Stuart & Friends: Music for Piano & Winds

Who: Stuart Malina, pianist, with flutist David DiGiacobbe, oboist Andreas Oeste, clarinetist Eric Just, bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and hornist Jonathan Clark 

What: Music by Stephen Sondheim, Sergei Prokofiev, Avram Dorman, and Francis Poulenc 

When: 8:00 on Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 – note: due to a scheduling conflict, the usual 7:30 start-time has been moved back to 8pm! 

Where: Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. 

Stuart Malina at the piano (photo by Dan Gleiter)

“Chamber Music” in its typical definition “is a form of classical music composed for a small group of instruments.” While academics might quibble over the use of form – a sonata is a form, as if musical terminology isn’t confusing enough – let’s just say it’s music to be performed by a small group of instruments (except, since a work for full orchestra can be arranged for only a few instruments, if it wasn’t composed for that small group, does that mean…? – Oh , wait, it probably means I’ve been watching too many legal shows on TV where lawyers and politicians dole out bowlfuls of quibble to obfuscate and bamboozle the opposition…).

The great writer Goethe once wrote in a letter to a friend of his (who also happened to be the teacher of a boy named Felix Mendelssohn) that chamber music was “four rational people conversing.” To him – and certainly to many music lovers out there – chamber music meant “string quartets.” While a solo pianist is readily accepted by the audience in general, a single violinist might raise an eyebrow (“will there be enough variety to hold my interest?”) – how did you react to hearing Kerson Leong last month?

The “chamber” in chamber music originated in the room where it was to be performed, camera being Italian for “room” (before it was applied to certain photographic devices) or kammer in German going as far back as medieval days and the Renaissance. Instruments playing in a room played what was called a sonata da camera as opposed to music played in a church where it would instead be called a sonata da chiesa (a “church” sonata). So here we are, listening to a performance of “chamber” music in a church… Normally, this should not be confusing… (Remember, btw, it takes four people to play a Trio Sonata.)

We're about to listen to “chamber music” performed by… well, different combinations of musicians: two works for two instrumentalists, another for five, and the grand finale combining six (count ‘em, six). And not a string quartet in sight. This time, it's piano and winds. There’s a set of waltzes for oboe and piano by Stephen Sondheim, a sonata for flute and piano by Prokofiev, a relatively new work for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano by Avner Dorman, and a work for piano and wind quintet (add a flute to the last batch) by Francis Poulenc. Certainly a variety of sounds, textures, and timbres as well as styles, all composed over a span of 75 years.

The concert itself is part of an on-going series of chamber music concerts with the music director and conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, now in his 26th year with the orchestra, performing as a pianist as he often does with members of the orchestra. In this case, he’ll be joined by principal flutist David DiGiacobbe, principal oboist Andreas Oeste, principal clarinetist Eric Just, principal bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and Jonathan Clark, a member of the orchestra’s horn section.

Back in the 1970s, there was such a proliferation of “____ & Friends” programs in New York City including several with concertmasters of the New York Philharmonic, that critics began wondering if the idea of “and Friends” hadn’t outworn its welcome. Then along came the Phil’s new concertmaster, Rodney Friend, so, of course, now we had programs performed by “Rodney Friend & Friends”... New York wasn't the kind of town where people would automatically understand "Rodney & Friends."

One of my favorite definitions of “chamber music” describes it as “music played by friends for friends.” It also goes to say, here in Harrisburg, we don’t need a last name to tell us whose programs these are.

Welcome to Stuart & Friends 2026!

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When I mentioned that definition of “chamber music” as music “written for a small number of instruments,” the academic pedant could argue the first music on the program, despite being performed by two musicians, was written for the pit orchestra of a Broadway theater. Stephen Sondheim had, by the time he’d composed the originals, become one of the leading composers of “Broadway Musicals” – let’s say, “American musical theater” since Sondheim’s works have found a long and prosperous life well beyond the Great White Way – and would go one to create several more to ensure his place as one of the all-time greatest composers in the field. 

 

Stephen Sondheim

While he’s well known for his tunes – who hasn’t heard “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music? – his music as well as his lyrics have an unmistakably recognizable quality both rhythmic and structural with technical demands for the singers as well as the orchestra that go beyond the traditional aspects of the typical musical.

In 1992, English composer Richard Rodney Bennett arranged these three waltzes from two of Sondheim’s more popular musicals (call them “shows,” if you must) which opened on Broadway in the early-1970s. While the original plot for these waltzes (two of them, originally vocal numbers) may be unnecessary to enjoy Sondheim’s melodic writing, both musicals deal with ordinary people and their frustrated and failing relationships. This causes not only tension in the plot but also in the nostalgia and hopelessness reflected in their music.

Company, opening in 1970 and winning 6 of the 14 Tonys it was nominated for, was one of the first musicals to deal with (then) contemporary aspects of dating, marriage, and divorce as the central character, a bachelor named Bobby, faces his 35th birthday. After what he assumes will be a one-night-stand with April (or is it June…?), his date is ready to leave for Barcelona (Bobby: “Oh?) but after he gives up trying to convince her to stay, she decides she will after all (Bobby: “Oh God…”). Here’s a link to the 2011 live performance recorded at Avery Fisher Hall with Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby and Christina Hendricks as April. 

Almost all the music of A Little Night Music (which takes its name from Mozart’s famous serenade, Eine kleine Nachtmusik) is written in 3/4-time; as critic Clive Barnes put it, “an orgy of plaintively memorable waltzes, all talking of past loves and lost worlds.” A series of “night waltzes” recurs throughout the score, mostly instrumental. Here’s Richard Rodney Bennett’s arrangement as played by saxophonist John Harle with Bennett at the piano. 

After what passes for an overture, the main characters enter dancing to this Night Waltz, “each uncomfortable with their partner.” One of these characters will be the middle-aged Frederick with his “trophy wife.” He goes to see a former lover, a fading flower of an actress named Desiree (she who gets to sing “Send in the Clowns”). After she tells him about the young married dragoon she’s currently having an affair with, Frederick tries to “one-up” her by telling her about his young wife, fending off Desiree's interjecting quips and eventually revealing his sexual frustration in “You Must Meet My Wife.” Here is a link to the Original Cast Album with Len Cariou as Frederick and Glynnis Johns as Desiree. 

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I was in my 20s when I saw the great (and then fairly new) flutist James Galway’s newly released RCA recording (with no less than pianist Martha Argerich) of a flute sonata by Sergei Prokofiev which, as I listened, turned out to be the 2nd Violin Sonata I’d been familiar with since I was in high school. Considering Galway paired it with the Franck Flute Sonata which clearly was a transcription of Franck’s famous Violin Sonata, I thought he was just raping the repertoire to find other things he could program. Yes, unfortunately, many great composers have never written great works for the flute (or for that matter most wind instruments) – so many instrumentalists will find something they like and appropriate for their own. 

And why not? It’s certainly nothing new – Mozart himself did it, transcribing a woodwind serenade when he was behind on a deadline with his publisher for a set of string quintets. 

Prokofiev, composing at the piano

So what's the story here?

It was deep in the midst of the horrors of World War II when the Soviet Union had been invaded and much of it occupied by Nazi Germany. Like Shostakovich and numerous other artists, Prokofiev found himself “evacuated” to various remote locations deep in the heart of Russia, first to Tbilisi in the Caucasus, then to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, then Perm in the Ural Mountains, that north-south line of mountains serving as a convenient dividing point between Europe and Asia. He may have been far removed physically from the ravages of the war then raging with the horrendous siege of Leningrad (which Shostakovich commemorated in his epic 7th Symphony) and the devastation then wasting Ukraine, and as you listen to this music, you would have no idea what current events may (or may not) have been affecting his life.

Historically, artists often deal with the challenges of creating art “in the midst of traumatic events.” Think of Beethoven writing his A Major Cello Sonata in the midst of Napoleon’s bombardment of Vienna in 1809, or Robert Schumann composing short piano pieces for his Album for the Young with the sound of gunfire audible quite literally just down the street as revolution came to Dresden in 1849.

A famous example would be how many artists responded after the events of September 11th 2001. The impact of such physical and emotional upheaval varies from artist to artist, culture to culture, or time to time, and in Prokofiev’s case he was working on several large-scale works during this time, most notably the opera based on Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, about the impact of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 (curiously, he had been thinking about it even before Hitler’s invasion was announced in the news in June of 1941).  

While under evacuation in Alma Ata, he composed the filmscore for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (music overshadowed by the score for Alexander Nevsky) but also worked on the ballet Cinderella, one of his most melodious scores, which occupied him throughout these four years. And, almost as an afterthought amidst these large-scale works, this Flute Sonata in D Major. He wrote to a friend describing his new work as a “sonata in a gentle, flowing classical style.” 

I can find no specific references to why he chose to a write a sonata for flute – he’d begun a violin sonata in F Minor in 1938 but put it aside as events developed, left uncompleted until 1946, after the war. By that time, his Flute Sonata had received its premiere in Moscow in 1943 with flutist Nikolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

When that violin sonata was finished and premiered by violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin in 1946, the flute sonata had already been published as Op. 94. Somehow, the newer 1st Violin Sonata in F Minor became Op. 80, perhaps because Prokofiev was thinking more about having started it years earlier in 1938, two years after he returned to his native Russia – now the Soviet Union – to stay. 

There’s a story, told by a student of the pianist, that at one point Oborin “played a certain passage, marked forte, too gently for Prokofiev's liking, who insisted it should be more aggressive. Oborin replied that he was afraid of drowning out the violin, but Prokofiev said ‘It should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat, and people will say 'Is he out of his mind?’”

Later, Oistrakh remarked to the composer that Flute Sonata, you know, would make a very good violin sonata – and so Prokofiev made a few adjustments to cover the difference between how the violin would play a passage compared to the flute (the piano part remained untouched) and published it as the Violin Sonata No. 2, Op.94b.

It’s in the standard four movements of a classical sonata: a luxuriantly unfolding andantino (not slow but not fast, either) followed by a bustling (if not scurrying) scherzo, a tender, Mozartean slow movement, and then a positive and positively enthusiastic finale. Here’s that recording by Galway and Argerich I’d mentioned, released in 1975:

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At Market Square Concerts’ 40th Anniversary concert in March, 2022, one of the works on the program was the Guitar Quintet by Avner Dorman, a composer with academic ties to the Midstate, with Grammy-winning guitarist Jason Vieux – here’s an excerpt from the version for guitar and string orchestra.

Avner Dorman at his desk (photo by Wendy Halperin)

For this concert, Stuart Malina will be joined by four wind-players for another quintet by Dorman, one written earlier in 2007. While the Guitar Quintet (from 2016) had been inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist from Vietnam, where each movement took its title from one of the six mantras outlined at the end of his book, “How to Love,” the quintet for piano and winds is entitled Jerusalem Mix and also has a story of sorts behind it, which the composer explains:

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Jerusalem Mix takes its title from a popular Israeli dish made of an eclectic assortment of fried meats. The dish, much like the city of its origin, is a melting pot of flavors and characters - each preserving some of its unique characteristics while contributing to the whole.

When I was first approached to write a woodwind and piano quintet for the 10th anniversary of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival I knew I wanted to write a piece that would reflect the spirit of the festival and of the city of Jerusalem.

As I started writing the piece, I discovered that the piano and woodwind quintet is a tricky ensemble as it embodies members of four different instrument families: the bassoon and oboe are both double-reed instruments; the clarinet is a single-reed instrument; the French horn is a brass instrument; and the piano is of the percussion family. I decided to use the diversity of this ensemble to mirror the diversity of Jerusalem. With this in mind I set out to write this piece as a collage of short scenes, each portraying one or more aspects of the city:

I. Jerusalem Mix – portraying the busyness of the modern city. Musically, this movement is based on Armenian and Turkish folk dance-styles in which the length of the beats constantly varies. In the middle part of this movement a prayer-like melody is introduced in the Oboe emulating its Middle-Eastern origins such as the Zurna or the Duduk.

II. The Wailing Wall – emulates the sound of a praying crowd. This movement is based on the characteristic sigh of the Jewish prayer and pays homage to the opening movement of Mordecai Seter’s oratorio “Tikun Hatzot.”

III. Wedding March – a humorous movement that is first inspired by Hassidic Music but gradually incorporates wedding music from Middle-Eastern Jewish traditions. As the wedding party reaches higher levels of ecstasy (and the guests are increasingly drunk) these different styles collide and collapse into one another.

IV. Blast.

V. Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) – by hitting the strings of the piano with drumsticks the pianist emulates the sound of a Kanun and the prayers of the opening movement and of the “wailing wall” movement become the call to prayer of the Muezzin.

VI. Jerusalem Mix. All the movements are based on two simple melodic cells – one chromatic and the other made of a whole step. For me, the fact that these simple motives can lend themselves to the music traditions of Christianity (Armenian dance), Islam, and Judaism, express that on a deep cultural, musical, and humane level, our cultures are closer than we realize.

(from program notes, ©Avner Dorman)

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Here is the complete work, performed at the Piano Salon Cristofori, Berlin, on January 6th, 2017.

Born in Israel, Dorman was 25 when he received the Prime Minister’s Prize for his Ellef Symphony, the youngest composer to have won the award. He studied composition with John Corigliano at Juilliard where he earned his doctorate. With numerous works commissioned and performed around the world – you can check his website for more details – he is currently Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College right here in Central PA.

Having studied musicology (as well as physics) as a student in Israel, his music is not only influenced by the culture and history of the country and the wider region of the world, but as a third-generation Holocaust Survivor, of his family’s German heritage (he describes how the household he grew up in was full of German music and literature). Whether it’s the musical DNA that brings out the soul of this heritage or his meditative or hypnotic approach to contemporary minimalism, he has created music with a direct emotional impact that goes well beyond the surface so many composers have failed to penetrate.

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The oldest piece on the program is by that “witty Vulgarian” intent on tweaking the various noses of the Parisian establishment, a member of a group known as Les Six (an obvious and singularly unimaginative nickname for a group of six composers) and a follower of what was called Neo-Classicism, taking its influences more from the distant past of Mozart rather than the recent trajectory of the Late Romanticism of Wagner and Liszt into the 20th Century with Schoenberg’s atonality and Stravinsky’s early ballets.

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, I remember people still thinking the music of Francis Poulenc was “contemporary.” After all, most of it was written only 30 or 40 years ago and the man had died as recently as 1963. Perhaps no longer shocking, it is certainly sincere and smile-worthy.

One critic had described him as “half bad boy, half monk” – which reminds me of a photo that once inspired the composer as he was writing a distinctly religious work – his Gloria, a late work from 1959 – still infused with some of his trademark cheekiness: a bunch of Benedictine monks in their robes playing soccer.

As Lucy Murray points out in her program notes, “Filled with comic gestures and dissonances that suddenly turn lyrical, the work continuously pulls the listener back and forth between pathos and humor. One senses, in Poulenc, one foot in the café and one in the grave.”

The Sextet opens like “a Paris traffic jam,” as Lucy puts it, with a contrasting slower, lyrical section ushered in by the solo bassoon building to a passionate climax before – okay, enough of this sadness – back to the comedy of the opening. The second movement opens in full classical clarity, evocative of a Mozart andante before everyone spontaneously decides it’s time to stop in at the dance hall but then (oh yeah) this is supposed to be a tender slow movement. The finale combines bits of jazziness (remember, this is only a few years after the Roaring ‘20s) with lyrical contrasts and then some Stravinskian rhythms (a bit of Les Noces perhaps? Poulenc had played one of the four pianos at its London premiere in 1926) before – another surprise – rather than the boisterous romp we’d expect to the finish line, it becomes this slow-motion reflection on themes from the previous movements (again, perhaps an inspiration from that magical conclusion to Les Noces), a solemn ending, by comparison, to what started off like a galop from Offenbach.

This performance is from a fairly new music festival in 2023, held in the port city of Pohang, South Korea:

It’s assumed Poulenc began work on the sextet in 1931, finishing it in 1933, the year after the Concerto for Two Pianos. Poulenc played the piano at the premiere with some of the best known wind players in Paris. It was, however, regardless what we might think of it today, not well-received by traditionalists: composer and critic Florent Schmitt criticized it as “wandering and vulgar.” A more positive review wrote that "with Poulenc, all of France comes out of the windows he opens." 

Poulenc extensively revised the composition in August 1939 because he was dissatisfied with the original, telling Nadia Boulanger, "There were some good ideas in it but the whole thing was badly put together. With the proportions altered, better balanced, it comes over very clearly."

Poulenc & Friend (1930s)

Self-taught because his parents intended him for a career in the family’s pharmaceutical company, Poulenc, after coming under the influence of that great Parisian iconoclast Erik Satie, was convinced music was his life. He described himself as a “Vulgarian” who wrote in his trademark light-hearted style to his final years in the early-1960s, long after such a style had gone out of fashion. However, in the summer of 1936, after an unexpected religious awakening following the death of a close friend and fellow composer in a violent car accident and his visit to a famous religious shrine shortly afterward, he began composing with a new-found and often religious seriousness, writing dramatic choral works during the Nazi occupation setting words of Resistance poets, which culminated in his intensely dramatic opera, The Dialogue of the Carmelites of 1957.

Even though his contemporaries might disparage his style, he himself was more open-minded than we might think. In 1921, he traveled to Vienna where he met Arnold Schoenberg and “talked shop” with him and his pupils (Schoenberg at the time was developing what soon became his “Method of Composing with 12-Tones”). A fan of Pierre Boulez, playing recordings of his Marteau sans maître for some friends, Poulenc wrote to him in 1961 how he was sorry to have to miss a performance of Boulez' recent Pli selon pli “because I am sure it is well worth hearing” (Boulez did not return the sentiment).

In 1942 he wrote to a friend, “I know perfectly well I am not one of those composers who made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Debussy or Ravel but I think there is room for new music which doesn't mind using other people's chords. Wasn't that the case with Mozart-Schubert?"

– Dick Strawser

Start the New Year with Kerson Leong and Lots of Incredible Music for Solo Violin

First of all, if you’re not familiar with Kerson Leong, the artist playing our first concert of the New Year, here’s something that might fill you in on what you’ve been missing.

Recorded in Montreal four years ago, he’s playing Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s “Grand Caprice” on Schubert’s The Erlking, which, as any pianist can tell you who’s accompanied the song, is a tour-de-force of sheer stamina for the left-hand with its pounding repeated octaves representing the hoofbeats of the horse riding through the storm (a father carrying his young son in his arms tries to reach the safety of home, pursued by the malevolent spirit known as the Erl-King). Transferring Schubert’s sheer Gothic terror – along with the singer’s melody and all the detailed harmonic nuances and contrasting moods – to the four strings of a single violin is a tour-de-force of its own. Playing it is considered a challenge only the most secure violinists can bring off.

Born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1997, Leong won the grand prize at the Canadian National Music Competition at the age of 8 and returned to win four more grand prizes there in successive years. The list of prizes and competitions he has won since then is an impressive list of some of the most prestigious honors available. In 2021, the concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony (and before that, the Montreal Symphony) called him not just one of Canada’s greatest violinists “but one of the greatest violinists, period.”

Incidentally, the violin he’s playing is by one of the greatest violin-makers of all time, Guarneri del Gesu, however much he might be overshadowed by his neighbor and rival in Cremona, Antonio Stradivarius (no less than Jascha Heifetz loved the 1740 Guarneri he played for most of his career even though he owned “several” Strads). The one on loan to Leong is known as the “Ex-Bohrer” from 1741, named for its one-time owner Anton Bohrer, a student of Rodolphe Kreutzer, the Kreutzer to whom Beethoven dedicated his famous violin sonata.

While Ernst’s retelling of Schubert’s Erlking is not on Leong’s program for Harrisburg this week, two other composers who are had also owned Guarneri violins which have been named after them: Ysaÿe and Kreisler, along with the dedicatee of one of the Ysaÿe sonatas Leong will play, Georges Enescu.

The concert will be held at St. Michael Lutheran Church on State Street (between Front & 2nd Streets) on Wednesday night at 7:30. The program – all works for solo violin – will include two of the six sonatas by Eugene Ysaÿe, Fritz Kreisler’s Recitative and Scherzo (Op. 6), the C Major Sonata and the Chaconne in D Minor by Bach. The program also includes two transcriptions of works for guitar: Francisco Tarrega’s famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra (“Reflections of the Alhambra,” arranged by Ruggiero Ricci) and Augustin Barrios’ Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios (“An Alm for the Love of God,” arranged by Kerson Leong).

Kerson Leong discusses why he decided to record all six of the Ysaÿe sonatas for his first release:

I’ll get to the Ysaÿe a little later. But first, some Bach!

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While one of my early teachers may have been disproved – that “everything begins with Bach” – Bach is certainly one of the most important “roots” of Classical Music. We mostly think of him as a composer and organist, but he was also, apparently, at least in his younger years, quite a violinist, if he wrote those Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin for himself to play. At the time – this would be in the early-1720s – he was the director of music at the court of one of Germany’s many little principalities, the Prince of Anhalt in Köthen.

Typical of Bach throughout his career – he would’ve been in his late-30s when he wrote these – it wasn’t just a matter of writing a series of contrasting works like, say, Beethoven (or anybody else back-in-the-day) writing his six Op. 18 String Quartets. Each work is different in some way and each work explores different ways to write for the solo violin. Writers often describe these works – or the 48 Preludes & Fugues of The Well-Tempered Klavier or “The Art of Fugue” – “encyclopedic.” It’s not very different from Chopin, say, writing his Etudes as an exploration of his pianistic technique; Debussy, in 1915, was more specific, subtitling each one as, say, for specific intervals (“for thirds,” “for sixths” and so on) or “for repeated notes” or “opposing sonorities.” Bach may not have been so literal as to define what each piece was doing (and a particular technical challenge may not have been limited to one piece or movement), but anybody who could learn to play them would certainly have learned a great deal about the art of playing the violin! It is no exaggeration to say a violinist learns Bach as a young student and then continues to learn and re-learn them throughout their life, always discovering something new no matter how long they’ve been playing them.

If you’ve never heard these works before (or seen the score), you may simply wonder how an instrument with only four strings can play the sheer amount of notes on the page, not to mention the number of musical lines we call “polyphony.”

True, you can play two pitches on two adjacent strings – something called double-stops – but triads would involve three strings (since you can't play two notes on one string), and a four-note chord is challenging enough even if one of those notes involves an “open” (or un-stopped) string.

The ability of a modern bow to cover three or four strings, though, is a physical impossibility. It wasn't until fairly recently the “baroque bow” of Bach’s day came into use again, since the bow-hair is less tight than a modern bow and could “bend” a little to accommodate the strings.

The real challenge is playing not just the number of notes at one time, but keeping distinct musical lines going over a period of time where one is a melody and the other an accompaniment or, as in a fugue, where there might be two or three independent lines moving contrapuntally (each one its own melody).

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In this set of six works, there are three sonatas and three partitas. Like the two volumes of 24 Preludes & Fugues of “The Well-Tempered Klavier,” they are not intended to be performed as a single work, though the concentrated effort of both playing them and listening to them is quite something to experience. And yet they offer enough variety that, taken as a whole, the process does not sound tedious.

The sonatas are the weightier, more intellectual of the set, each one in four movements with the standard pattern of slow–fast–slow–fast, unlike the more familiar sonatas of the Classical and Romantic eras which were generally of three movements, fast–slow–faster.

The first half of the C Major Sonata is much “weightier” than the second: what sounds like a slow introduction to the Fugue balances the lyrical slow movement which is then followed by a rapid-fire perpetual motion.

The sonata opens with the mesmerizing repetition of simple notes in dotted rhythms that gradually expand to wider and more intense harmonies: already by the fourth measure, the violinist is already playing simultaneous notes on all four strings.

The second movement is the monumental Fugue, full of all manner of contrapuntal tricks. The subject (or “theme”) is combined with a chromatically descending line. Then it appears in stretto (where statements of the subject succeed one another ‘too rapidly’ rather than at the standard number of beats). Then, about halfway through, this subject is inverted (here, ascending steps become descending steps, and vice versa). Near the end, everything is combined: the “regular” fugue, the “stretto” fugue, and the inverted fugue! It’s a compositional tour-de-force to say nothing of an even greater challenge for the soloist.

After the chordal and polyphonic complexities of the first half, the third movement is a simple melodic line accompanied by simple, by comparison “intermittent” harmonies. The finale is a joyful romp in “perpetual motion” mode, usually a “single line” but one that forms a variety of widely spaced chords as it sweeps back and forth across the strings.

In this video-with-score, Augustin Hadelich – who has appeared with the Harrisburg Symphony in previous seasons – plays the Sonata No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violin:

Each partita – a word synonymous with “suite” – consisted of various dance movements which usually alternated tempos and moods and differed from suite to suite. In general, they were considered “lighter” and more “entertaining” (for those who thought something “intellectual” was not). The second of these partitas, in fact, ends with a chaconne (originally a slow dance) that is longer than the first four dance-movements combined – speaking of weight and balance. A chaconne (or ciaconne in Italian) is a set of variations on a repeating harmonic progression (the bass-line of these chords can be expressed as a line but it is not a “theme”). (Let’s skip the quibbling over the difference between a chaconne and a passacaglia which often seem to be used interchangeably: as most composers would say to most theorists, “what do I care about you and your little dictionary?”)

Bach builds an immense structure out of these simple chords introduced in the first four measures, turning them into a vast three-part work that lasts about 15 minutes! When you think it’s exhausted its possibilities, Bach begins the second part, turning it from this dark, dramatic D Minor into a bright and magical D Major, before returning to D Minor and a long, tense passage with a reiterated A on the open string which builds to the final final cadence and a restatement of the opening chords to bring it full-circle.

The Chaconne has been arranged many times and many ways, but Johannes Brahms transcribed it for piano left-hand and, after finishing it, wrote to Clara Schumann, that here, “on one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Once again, I’m using Augustin Hadelich’s performance with the score cued up to begin the Chaconne that concludes the Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin:

It is interesting to note the title page of Bach’s manuscript bears the Italian title SEI SOLO which is usually translated as “Six Solos [sic]” since to be grammatically correct, it should’ve been SEI SOLI. Did Bach not know his Italian? Or is Bach being cryptic by writing what would be correct Italian for “YOU ARE ALONE”?

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Two centuries later, the Belgian violinist and composer Eugene Ysaÿe heard Joseph Szigeti play all six of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, then set about writing six sonatas of his own for solo violin and dedicated each of them to a fellow violinist. All six sonatas were written in July, 1923, when Europe was still in the aftermath of World War I's devastation, trying to pull itself out of the rubble.

As Ysaÿe explained, "I have played everything from Bach to Debussy” – who had died only in 1918 – “for real art should be international." In these sonatas, Ysaÿe used now familiar fingerprints of early-20th Century style ranging from Debussy's whole-tone scales, dissonances that might be familiar from the earlier works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók. It's not so much up-dating Bach for the 20th Century since Bach doesn't need to be “made relevant,” but reflecting Bach into the 20th Century and adding his own style and fingerprints to the mix of influences available to a modern-day composer.

But virtuosity is not just the ability to play fast notes flashily. Ysaÿe employed virtuoso bow as well as left-hand techniques throughout, believing “at the present day the tools of violin mastery, of expression, technique, mechanism, are far more necessary than in days gone by. In fact they are indispensable, if the spirit is to express itself without restraint.” So, just as Bach did so significantly two centuries earlier, Ysaÿe's set of sonatas places high technical demands on its performers. Yet Ysaÿe recurrently warns violinists that they should never forget to play instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing."

Naturally, the first sonata was dedicated to Szigeti. The second, for Jacques Thibaud, “riffs” on the famous Dies irae motive as a humorous tribute to Thibaud’s well-known hypochondria (nice…). The last sonata, for the Spanish violinist Manuel Quiroga who may be overlooked today, makes use of habanera and tango rhythms.

Of the third sonata, a single-movement “fantasia”dedicated to the Romanian violinist and composer Georges Enescu, Ysaÿe wrote “I have let my imagination wander at will. The memory of my friendship and admiration for George Enescu and the performances we gave together at the home of the delightful Queen Carmen Sylvia have done the rest.”

Subtitled Ballade, it is in two parts, a slow recitative-like introduction with motives or hints of themes to be heard in the second or main section of the piece. Ysaÿe makes use of Debussy’s whole-tone scales and a fair amount of “chromatic dissonance” to remind us things were changing in this decade since Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Marked Allegro in tempo giusto e con bravura , agitated dotted rhythms and double- and triple-stops abound (nothing without the influence of Bach, to be sure) with a contrastingly calm middle section before the dotted rhythms return and the piece – all six minutes of it – ends with a brilliant coda.

Here, Kerson Leong plays Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 3, recorded in a church in Quebec in October, 2020 (and I guess, yes, a program of solo violin music during the Pandemic Lockdown satisfies both our need for art and for staying safe).

Speaking of inspiration from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Bach’s “broken chords” haunt the sonata Ysaÿe dedicated to Fritz Kreisler. With references also to Bach’s A Minor solo sonata, reportedly Ysaye was saying (either directly or indirectly) “if you can spoof Baroque music, so can I,” referring to Kreisler’s famous habit of writing original works “in the Baroque style” which he passed off under various assumed names, some real, some imaginary. However, Ysaÿe also pays homage to Kreisler’s own Preludium and Allegro in the final movement, with a whiff of Viennese nostalgia in the slow movement, a tribute to Kreisler’s birthplace.

Here, Kerson Leong plays Ysaÿe’s 4th Sonata at an opening concert “garden party” as part of the 2018 MuCH Waterloo Music Festival in Belgium.

While Eugene Ysaÿe dedicated his sonata to Kreisler in 1923, Kreisler had dedicated his Recitative & Scherzo, Op. 6, to Ysaÿe in 1911. Once again, here is Kerson Leong performing the Kreisler at a music festival in Riems, France, in 2017.

That leaves two shorter works to discuss, both of them transcriptions of pieces written for guitar. Leong opens the program with Francisco Tarrega’s famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra… written in 1899 as a “Memory” of his visit to the palace in Granada. It was originally entitled Improvisación ¡A Granada! Cantiga Árabe (Improvisation To Granada! Arab song) – many composers can come up with great music but not so great titles – and features a fiendishly difficult tremolo technique where one note (on one string) is played by three fingers in such quick succession it creates a blur of a sustained pitch.

Speaking of titles, the great Paraguayan-born guitarist Augustín Barrios Mangoré came up with perhaps his most famous work which he called Una limosna por el amor de Dios (An Alm for the Love of God). Actually, as the story goes, he did not call it that. It was one of his last works and while it was complete, the manuscript did not have a title. Once, while giving a lesson (this was 1944 in Brazil), he was interrupted by a knock at the door and when Barrios answered it, it was an old woman who stretched her hands out, begging for una limosna por el amor de Dios. Barrios gave her the few coins he had in his pocket, then returned to his student, announcing he had always wanted to write a “tremolo piece,” and he just had an idea for it, telling the student about the old woman’s visit. When the manuscript was found after Barrios’ death, the student told this story and so it was decided to call the piece Una limosna por el amor de Dios. It was also called “The Last Song,” but really, given the inspiration, isn’t the old woman’s call a better title?

Here, recorded in a church in Quebec in 2020, Leong plays the Barrios,

 

and, recorded in Halifax in 2019, Ruggiero Ricci’s transcription of Tarrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra.

It doesn’t have to be fast and loud and full of notes to be virtuosic. The hardest part is making it sound so effortless…

- Dick Strawser

The Sebastians: a Soundscape of London in the Time of Handel

When a group calls themselves “The Sebastians,” as this ensemble already winning accolades in Early Music Competitions in 2011 has done, the average concert-goer might assume either they’re all (or mostly) members of the Sebastian Family (like the Ying Quartet) or they’re all named Sebastian Something-or-Other, or perhaps (like the Emerson Quartet) honoring a favorite someone, say Sebastian Irgendeiner.

But most likely, you’d assume they’re honoring one of the Greatest Composers of All Time, Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas simply calling themselves “The Bachs” would include a whole lot of Bachs, many of whom were musicians ranging back to the grandfather of musician Veit Bach (born around 1550) and included Veit’s grandson Phillipus Bach, known to us primarily as “Lips” Bach (No.65 on the Genealogical Tree), listed as a musician (was he a trumpet player?) – his father, just plain “Lips” Bach, born around 1555, was listed as a carpetmaker. Even Henry Louis Gates Jr. would have to spend a lot of time sorting this one out.

The famous one, at least to us, is Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), who’s No.24 on The Tree, and he had at least four children who were all recognized as composers, not just musicians, and in their own generation better known than their now ubiquitous father. (That would be two sons to first wife, Maria Barbara, two more to his second wife, Anna Magdalena.) Even grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach was a respected composer who died in 1845 (the year Wagner premiered Tannhäuser). The Last of the Bachs was apparently Johann Philip Bach, a court organist in Meinigen who died in 1846 at the age of 94 (he was No.85 on the Bach Tree).

Further proof, if needed, is the phone number listed for The Sebastians on their website: 262–345-BACH.

But there will be no Bach on this program. There won’t even be any Bachs on the program you can hear at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg on Wednesday, Nov. 5th. But there will be music by Bach’s famous colleague, George Frederick Handel which while an excellent resource for any Early Music ensemble would not require them to change their name to The Fredericks.

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In the past, concert programs of chamber music, depending on the ensemble, would include a variety of works usually contrasting by style or period – the opening Classical work (Mozart or Haydn), something remotely contemporary (when I was growing up, Bartók was still considered new, but then he’d died only 20 years earlier), and then a major work of the Romantic Era (usually Beethoven). Early Music Groups were more limited in scope, especially as Baroque music fell off the grid for standard modern instrument ensembles in the 1960s and ‘70s. But then concerts during the 18th Century were usually New Music, and the Newest Music was often the “big draw” on a program in the 19th Century when people considered Brahms old-fashioned and Wagner avant-garde. Rimsky-Korsakov, in his autobiography, recalls Balakirev in the 1880s wasting his time on his “Ancient Music” concerts which featured symphonies by Haydn and Mozart (who wanted to hear that old stuff?).

So here we have a program examining the musical life of one location – London – in one particular era – between 1715 and 1747 – that, while mixing German, Italian, and English composers, remembering they were all active in London during that time. Then throw into the mix a wildly popular dance tune “covered” by Vivaldi in 1705, an Old Chestnut indeed, and, as Sebastian harpsichordist Jeffrey Grossman points out in his program notes, “a fitting conclusion for a program about a city (and an age) that thrived on reinvention, cosmopolitan flair, and a touch of chaos.”

(not a Bach)

George Frederick Handel in 1726 (see left) 

Recreating the soundscape of Handel’s London – he was and remains still the most significant composer of the time and the location – brings to mind some other “invention” we, sitting in modern-day concert venues, take for granted: the Public Concert.

Establishments like the Vauxhall Gardens – “pleasure gardens,” as these were generally known – promoted the latest in English music, and many well-known pieces were often first played there. Thomas Arne, who was Vauxhall’s musical director from 1745–1777, was responsible for the patriotic song Rule Britannia, as well as a version of God Save The King. The music you could hear was quite varied: concertos or cantatas, ballads or marches, symphonies or dance music and of course popular songs complete with illustrated song sheets so you could sing along.

The composer most associated with Vauxhall was George Frederick Handel. Many of his pieces were performed in the gardens during the 1730s and 1740s, including the Vauxhall Hornpipe, written especially for the venue and one of the Big Hits of the Year (not to be confused with the more famous one in his Water Music Suite). Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed for King George II in 1749, was first rehearsed in the Vauxhall Gardens on 21 April 1749, and it’s said some 12,000 Londoners rushed to hear it. This reportedly caused a three hour traffic jam as carriages tried to cross London Bridge, the only bridge within the city, to get there.

But the fad for such “entertainment palaces” went back further and had more humble roots in simple music rooms in the local taverns. But when people found they could make money by performing there and selling tickets to a potential audience, the practice soon went up-scale: better places in better locations (in better neighborhoods) meant a better class of audience and, hence, more money. Some of these were managed by the musicians themselves, but eventually entrepreneurs – impresarios – took over the business. Perhaps the most famous of these would be another German immigrant, Johann Peter Salomon who, in 1791, set up a series of concerts featuring the world-renowned composer (“straight from Vienna!”), Franz Joseph Haydn, promising brand new symphonies written especially for them and capitalizing on the popularity of his earlier symphonies.

A concert room at York House (the London home of the Archbishops of York), just off the famous Strand, was built specifically for concerts in 1680, the first of its kind designed for the general public. Many of Handel’s works were first heard here, especially the oratorios he began producing during the Lenten Season when opera was forbidden and his singers and musicians needed something to earn them some money. Other musicians working in London might rent these rooms (or “halls”) and offer a series of concerts and many of them brought the latest music from the Continent to entice the crowds. Francesco Geminiani – we’ll hear more of him, later – announced a series of twenty “subscription concerts” starting in December, 1731. When Leopold Mozart brought his children to London in 1765 to milk the crowds, they would perform in people’s houses but also give public concerts at some of these same music rooms (Leopold was always conscious of the expense of renting the hall being subtracted from the potential income).

Much of this, however, is in the future as far as Handel’s Day was concerned, but he was involved in it, it was a prosperous if risky business (he himself had several successful seasons, a few that were less so, and some that were downright disastrous), and the other composers on this program were all part of the scene: this is what Londoners could hear on a regular basis.

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In Europe at that time (that is, The Continent, to distinguish it from England, the Island), music (at least the “concert music” we think of today) was essentially the realm of the aristocracy: being a vast quilt of small principalities, Germany had hundreds of “aristocratic courts” which employed musicians for orchestras and opera theaters, where the audiences were usually the reigning princes and their family and friends, including other, lesser aristocrats who were regarded as courtly satellites. In large nation-states like France and Spain, these courts were centered in the capital city which happened to be wherever the King resided. In a place like Austria, Vienna was the capital of the Austrian Empire, but Austria was just a part of the Holy Roman Empire (in the 18th Century, the Emperor was often the same thing as the ruler of Austria). But in Germany, there were dozens of larger states like Prussia and Bavaria, but hundreds of smaller states, some merely city-states: the rulers of Hanover, an important Electorate (its ruler could vote to choose the Holy Roman Emperor which was not a hereditary office), had their court in the city of Hanover, located about 100 miles south of Hamburg. In 1708, the newly ratified Prince Elector was Georg Ludwig.

About 150 miles southeast of Hanover is the city of Halle, in the 1700s part of Saxony, but at various times part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg or Magdeburg, depending on who married whom and inherited what from where. Here was born a future musician named Georg Friedrich Händel – note the umlaut which in German makes it “Hendl” not, as the English would butcherize it, HAWN-d’l. Unlike any of the Bachs, Handel was not born into a family of musicians and the usual mythology, the product of a 1760 biography by John Mainwaring, that not only was his father adamantly opposed to his son’s becoming a music (as the eldest surviving son, he was destined to inherited his practice as the town’s barber-surgeon, whom you could go to have a haircut and get a tooth pulled), the boy taught himself music by smuggling a small and notoriously quiet keyboard instrument called a clavichord into the attic where he would sneak off to in the middle of the night while the rest of the family slept. The source of this tale was probably Handel’s friend and copyist, J.C. Smith, but since Handel had died in 1759, he was not available to corroborate one of the most persistent stories of his childhood.

Regardless, while he accompanied his father on a trip to nearby Weissenfels, the boy (between 7 and 9 years old) was noticed (somehow) by the local Duke as a promising musician: the story (another story) goes that the boy sneaked into the ducal chapel and played the pipe organ so well that said Duke recommended to the boy’s father, when he was found, his son should be given musical instruction. Thus, Händel Senior gave in and found a church organist to teach his son, in fact the only teacher Händel Junior ever had. From there, compressing time and space, he ended up in Hamburg, home of Georg Philip Telemann whom he’d met as a fellow student at the University in Halle. Initially oriented to the old-fashioned world of fugues through being a church musician, he came under the influence of Hamburg’s Italian opera house.

At some point, probably around 1708, he was invited by a member of the Medici Family of Florence to visit Italy where he learned the Italian Style first-hand and wrote several Italian operas and cantatas of his own. He went to Rome where opera was banned by the Papal States, so he wrote religious music in the Italian Style instead (ever-practical in re-inventing himself whenever needed). He had so much success in both sacred and secular styles, he was dubbed Il caro sassone (the dear Saxon) and seemed destined for an operatic career – in Italy.

Then, in 1710, he’s off to become the Court Kapellmeister (the music director) for the Prince-Elector Georg Ludwig in Hanover, and the following year has a great success with his opera, Rinaldo, which made use of several pieces he’d written in the Italian style while working in Hamburg (Handel was a regular self-plagiarizer, and a frequent plagiarizer in general whenever someone else’s idea struck his fancy). There are various opinions why Handel left a good job in Hanover: some say he wanted to study more in Italy (but he’d already done that) and since he overstayed his welcome, turning a brief “leave-of-absence” into a longer one, the Prince-Elector fired him (after all, his job was to write music for the Hanoverian Court); the more likely choice was Handel went to England, invited by the British Ambassador to Venice whom he’d met there, and when he failed to return to Hanover, the Prince-Elector fired him. Handel had been received favourably at Queen Anne’s court in London (she commissioned frequent works from him), so now he decided to stay, either unaware or oblivious to the fact the childless Queen Anne’s heir-apparent was her second cousin by way of a descendant of the first Stuart king, James I (also James VI, King of Scotland), Anne’s grandfather. This cousin happened to be Prince-Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover! – who, in 1714, now became King of Great Britain as well (he would hold both titles till his death in 1727).

So young Mr. Handel found himself in what the Brits would call a “sticky wicket.” His new boss, if he hoped for any court appointment here, was his old boss who’d fired him only a few years before. Whatever animosity might have existed, the new King, George I, requested a suite of pieces to be played at a Royal Outing which happened to take place on the River Thames on July 17th, 1717, while the Royal Barge plied it was up the Thames to Chelsea then back to London in the course of the evening, accompanied by a barge holding 50 musicians to play Handel’s music, a collection of dances forever known, for good reason, as “The Water Music.” In fact, King George enjoyed it so much, he had it played three times in all, twice up and once again back down the river. Not sure how the musicians felt, playing almost continuously from around 8pm till past midnight with only a bit of time off for the Royal Potty Break at Chelsea, but then that was long before the days of unionization.

However, there will also be no Water Music on the program, either: but it will open with the overture to his opera, Rodelinda, written in 1725.

A stately opening march with dotted rhythms “in the French style” is followed by a presto fugato (much imitative scurrying about) complete with a stately minuet to conclude. Unlike overtures we associate with 19th Century operas which either prefigure the story (think Wagner’s Flying Dutchman) or make use of major themes to whet our appetite for what we’ll hear later in the opera. Even Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro basically only sets the mood for the comedy to come. What Handel offers us is a three-part suite that gives the listener some pleasant music to enjoy while everybody finds their seats and settles down for the three-hour opera about to begin.

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And so our London Concert begins: There then follows a trio sonata by William Boyce dating from 1747; a transcription (more than a “cover,” more like “fan-fiction” riffing on a popular aria from Handel’s 1711 opera, Rinaldo, by the virtuoso harpsichordist William Babell; and, after intermission, another trio sonata by another English composer known only as “Mrs. Philharmonica” who is marked biographically as “flourishing c.1715.”

In fact that’s about all that is known biographically about Mrs. Philharmonica, if she’s mentioned at all (frankly, I’ve never heard of her before seeing this program!). While who she was remains a mystery: given the times, women were “not allowed” to pursue careers as, among many other things, musicians and writers. So they usually chose male pseudonyms: think of Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (better known as George Eliot). But in music, if a woman’s works were published, it might be like Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel who had a few songs her more famous brother Felix published under his own name. There’s a lot of controversy here, but given the nature of the program, let it suffice that when Mendelssohn played some of his songs while visiting Queen Victoria, Mendelssohn was pleased to report to his sister that the Queens favorite song of the lot had been one she had composed.

Mrs. Philharmonica published everything we know of her in 1715: a set of six trio sonatas, and a set of six divertimenti which were essentially lighter fare than the more serious trio sonata (though written for the same instruments). 1715 – a very brief career, regardless, considering Handel’s output just on this program ranged from 1711 to 1739 and he continued to compose until his death in 1759. (For those who may be chronologically challenged, Handel, a Baroque Composer, died when Mozart, a Classical Composer, was already 3 years old.)

So who was she? Was she a professional musician who dared to compose (if she was a professional composer, I hope she had a day job)? It’s unlikely a man would choose the name for a pseudonym, but then it was also frowned upon for aristocrats to publish their own works. Was it some 18th Century version of P.D.Q. Bach, an inside joke? But, as Jeffrey Grossman’s program notes tell us, “her music speaks with elegance and originality, and reminds of that London’s musical life extended beyond the big names we remember today.” And one thing that would’ve been difficult in a world interested in the latest Big Thing would’ve been “to be original,” as it almost always is in a world full of Big Names. If she were interested in making a few bucks from her music, she would’ve been better off imitating whatever was the Going Rage that season – probably Mr. Handel’s music. So, enjoy the mystery and some quiet introspection while listening to what remains of Mrs. Philharmonica, both woman and composer.

While The Sebastians will be playing the first of her trio sonatas, here's a performance, by way of sample, of an excerpt from her third:

With William Boyce, we’re on more familiar territory, biographically speaking. Almost entirely London-bound, he began his musical life as a boy chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1719 where, 60 years later, he would be buried directly under the dome. As a musician, he served as an organist and began composing in the 1730s, writing songs for some of the more popular music venues’ series of concerts, mostly light-hearted fare suitable for places officially known as “Pleasure Palaces” rather than Concert Halls. In 1747 he had published his first purely instrumental composition, a set of "Twelve Sonatas for Two Violins and a Bass" (a.k.a. Trio Sonatas) and these proved so popular, diarist Charles Burney wrote they were "not only in constant use, as Chamber music, in private concerts ... but in our theatres, as act-tunes [i.e. intermezzi] and public gardens, as favourite pieces, during many years."

He wrote tons of secular songs and religious anthems, sets of church services and other liturgical music, a slew of theatrical works including what we might call “incidental music” used between scenes and acts as necessary. Many of these were gathered together to create a series of eight symphonies in 1760, perhaps his most familiar works today. In more recent news, we heard the opening movement of his Symphony No. 1 at the conclusion of Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s wedding in 2018; and his coronation anthem, The King Shall Rejoice, written for King George III in 1761, was performed at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023.

Here is his Trio Sonata in A Minor, the first of a set of twelve published in 1747, and performed by the ensemble Orpheus musicus, a Spanish ensemble here performing in the Age of Covid, hence the masks (interestingly, the harpsichordist is named Alfonso Sebastián.)

Perhaps it’s time to mention the Curious Case of When Four Musicians Make a Trio. In the Baroque age, perhaps the most popular instrumental form was the Trio Sonata which consisted of two violins and continuo. The numerical configuration is compounded by the fact “continuo” involved two instruments, a harpsichord along with a cello to reinforce the bass-line. Hence, four! (Looking at the cover photo on the video, I’m not sure who the fifth person is; perhaps the driver of the van or the schlepper of the harpsichord?) However, things were a little flexible regarding who played what: more precisely it would’ve been two “melody” instruments, perhaps instead two flutes, or a violin and a flute; the "harmony" instrument was usually a harpsichord (or some equivalent keyboard) but in a church, they would make use of the organ; if the melody instruments were strings, then a cello played the bass-line; if winds, then a bassoon; if an organ, a double bass could replace or maybe double the cello. It’s kind of a pot-luck ensemble.

Speaking of Trio Sonatas, there’s an excerpt from one by Handel himself to open the second half of the program. Written in 1739, the set of Trio Sonatas, Op. 5, falls into an odd category that involves his publisher John Walsh and just to make it confusing for a musicological layperson like myself, there are two John Walshes, father and son. It becomes easier when dealing with Walsh’s publications of 1739 since Walsh Sr. has by now been dead three years…

It’s not a question of being unscrupulous but rather of taking advantage of a situation for commercial gain and while there is no record Handel himself objected to the practice, there is no record he was involved in the “creation” of many of his published works. It seems, since Mr. Handel was well-known for recycling much of his own music “as needed,” Walsh Sr. figured why not assemble “new pieces” out of all these wonderful bits of smaller pieces and arrange them for the domestic market? How many of Handel’s early trio sonatas, for instance, were actually written as such doesn’t matter when you consider all the music was written by Handel: Walsh was just being a little creative with arranging them with an eye to household sales. So no, unlike some less scrupulous publishers who published forgeries of famous composers’ “works,” Walsh Sr. was publishing Handel’s music, and, perhaps, as long as the composer received money from his art, why complain? After all, when Walsh Sr. died in 1733, he left behind £20-30,000 (quite a fortune); when Jr. died in 1766, the company was worth £40,000.

Walsh Jr. published a set of such trio sonatas in 1739 and, unlike some of the publications issued by his father without Handel’s direct involvement, four of these sonatas – and, oddly, there are seven of them, not the usual six – “feature” new music, so apparently Handel was more directly involved with it than in the past. Several movements were “adapted without substantial alteration” from his earlier Chandos Anthems and various sets of dance music composed for his Covent Garden operas.

Here is a “vintage” performance by The Sebastians as of 2014 at Trinity Church in New York City. If you’re wondering where the violist came from, whether the addition of the part was a performance decision (he seems to be more than doubling the continuo bass-line of the cello) or, given Mr. Walsh’s creative flexibility, perhaps he decided the more instruments, the better the profits… (Further performances on YouTube might include two violins versus a continuo including two harmony instruments, a harpsichord and a theorbo, plus cello and double bass with the viola.) Incidentally, the Sebastians’ video contains the whole Op.5 No. 4 sonata, but I’ve cued it up at the Passacaille (that is, a passacaglia) and it will continue into the subsequent two movements, a lively gigue and a stately minuet to conclude. Well worth it to take the time to start at the beginning but only the passacaglia – a set of variations over a repeating “thematic” idea in the bass – is on their Market Square Concerts program.

Of William Babell, diarist Charles Burney wrote that he “acquired great celebrity by wire-drawing the favourite songs of the opera of Rinaldo, and others of the same period, into showy and brilliant lessons” [what we would today call suites], “which by mere rapidity of finger in playing single sounds, without the assistance of taste, expression, harmony or modulation, enabled the performer to astonish ignorance, and acquire the reputation of a great player at a small expence … Mr Babel … at once gratifies idleness and vanity.” (No, Charles, what do you really think? I love that “without the assistance of taste”!)

More than just a transcription, arrangement or even a fantasia (or a “fanfiction”tasia) on Handel’s theme, this, Babell claimed, was his version of how he’d heard Handel himself improvise upon the tune. Here, Robin Bigwood plays a monster harpsichord modeled on a 1740 three-manual instrument:

(Here is a recording by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music of the original aria with soprano Luba Organasova as Armida; for another more famous aria from the same opera, here is Lascia ch’io pianga with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli).

Mr. Babell, who knew Handel well enough to claim he’d studied with him, also studied with Johann Christoph Pepusch, a Berlin-born musician who, at 14, had been appointed music teacher to the future king, Friedrich Wilhelm I, but resigned his position in 1698 after witnessing the execution without trial of an officer charged with insubordination and decided he would prefer to “put himself under the protection of a government founded on better principles.” First visiting Amsterdam, he eventually settled in England in 1704 where he made a living as a violist in the theater orchestra at Drury Lane, then becoming the orchestra’s harpsichordist. Later, he became a “music theorist” teaching theory and counterpoint, as well as an organist, and in 1713 was given a DMus degree from Oxford. A few years later, Dr. Pepusch became the music director for future Duke of Chandos who had a fine musical establishment at his home, Cannons, and composed a Magnificat and several anthems for the chapel there. Recent German ex-patriot composer George Frederick Handel was also a composer-in-residence there starting in 1717 when he began composing a set of eleven anthems.

Though primarily involved in the theater, in 1726 Pepusch founded a group of amateur and professional musicians he called the Academy of Vocal Music, renamed the Academy of Ancient Music in 1735 which remained active and popular in London until 1826 (its name, at least, resurfaced in 1973, newly re-founded by Christopher Hogwood). The ever-present Charles Burney’s opinion of Pepusch has colored his legacy, “posterity,” according to Grove’s Dictionary, looking “upon Pepusch as an academic pedant who opposed Handel’s cause in England,” especially regarding the Italian Style of his “serious operas” with their often mythologically unfathomable plots. But after Handel’s success with Rinaldo in 1725 (remember its overture, which opened the program), the Anti-Handel Faction produced an opera – or rather anti-opera – called The Beggar’s Opera, turning to another German composer, known now as John Christopher Pepusch (well, Georg Friedrich Händel had become anglicized to George Frederick Handel, after all) and asking him to arrange popular street ballads for it – not, mind, to compose original arias. Instead of gods and ancient heroes in contrived and convoluted plots sung in Italian, these were songs that the audience would likely already know and could hum along with, sung by poor people and criminals who populated a run-down part of London, lampooning the upper-class immortals of opera seria and satirizing English politics and its attitude toward poverty and justice. Initially so successful it ran for 62 performances, a record in England in its day, it's continued to be popular ever since: a 1920 revival ran for 1,463 performances (also, then, a record) and then Berthold Brecht turned it into a modern version with Kurt Weill to produce The Three-Penny Opera in 1928. (And the shark's teeth are still pearly white...)

Here is Pepusch's Overture for The Beggar's Opera performed by a group (speaking of names) calling themselves The Harmonious Society of Tickle-Fiddle Gentlemen:

Curiously, there seems to be no foundation for an intense rivalry between Handel and Pepusch, though the popularity of The Beggar’s Opera did manage to ruin a few seasons of his trying to get new operas performed by the Royal Academy, London’s principal opera house. Pepusch still subscribed to (that is, became a financial supporter) several new Handel operas after 1728 and continued to arrange for performances of Handel’s music by his own Academy of Ancient Music.

For Pepusch, though, The Beggar’s Opera did not open a whole new career. If anything, it prompted him to retire from composing altogether, and, as if expiating for his sins of vulgar popularity, dedicate himself to his theoretical studies and writings until he died in 1752.

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Perhaps the Anti-Handel Faction behind The Beggar’s Opera was activated by Handel’s having officially become a naturalized British subject in 1727, making him now eligible to be appointed as Composer for the Chapel Royal. In June, the king, while on a visit to his home in Hanover – he was still the Prince-Elector there – suffered a stroke while traveling in a carriage and died there two days later. His son became George II amidst much political turmoil in England – he and his father had always been at odds about many issues – and for his coronation in October, Handel composed the coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest which has been sung prior to the anointing of the sovereign at the coronation of every British monarch since its composition (if you have 5 minutes, listen to it as it was performed at Westminster Abbey in a more recent coronation, that of King Charles III in May, 2023.)

Whether one could say London society was xenophobic or not – George I, who never learned to speak English, was never popular in England – it didn’t seem to mind the presence of composers who were German like Handel and Pepusch. And while English-born composers like Boyce were active and frequently performed, no one else on a list of some 50 such composers have survived the test of time to challenge Handel for his supremacy as a leading “English” composer. It has often been pointed out, even with names like Elgar and Vaughan Williams, the first English composer to achieve anything akin to international fame since Henry Purcell (who died in 1695) was Benjamin Britten whose career took off with the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945 and continued up until his death in 1976!

Other composers popular in London then included several Italians – why should Germans have all the fun? Pietro Castrucci, born in Rome, was a violinist who studied with the great Arcangelo Corelli, usually regarded as the finest violinist of the day who also composed some of the most influential sonatas and concertos of the early-1700s. Castrucci settled in London in 1715, two years after Corelli’s death, and there became the concertmaster of Handel’s opera company’s orchestra. It seems whenever Handel had an opera company – and he made and lost several fortunes in the opera business during his career – Castrucci remained his concertmaster until 1737. Like most virtuosos of the time, much like his master, Corelli, he also composed, and our program offers a Sonata for Violin & Continuo published in 1718. In 1739, the now aged Castrucci became one of the first beneficiaries of the Royal Society of Musicians’ “Fund for Decay'd Musicians” (ouch) which included names like Edward Purcell (eldest son of Henry Purcell), Thomas Arne (composer of the popular song, Rule Britannia), Boyce, Pepusch, and Handel among its original signatories. By the way, Castrucci died erroneously in 1746 but then officially in 1752 in Dublin, a pauper but buried with full ceremony.

Francesco Geminiani had enough of a pedigree, studying with both Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti, two of Italy’s leading musicians, that when he traveled to London in 1714, he was already acclaimed as a virtuoso. When he performed some of his concertos before King George I the following season, the harpsichordist for the occasion was none other than the likewise recently arrived George Frederick Handel. He adapted many of Corelli’s trio and solo sonatas as concertos – the concerto grosso with a small group of soloists and a larger group as the orchestra (Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are famous examples of the format) – and of his own such concertos and sonatas, a set of 6 for cello and continuo, were published while he was visiting Paris in 1746. He was called by no less a violinist than Giuseppe Tartini (he of The Devil’s Trill fame) Il furibondo (the Madman) “because of his expressive rhythms” and is best remembered for bringing “drama and lyricism to English chamber music.”

And perhaps a madman is sufficient transition to the concluding work on the program, Antonio Vivaldi’s Sonata Op. 1, No. 12, based on a popular dance all the rage in Europe, La folia. Over the years, some 150 composers wrote their own versions on the bass-line known as La folia, like Lully, Corelli, Geminiani, even Handel himself; even Bach used it in his Peasant Cantata. One of Antonio Salieri’s last works was a set of 26 variations on it for orchestra, one of his few solely instrumental works, and generally considered one of his best. Franz Liszt quoted it; Rachmaninoff wrote a set of variations on Corelli’s version of it. And so on.

Vivaldi was the famous “Red Priest” from Venice, a violinist and composer who, though a red-haired priest (and red-hair in Italy was considered a bad sign) with poor health, he left us a great deal of music, much of it written for the girls of the orphanage where he spent most of his career teaching. These days, it’s difficult to escape, if nothing else, his Four Seasons. His first collection of published works, a set of a dozen trio sonatas, appeared in Venice in 1705 and concluded with not the usual multi-movement suite-like form but a continuous set of variations on the Folia (or, as it’s sometimes spelled, Follia) bass-line.

So even though Vivaldi never made it to London (he did, however, die in Vienna where he was hoping to find a job), we bring the concert – and this post – to a conclusion with The Sebastians’ performance of Vivaldi’s La Folia.

– Dick Strawser