

From over a dozen musicals written for Broadway, many of them collaborations with his older brother, Ira, came numerous popular songs which can be found in numerous adaptations. “Strike Up the Band” was part of the 1927 musical in which a war-loving USA declares war on Switzerland. The show failed but the song eventually became a hit on its own. “Embraceable You” was written for an unpublished operetta, East Is West, in 1928, then incorporated into Girl Crazy in 1930 where it became a dance number for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “It Ain’t Necessarily So” is the drug dealer Sportin’ Life’s cynical biblical summary told at the church picnic in the 1935 opera, Porgy & Bess. 

I should mention the title of this last song could also be a response to any answer to that initial question, “What Is an American composer?”

- Dick Strawser

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

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

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

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:

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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.

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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.
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CLIP THREE – End of 2nd Movement; complete 3rd & 4th Movements
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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.

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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

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
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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.

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- Dick Strawser

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

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. 

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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.”

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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...?

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...