The blogger in me sees this as a program all about “identity.”
Rather than follow program order, let's begin with the little-known Cello Sonata by Edvard Grieg. We mostly think of Grieg as a composer of “charming” miniatures, ranging from his beloved Peer Gynt Suite (mostly the first one) to various Norwegian Dances, picturesque images of country life. And while it's true he didn't write a lot of “large-scale multi-movement works” that were what proved most 19th Century composers' worth on the concert stages of Europe, he did write a famous and often-played Piano Concerto when he was in his mid-20s – its premiere in Leipzig put both him and Norway on the musical map – and while the Piano Sonata is both charming and overlooked (he wrote it when he was 22), there are three violin sonatas of which the third, written in 1886, sometimes shows up on American programs. And there is the A Minor Cello Sonata, completed three years earlier when he had turned 40. There were also to be three string quartets, but the first was lost and the third was incomplete when he died in 1907. Of the one that made it to the publisher in 1878, Grieg wrote to a friend it was “not intended to bring trivialities to market,” a sarcastic comment on what he knew was the bread-and-butter of his fame: the miniatures he was best known for already, incidental music to plays like Ibsen's Peer Gynt (a work he loathed while composing it), even though most of his collections of Norwegian dances were still in the future and the first concert suite of four pieces from Peer Gynt wasn't published until ten years later, soon making him internationally recognized as the most popular (and therefore, in the public's eyes, the greatest) Norwegian composer ever...
In the midst of this, he composed his Cello Sonata. His brother John (named after their Norwegian-born grandfather and their Scottish great-great-grandfather) was three years older and an amateur cellist. Whether that was the reason Edvard wrote the sonata or not, he did dedicate it to him. Grieg was the pianist in its premiere performance in Dresden (the cellist was Freidrich Grützmacher, one of the leading German cellists of the day) and he played it again in his last public appearance in 1906 with a then rising star named Pablo Casals. (Considering Grieg had already made some 78rpm gramophone recordings playing some of his dances in 1903, imagine if this 1906 performance could've been recorded as well!)
It's in three movements with a lyrical slow movement between two large and rather dramatic outer movements, the first an all-out “Sonata Form” – for which sonatas were called Sonatas (it also usually appears as the first movements of other large-scale multi-movement works from String Quartets to Symphonies and Concertos) – and the last based on a rather simplistic folksy tune that immediately says “Norwegian!” just as Dvořák's dance-like tunes (even in his New World Symphony) underscored his Bohemian origins.
The lyrical contrasting second theme of this opening movement sounds like a new movement, an embedded slower romantic miniature of its own, but it really is one of Grieg's most frequent tricks, creating contrast by merely taking the first theme (as he does in most of his miniature dances) and playing it with only slight differences but in the completely opposite tempo. Even though the tempo doesn't literally change, he marks it tranquillo and doubles the note-values so it sounds or at least feels slower, compared to the tempestuous opening (marked agitato). But complete with a development section and a recapitulation, it's still a genuine Sonata-Form movement, not a string of miniatures strung together to give the impression of length. It's actually a more organic structure than most people would've given Grieg credit for.
Curiously, the slow movement uses Grieg's own “Homage March” from his 1874 incidental music for a play based on the 12th Century Norwegian king, Sigurd Jorsalfar (some sites translate it as a Wedding March). In its original context, the theme was to be played by four cellos. Whatever associations it had for the Grieg Brothers – perhaps they would've played it together at Family Musicales? – there is no known outward program behind the music, just an abstract work with a dramatic first movement, a lyrical slow movement, and a lively finale, not dissimilar from the formula Beethoven or Brahms would've used. But no one could listen to this music and think it was by a German composer!
Here's a performance with cellist Natalia Gutman and pianist Viacheslav Poprugin:
If you're interested in following the score, you can view this You-Tube Video with Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk.
Incidentally, anyone thinking this shows the influence of Johannes Brahms, keep in mind his 2nd Cello Sonata was written three years later, in 1886.
We don't get many descriptive accounts of a composer except from musicologists and maybe letters of friends. Here's an interesting observation of one composer by another from a day when three of the greatest names in late-19th Century Classical Music met for the first time at the home of a mutual friend when they all happened to be in Leipzig: it was New Year's Day, 1888, and, during a rehearsal of a new piano trio by Johannes Brahms, Tchaikovsky looked up and wondered who this was:
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| Grieg in 1888 (sans beard) |
I was overjoyed when it turned out, as we were introduced to one another, that this person, whose appearance had inexplicably elicited my sympathy from the very start, was a musician whose deeply felt melodies had won my heart long ago. This was Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer, who for some fifteen years now [has been] generally very highly esteemed and renowned. I think I am not mistaken if I say that to the same extent as Brahms, perhaps undeservedly and unfairly, is unpopular with Russian musicians and the Russian public, Grieg managed to win the hearts of Russians once and for all. In his music, which is suffused with an enchanting melancholy and reflects the beauty of the Norwegian landscape—sometimes majestically broad and grandiose, sometimes drab, modest, and forlorn, but always indescribably captivating for the soul of a northerner—there is something close and familiar to us, something which immediately finds an ardent and sympathetic echo in our hearts.
It may well be that Grieg does possess far less mastery than Brahms, that the tone of his music is less elevated, his aims and aspirations not so ambitious—and one thing that is certain is that he does not seem to have any pretensions to depth whatsoever—but on the other hand he is closer to us, he is more understandable and congenial, precisely because he is profoundly human. When listening to Grieg, we sense instinctively that this music was written by someone who was driven by an irresistible impulse to pour out in sounds the surge of emotions and moods swelling up in his profoundly poetic nature, which is not in thrall to any theory, principle, or banner that others might nail to their mast as a result of these or those fortuitous circumstances, but which obeys, rather, the vital force of sincere artistic feeling.
As for perfection of form, strictness and faultless logic in the elaboration of his themes (which, by the way, are always fresh, new, and stamped with the characteristic traits of Germano-Scandinavian nationality), let us not insist on looking for these in the famous Norwegian's music. But to make up for that, what charm it has, what spontaneity and richness of musical invention! How much warmth and passion there is in his singable phrases, how much spouting vitality in his harmony, how much originality and enchanting peculiarity in his witty, poignant modulations and in his rhythm, which, like everything else about his music, is always interesting, novel, and distinctive! If in addition to all these rare qualities we also take into account his utter simplicity, which is free from any affectation and pretensions to come across as fantastically profound and new (in contrast to many contemporary composers, including Russian ones, who suffer from an unhealthy striving to open up new paths, even though they do not have the slightest vocation or innate gift for such a task), then it is not surprising why everyone loves Grieg, why he is popular everywhere and his name appears continually on concert programmes not just in Germany and Scandinavia, but also in Paris, London, Moscow, and wherever you care to name. Foreigners who visit Bergen in Norway consider it a pleasant duty to take a look, even if only from afar, at the charming haven surrounded by rocks on the sea-coast where Grieg retires to work and where indeed he spends most of his life.” – from Tchaikovsky's Autobiographical Account of a Tour Abroad in 1888.
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Claude Debussy was another composer not usually associated with the classical rigors of especially German things like fugues and sonatas. After his String Quartet of 1893 (he was 31), he wrote no more chamber music after that, aside from the rather curious incidents of the two Rhapsodies, one for saxophone and piano begun in 1901 but not completed until 1911, and the second, called the First Rhapsody for clarinet and piano in 1910. At least until 1914 when, after Debussy mentioned feeling inspired by a performance of Camille Saint-Saëns' Septet (with trumpet), his publisher suggested he write a series of chamber works inspired by 18th Century French composers like Couperin and Rameau. (Keep in mind, Ravel was working on a piano suite with a similar frame which became his Tombeau de Couperin, begun at the same time but not completed until 1918.) And so, as World War I began, Debussy mapped out a project for Six Sonatas for Various Instruments and identified himself on the manuscript's title page as “Claude Debussy, musicien Français.”
The first would be a Cello Sonata followed by one for Flute, Viola, and Harp, and then a Violin Sonata. The second would be balanced by one for oboe, horn, and harpsichord, and the next for clarinet, trumpet, bassoon, and piano. The last one would essentially be for chamber orchestra, combining all the instruments of the previous five sonatas along with a double bass.
Alas, the Violin Sonata, written in 1917, was to be Debussy's last completed work. Cancer ended his life in March, 1918, during the German bombardment of Paris. He was 55.
– (with cellist Maurice Gendron and composer Jean Françaix at the piano, recorded in 1964.)
Working on his opera, Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy was exasperated by someone who asked him to write a piece he could perform in two months, complaining to a friend how it often took him that long to decide between this chord or that chord. By comparison, he wrote the cello sonata, brief as it is, in a few weeks in July, 1915, while vacationing in a seaside town in Normandy.
Though it takes barely 11-12 minutes to perform, its three movements are a neo-classic compression of a much more substantial structure, something a listener, hearing it for the first time after being familiar with lush, expansive works like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, La Mer and Pelleas et Melisande might find surprising and certainly unexpected. But Debussy was now in his early-50s and ripe for the kind of “Third Period” style-change you can definitely hear in the Etudes for piano also written in 1915 (compared to some of the impressionist imagery of many of the Preludes written only a few years earlier). Here, the imagery suggested by picturesque titles is replaced by technical concerns for the pianist studying the skills necessary to play “thirds” or “octaves,” “repeated notes” or “composite arpeggios.” While the quirkiness of the Cello Sonata's frequent changes of tempo might suggest a caricature not unlike the Preludes' Général Lavine – eccentric (a cakewalk) and “The Interrupted Serenade,” another cellist heard in the new sonata a portrait of Pierrot, the classic clown of the Commedia del'Arte, complete with a serenade to the moon and, when the moon remained unresponsive, Pierrot consoling himself with a “song of liberty” (?!?) – even suggesting Debussy call it Pierrot Angry at the Moon. Debussy confirmed in a letter to his publisher how the cellist had visited him and seemed to have misunderstood both him and his music. (Sacré blue...!)
Rather than following the standard Germanic Sonata-form outline – a statement of two contrasting themes, development, and recapitulation – Debussy chose to find inspiration in the 18th Century “sonatas” of François Couperin, keeping in mind “sonata,” after all, originally meant in 17th Century Italian “to sound” as in playing an instrument, compared to “cantata” which meant “to sing.” In his own way, this was how Debussy chose to confirm himself as a French Musician.
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Which brings us to the third piece on the program, a Rhapsody for Cello and Piano which composer Alberto Ginastera called “Pampeana No. 2, Op. 21,” composed in 1950.
While a “pampeana” isn't a
form like a sonata or rondo or even a rhapsody, this particular work
isn't really rhapsodic in the way it's structured, not as
loose as "rhapsody" would imply. The cello plays occasional cadenza-like,
sometimes solo, sometimes accompanied by chords as a bard might
punctuate the introduction to his poem on the lyre, which then break
into intense rhythmic dances, typical of the foot-stomping folk
dances of Argentina's gauchos which formed such a part of Ginastera's
musical language even before he wrote his 1941 ballet Estancia
with its famous “Malambo” (arguably
Ginastera's Greatest Hit). But the middle section is a
mysterious incantation over slowly pulsating chords that eventually
returns to the first dance before building to a climactic conclusion.
So really it's no different than a standard A-B-A form
(fast-slow-fast with a contrasting middle section) most European composers had been using for centuries.
(cellist Gabriel Martins and pianist Valeria Resjan recorded in 2018) If you wish to follow the score, check out this performance.
By now, you've probably figured out “Pampeana” is not a form or even the name of a dance but evocative of a famous region of Argentina comparable to the United States' “Old West” with gauchos instead of cowboys. Welcome to the Pampas!
You'd assume, if there's a “Pampeana No. 2,” there must be a “Pampeana No. 1.” It's for violin and piano, written in 1947. In between, he composed his String Quartet No. 1 which he considered a kind of watershed piece on his way to a new creative style that combined his original folk-influenced style he now called “objective nationalism” with what he was experiencing in standard European classical music, now that he was receiving international recognition, a style he called “subjective nationalism.” This became a Classical Style but with a musical accent that could only be Latin American, not European, and specifically Argentine. It was essentially what Grieg had done, marrying German romanticism and standard forms with his natural Norwegian accent and which Bela Bartók had done starting in 1907 with his 1st String Quartet, initially quoting authentic Hungarian folk songs (not the Gypsy songs which most people then considered folk music – it's more “urban pop,” by today's terms), before deciding to create his own melodies based on the characteristics of folk song in works like his 4th Quartet – which the Escher Quartet will play in the third and final Summermusic concert next Wednesday night at Temple Ohev Shalom, by the way – something he called “imaginary folk music.”
In a sense, given the popularity in the 19th Century of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies which were actually based on Gypsy tunes, this is essentially Ginastera's entry to create a viable but diverse sound to identify his own nationality.
Curiously, this path was not quite the one chosen by a young composer who'd studied with Ginastera in 1941. This student had aspirations to become a serious creator of classical European-style concert music who wanted to write symphonies but instead ended up turning Argentine pop-music into an unmistakable language of his own: and that's how Astor Piazzolla conquered the world.
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With this theme of national identity and the influence of folk music around the world, let's jump ahead to the last work on the program, even though Don Ellis grew up in Minneapolis where his father was a minister and his mother the church organist, pretty far removed from the complex rhythms of the Balkans. It's not Ellis' concern to reinforce his own ethnic heritage as it was for Grieg, Dvořák, Bartók or Ginastera: as a jazz musician, he took an interest in ethnomusicology, studying Indian classical music which had, in the mid-'60s, become so trendy with the Beatles' introduction of Ravi Shankar to American rock-n-roll lovers. Ellis had already become acquainted with East European folk music, particularly Greece and the Balkans, after playing at a jazz festival in Poland in 1962, and while he enjoyed a cross-over success with conductors like Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ellis started using complex meters like 5/4, 7/8, and 9/4, uncommon in jazz – think of the success Dave Brubeck had with his “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo á la Turk” back in 1959 – before he branched out into more complex rhythms like 19/8 and 27/16. Then, in his 1971 album “Tears of Joy,” he introduced his brain-defying "Bulgarian Bulge", based on a Bulgarian folk tune in 33/16 time!
While some us may have trouble subdividing 5/4 into (2+3) – think Tchaikovsky's odd 2nd movement “waltz” in his 6th Symphony – musician Todor Tsachev, who played with Ellis' Bulgarian-born pianist, Milcho Leviev, mentions in the video's comments, “As Bulgarian I'm hearing a mix of three authentic Bulgarian folklore dances - Buchimish (15/16 - 2+2+2+2+3+2+2), Daichovo (9/16 - 2+2+2+3) and Grancharsko (9/16 – 2+3+2+2).” Add them all together and you get (15+9+9) or 33/16 (or, if you want to double the 16th notes to become 8th notes, 33/8). And then you just subdivide them accordingly – easy! – counting a rapid-fire
(2+2+2+2+3+2+2)+(2+2+2+3)+(2+3+2+2)
Or, as I will do, you can just sit back and enjoy Nick and Michael doing the counting for you.
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Officially, Clara Schumann was Clara Wieck when she composed her Piano Concerto. She was 16 by the time she finished it with a little help on the orchestration from one of her father's students, a young man named Robert Schumann you might've heard of. She was being groomed to become one of the greatest pianists of the day and that much did come true; the fact that she also composed was part and parcel of being a typical concert virtuoso in the Age of Romanticism when performers were expected to write their own music. Perhaps the main reason Clara Wieck-Schumann didn't become a recognized composer as well had more to do with her eight children whom she had to raise on her own after her husband attempted to commit suicide and eventually died in an asylum. However, all that is well into her future: listen to this beautiful slow movement and try not to think of the “what if,” here.
The 2nd movement is essentially an extended duet for the soloist and the principal cellist. (The finale begins at 11:30.)
If the style reminds you of Chopin, he wrote his concertos in 1829 and 1830 but this was essentially the “style of the day,” influenced by Bellini's bel canto operatic style which several other once well-known but now forgotten virtuosos of the day would've also been inspired by and whose music Clara would've been well acquainted with. And yes, Johannes Brahms also wrote a piano concerto whose slow movement has a prominent cello solo accompanied by the piano soloist. It had never occurred to me before that perhaps Brahms did that as an homage to his friend Clara Schumann in 1880 or so (she was by then in her early-60s) (yes, they were friends – okay, well, how close were they? – none of your business...).
Speaking of identity, as I mentioned with Alberto Ginastera's student Astor Piazzolla in the post for last Friday's concert, George Gershwin would fit into the category of “cross-over artist” who became one of the most celebrated American composers after starting as a song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley before becoming a musical sensation both here and in Europe with concert works like the Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F, and American in Paris. He was a friend of Ravel and a tennis partner of Arnold Schoenberg's.
Gershwin was planning on writing 24 preludes – just like Chopin – one in each key, and each infused with a different dance style akin to that favorite American cliché, the Great Melting Pot. As it turned out, he published only three, alas – there were a few others but they ended up on the cutting room floor: the first in B-flat, inspired by the rhythms of a Brazilian dance with a lot of flat-7th chords typical of jazz but not, at the time, of good old-fashioned classical music; the Prelude in C-sharp Minor was “a blues lullaby”; and the lively Prelude in E-flat Minor he described as “Spanish.”
Imagine if – the ever-present “what if...?” – Gershwin had written and published 21 more preludes?!
While we'll hear Nick Canellakis' own arrangement of them Wednesday night, here's a piano-roll recording made by Gershwin himself in 1928.
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While I've spoken a lot about influences on some of the composers you've been listening to over the years, my first introduction to Michael Brown was as a teenager on NPR's “From the Top,” playing some piano pieces by a composer whose reputation as a gnarly theorist of serial music in the late-20th Century made his music seem even more formidable. But when I heard Michael play three of Perle's “Celebratory Inventions,” I couldn't imagine why anyone would think this was “difficult to listen to” until I realized that any other performances I've heard of Perle's music were played by very good musicians who still were so busy trying to play the right notes at the right time, they forgot that when you connect these notes they're supposed to make music and not sound like a New York Times crossword puzzle. Here was a kid playing them with the lightness of touch and complete lack of fear that made them sound as innocent and delightful as Mendelssohn. Here he is, a couple years later in 2009, playing all Six Celebratory Inventions by George Perle at a Cleveland recital.
Now a composer on his own standing, he's received frequent commissions, and has played his Piano Concerto with several orchestras across the United States and in Poland. In 2014, he wrote this “Prelude & Dance” for friend and colleague Nicholas Canellakis, then revised in 2017 which they'll be playing on Wednesday's concert. Here's their performance from a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert in late-2017:
The question of identity, here, may be one of the tag, “composer/performer,” something, as I said about Clara Schumann, that was standard in the 19th Century, but rare today. How do you have a busy performing career and still find time to compose? (What of those who also have teaching schedules to contend with, as well? For that matter, what about women who combine any or all of that with the role of being a wife and mother today? But that's a topic for another 25,000-word post...) It is not a question of choosing “either/or,” but somehow finding a way of maintaining “both.”
– Dick Strawser
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