 | ||
| Jason Vieaux & Julien Labro [photo credit: Ken Blaze] |
Now that the 4th of July Holiday is past and the year 2023 is half past, July 7th is not only the 163rd birthday of composer Gustav Mahler and the international celebration of World Chocolate Day, it is also the first of three concerts for Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2023, this Friday at St. Michael Lutheran Church at 118 State Street starting at 7:30 with a varied program by Grammy-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux and Julien Labro playing the bandoneón.
(Subsequent concerts will be held on Wednesday July 12th at Market Square Presbyterian Church with cellist Nickolas Canellakis and pianist Michael Brown and the following Wednesday July 19th at Temple Ohev Sholom at Front & Seneca Streets with the Escher Quartet. See below.)
This first concert's program includes several works by Astor Piazzolla including his complete Histoire du Tango on the installment plan, plus his “Escualo” and “Libertango” as arranged by Julien Labro.
Given it's summertime and we're hearing more about shark-attacks in the news as we head to the beaches for holiday getaways, here is a tango by Piazzolla inspired by a fishing trip off the coast of Uruguay when he caught a shark known locally as escualo. Written in 1978 for the violinist in his Quintet, Piazzolla supposedly put the music on the violinist's stand and said, “Let’s see if you can play this!” Here it is, played by both Jason Vieaux and Julien Labro.
(incidentally, in this performance, Julien Labro is playing a button-keyboard accordion - see below)
“Libertango” is a portmanteau title from Libertad (the Spanish word for “liberty”) and tango. It was written in 1974, and symbolizes the break from the traditional tango of Argentina Piazzolla had grown up with into what he now called “nuevo tango” or “new tango.” This performance features the composer playing the bandoneón with his Quintet in Barcelona in 1985.
Which would logically bring us to Piazzolla's capsulized history of the tango with four stops on the time-line between 1930 and the “Present Day” when he composed it in the mid-1980s:
Here are Jason Vieaux and Julien Labro playing “Nightclub 1960” & “Concert d'Aujourd'hui,” the last two movements from Piazzolla's Histoire du Tango (after 9:15, if you can stick around, they offer an encore with “Everybody wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears). This was recorded in 2012.
What more does one need to say about the piece that can't be said by quoting the composer's own program notes, here used in the liner notes of a 2009 recording of the original version for flute and guitar, as culled from the wilds of Wikipedia:
Bordello, 1900: The tango originated in Buenos Aires in 1882. It was first played on the guitar and flute. Arrangements then came to include the piano, and later, the concertina. This music is full of grace and liveliness. It paints a picture of the good natured chatter of the French, Italian, and Spanish women who peopled those bordellos as they teased the policemen, thieves, sailors, and riffraff who came to see them. This is a high-spirited tango.
Cafe, 1930: This is another age of the tango. People stopped dancing it as they did in 1900, preferring instead simply to listen to it. It became more musical, and more romantic. This tango has undergone total transformation: the movements are slower, with new and often melancholy harmonies. Tango orchestras come to consist of two violins, two concertinas, a piano, and a bass. The tango is sometimes sung as well.
Night Club, 1960: This is a time of rapidly expanding international exchange, and the tango evolves again as Brazil and Argentina come together in Buenos Aires. The bossa nova and the new tango are moving to the same beat. Audiences rush to the night clubs to listen earnestly to the new tango. This marks a revolution and a profound alteration in some of the original tango forms.
Modern-Day Concert: Certain concepts in tango music become intertwined with modern music. Bartok, Stravinsky, and other composers reminisce to the tune of tango music. This [is] today’s tango, and the tango of the future as well.
Julien Labro, in addition to arranging some of the works on the program, offers two of his own compositions: a movement from “Canvas,” a Double Concerto for Bandoneón and Guitar, premiered in 2019, plus a song called “Janzie.” And he can give you much more insight into his own music at the performance.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
While Johann Sebastian Bach will not be at the performance to introduce transcriptions of two of his works, neither of which really need any introduction (one of then, after all, is the famous “Sheep May Safely Graze”), there are also two songs by American jazz musician Pat Metheny whose “Dream Box Tour” is taking them across Denmark and France as we speak before they arrive in York PA in mid-September. So I'll leave you with this video from a live concert by the Pat Metheny Group performing “Antonia,” posted in 2008.
Well, okay – one more. Since we think, these days, that Bach's “Sheep May Safely Graze” is one of those Old Chestnuts everybody knows and loves, we assume people have always known and loved it, even in Bach's own day, but that's not always the case. The Cantata, “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” may be one of his most popular and frequently performed cantatas today, but he wrote it for a specific church service in Leipzig in November of 1731, the 27th Sunday after Trinity. The prescribed readings for the day included Jesus' “Parable of the Ten Virgins,” so the chorale he used as a basis for his cantata du jour was a (then) well-known setting by Phillip Nikolai written in 1599.
This “27th Sunday after Trinity” is a church date that occurs only in those years when Easter falls early. While it occurred only once more during Bach's tenure in Leipzig, in 1742, that 1731 performance was the only time Bach's cantata was ever performed in his lifetime! However, Bach later took the now familiar central movement of the cantata, the one we know as “Sheep May Safely Graze,” and arranged it for organ as the first of six chorale preludes published in the late-1740s. The catalogue number assigned to that is BWV.645 (the complete cantata, however, is BWV.140). Here is the original setting from the Cantata. That beautiful, ornate, lilting melody in the violins actually turns out to be an “accompaniment” to Nikolai's chorale tune itself, sung eventually by the tenors.
(This is the Netherlands Bach Society; the movement ends at 19:37.)
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
All well and good, but that doesn't answer a question many American music-lovers may ask when seeing information about this concert: “what is a bandoneón?” Many might assume it's an accordion but technically it's another member of the family of instruments that also includes the more familiar accordion. And no, not all squeeze-boxes are alike...
 |
| Astor Piazzolla playing a bandoneón |
 | ||
| Someone not Astor Piazzolla playing an accordion |
Few Americans would have a problem picking a guitar out of an Instrumental Line-Up, due to its being one of those popular “social instruments” that long ago replaced the piano when every home – well, many homes – had some form of a piano in their parlor (a grand piano, an upright piano, a smaller spinet piano, going way back to a harpsichord or even, in the waaaay old days, something called a clavichord which was basically a table-top instrument. But the guitar is also a member of a much larger family that includes, among others, the banjo, the ukulele, the Spanish vihuela, the Renaissance lute (let's not forget the gittern) or that two-storey thing called a theorbo Paul Morton played at one of last year's Summermusic programs that looked like a giraffe-sized version of a lute. They're all related to what we call “the classical guitar” but which are not in themselves “guitars.”
The same with the bandoneón and the accordion. Essentially, they're both examples of a bellows-driven free-reed aerophone producing its sound as air flows past a reed set in an interior frame. While there were accordions being made in Russia in 1830, where it became a folk-music feature, apparently the instrument was invented in Berlin in 1822 or before. The fact an earlier similar instrument has been found (Wikipedia, alas, does not say where), there's always the argument the idea for the accordion evolved serendipitously if not simultaneously in different locations.
That's also true of the concertina, a precursor of both the accordion and the bandoneón. An earlier version was invented by Charles Wheatstone in England in 1829 (he also invented the stereoscope, was involved in the development of telegraphy and what later became “encryption technology”), five years before it was also invented in Germany by luthier Carl Friedrich Uhling.
We think of the bandoneón as Argentinian, particularly through its association with Astor Piazzolla and his music, but it was invented in Germany by a man named Heinrich Band who died in 1860, hence – like Adolphe Sax inventing the saxophone – it was named after its creator, becoming the bandoneón. By 1870, German immigrants had taken this instrument with them to Argentina where it became so popular, German manufacturers eventually were sending 30,000 bandoneóns to Argentina in 1930 alone. It quickly became involved in what was then a new dance craze called the Tango (which in turn originated in the earlier dance called the milonga, which someone once described as “an excited habañera,” itself an off-shot of the Spanish version of a traditional European contradanse. (As often happens in music, everything is relative, if not exactly related.) Once Piazzolla brought the Argentine tango to the world, suddenly people started realizing “that cute little accordion” he was playing brought with it a world of its own.
 |
| The bandoneón's buttons |
Okay, many of these buttons will produce two different pitches: when “opening” the bellows (pulling out), you'll get, say, a G in an upper octave, but when “closing” the bellows (pushing in), that same key will produce an A-flat a half-step above; but two keys away, you'll get a higher-octave G “in” but a G-flat a half-step below “out”! And yet another key might produce a C “out” and an F a fourth above “in” while the key next to it produces a D-flat “out” but an A-flat a fourth below “in”...! As a pianist, I have to admit my brain hurts just looking at this illustration...
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Stay tuned for two more Summermusic 2023 programs. Next week, on Wednesday, July 12th, at Market Square Presbyterian Church, cellist Nickolas Canellakis and pianist Michael Brown return to Market Square Concerts with a program including works by Debussy, Grieg, Clara Schumann, and Alberto Ginastera with some of their own compositions and arrangements. The follow Wednesday, July 19th, the Escher Quartet returns to Temple Ohev Sholom with Haydn's Quartet Op. 71 No. 2, Bartók's 4th Quartet and Schubert's Death & the Maiden Quartet. Both concerts begin at 7:30 and tickets will be available at the door. Single tickets are $35, seniors $30, with college students $5; and K-12 students can get free admission when an accompanying adult buys a $10 ticket.
– Dick Strawser
No comments:
Post a Comment