Summermusic #3: A String Quintet by a Russian Romantic

Glazunov at 21

This evening, the Strings of Summermusic 2013 will perform three works - a duo by Maurice Ravel, a trio by Antonin Dvořák and a quintet by Alexander Glazunov - at the Civic Club on Front Street in Harrisburg. The concert time is earlier than usual - 6:00 - so be aware of that.

(You can read about Maurice Ravel's Sonata for Violin & Cello, here.)

For those unfamiliar with the Civic House, it's a new venue for Market Square Concerts and the room has a great view over the Susquehanna River toward the West Shore. It's the only building on the river-side of Front Street, by the way, and it's between the Harvey Taylor Bridge and State Street (don't forget, you can't make a left turn onto Front Street from Forester!!! You'll need to turn up 2nd Street and then take the first available left to reach Front Street). As for parking, it's minimal at the building itself though people do park on the grass in the park just south of the Civic Club's brownstone walls, but you can also park on State Street which is just around the corner on the right.

Here's a short video of the ensemble rehearsing the Glazunov Quintet with violinists Peter Sirotin and Nicole Sharlow, violist Michael Stepniak and cellists Fiona Thompson and Nadine Trudel.

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Alexander Glazunov may not be a very well known or highly respected composer today, not like his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov or his student Dmitri Shostakovich. Unfortunately, he is more remembered as the alcoholic conductor who ruined the premiere of Rachmaninoff's 1st Symphony and as an old-fashioned past-his-prime relic who ran the St. Petersburg Conservatory in the years around the Bolshevik Revolution before falling out of favor with the new Soviet ethic.

Glazunov & Rimsky-Korsakov

Yet in Russia in his youth, he was regarded as a major composer, a prodigy who'd written his first symphony when he was 16, the darling of the nationalists until he became too much a cosmopolitan academic. Today, his ballet “The Seasons” survives in a dance world starved for works from the Golden Age of the Russian Imperial Ballet, his Violin Concerto (once very popular) is still occasionally heard in the concert hall, and saxophonists play his concerto simply because there's not much else to play, is there? In this country, few if any of his symphonies and little of his chamber music ever get dusted off.

Again with the usual caveat of finding reasonably good performances with decent recordings and half-way acceptable sound on You-Tube, here's the String Quintet in A Major, Op. 39 by Alexander Glazunov: recorded on August 20th, 2011 in Chandler Hall. Randolph, Vermont, as part of the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival – with violinists Arturo Delmoni and Cyrus Beroukhim; violist Michael Roth; and cellists Peter Sanders and Allistair MacRae.

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1st Movement

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

4th Movement

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Glazunov's style is usually regarded as a mix of his mentors' folk-song-inspired nationalism with a dash of the romantic aura of Orientalism (most famous in Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherezade) combined with the cosmopolitan absorption of Western European elements also heard in Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky that in itself was a kind of mash-up of Liszt on the one hand and Mendelssohn on the other.

In one of those impossible comparisons everyone likes to make about something you may not know in terms of something you might, he's often referred to as “The Russian Mendelssohn” which is partly true in his coming from a well-to-do family and also in being precocious and that his style is a mixture of various, often conflicting influences – the stylistic dialectic of Nationalist Romanticism on the one hand combined with a sense of the European Classical Past on the other, hoping to find some common ground. Otherwise, it's basically like saying Glazunov “tastes like chicken,” but it's not a bad place to start.

And if this piece might compare to anything, it might be to much of the chamber music Mendelssohn composed (always excepting the Octet which is incomparable). It might never stand up to the Schubert Quintet as a masterpiece - but then, what can?

When Glazunov wrote his String Quintet, he was in his mid-20s and in between writing the 3rd and 4th of his eight symphonies as well as the 3rd and 4th of his seven string quartets.

Glazunov in 1895

1892 was a productive year: in addition to the String Quintet, he composed his Carnaval Overture for large orchestra and organ, a brass quartet called In modo religioso, a number of waltzes and salon pieces as well as the bombastic Triumphal March composed for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago (its use of The Battle Hymn of the Republic especially at the end should please lovers of the 1812 Overture who might be looking for suitable American-inspired fireworks music for the 4th of July). One critic thought this Triumphal March sounded a bit more British than American (I hear lots of Wagner, myself), yet in 1892, who in the United States even knew what American music sounded like?


If you're not familiar with Glazunov's music, take a few minutes at least to sample these more representative pieces:
- his 1st Symphony (1881)
- the Violin Concerto (1904)
- his 2nd Piano Concerto (1917)
- the Saxophone Concerto (1934) 

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Glazunov composed with legendary facility and his music was generally greeted without much concern or controversy (beyond the initial debut when people refused to believe a 16-year-old could write a symphony like that and accused his well-to-do parents of paying someone to write it for him).

But around the time he turned 40, this ease came to a grinding halt. Part of this may have been the responsibilities of taking over the St. Petersburg Conservatory from his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov in 1905 after he ran afoul of government during the political upheaval that almost became a revolution. His alcoholism worsened – though it had already played a very likely part in the disaster of Rachmaninoff's 1st Symphony in 1897: it was enough that he didn't care for the piece and made comments about not understanding it. He was finding himself a man-out-of-touch with what was going around him, musically.

Lyadov, Glazunov & Rimsky-Korsakov in 1904

In the 25 years from his first published works to the 1905-1906 Season when he completed his last symphony, there are 85 opus numbers in his catalog. In the remaining 30 years of his creative life, there are only 24 works, mostly inconsequential by comparison even though they include both his piano concertos (the 2nd, in B Major, is one I've always liked and wondered why no one plays), the last two string quartets (the last one, subtitled “Hommage au passé”) and the Saxophone Concerto which one occasionally hears as much because there aren't many Romantic-style concertos for the instrument (despite its being composed in 1934) as it's the last major work he composed.

If his teaching responsibilities didn't have a serious enough impact on him – whether or not the alcoholism was a symptom or a contributor to his creative decline – the political and social climate of the new 20th Century certainly undermined everything he as a conservative held dear, both socially and musically. Though he stayed after the Communists took control of the government and lived through the privations of the 1st World War, the two 1917 Revolutions and the ensuing Civil War, he never really regained the status he had enjoyed as a young man in the Imperial Age.

When he left the Soviet Union for the West, he did so “for reasons of health” rather than as a political refugee like Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev or Stravinsky: if nothing else, this allowed his music to still be performed “back home.” But he spent the last eight years of his life as an exile in Paris, a man without a country (or even a culture) and, ironically for a man as “cosmopolitan” as he was, musically, little musical inspiration.

He was deeply suspect of New Music at the time. He told a colleague that Stravinsky's Petrushka was not music though skillfully orchestrated. Looking at Debussy's “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” he thought it was “orchestrated with great taste,” then wondered “Could it be that Rimsky and I influenced the orchestration of all these contemporary degenerates?”

Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading symphonist of the Soviet era, owed a great deal to Glazunov the teacher and administrator. His recollections in Semyon Volkov's highly questionable memoir, “Testimony,” include stories of Glazunov's legendary memory.

We owe the Overture to Borodin's Prince Igor to that memory since Borodin, a busy chemist and professor as well as composer, did not live to complete the opera or jot down anything for the overture. He'd played through it at the piano for his friends: Glazunov had heard one of these performances and was able to write it down later.

Another story was how the composer Taneyev had come to Belyayev to play his new symphony at the piano for him: meanwhile, the teen-aged Glazunov had been hidden in an adjacent room, listening to the performance. When it was over, Belyayev called Glazunov into the room as if he'd just arrived and said, as it happened, this young man was going to play through his new symphony as well. And he sat down and played Taneyev's symphony back to him, note for note.

Shostakovich, Student

While there is also the famous story of Glazunov keeping a bottle of vodka in his desk drawer, a rubber hose hidden in his coat connecting to the bottle so he could sip on it during his lessons, it's perhaps kinder to end with the fact – whatever he thought of “new music” – Glazunov arranged the premiere of his student Shostakovich's 1st Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic in the same hall where his own 1st Symphony had been premiered 44 years earlier and had created just as much of a stir when the teenaged composer walked out on-stage to accept the cheers of the audience.

Summermusic #2: A Kind of a French Connection

The second concert of this summer's Market Square Concerts series takes place on Sunday at 4pm in the air-conditioned Market Square Church and features works by Claude Debussy, Richard Rodney Bennet and Johannes Brahms with Peter Sirotin and Stuart Malina playing the Debussy Violin Sonata, and oboist Gerard Reuter and pianist Ya-Ting Chang joining violinists Peter Sirotin and Nicole Sharlow, violist Michael Stepniak and cellist Fiona Thompson for Bennet's oboe quartet, "Arethusa" and the Brahms Piano Quartet in C Minor . This post is about the first two composers.

Two of the works on this program are by familiar composers of the traditional classical pantheon; the third composer may not be that well known in this country though you may have heard his music without knowing it.

Richard Rodney Bennet (see below for photo credit)

Richard Rodney Bennett's Arethusa, written for oboe and strings in 1989, is inspired by the ancient legend of a nymph transformed into a fountain to escape from a pursuing river god. 

An English composer who spent much of his career living in New York City, Bennett was at home in various musical languages. You might have heard some of his film scores (like Four Weddings and a Funeral released in 1994 or Far from the Madding Crowd in 1967), several of which were nominated for Oscars. He is well-known as a jazz performer and singer. He studied privately with one of the most formidable presences in 20th Century music, Pierre Boulez, which might be where he began his mature musical life, though, like many composers, his style changed to take on a more lyrical quality without “dumbing down” or rejecting his earlier approach. His opera, The Mines of Sulphur, written in 1963, is one of the most riveting operas I've heard (it is often performed but not anywhere I've been able to see it since I first heard the recording when it came out in 2005 – you can hear samples here). He can write miniatures of exquisite beauty regardless of style and he has been influenced by many strands of the 20th Century – from Claude Debussy to jazz to the complex serialism of Boulez.

To celebrate his 75th birthday in 2011, you could've heard a double concert at London's Wigmore Hall which included one of his Debussy-inspired pieces, the Sonata after Syrinx on the first concert with Bennett and singer Claire Martin performing from “The Great American Songbook,” with his own arrangements of songs by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, among others, on the second concert.

Comfortable in any of these “musical dialects” he chooses, he rarely writes what we'd call “cross-over” pieces. Yet he composed a saxophone concerto for jazz giant Stan Getz which, according to Tom Service of the British newspaper The Guardian wrote in his excellent “Guide to Richard Rodney Bennett's Music,”

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...isn't about a Third-Stream kind of blend of improvisation and classical conventions; instead, as Susan Bradshaw wrote about the piece, it's about putting "jazz harmonies in conjunction with the composer's own free-flowing serial technique". It's a work whose tensile rigour and utterly compelling musical momentum couldn't have happened without Bennett's structural thinking, but that also sings and stomps with expressive and stylistic freedom.
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You can read Service's complete article, here: it was published in July of 2012. Bennett died on Christmas Eve, later that year.

Here are some examples of the different voices of Richard Rodney Bennett:
- from his Clarinet Quintet (1992) 
- his Five Impromptus for Guitar (1968) 
- from his 1995 Partita (you can hear sample clips, here)
- and music from his 1974 film score for Murder on the Orient Express one of those scores nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Score

In this largely unedited interview, he talks primarily about writing a new piece for two pianos for the 2008 Dranoff Competition, but between 9:54 and 15:36, he talks about what it's like to be a composer, how he starts writing a new piece, dealing with things like writer's block and what his ideas are of success.

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Throughout his life, Bennett was inspired by the music of Claude Debussy. For instance, he wrote Dream Dancing in 1986. In a program note, the composer wrote:

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The late works of Claude Debussy have always been of the utmost importance to me. Dream Dancing is the fifth in a series of works based on Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute, the others [including] After Syrinx I for oboe and piano, [and] After Syrinx II for solo piano.

At the end of his life Debussy was planning a series of six sonatas, of which he only lived to complete three - the violin sonata, cello sonata and the sonata for flute, viola and harp. The fourth was to have been for oboe, horn and harpsichord, the fifth for clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, piano and double bass, and the six for an ensemble made up of all the instruments used in the previous five sonatas. This is in fact the ensemble which I have used in Dream Dancing (with certain doublings) - flute, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, harpsichord, piano/celesta, harp, violin, viola, cello and double bass.
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Which brings us, then, to the work that opens this Summermusic program, the Violin Sonata Claude Debussy composed in 1917. In the order of these proposed six sonatas, it was the third but, unfortunately, the last work he completed. It also marked his last public appearance – he was the pianist for its premiere in May, 1917. He died in March the following year, in the midst of the German bombardment of Paris which marked the eventual end of the First World War.

It is with the awareness of the war that Claude Debussy described himself on the cover of these sonatas as “un musicien français.”

Here is a compelling performance of Debussy's Violin Sonata – which will be played on the program by Peter Sirotin and Stuart Malina – with Janine Jansen and Itamar Golan recorded in Paris's Salle Pleyel in 2011.

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1st Movement:

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2nd Movement:

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3rd Movement:

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You can read more about this sonata in a more detailed follow-up post on my other blog, Thoughts on a Train, here.

- Dick Strawser

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Photo credit: portrait photograph of Richard Rodney Bennett by Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian.

Summermusic 2013: Mozart at His Best

Friday night at 8:00 at Market Square Church, "Summermusic 2013" gets underway with the first of three concerts. You can read more about the whole series and especially the other works on that program in this previous post. This post is about Mozart and his Quintet in E-flat Major for Piano and Winds, K.452, which concludes the concert.

This photograph was taken last summer when concert-goers heard the Quintet for Piano and Winds by Ludwig van Beethoven with pianist Stuart Malina, oboist Gerard Reuter, clarinetist Christopher Grymes, bassoonist Peter Kolkay and hornist Geoffrey Pilkington.

So it should come as no great surprise that the same performers have returned this summer to perform another quintet for the same combination of instruments – the one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in 1784. It was a very good year: Mozart, at the age of 28, was just coming into his prime - at least as far as Vienna and this newest phase of his career. And he thought it was the best thing he'd ever composed.

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Marianna Shirinyan, piano; Rachel Bullen, oboe; John Kruse, clarinet; Etienne Boudreault, bassoon; Joke Wijma, horn – at the 13th Esbjerg International Chamber Music Festival in Denmark, 2011
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Mozart certainly thought highly of the piece and Beethoven so admired it, he decided to write one himself, using Mozart's as the model.

Could you imagine if Brahms, who loved Beethoven and Mozart, would have written one of his own as a tribute to both? What if the guy who asked Schubert to write the “Trout” Quintet had played the bassoon instead of the cello?

There are not a lot of works for an ensemble like this – certainly not by top-shelf composers like Mozart and Beethoven. An on-line search brings up a composer named Fritz Spindler whom I've never heard of, yet his quintet was published in 1888 as his Op. 360.

Nor can I imagine a more recent one by Elliott Carter would ever show up in the general repertoire.

Yet the scarcity of such works hasn't exactly made Rimsky-Korsakov's quintet (which replaces the oboe with a flute) a less infrequently heard piece than it already is.

Mozart was 25 when he quit his much-hated job with the Archbishop of Salzburg's household staff. Having been unable to find a position with any other aristocratic court (the most frequent employer of musicians in the 18th Century), he decided to try his luck as a free-lance performer, composer and teacher in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1781. It was not easy and not without its challenges, but having caught the ear of Emperor Joseph II, Mozart became the “new hot thing,” to turn a phrase.

Two things happened by the time Mozart composed this quintet. For one, he had gotten married in 1782 and (finally) returned to his hometown in late-July, 1783, with plans to introduce his bride Constanze to his father and sister. I should say his disapproving father and sister: the trip was more to convince them to accept her. Though we know little of what did happen during the three months he spent there, we do know there were no public concerts and no stimulation for new works. The one performance mentioned (without comment) in his sister Nannerl's diary indicates that Constanze sang the soprano solo in a mass by Mozart (he'd been working on the great C Minor Mass which he left incomplete at this time but it was more likely one of his earlier and less extensive masses included in the service). His visit seemed almost to be a non-event.

We don't know much about Mozart's daily life from this period but it's not difficult to imagine that, having seen what life in Salzburg might still be like had he stayed, he attacked Vienna with a new vigor. And apparently with a little more self-assurance (something it's hard to imagine Mozart ever lacked).

Because in February, 1784, came the second, seemingly minor event: he started keeping a record of his compositions, entering them into a thematic catalog when they were completed, along with a brief quote of the opening bars and its instrumentation. This is clearly the work of someone more concerned about the future – and in those days, artists very rarely thought about posterity. It may be nothing more than merely organizational paperwork, keeping track of what he had written, having found himself without a symphony on this trip. But why the change in procedure, now?

Whatever the reason for this sudden turn at a more organized life (itself a new idea, given Mozart's lifestyle, almost in the manner of a modern-day new year's resolution), the first works he entered into it were these:

Piano Concerto in E-flat (K.449) – February 9th, 1784
Piano Concerto in B-flat (K.450) – March 15th, 1784
Piano Concerto in D (K.451) – March 22nd, 1784
Quintet in E-flat for Piano & Winds (K.452) – March 30th, 1784
Piano Concerto in G (K.453) – April 12th, 1784
Sonata in B-flat for Piano & Violin (K.454) – April 21st, 1784

The two piano concertos of March – K.450 and K.451 – were performed on the same concert with the Quintet (K.452) on April 1st, the day after he completed the quintet. Mozart was the pianist for all three works on the program.

Afterward, a very happy Mozart wrote home to his father that the Quintet “called forth the very greatest applause: I myself consider it to be the best work I have ever composed. How I wish you could have heard it! And how beautifully it was performed!” Then he added, “To tell the truth, I was really worn out at the end after playing so much – and it is greatly to my credit that my listeners never got tired.”

Curiously, the quintet is written with a clarinet in the ensemble, though the winds in the orchestra for the two concertos includes a flute but no clarinets. There is, of course, the old story that Mozart didn't much care for the flute, but for all practical purposes, why not include it in this piece instead of bringing in a clarinetist (perhaps his friend, Anton Stadler, for whom he'd later write a concerto, the clarinet quintet and the “Kegelstatt” Trio)?

This was a busy time for Mozart: in the nine weeks around the time he composed these four works, he was involved in “no less than 24 performances” according to Volkmar Braunbehrens' Mozart in Vienna.

It's also interesting to note that, whenever he might have composed it (and for whatever reason), his friend Stadler performed the earlier Serenade for 13 Winds, generally known as the Gran Partita (the title is not Mozart's), K.361. Judging from the watermarks on the paper, scholars assume it was composed in 1781; others think it might have been written sometime between his leaving Salzburg and his starting to keep the thematic catalog.

The important thing is, Stadler's concert was on March 23rd, 1784. Mozart completed the Quintet on March 31st and performed it the next day.

Though this is purely conjecture on my part, I can just imagine Mozart being so delighted with hearing this piece - especially since he thought so highly of Vienna's excellent wind-players - he might have decided to add another wind piece to the concerto program and dashed it off in the following week. If that's the case, then how could he not include Stadler?

Another famous anecdote (speaking of hectic) involves the Violin Sonata, K.454, which Mozart completed three weeks later and performed with the famous violinist Regina Strinasacchi (who turned 20 that year). He had not had time to write out the piano part and played it “from memory” (no, as some tellers of the tale put it, he did not improvise it: it was completely composed in his head – it just wasn't written down, yet). When the emperor looked at the score afterward, he was dumbfounded to see only the violin part inked in: the entire piano part of the score Mozart was playing from was blank!

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While I don't know what a florin from the 1780s would be worth today, it is estimated (see Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart) that in his first year in Vienna, Mozart earned between 1,084 and 1,284 florins; in 1782, between 2,174 and 3,074 florins. In 1783, his income was down – less than 2,408 florins – but then he spent at least three months in Salzburg and did not return to Vienna until several weeks later. In 1784, a year that began so productively, he earned about 3,720 florins, the most he would earn until 1791 when he made between 3,672 and 5,672 florins.

Part of the reason for this decline in his income was the fickleness of the Viennese public: while Mozart was confident of his fame, he did not count on the fact that sooner or later (and unfortunately, sooner than he expected), Vienna began looking somewhere else for the “new hot thing.”

Mozart was not very practical when it came to money – his gambling problem developed later – always feeling the need to “keep up appearances” (he felt, in order to impress the aristocracy, one needed to be well dressed and present an image of affluence), always living just beyond his means. But that is an issue for a later time.

However, with Mozart, there isn't a lot of time “for later.” We tend to forget, given this steady stream of divine music which he seemed to produce so effortlessly, that he had only seven more years to live. He wrote this Quintet when he was 28 – he would be dead before his 36th birthday.

Music lovers are always playing "What if...?" especially with Mozart. What if he had lived as long as Haydn? As hard as it is to imagine, he would have outlived Beethoven and Schubert and died in 1833, the year Brahms was born.

It is too easy to fantasize about what might have been but it does make the music we have all the more amazing to contemplate, especially when Mozart himself thought this piece was the best he had offered - so far.

- Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2013: Opening Night (The French Connection)

In case you hadn't noticed, it is definitely summer and if the forecast for this third week of July is any indication, with yet another heat wave on the way, it's a good thing the three programs of Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2013 are all inside in air-conditioned comfort.

The first concert takes place this Friday at Market Square Church at 8:00 and features music for piano and winds.

The second concert will be on Sunday afternoon at the church as well – this time, 4:00 – and features music for piano and strings.

The final concert in the series will be on Wednesday evening, July 24th, and will be held at the Civic Club on Front Street (between the Harvey Taylor Bridge and State Street). With music for strings, it begins earlier than we're used to, so it's not a typo when it says “6:00.” Yes, that's six o'clock!

(You can read Ellen Hughes' "Art & Soul" column for Harrisburg's Patriot-News here.)

In addition to pianists Stuart Malina and Ya-Ting Chang, the first program marks the return of the wind players who joined Malina last year for the Beethoven Quintet. This summer, they'll be performing the Quintet for Piano and Winds that Mozart thought was the best thing he'd ever composed so far (he was 28 at the time) and which Beethoven thought so highly of, he used it as a model for his own quintet.

We'll hear oboist Gerard Reuter, a regular at these summer concerts, joined by clarinetist Christopher Grymes, bassoonist Peter Kolkay and hornist Geoffrey Pilkington.

Most of our string players get the first night off, but will be in full force for the last two programs. In addition to pianists Stuart Malina and Ya-Ting Chang, we'll hear violinists Peter Sirotin and Nicole Sharlow, violist Michael Stepniak and cellists Fiona Thompson and Nadine Trudel.

In addition to the Mozart quintet, this first program includes some light-hearted, witty music by Igor Stravinsky and Bohuslav Martinu – a quality you might not immediately associate with the composer who gave us The Rite of Spring a hundred years ago or with a name which might be unfamiliar to you.

Camille Saint-Saëns, famous for his popular Carnival of the Animals and the “Organ” Symphony, offers us a little-heard Bassoon Sonata that was the last piece he composed when he was 85. Hearing this work for the first time only a few years ago, I was reminded how one of those concert companion books I grew up with as a child included Saint-Saëns in a chapter called “French Composers of the Charm School.”

Sunday's second concert opens with Debussy's Violin Sonata and a quintet by the late Richard Rodney Bennet for oboe and strings entitled “Arethusa,” and concludes with Brahms' Piano Quartet in C Minor.

It's all-strings at the Civic Club on Wednesday, the 24th at 6:00, with the Sonata for Violin and Cello by Ravel, the string trio Dvořák composed for two violins and viola, and a String Quintet by the Russian composer, Alexander Glazunov. (Did I mention this concert begins at six o'clock?)

This post will be about the opening concert but with the Mozart on a separate post.

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Stravinsky's suite consists of five brief movements – each barely over a minute long: after an opening Andante, there's an evocation of Spain called “Española,” a bit of nostalgia from his native Russia with “Balalaika” (a strummed string instrument that accompanies a folk-like tune), then a jaunty Italian souvenir “Napolitana,” before winding up in Paris with a riotous “Galop” that would do Poulenc proud.

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Igor Stravinsky's Five Easy Pieces

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Stravinsky by Picasso, 1917

There are two small sets of pieces Stravinsky composed for piano duet – two pianists sharing one piano – both initially meant for him to play with his young son. The first set of three pieces, written in 1915, just two years after The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris, has a simple accompaniment (the “left” hand) and a more involved melodic part (the “right” hand). In these “Five Easy Pieces,” written two years later, it is the accompaniment which is more complex while the melodic part, though not as simple as the easy part from the earlier set, is still less technically demanding.

Stravinsky wrote these for a Parisian princess who wanted to publish his Three Pieces for String Quartet, the first thing he completed after The Rite of Spring and already something in a markedly different, more “classically”-lined, even intimate style. But Stravinsky didn't want to publish them and talked her into publishing a few shorter, newer pieces instead, including these Five Easy Pieces which he hadn't even written yet. Stravinsky, then living in Switzerland, wrote each of the pieces in one day, adding the “Española” just before he mailed them off to his publisher.

If you think Stravinsky was imitating Francis Poulenc, especially in the last movement's visit to a Parisian dance-hall, Poulenc first surviving composition was written in 1917 which, later that year, would be shown to Stravinsky who would later help the young man publish it.

On a more serious note, placing these delightful pieces in their historical context, at the time the princess asked Stravinsky about publishing some of his music, the four-month-long Battle of the Somme was coming to a close where it is estimated over one million men died or were wounded, making it one of the bloodiest battles in history.

1917 was also the year Claude Debussy completed his last composition: the Violin Sonata which will be performed on the second of our Summermusic concerts. A year later, Claude Debussy died of cancer in the midst of the aerial bombardment of Paris, part of the Germans' final spring offensive, his funeral winding through the deserted streets of this great city that has seen its share of violent history but has also given the world so much beautiful, light-filled and even light-hearted art.

Listening to these pieces, it's difficult to imagine they could have been written in the midst of such horrible times.

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Martinů at 5

Paris would also become home to the Czech-born composer, Bohuslav Martinů, who was raised in a small-town church tower in an apartment 193 steps above the street (talk about a “walk-up”...). He gave his first violin recital when he was 14 but since the age of 10 he'd been focused on becoming a composer. He played in the 2nd Violin Section of what became the Czech Philharmonic after the nation's independence, following World War I, but in 1923, now in his early-30s, he received a scholarship that allowed him to study composition in Paris where he remained for the next 17 years, making a living as a “poor, starving musician” – a true Bohemian! With the outbreak of World War II, he managed to escape before the Nazi Occupation of Paris and settled in the United States. It was here that he wrote the Quartet we're going to hear on this program.

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Bohuslav Martinů's Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Cello and Piano, with Members of the Czech Nonet:

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Martinů in 1945

Martinů was a prolific and seemingly effortless composer. A great deal of his music seems to have this overall happy sense of well-being, usually energetic and often optimistic. It's not that his life was necessarily well-adjusted: aside from the poverty of his Paris days (recognition came slowly, if at all), when he fled the approaching Nazis who had already black-listed his music (which, I suppose, was a kind of recognition, though it was primarily for his role in the Czech Resistance), he was forced to leave most of his manuscripts behind and had difficulty booking passage to America, first finding refuge in Southern France, then Lisbon. It took almost a year to get a boat to New York City where he arrived speaking no English and bringing with him only the few scores he'd composed in the past year.

It was Serge Koussevitsky in Boston who came to his rescue – much as he did with another war-time immigrant from Central Europe, Bela Bartók (the result, there, was his famous Concerto for Orchestra). And so, Martinů composed his 1st Symphony for the Boston Symphony, gained some recognition and re-gained some much-needed confidence before setting off to write four more symphonies and several concertos over the next five years. After the war, he was invited to return to Prague to teach at the conservatory there, but the new Communist regime blocked his passport and he now found himself stuck in America.

That summer, he was appointed to the faculty at Tanglewood (another Koussevitsky save) but he was unable to fulfill it because of a serious fall from a balcony which affected his hearing and his nerves, not to mention hitting him with serious medical bills.

It was during this time he composed his Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Cello and Piano, a work that hardly reflects the reality of the context it was written in.

Later, he taught at the Mannes School of Music in NYC and then at Curtis in Philadelphia – his students included Alan Hovhannes and Burt Bacharach – even after he returned to Europe, where he spent much of his time in the South of France, also teaching at the American Academy in Rome. But he was still beset by financial insecurity: Paul Sacher, a noted Swiss conductor and patron to many famous composers, invited Martinů to live on his estate in Switzerland, where he died two years later at the age of 68.

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Saint-Saëns, prodigy

By comparison, Camille Saint-Saëns had it easy: a prodigy who began composing at the age of 3 (?!), he could play all of Beethoven's piano sonatas from memory when he was 10. Hector Berlioz heard a symphony Saint-Saëns composed when he was 17, and wrote, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.”

In 1886, he produced his two best-known works, the witty (and mostly irreverent) Carnival of the Animals and the grandest of French symphonies, his Third, the famous “Organ” Symphony which he dedicated to the memory of his friend, Franz Liszt, who had just died.

The Bassoon Sonata is one of three wind sonatas composed in his final year. It is amazing to hear it, once you realize it was written in 1921 and recall how, at the first concert performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring a year after its premiere, he famously stalked out of the hall shortly after the music began, complaining about the composer's misuse of the bassoon in its famous opening solo.

As usual, finding performance videos on You-Tube can be a daunting search – locating a good performance with a good recording and a reasonable interpretation I can recommend. While there are several videos of this work on-line, most of them are poorly recorded or have annoying background audio issues. This performance almost didn't make the cut simply because it may possibly be the worst backdrop for a recital I've ever seen, so please don't let that influence the music or its interpretation!

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Saint-Saëns' Bassoon Sonata in G, Op.168 with bassoonist Marcin Orlińaki and pianist Hanna Sosińska-Kraski

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When Saint-Saëns was young, he was considered a progressive, championing the more radical styles of Liszt and Berlioz. Born eight years after Beethoven's death, his early career ran parallel with the mature Chopin and Mendelssohn. He was considered “the most German of all French composers” mostly because he often wrote with a sense of counterpoint – writing independent lines that worked melodically as well as harmonically rather than in the standard melody-plus-accompaniment approach – which was considered an academic German technique. When they called him “The French Beethoven,” it was not always meant as a compliment.

En route to California, 1915

By the end of his career, he was regarded as uselessly old-fashioned, especially by Debussy and Ravel (whose music will appear on the second and third programs of this year's Summermusic). Even though he may have been the earliest-born pianist to make a recording of his playing and the first major composer to write for the film (in 1908), he fought against the influences of new music either by Debussy or Richard Strauss. He (like many of his contemporaries) considered Stravinsky “mad.”

Saint-Saëns at his best is usually regarded today as a composer of great facility while the music of his last decade is generally overlooked if not dismissed. That, however, is only in the context of what was being written around him. If an old dog cannot be expected to learn new tricks, why should we begrudge a composer in his 80s for waxing nostalgic over the Good Old Days rather than writing like Stravinsky or Schoenberg because that's what was all the rage (in more ways than one)?

Rossini and Sibelius are two famous composers who chose to stop writing at the peak of their careers rather than adopt the latest trends, spending their final decades in silence. We often wonder “what if...?” Saint-Saëns at least kept on going, right to the very end.

Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds concludes this first program, but that will be the subject of the next post.

- Dick Strawser

Plum Blossoms & Fluers-de-Lys: Music of Versailles and The Forbidden City

(From the Better-Late-than-Never Department, a post about the last Market Square Concerts program of the season with The Four Nations and Music from China, tonight at 8pm at Whitaker Center in downtown Harrisburg. Due to a computer having problems unitasking and my severe attack of acute procrastinitis following a dinner of Sweet and Sour Red Herring, it took too long to get this finished. But here it is. Also suitable for "additional information that can be read following the concert.)

Here’s a short clip to introduce you to The Four Nations Ensemble who’ll be performing Thursday (April 25th) at Whitaker Center at 8pm:
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Though they’re playing Handel, here, it’s a chance to dip your toe – or, better, your ear – into the sound world of the Baroque.

They will perform a combined program of French Baroque and Chinese music with the ensemble aptly called “Music from China”. Here they are, in a short clip, recorded recently at William & Mary College:
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The program is called “Plum Blossom and Fluer-de-Lys: Music of War and Peace in the Forbidden City and Versailles.”

It’s not really an odd combination at all, if you think about it, the difference in the sound-world aside. If the Language of Music is truly international, it’s only the surface “dialect” that changes. Beneath that surface lies a varied world of commonalities rather than differences.

One thing, if nothing else, is the love French composers of the Baroque era had for picturesque titles. Descriptive, evocative or merely suggestive of mood, Couperin and Rameau wrote tons of keyboard pieces with titles like La Poule (The Hen) or Les regrets by Couperin (here, performed by Andrew Appel of the Four Nations Ensemble)

Though most of the French works on the program have “abstract” names – suites and things like that – individual movements may have descriptive titles. However, all you have to do is look at the offerings on the Chinese side of the program to see titles like “Quietude” or “The General’s Command” and, of course, “Ambush on Ten Sides” which will probably bring to mind (dramatically, at least) any number of fight scenes in classical Chinese martial arts films. The event describes dates back to a historical event in 202 BC but the music became a virtuoso piece for the pipa or Chinese lute sometime in the 17th Century; a famous version of it dates from 1818 with several other arrangements and versions of it available.

Here is an hour-long program “Music from China” presented recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which includes introductions to the instruments and the instrumentalists as well as a good bit of music:
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With all the talk about personality types and the psychological tests that exist to evaluate them and ways of determining who is a Left-Brained person and who’s a Right-Brained person, I’m reminded that composer Ned Rorem used to describe everything in terms of being either German or French. As national stereotypes go, it seems fairly accurate: the Germans are traditionally tradition-bound and precise (I used to joke about a Berlin-born friend who would become frantic is we were a few seconds late) where the French are typically more laissez-faire about life in general. Things that might be described more recently in pop-psych terms as being Left-Brained (logical and objective) would be, to Rorem, “German.” Things that were Right-Brained (irrational and subjective) would be, then, “French.” Having lived in Paris much of his life, he quite possibly had enough experience to make this generalization.

It amused me to see him write somewhere – probably in one of his numerous published diaries – that “The Japanese are German and the Chinese are French.”

Think about it.

It may or may not be an accurate stereotype, dealing with the two major cultural and political nationalities in Asia, but it has something to say for the Japanese love of technology (logic) and, if nothing else, a more picturesque and impressionistic (subjective) approach to art and music in China that is very akin to what we in the West are more familiar with in French art and music.

The argument, I think, falls apart when discussing Japanese art which is, after all, its own adaptation of what were originally Chinese influences, and has many of the same traits. It’s true than many Japanese composers – Toru Takemitsu, perhaps, the most familiar to Western audiences – are stylistically full of impressionistic titles and hazy Debussy-like harmonies.

But in their pursuit of performing mostly Western music in their concert halls and the training required at the conservatory level, it might seem a more rigid, rule- and goal-oriented society. Political systems and the attitudes toward Western Art differ as well, but the Chinese training of classical musicians, I gather, would be more comparable to the French conservatoires, where the end (seeing the big picture) is more important than the means (seeing the details), though anyone who ever studied with Nadia Boulanger in early-20th Century Paris would never consider her a laissez-faire teacher…

Anyway, keeping the possibility of these contrasts and similarities in mind, a journey to Paris and Beijing might at first seem an odd pairing for a classical music concert, at least as we normally think of them.

But when you look at the Big Picture – in this case, music as an International Language – perhaps it’s not so unusual, after all?

That’s where this Thursday night’s program will be taking us, leaving from Whitaker Center at 8pm – with a program by two ensembles joining forces for “Music of the Court: Versailles and the Forbidden City.”

One – the Four Nations Ensemble – offers music from the French Baroque associated with the French royal court of the first half of the 18th Century and life at the palace of the “Sun King.”

The other ensemble – appropriately called “Music from China” – presents music inspired by the ancient traditions of the rarified world behind the Imperial Court of the “Son of Heaven.”

While it would be easy to call this week’s concert – the last one of the official subscription season, believe it or not – “East Meets West” or something stereotypically bland, it’s more than just a collection of pieces from Western Europe and pieces from China.

Since music was a fundamental part of aristocratic life – more so in 17th and 18th Century Europe as we’re used to with music of the French and German Baroque and the musical life of Mozart and Haydn’s day – it wouldn’t be a big stretch of the imagination to realize music was a very important aspect of the aristocratic life in China as well.

The only problem is, most of us in the West are unfamiliar with even the basic details of Chinese history. If we’re familiar with the names of a few dynasties – the traditional way of describing its historical eras – it’s more likely the dynasty’s name will be followed by “vase” or “poet” rather than approximate dates or the equivalent to whatever era was happening in Western Europe.

To many audiences today, used to Beethoven and large orchestras in vast halls (not to mention amplification in popular music), instruments like viols and harpsichords may seem quaint, the bailiwick of the historically informed “Period Instrument” world.

So, imagine being confronted by the variety of instruments played in China. We might think of the er-hu as “The Chinese Violin” but there are numerous types of such violin-like (or more specifically, viol-like) instruments. Yes, they are divided into the equivalents of string, wind and percussion instruments just like their Western counterparts - flutes, oboes, lutes, zithers and dulcimers - but they have different sounds, tunings and playing techniques that create, on the surface, a different world of experience from the Western instruments we might be reminded of.

But then, for many in the modern day audiences, sometimes the sound of a viol or a harpsichord or a recorder will sound just as different from the traditional violin, piano or flute.

Here’s another ensemble (Jordi Savall and Les Concerts des Nations) playing the second half of a work The Four Nations Ensemble has included on their Market Square Concerts program: from the fourth of the “Concerts royeaux” (Royal Concerts) which were composed for the Sunday concerts King Louis XIV requested – no, “commanded” – for entertaining his court living at the Palace of Versailles.
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Louis XIV, Patron of the Arts

Louis XIV is the epitome of the 18th Century monarch. Called “the Sun King,” a nickname which didn’t need to originate with sycophantic courtiers, Louis le Grande ruled for 71 years, the longest reign in French and, for that matter, European history. He died days shy of his 77th birthday and had outlived so many of his heirs that his great-grandson had become his direct heir, a boy of 5 who became Louis XV.

It may have been, to borrow a phrase from the English author Charles Dickens writing about a slightly later time in the history of another resident at Versailles, “the best of times, the worst of times,” with periods of great cultural achievements in the arts and frequent periods of warfare, but above all it was an age defined by the king’s palace.

Not just any palace, but one where he required many of his aristocrats to live with him – all the better to keep them under control (especially the ones who had participated in the rebellion known as The Fronde during his childhood). Through an elaborate court ritual, the king was aware which of the nobility were there to attend him (or wait on him) and who was absent, which he was then able to use to distribute favors. Whether “Sun King” referred to Louis’ brilliance, his life-giving benevolence or the fact he was the center of the courtly universe revolving around him, this helped to weaken the power of the aristocracy and, among other things, to coalesce the unwieldy and still largely feudal society into a strong central state which made France one of the leading powers in Europe during his reign.

Versailles in 1722

This place was called Versailles, and quite a place, even today. It’s now a museum for a Golden Age in French civilization. It hallways and rooms as well as the art that adorns them evoke a time we can only imagine.

Louis XIV’s father, Louis XIII, had turned a former hunting lodge into a royal residence around 1624. Louis XIV, then, turned it into one of the most magnificent royal palaces in Europe and the home of French kings until 1789 when Louis XVI – the grandson of Louis XV who himself ruled 58 years – was overthrown in the French Revolution and guillotined in 1793.

Since then, the palace was rarely lived in: Napoleon’s second wife lived in some apartments in the main building, but the Emperor preferred the Grand Trianon, a smaller retreat in a corner of the Versailles grounds with its own park.

When the monarchy was restored, French kings did little more than visit the palace and eventually it became a museum and, in modern times, a major tourist attraction. It may still be used for state occasions and grand congresses but for little else, at least as it was originally intended.

Panoramic View of Versailles today

For instance, it has over 720,000 square feet of floor space, 2,300 rooms (of which the famous Hall of Mirrors is only one) and 2,153 windows. The collection is home to over 6,000 paintings, 2,100 sculptures, 1,500 drawings and 15,000 engravings, over 5,000 pieces of furniture and objets d’art.

Royal Shuttle...

One item may look curious (see left): this was a single-occupancy "taxi" that would be carried on poles like a palanquin so the royal feet did not need to tire themselves out when traveling from one end of the palace to the other.

The music associated with the age of the French kings living at Versailles can only be imagined, however. Many of the greatest musicians living in France at the time worked or performed there. There were numerous ensembles for various occasions, from the king’s private orchestra called of Les 24 Violons du Roi (which was actually a string orchestra founded in 1626 by Louis XIII) that was later supplemented by an additional 16 players. There was a grand band for ceremonial purposes with winds and brass – and orchestras for the opera or the Royal Chapel could be created by combining members of the string and wind ensembles. These were largely disbanded or reduced in 1761 due to budget cuts – even at Versailles – but then, Louis XV was more interested in math and science, less so in music compared to the two previous kings.

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And now, a world away – to China.

 

We remember important facts about ancient Empires – Alexander the Great and the expansion of Rome across the “known world” – how things fell apart with the barbarians and maybe how Charlemagne created the Holy Roman Empire out of the medieval rubble (though the most we remember of it was “it was neither Holy nor Roman”). So if Alexander’s empire is dated to the 300s BC and that Rome flourished around the rise of the Christian Era (since we divide time into BC=Before Christ and AD=Anno Domini, in the year of Our Lord) and Charlemagne lived around 800 AD, it might come as a surprise to realize “written history” in China dates back to the Shang Dynasty before 1,000 BC or that the first truly united centralized state we now think of as China originated with Emperor Shi Huang-ti (literally “The First Emperor” in Chinese) in 221 BC, initiating a state generically considered Imperial China that lasted until the Revolution that established the Republic of China in 1912 AD – a total of some 2,100 years of more or less direct continuity.

Compare that, for instance, to the Roman Empire which lasted only some 500 years, much of which was spent in political free-fall and social chaos after which the surviving Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) continued to shrink until 1453, almost 1,000 years later, when it fell to the rising Ottoman Empire.

And compare that longevity to our own history – a government that has been in existence some 237 years.

Chinese history is divided (like Egypt was) into its various dynasties. Curiously, the dynasty Shi Huang-ti founded barely outlived him. On the program, you’ll find references to the Han Dynasty (between 206 BC and 220 AD) as well as the Qing, the last official dynasty of the Empire which ruled from 1644 to 1912.

Alas, it seems the music marked on the program as “Han Dynasty” is not from such an ancient age as that – the Red Herring I referred to earlier – but to a style that developed during that time period: this particular piece was inspired by a poem of Li Bao (or, in a previous transliterating of Chinese names, Li Po) who lived in the 8th Century during the Tang Dynasty, considered a Golden Age of poetry if not Chinese culture in general. If I read the Music from China website correctly, a piece with the title “The Moon Over Fortified Pass” was actually written in 1995 (AD) by Huang Qiuyuan, then a composition student at Beijing’s Central Conservatory.

Though in actuality, it is based on a “type of military music known as Gujiao Hengchui (Music of Drums, Horns and Transverse Flutes)” that has existed since the days of the Han Dynasty. “These tunes, numbering fifteen in all, were sung and played by soldiers on horseback patrolling the frontiers. Noted Tang dynasty poet Li Bai [a.k.a. Li Po] (in the 8th Century AD) wrote lyrics for some of this music, the most famous being The Moon Over Fortified Pass."

So while the tradition might be very old and the music written down sometime before the 8th Century, it forms the basis of a more modern setting which helps preserve an ancient tradition.

The later Qing Dynasty, meanwhile, would be roughly parallel to the time of the French Kings at Versailles – as well as the rest of the 18th and 19th Centuries in European history.

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We know a refined musical culture existed in China even before The First Emperor in 220 BC: the earlier Zhou Dynasty (1122 to 256 BC). The debate about “popular” and “art” music was raised in a question by a powerful ruler to his advisor, Mencius, around 300 BC, whether it was “moral” to prefer popular music to the classics (Mencius diplomatically answered it didn’t matter so long as the ruler loved his subjects).

The First Emperor of China

Shi Huang-ti established, among so many other things in his centralizing bureaucracy, an Imperial Music Bureau to “regulate” various aspects of court and military music and determine which folk songs, for instance, would be officially recognized.

(Incidentally, the subject of Tan Dun’s opera, “The First Emperor,” premiered at the Met in 2006 with Placido Domingo as Shi huang-ti, concerned the creation of an imperial anthem during a time of warfare and the building of the initial Great Wall of China.)

While musicians were generally lower in status than poets, rulers even before the empire would send out scholars to collect folk songs to “check the will of the people,” many of them dating between 800 and 400 BC.

The earliest surviving written music is a song, “The Solitary Orchid,” attributed to Confucius who died in 479 BC. This collection of songs, incidentally, was one of the books banned and burned by Shi Huang-ti (he buried hundreds of scholars alive for hiding some of these banned books) and it had to be reconstructed from memory in the years following the overthrow of his not-so-powerful son.

(Incidentally, while Shi Huang-ti built the Great Wall, or rather connected several already existing but not very practical walls, little of the original wall exists: what we see today was largely rebuilt in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The First Emperor, though reluctant to discuss his own death and leave a will concerning his successor, he managed to build a sizeable tomb only recently discovered with its 6,000 terra cotta warriors.)

While much of the performance details of this music would have been passed on orally from teacher to student, the first great flowering of written instrumental music for the ch’in (or qin) of the zither family (which originally dated back to 2500 BC) was in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).

1425 Chinese music manuscript

Here, for instance, is a musical manuscript for the ch’in dating from 1425 (see left). It is a kind of notation familiar to lutenists studying Renaissance and Baroque music who have to master complex forms of tablature that many, in exasperation, joke must have been invented by a blind person. This kind of notation still exists today, though greatly simplified, in popular sheet music that may include “guitar chords” representing the basic strings and frets of the guitar neck and where the fingers would be placed to play the correct pitches.

Earlier systems of notation in China might use a series of markings given picturesque names to indicate types of attack or groupings of notes that might be comparable to the neumes of Gregorian chant or the ecphonetic notation you might find in Hebrew Bibles prior to Christianity.

Later notations used numbers to designate pitches, just as we use letters – A, C, G and so on.

Marco Polo aside, incidentally, the first known account of East meeting West – at least, musically speaking – would be the arrival of an Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci who presented the Emperor with a harpsichord in 1601. He trained four eunuchs to play the instrument.

While Chinese instruments might be the equivalent of bowed instruments like violins or plucked instruments like lutes and zithers or those played with hammers like dulcimers, the idea of playing something like a ch’in with a keyboard must have seemed a novelty to the Chinese, then. One wonders what the Imperial Court must have thought of this “strange music.”

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View of the Forbidden City today

The Chinese equivalent of Versailles is a series of palaces enclosed behind walls and gates in the center of Beijing which had served as an occasional dynastic capital before it became the Imperial Capital during the Ming Dynasty around 1400. The old Tianning Pagoda may date from the 1120s but the city underwent many transformations, having been captured, burned to the ground, rebuilt and then abandoned between then and 1406 when the Imperial Palace was begun, completed in 1420. It became known as “The Forbidden City.” Beijing then remained the Imperial Capital ever since.

 The entire complex consisted of numerous buildings – palaces and temples, mostly, and ceremonial gates – all within a walled complex covering some 7,800,000 square feet. Its “Outer Court” was used for ceremonial purposes and the Emperor and his family lived within the “Inner Court.” There was a rigid hierarchy regulating everyone in relationship to the Emperor who, whatever his name or reputation, was called “The Son of Heaven.” The bureaucracy and ritual of the Forbidden City would make Louis XIV’s Versailles look simplistic by comparison.

One of the great emperors of this dynasty was Qianlong who ruled for 60 years before he abdicated in 1796. He was a great patron of the arts, both “a preserver and a restorer of Chinese culture.” While he himself wrote some 40,000 poems, he still engaged in periodic book-burnings, banning books deemed to be subversive, a list that included some 2,300 titles.

Hall of Supreme Harmony

Today, following the demise of its Empire, the rise of the Republic and the revolution that brought about the current Communist state, the Forbidden City remains a museum of Chinese culture, and like Versailles today is a major tourist attraction. Even though the pageantry of the Imperial Age has passed, the square in front of the City is a major part of Beijing’s public life. At 109 acres, it is the largest public square in the world, spreading out before the Gate of Heavenly Peace or, in Chinese, Tienanmen. For many Westerners, Tienanmen Square will forever be remembered for the 1989 protest and its ensuing massacre, especially with its iconic image of the young man facing down a line of government tanks.

One need only think back to a time when riots in a Paris square in front of the Bastille Prison in 1789 that ended the long and illustrious world of many of the kings who’d lived in the rarified world of Versailles.

- Dick Strawser

Denk Think: Some Thoughts about the Elusive Interpretation of the Transcendent

Jeremy Denk will be playing a recital in Carnegie Hall on Friday. More importantly, for those of us in Central Pennsylvania, he’ll be playing the same program for Market Square Concerts at Whitaker Center on Wednesday at 8pm.

Frankly, I’d go even if he were just live-blogging, but he’s playing a prelude and fugue by Bach, four works by Franz Liszt, the Bartók Piano Sonata (which I haven’t heard live since my grad school days) and Beethoven’s last piano sonata, the C Minor Sonata, Op. 111, which I’d heard Denk play at Gretna Music some summers ago.

He’s also just recorded the Beethoven for Nonesuch, paired with two books of etudes by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (better known in this country to a certain generation of movie-goers who might recall two of his works used in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey). With any luck, there will be enough CDs for sale in the lobby – from what I’ve heard of it, it’s a keeper, even for the Beethoven alone.

(You can read Ellen Hughes' article about Denk's performance as well as an appearance in Central PA with another giant of the keyboard, Emanuel Ax, here.)

Now, one usually evaluates a performer on their performance – that seems to be what it’s all about – and how they communicate the music to you, the listener. But putting a program (or a recording) together can be a daunting challenge and sometimes it feels like a slap-dash program of this and that that’s thrown together to meet certain expectations can often lead to a slap-dash performance that, individually, might prove very entertaining or even meaningful but often can fall a little short on the whole.

But a thoughtful performer – especially one who wants to get something out of the performance himself – puts a lot of thought into a program and one thing Jeremy Denk is noted for is his intelligent approach to his programming as well as to his performances.

The idea of a performer being labeled “intelligent,” however, may prove off-putting or intimidating to someone who’s out to be entertained – “I could’ve stayed home and watched reruns of Dancing with the Stars instead!” – but there is so much music out there that is beyond its mere entertainment value, it’s good to have someone you can trust it to, a mind that’s willing to get underneath the surface and come to terms with the essence of the music (that indefinable otherness that makes it so difficult to describe and explain why it’s so great). Otherwise, we’d sit there and wait for the big tunes or marvel at how fast the fingers can move.

There are several interviews with Jeremy Denk available on YouTube – this one, a New York City Arts profile, is as good as any:

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Or this one, from a series courtesy of NPR, in which he describes the music he’s playing – how the composer works, how he’s taking it apart before putting it back together for you, rather than just playing the notes on the page: here’s a bit on the Aria that forms the basis of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach:

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Most people would listen to the tune in the right hand – after all, that’s what’s most “obvious,” isn’t it? But that isn’t what Bach is doing in the course of this monumental piece: the theme itself is built on an even simpler harmonic bass-line (the lowest notes of the left hand) which, according to standard practice, Bach expands to create in itself a satisfying progression of implied chords which then support the melody we’re enjoying so much.

This is why some people have problems realizing the organic unity of these variations: what’s being varied, the generating material for all this music, is not the most obvious thing we hear but what supplies the foundation that, whether we hear it or not, keeps such a vast piece of music from falling into 30 episodes in the life of a pianist.

While the program had changed from its initial appearance in our brochures – sometimes I understand why the promotion doesn’t include what they’ll be playing because that’ll probably change anyway – the way it stands now (barring any unforeseen tweakings or outright alterations) combines works in a comparative logic and I mean by that the chance to compare, for instance, the last of Bach’s Preludes & Fugues from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier with the last of Beethoven’s sonatas, or works by Liszt, one of the greatest pianists of the 19th Century, inspired by the great Italian poets of the 14th Century in between a prelude inspired by a Bach cantata (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen – Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, Fearing) and a transcription capturing one of the most transcendent moments from any of his friend (and son-in-law) Richard Wagner’s operas, what we know as “Isolde’s Liebestod” from the opera Tristan & Isolde.

Missing from the rather daunting set of Liszt pieces is the “virtuosic” Liszt, our typical perception of him as a 19th Century Rock Star, all flash and dash who was all about Entertainment. But this follows a work by Béla Bartók, another Hungarian composer who is better known for his use of folk music, just as Franz Liszt had captured Europe’s imagination with his Hungarian Rhapsodies. Unfortunately, these had nothing to do with folk music but most people assumed they were Hungarian folk music: actually they were inspired by the urban popular music of the Gypsies when people (including Brahms) used to hang out in Vienna’s smokier taverns to listen to their favorite gypsy bands the way people (including Elliott Carter) in more recent times would hang out in clubs to listen to their favorite jazz bands.

But Bartók’s infrequently heard Piano Sonata, while owing much of its musical language to his Hungarian roots, also marks a change in his own under-the-surface language. While he’s not quoting actual folk music as it may seem to a non-Hungarian, he has taken the essence of it to create his own “imaginary folk music” (I’m not sure if the phrase belongs to the composer who was notoriously tight-lipped about his compositional approach, or a well-meaning biographer but the idea is apt enough for our purposes) which looks back in one sense to Liszt’s virtuosity as it looks ahead to what we might hear today in Ligeti’s Etudes. It does make one wonder if there isn’t some national genetic marker in these composers’ musical fingerprints beyond the role of mere influence.

There’s also another aspect of Bartók that might not come to mind easily and that is the role of Bach – not so much his magisterial contrapuntal style but the transformation, perhaps, of the sheer joy one hears in the gigues that end Bach’s keyboard suites which might have toes tapping and heads bopping before one realizes, “hey, this is a fugue!” There’s a contrapuntal sense, a certain left-braininess in Bartók’s finale, aside from all the foot-stomping, drum-pounding clusters in the background, that gives the work its dynamic rhythmic excitement, one that might not be so far removed from Bach’s sense of gaiety, not that I would call it “Bachianas hungarieras.” But the contrast with Bach-inspired Liszt to follow may be less obvious than you’d think.

Of course, the program has to end with Beethoven’s last sonata because where else would you put it on a recital? After that ending – one of the most transcendent in all of music, as far as I’m concerned – no more music is really necessary (damn, I was hoping for an encore).

When Denk played Op. 111 at Gretna, paired with Charles Ives transcendental “Emerson” Sonata, I was doing the pre-concert talk. There is so much to say about Beethoven’s C Minor Sonata but instead I chose to read an excerpt about the work from a famous novel that examines the depths of creativity and genius, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This was from Chapter 8, when the music teacher Wendell Kretzschmar (who hails, fictionally, from Pennsylvania) is giving a lecture about Beethoven’s Sonata, specifically why there’s no 3rd movement. I can’t quote it all, here – it’s very extensive and there are copyright laws to be broken if I do – but I highly recommend it, especially in John E. Woods recent translation.

It is the moment when the young composer who’s the focus of the story is awakened to the power of music to connect over time and generations, between creator and listener.

(It seems only fair to bring Thomas Mann into the discussion since, Petrarch and Dante aside, as you can see in the video recorded in Denk's apartment, his walls are covered with bookshelves and he can toss off a reference to Proust, not trying to sound pretentious, with the best of them. By the way, if you’ve already discovered Proust, might I recommend Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities?)

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There are, of course, many ways to play these pieces. Someone who is not a trained musician (and too many who are) might think everything is there on the printed page with all the notes and directions the composer gives us. How, then, can one performer play it differently than another if it’s all the same?

That’s just it – it’s not all the same, and even one pianist will admit that, depending on any number of variables – whether or not you’ve had your favorite brand of coffee that morning; how the spring-like weather of Central Pennsylvania might affect you; the fact you’re performing in a place like Carnegie Hall with all its history and historical and professional baggage (practice, baby, practice) – that can create subtle differences from one performance to the next, hitting the notes aside (in itself, enough of a challenge). A “different” piece? Well, not obviously but intrinsically – and how well, in the long run, it reaches and affects the listener, this mysterious communication of the composer’s idea distilled through the performer’s idea to reach the audience’s idea.

The Beethoven is one of those works that an artist or listener can keep coming back to and discovering new and different things in it, for lack of a less specific term. The first movement is a fairly standard “sonata form” by Beethoven’s approach. There’s a slow searching introduction leading to a dynamic, dramatic first theme (or germ of a theme that keeps on spinning) and what seems like a second theme but never really turns into one – it’s a contrast in a major key with a different mood before we’re thrown back into the dramatic struggle of the first theme. There’s a not unexpected development section – with a lot of fugal writing (as Beethoven was fond of in his later works – his last three sonatas were written simultaneously with the massive Missa Solemnis and the Grosse Fuge of Op.133 was not long into the future) – and a not unexpected recapitulation before the drama seems to collapse rather than resolve.

The second movement – much longer – is a complete contrast and, like the Goldberg Variations, is based on a simple theme which Beethoven labels Arietta as opposed to Bach’s Aria. The variations evolve melodically and, as you’d expect, become more complex, bringing in an element of syncopation atypical for Beethoven’s contemporaries. Suddenly, it erupts in what is often referred to as the “ragtime” or “boogie-woogie” variation – generations before such a style existed and which is only an inaccurate after-the-fact descriptor – that, after incredible intensity, turns into a series of expansive meditations, complete with elongated trills, on a short motive which Mann’s Kretzschmar refers to as his “fare-thee-well” motive.

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“After all its ordeals, the motive, this D-G-G, undergoes a gentle transformation. As it takes its farewell and becomes in and of itself a farewell, a call and a wave of goodbye, it experiences a little melodic enhancement. After an initial C, it takes on a C-sharp before the D, so that it now no longer scans as ‘sky of blue’ or ‘meadow-land’ but as ‘O – thou sky of blue,’ ‘greenest meadow-land,’ ‘fare-thee-well for good;’ and this added C-sharp is the most touching, comforting, poignantly forgiving act in the world. It is like a painfully loving caress of the hair, the cheek – a silent, deep gaze into the eyes for one last time. It blesses its object, its dreadful journeys now past, with overwhelming humanization, lays it on the hearer’s heart as a farewell, forever, lays it so gently that tears well. ‘Now for-get the pain!’ it says. ‘God was – great in us.’ ‘All was – but a dream.’ ‘Hold my – memory dear.’ Then it breaks off. Fast, hard triplets scurry toward a convenient final phrase that could easily conclude many another piece.”
(– Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, translated by John E. Woods, Knopf NYC 1997.)
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Here is a performance of the complete Sonata, Op. 111 by Beethoven, with Jeremy Denk recorded live at GreenSpace during a Beethoven marathon:


The discussion “why there is no 3rd movement,” the expected finale after this slow movement’s set of variations, is unnecessary after you hear it. Beethoven essentially combines elements of both slow movement and finale (even a scherzo in those ‘ragtime’ moments) that anything further is pointless. When his friend and secretary Anton Schindler asked why he didn’t write a third movement, Beethoven may have been joking (as he often did) that he had no time to write one; perhaps it was only after he was done, he too realized he’d already said all he needed to say on the matter.

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As if to prove a point that no music is necessary after Beethoven’s Op. 111, I will now add something about the work that opens the program – the Bartók Piano Sonata.

Here are two different performances by entirely different performers of the opening movement of Bartók’s sonata dating from 1926. The first is the ebullient Lang Lang who is clearly enjoying himself and whose performance is guaranteed to bring down the house:
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Now, here is a second performance (also recorded live) with a pianist I first heard when we were both grad students at Eastman and whom I found courtesy of YouTube purely by accident: here is Mark Westcott’s take on the same music:

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Quite a difference, no? The first, of course, is more exciting, focusing on the sheer physicality of performing the music. Most people would stand up and cheer because it is, after all, faster and louder than the second performance. These same people would not even consider this the least bit vulgar because it pushes all the right buttons – if you’re watching American Idol.

For some, Westcott’s performance may seem by comparison “too elegant” if that’s possible but I point out that the composer’s own tempo indication is Allegro moderato – in other words, a moderately lively tempo, not “prestissimo vulgarando.”

And yet the notes are the same. Please explain…

Dick Strawser