The Poulenc Trio Plays Poulenc (no surprise) and Brings a Few Others Along for the Ride

Please note, this Sunday's concert with the Poulenc Trio is being held at the Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey (PA) at 4pm – click here for directions.

The Poulenc Trio

Since they call themselves The Poulenc Trio and they're an ensemble consisting of an oboist, a bassoonist, and a pianist, it would be obvious Poulenc's Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano should be at the center of their repertoire. To be honest, it's more like “near the end of the program,” but I'll begin with it. Here is the Poulenc Trio playing the Poulenc Trio which Francis Poulenc completed in 1926 when he was 27:

Since I can't find the 3^rd movement with the Poulenc Trio, here it is from a studio recording made in 1957 with oboist Pierre Pierlot, bassoonist Maurice Allard, and pianist, Francis Poulenc, now 58.

It's the usual “fast-slow-fast” combination of movements, but it begins with these very serious sounding chords in the piano, a little off-putting with their dissonances, perhaps, followed by the winds playing with almost operatic seriousness. Imagine hearing this in the mid-1920s as Late-Romanticism's lushness was giving way to a harder edged Neo-Classicism, the “New Classical Style” with what many of its contemporaries called “Wrong-Note Harmony.” It has the same clean lines of Mozart and Haydn's 18th Century, but with something... well... a little different. It's almost as if Poulenc were giving his "serious" listeners, as they say, the bird...

Poulenc at 18 (w/bird)

After this recitative-like introduction, it's “aaaaand they're off!” barging into a rollicking presto that seems anything but serious, something that must have struck its critics like a mash-up of “Handel Meets Offenbach.” The slow movement, lyrical and flowing, shows off Poulenc's melodic gift – he would later become one of the great song composers of his day – before the gigue-like finale frolics along to its delightful end.

Francis Poulenc was a French composer, through and through – more specifically, a Parisian composer, born there in January of 1899 and dying there in 1963. But not just born in Paris: in the 8th arrondissment centered around the Champs-Élysées with the famous Arc de Triomphe at one end, a district known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, if not the “Main Street” of Paris, certainly one of the most famous streets in the world (even if you only think of George Gershwin listening to taxi horns while sitting in a sidewalk café in 1926). No doubt Poulenc's growing up in the heart of this joie de vivre had some influence on his light-hearted musical style.

And because of this, Poulenc is often not “taken seriously” by serious-minded music-lovers. When showed his Rapsodie negre, Poulenc's first “serious” composition (considering the very first piece on his list of works was a "Procession for the Cremation of a Mandarin" from 1914), a professor at the Conservatoire thought the 17-year-old composer was trying to make a fool of him. It hardly got any better as he explored the various possibilities open to a young composer in the Paris of World War I at a time when Debussy was dying and Ravel was at his peak.

Poulenc's family was wealthy – manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, in fact – and his mother was “an excellent pianist” who started giving him lessons when he was 5. Her brother, known to us as “Oncle Papoum,” introduced him to Paris' lively theatrical life. Young Francis could recite Mallarmé from memory at 10 and at 14 was among those amazed at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. At 16, he began studying piano with the great Ricardo Viñes, a friend of Debussy's and Ravel's, and soon met some other composers named Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Georges Auric (they soon added two more friends including Germaine Tailleferre, to form a group known as Les Six – as if their musical style wasn't daring enough: a group of composers that included a woman!) not to forget Erik Satie, a major influence, who was the front-rank avant-garde composer du jour.

He tried studying with Ravel but that apparently didn't work out: Fauré, then the director of the Conservatoire, had an assistant, Charles Koechlin (much over-looked by American audiences today), who proved more sympathetic. Poulenc studied with him off-and-on between 1921 and 1924. “By mutual consent,” according to Grove's Dictionary, “Poulenc's involvement with counterpoint went no further than Bach chorales,” meaning he never bothered with fugue-writing, one of the cornerstones of the development of ones contrapuntal skills. His ballet Les biches was a huge success with Diaghilev's company in 1924. (The untranslatable title can be loosely translated as “The doe-eyed young ladies” though there was also the underworld slang of “someone, male or female, with 'deviant sexual proclivities'.”) In the meantime, he started several pieces of chamber music – easier for a young beginning composer to get performed than writing orchestral and operatic works. 

Poulenc in 1925

But between 1918 and 1926 there had been seven pieces of chamber music: a sonata for clarinet and bassoon (heavily influenced by Stravinsky's 1918 L'Histoire du soldat) and another for horn, trumpet, and trombone, both from 1922, survived (not counting the piano “arrangements” he made of both works). But his catalog of works also lists two violin sonatas, a string quartet, and a quintet for clarinet and strings which did not (the string quartet was rumored to have been consigned to the famous Paris Sewers). Notice the survivors were works for wind instruments; the ones destroyed or lost were primarily for strings.

Poulenc never was comfortable writing for strings: he considered his one surviving Violin Sonata (his fourth attempt and the only one published, 1943) a failure, and he thought the Cello Sonata (written over a span of eight years in the '40s) would've sounded better on the bassoon. While a string trio and another string quartet would be trashed, one of his happier experiences with chamber music was the Sextet for Piano and... Wind Quintet! 

While it's conceivable this Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano could've been written initially with clarinet and cello in mind, the infectious joy of the first movement and the heart-on-sleeve romance in the slow movement may have struck him later as better suited for the combination he ended up choosing. (Even in these post-Covid days, perhaps I should reconsider using the word “infectious”...) To get away from family distractions, he retreated to a hotel room in Cannes (to avoid distractions??). While there, he met Igor Stravinsky who gave him some helpful insights in how to handle some problematical moments in the first movement. Poulenc dedicated the newly finished work to his friend, Manuel de Falla. At that same time, he met Wanda Landowska who was re-introducing the harpsichord to modern audiences and she commissioned a new concerto from him.

Poulenc (w/Mickey)

Self-taught because his parents intended him for a career in the family company, he described himself as a “Vulgarian” who wrote in his trademark light-hearted style to his final years in the early-1960s, long after such a style had gone out of fashion. However, in the summer of 1936, after an unexpected religious awakening following the death of a close friend and fellow composer in a violent car accident and his visit to a famous religious shrine shortly afterward, he began composing with a new-found and often religious seriousness, writing dramatic choral works during the Nazi occupation setting words of Resistance poets, which culminated in his intensely dramatic opera, The Dialogue of the Carmelites of 1957. Still, there are passages in some of his religious works that remind me of those photographs you might find of nuns playing soccer. 

Poulenc loved to absorb almost anything that caught his imagination. He might evoke the past or the new-fangled sound of jazz. His love of Mozart is evident through many of his works, even this trio: he opens the slow movement of his Concerto for Two Pianos, written in 1932, with a definite bow to Mozart but it quickly moves off into a style that is decidedly his own. There are, as well, tinges of jazz by way of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, premiered only a few months earlier, not to mention the appearance of the Balinese gamelan which he'd first heard the year before.

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

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

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Viet Cuong (photo by Aaron Jay Young)

Born in California in 1990 and growing up in Marietta, GA, Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong – it's pronounced vee-EHT kwawng – “enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical” in his music, “and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying.”

“Audience members are in for a sound that they’ve never heard before,” according to the Trio's website. “Explain Yourself features what must be the most multiphonic oboe notes ever written in a tonal chamber music work. Multiphonics are a special playing technique where oboist Alex Vvedensky” (the oboist at the time it was composed) “will he heard to play multiple notes at once, similar to the ‘double-stop’ effect used by string instrumentalists. The multiphonic effect adds to the wild feeling that infuses the piece.”

“As a clarinetist and admirer of twentieth century French music,” the composer writes, “I’ve always loved the music of Francis Poulenc. I’m particularly drawn to the joyous, witty nature of many of his pieces, and, with this piece being for the Poulenc Trio (plus clarinet!), I wanted to pay homage to Poulenc and his sense of humor. As such, the piece actually begins with a direct quote of his chamber piano concert, Aubade. This quote serves a few purposes: it acts as a marker for when the first section “repeats” itself, and, perhaps more importantly, the main melody of the entire piece uses the same pitches as the opening of Aubade.

“After the Poulenc quote, the piece jolts into a tango-like romp with a baroque flair. The instruments all play an equal role in this music and, all things considered, it’s pretty mild mannered. After a few minutes, the Aubade quote signifies a trip back to the beginning after the first climax concludes— much like a repeat in a classical symphony’s first movement. However, this repeat goes awry as the oboist begins to act out by replacing regular notes with raucous multiphonics. The other wind instruments begin to pick up on this mischievous behavior, and all three of them start to interrupt, mock, and distort the phrases. The pianist notices and isn’t pleased. Much like a frustrated parent or teacher, the pianist hammers out dense chords, essentially scolding the winds to get back on track.

“Things nearly fall apart as the winds continue to misbehave. Eventually it all comes to a head when the pianist and oboist perform an imitative duet. In doing this, the oboist has a chance to explain himself and prove that, while these multiphonics can be funny, they can also be played melodically and provide structure to a phrase. Won over, the pianist joins in on the fun and the piece concludes in a place where functional classical harmonies and multiphonics can coexist.

“This piece was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for the Poulenc Trio.”

While I couldn't find a recording available of “Explain Yourself!”, I decided to use this one to illustrate Mr. Cuong's musical versatility. After you've read the “humorous description” behind the music in the work you'll hear at Sunday's concert, this one, written in 2023, was inspired by grief and the composer's response to the loss of his father. “I felt as if I had lost my leaves,” he writes. “Many days I feared those leaves would never grow back. After struggling for months to write, I finally found some healing while creating Deciduous. This involved revisiting chord progressions that brought me solace throughout my life and activating them in textures that I have enjoyed exploring in recent years. The piece cycles through these chord progressions, building to a moment where it’s stripped of everything and must find a way to renew itself. While I continue to struggle with this loss, I have come to understand that healing is not as much of a linear process as it is a cyclical journey, where, without fail, every leafless winter is followed by a spring.”

(Deciduous by Viet Cuong, performed by the Texas Tech University Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Dr. Sarah McKoin, Director)

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Mikhail Glinka, painted by Ilya Repin in 1887

Mikhail Glinka's name is most likely familiar to many of you, if not his story. Some of his music is indeed famous – the operas, A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmilla, a few orchestral works, but most specifically, Kamarinskaya – but the “Trio Pathétique” may be unfamiliar territory. Written originally for clarinet, bassoon, and piano, it was published with an alternative ensemble, the traditional piano trio with violin and cello. That was the publisher's doing since he could make more money selling the sheet music to amateur string players than there would be clarinetists and bassoonists looking for things to play (that's the reason violists can thank Brahms for writing two viola sonatas at the end of his life: the publisher saw little chance of any income from stuff for clarinet!). So it's not illogical to find an oboist and a bassoonist appropriating some other combination's repertoire (I refer to the previous concert with all the transcriptions for Cello Quartet!).

It's in four movements with the scherzo in second place, but there's a break between the slow movement and the spirited finale. For Mozart, D Minor was a dramatic key – his demonic D Minor Piano Concerto and the statue music of Don Giovanni (G Minor was, for Mozart, the tragic key); Glinka's finale might seem more despairing, like a heart-broken lover taking leave of an ex-girlfriend perhaps?

Glinka in 1840

If you're thinking there's a connection between Glinka's little-known trio and Tchaikovsky's famous 6th Symphony, the Pathétique, keep in mind Glinka composed his trio in 1832 and Tchaikovsky was born in 1840. In Tchaikovsky's case, so the famous story goes, he'd completed the work with its bleak ending before coming up with the subtitle. He was thinking “Tragic” except it smacked of Brahms and his “Tragic” Overture – and Tchaikovsky detested Brahms' music – when his brother Modeste suggested the French pathétique, not so much in the literal English sense of “pathetic” (as in “man, you're pathetic!”) but from the word pathos, “a quality in a situation, film, or play that makes people feel sadness and pity.”

In Glinka's case, after the first performance, the bassoonist told the composer (in Italian) "Ma questo è disperazione!" Again, this is not so literally desperation as in "feeling desperate" – imagine playing the “Desperation Trio” – as despair. Given the first publication of the piece wasn't until 1878, 21 years after the composer's death, whether it was known (if known at all) in the interim as the Trio Pathétique, I can't say, but the publisher prefaced the score with a quotation in French from the composer himself: «je n’ai connu l’amour qu’à travers le malheur qu’il cause» ("I have only known love through the misfortune it causes") whether the title was his suggestion or not.

Given Glinka's habitual womanizing, however, this might make more sense, as one commentator suggested, “[evoking] the trail of amorous spite”. Other adjectives often attached to the composer are “indolent, self-indulgent, a hypochondriac, and a libertine who wasted years of his life in dissipation, the pursuit of women, or simple idleness,” and we might see the title in a more comic light, given the light-heartedness of most of the piece rather than tragic. But then Tchaikovsky's symphony is not entirely “one of sadness” given the third movement's rousing march, the second movement's nostalgic 5/4 “waltz” or even the drama of the turbulent conflicts throughout the first movement.

Stylistically, given Glinka's future reputation and the fact that, in 1832, he hadn't had a chance to find his voice yet (always an elusive adventure for any young composer), this early work of his sounds more like Spohr or, in parts, Weber, or for that matter any of the hundreds of other once popular composers of the day who are now largely or entirely forgotten. Who listens to someone like Moscheles, Herz, or Kalkbrenner these days without thinking “Chopin did it better”? On the other hand, checking out Kalkbrenner's 4th Piano Concerto from 1835, it's an appealing and delightful piece, thoroughly entertaining: what would be wrong with hearing it once in a while instead of something that's constantly overplayed? Yes, well... moving right along...

Speaking of hindsight, if you're familiar with Glinka's name and a few of the few pieces he left us, you might expect some “really Russian-sounding music” here, comparable to the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla or his brilliant dance-piece Kamarinskaya, perhaps the last work he completed, which has been called “the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music grew” (Stravinsky's usually given credit for that) but Tchaikovsky had said much the same thing much earlier. In fact, if you want to talk about the direct influence of Glinka on the young, developing Tchaikovsky, the finale of his 2nd Symphony (now re-translated as “The Ukrainian Symphony”) with its repetitive folk-song melody, is a direct descendant of Kamarinskaya.

“But,” you'll think while listening to Glinka's trio, “there's nothing remotely Russian-sounding here!” And that's basically because, quite simply, it was written before he discovered himself to be a composer of Russian music. Or for that matter, before any Russian-born composer had made the same discovery!

Unfortunately, that involves reams and reams of historical and cultural background: if you want, I could suggest a few very fat books that would delve into the question, “What Makes the Music Russian?” Suffice it to say that, at the time Glinka was growing up, there were no music schools in “all of Russia.” In fact, there were no music schools in Russia until two years after Glinka died – at the age of 52, btw – when Anton Rubinstein, a Russian pianist and composer who was, he lamented, “too German for the Russians and too Russian for the Germans,” founded a Music Society in Moscow and subsequently a branch in St. Petersburg that became conservatories. Among the first graduates was a young law clerk named Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.

So technically Glinka did not have the resources a conservatory-trained student would have had. Nor did he, like Beethoven, have the support of the immediate past with models comparable to Haydn and Mozart and centuries of Germanic culture. There were no Russian composers, for the most part, and those that were were, like the architects who built St. Petersburg or the choir-masters who trained the singers in the Imperial choirs and theaters, imported from Italy. Yes, they slapped an onion-shaped dome on a church tower and called it “Russian” but that's about the extent of it. Those singers trained by Italian choir-masters (who were often also composers) sang Italian operas and those who began writing their own operas – even the Empress, Catherine the Great, wrote some librettos for them! – wrote in the Italian style.

In his epic novel War and Peace, Tolstoy points out how aristocrats spoke French rather than Russian and it was Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 that sent Russia's nobility scrambling to learn Russian (which they considered a “brutish” language) so as not to appear to be siding with the enemy. If you've read War and Peace, that most Russian of Russian novels, there are great swaths of French, even in the original Russian publications, stretching across the opening scenes as members of the Imperial elite gather to party and discuss the latest news from the Continent as Russia finds itself being dragged into the Napoleonic conflict of 1805.

And Glinka was born in 1804 on the estate of his father, a retired army colonel and member of this landed gentry, whose lands had been part of the family since the mid-1660s. The fact this estate, near Smolensk, was on the route Napoleon's troops took in 1812 during the course of their attack on Moscow and more importantly on their disastrous retreat following the burning of Moscow (“scorched earth” and the Russian Winter were two of the Russian armies most successful secret weapons). Russia was beginning to awaken, culturally, with this generation, but it was a long and very slow process, not an overnight blossoming, following centuries of isolation from Europe, largely begun around 1700 by Tsar Peter I (known as “The Great” to the West; to the Russians, not so much).

Growing up in this hot-house environment of the aristocracy, Glinka was not expected to “work” except as a military officer or a court minister (given the Byzantine bureaucracy that presumed to run this vast country), neither of which appealed to him, hence the idea of his being “indolent.” If you're interested in a Russian novel that won't make you want to slit your wrists, I strongly recommend Goncharov's Oblomov where a “thoroughly superfluous man” of the gentry class spends the entire first part of the novel lying in bed trying to think about the day ahead, “raising slothfulness to an art-form,” yet without making any decisions about what needs to be done (he's basically the patron saint of procrastinators – btw, I've been meaning to reread this novel for years, now...). It was begun during the mid-1840s when Glinka was trying to find his artistic voice, and published in 1859, the year Rubinstein founded his Moscow Music Society and school.

Raised first by his hypochondriac of a grandmother until around the age of 10, he then went to live with his uncle on a nearby estate where there was a small orchestra which played Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (who had written his Eroica in 1803). But in addition to hearing the peasants singing folk-songs with their crude traditional, often dissonant harmonizations, it was a clarinet quartet by Crussel (a Finnish-born composer of German heritage and training) that caught the boy's interest, and so he was then given music lessons on the piano and the violin. When he was sent to the Imperial Capital to attend a school for “aristocratic youth” at 13, he also widened his musical exposure, including all of three lessons with the Irish pianist John Field, the true “inventor” of the Nocturne who, as Clementi's traveling assistant, had been abandoned in Petersburg but stayed on to pursue a career as a concert pianist and teacher (in 1818, he left for Moscow where he stayed until returning to Europe four years later).

But the city was full of wealthy amateurs who amused each other with in-home performances and who wrote their own music imitating the more popular composers, mostly melancholy songs and fancifully titled piano pieces. Glinka, having no recourse to professional music-making otherwise, fell into this culture and wrote a great many such pieces himself – salon music, it's usually called, with the same dismissive air we unfortunately treat the word “amateur” today (sniff...). (In the 19th Century, the term amateur had nothing to do with the quality of the artist, but rather with the fact they were doing it out of love (hence, amo – amateur) rather than for financial gain. As aristocrats – especially as aristocratic ladies – it was also unseemly they should pursue an actual career in it!)

As for his bureaucratic career, young Glinka was appointed as an assistant secretary in the Department of Public Highways (RUSSdot, I guess you could call it), having failed to gain entry into the more prestigious Foreign Office. The rather light demands of his work-life did not impinge on his becoming a leading dilettante in Petersburg. But when in 1830 his physician suggested a trip to Italy for his health, he ended up in Milan (then part of the Austrian Empire) where he attended some classes at the conservatory and was so bored with the academic work – the study counterpoint has nearly killed more than one budding composer – he found a new hobby: hanging out with singers, especially romancing the ladies. With this new crowd, he met composers like Berlioz and Mendelssohn – both were in Rome at the same time, working on their Fantastique and Italian Symphonies respectively – and followed one soprano, a Russian, to Naples and sat in on her voice-lessons where he learned some of the techniques involved in bel canto singing (a vocal style that also greatly influenced Chopin). While in Naples, he also met Donizetti and Bellini who were in town for the premieres of their Anna Bolena and La sonnambula respectively. However, bored with Italy, he traveled by way of Switzerland to Berlin where he met Siegfried Dehn, a well-known theorist, with whom he began serious study of composition.

Dehn, Glinka later wrote, “not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing.” This was in 1833. The following spring, word arrived that Glinka's father had died: he must return to Russia and the estate he'd now inherited.

So while he'd been in Italy – specifically Milan – hating counterpoint and not taking his music education too seriously, the then 28-year-old Glinka wrote a trio for some friends of his: he played the piano, with Pietro Tassistro, the clarinetist, and Antonio Cantú, the bassoonist. They were not amateurs but members of the orchestra at La Scala.

Whatever the subsequent history of this piece may have been – keeping in mind, the following year Glinka left Italy and decided to pursue the study of composition in earnest – its publication as late as 1878 was due to Glinka's long-suffering younger sister, Ludmilla (she died in 1906!) who had frequently acted as his nurse during his various illnesses. Returning to Berlin and just resuming his studies with Dehn after having heard the Crucifixus from Bach's B Minor Mass, he caught a cold and died at the age of 52 – I can just hear the hypochondriac now: “I told you I was sick!” It was Ludmilla who had him reburied in Petersburg. She had always been urging him to compose whenever he would give up in frustration, especially after the failure of his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmilla, so it was perfectly natural she spent the decades following his death trying to keep his music alive.

Failing to convince the authorities to stage Ruslan in Petersburg, she sent a young friend of hers to Prague, hoping to mount the opera there and maybe impress the Russian opera houses to take it more seriously. Eventually, it worked, but not until 1872. There was only one copy left of A Life for the Tsar, his first opera – which was a success – so she had this same friend and a couple of his friends make two new copies of the score; and just in time because shortly afterward, there was a fire at the Imperial opera house and the original manuscript was lost in the flames!

By the way, these young friends of Ludmilla's? The one sent to Prague was Mily Balakirev, and one of the copyists was Modeste Mussorgsky. Soon, there were a few more gathering at Ludmilla's home for musical discussions and performances who would become the nucleus of a bunch of composers forever known as The Mighty Handful – or more famously, The Russian Five.

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Shostakovich (front, right) watching a football match

A much better known Russian composer is Dmitri Shostakovich and thanks to Stuart Malina's love of his symphonies, we've heard quite a few of them with the Harrisburg Symphony over the years – most recently the 6th earlier this season. But the music on the Poulenc Trio's program – perhaps in deference to the typical joie-de-vivre of their namesake – is not the Shostakovich of those slowly unwinding, expansive, often gloomy opening movements typical of so many of his symphonies, well-known for their often dark and always intense emotional underpinnings. There is, contrary to what you might assume, a lighter side to Shostakovich – and more than just the tongue-in-cheek naughtiness of the Polka from the ballet, The Age of Gold.

His Moskva Cheryómushki is basically a Soviet equivalent of a Broadway Musical though it's called an operetta (less serious than a real, all-out opera) – just as his “Jazz Suites” are not so much Western jazz as English dance-hall tunes! And when you listen to this, if it's new to you, I defy you to win a “Name That Composer” contest – or even realize this is RRRRussian Music!

Here's the Poulenc Trio in a 2019 performance recorded at Peabody in Baltimore:

Ostensibly, the show's plot focuses on the typical Soviet citizens' never-ending search for livable housing conditions. Cheryómushki is a real place, a subsidized housing development in Moscow full of cheap houses built in 1956. There are seven “good” characters and three villains which include a colleague of the hero's who's conniving to get the apartment first, the corrupt developer (a petty bureaucrat), and an equally corrupt low-ranking estate agent who refuses to give over the key. The scene for "A Spin Around Moscow" describes the delight of the "good characters" as they are driven across town, no doubt careening through winding streets, to see their new home.

And what did the composer think of this step outside his typical symphonic comfort zone?

Before the premiere, Shostakovich wrote to a friend, “I am behaving very properly and attending rehearsals of my operetta. I am burning with shame. If you have any thoughts of coming to the first night, I advise you to think again. It is not worth spending time to feast your eyes and ears on my disgrace. Boring, unimaginative, stupid. This is, in confidence, all I have to tell you.”

Well, yes... enough said... moving right along...

The Poulenc Trio prefaces this with a “Romance” – in Russian, the word for “song” is “romance” just as in German it's Lied – taken from his 1955 film score for the Russian thriller, “The Gadfly,” based on an 1897 novel by Ethel Voynich set in the 1840s during the Italian attempts to dispel the occupying Austrian forces. Again, the plot is not important to enjoying the melody Shostakovich wrote, here – you can read the plot summary if you're curious – but, not being familiar either with the novel or the film or who's involved in this particular scene, I'm curious about the motivic references to Schubert and Schumann I hear in it; not that all Russian music (even Soviet music) needs to sound like a peasant dealing with lost love or a harsher-than-usual winter...

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Handel and Rossini may frame the program, but I'll end this post with them.

The trio sonata as a “form” – more correctly, a genre – was sort of a default setting in the Baroque Era. Typically, it consisted of four players because, in Baroque music, the role of “the continuo” was always played by two instruments, an instrument that could play harmony like a harpsichord or organ, and another to emphasize the all-important bass-line of the harmony with a cello, bass, or bassoon. If the piece was played in a church, they'd use the organ; in some aristocrat's music room, a harpsichord – or, for that matter, even a lute of some kind. The two “melody instruments” playing over this accompaniment were normally violins, but it would be possible to use, say, a violin and a flute or oboe, or a pair of wind instruments, matched or mismatched. It really didn't matter: the music was not specifically composed to suit the violin the way Beethoven or Paganini would later write for them. 

With the Poulenc Trio, their solution was to use a modern day piano, of course – still, a transcription given the difference in technique needed to play a harpsichord or organ – but also to use the bassoon not as a continuo instrument but as one of the "melody" instruments, even if they're not playing in the same octave like a pair of flutes.

There are some 28 trio sonatas listed in the Handel catalogue, a few of them in F Major and some of them available in different editions. This is the one the Poulenc Trio will perform to open their concert:

And now to conclude, finally, with a Fantasy on Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, here recorded by the Poulenc Trio in Baltimore, 2021:

Officially, this last work on the program is one of those “bring-the-house-down” bravura concert fantasies based on themes from other composers' popular works. In this case, oboist Charles Triébert and bassoonist Eugène Jancourt, both famous teachers at the Paris Conservatoire and highly acclaimed performers adapted some of the greatest moments from Rossini's opera, L'Italiana in Algeri (“The Italian Girl in Algiers”), originally written in 18 days in 1813 when Rossini was 21. Incidentally, Triébert also improved the fingering system for the oboe in 1855 and Jancourt brought various improvements to the bassoon to make it a more reliable solo instrument, especially improving the upper register – another reason both men should be remembered fondly by oboists and bassoonists of today. 

While one could argue the music Jancourt and Triébert adapted for their “Fantasie Concertante” was by Rossini, the way it was presented – particularly with its virtuosic cadenzas and technical passages – was entirely their own, transcending the art of arranging and going beyond the original roles assigned to the singers. I don't know if anyone every called Triébert the Paganini of the Oboe or Jancourt the Franz Liszt of the Bassoon, but it would amount to the same thing, given the number of such fantasies that frequently appeared on their concert tours like Paganini's Fantasy on the G String from Rossini's Moses and Liszt on... well, to pick just one, let's say his Concert Paraphrase on Verdi's Rigoletto.

And now, moving right along... enjoy the concert! 

– Dick Strawser

The Galvin Cello Quartet: Four Cellists and Ten Composers

Who: The Galvin Cello Quartet 

What: Works from Mozart and Vivaldi to Gershwin and Piazzolla with the premiere of a new work by Zev Malina

When: Wednesday, February 21st, 2024, at 7:30

Where: Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg

The Galvin Cello Quartet – consisting of cellists Luiz Fernando Venturelli (left), Sihao He, Sydney Lee, and Haddon Kay (right) – “met as students at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music in the studio of acclaimed pedagogue Hans Jørgen Jensen. Named after the Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall at Bienen, the Galvin Cello Quartet began during the height of the pandemic. Its story is a testament to the power of teamwork and exceeds all expectations of traditional chamber music.

“Some of the greatest joys as a musician are the friendship and camaraderie strengthened through collaborative music-making. As part of a tight-knit cello studio at Bienen, the four friends wanted to channel their collective passion for music instilled in them by Jensen. But with pandemic restrictions in place, the school running virtually, and Venturelli back home in Brazil, performing as a string quartet was not possible. Despite these challenges, the four cellists, each with their own personality and charisma and eager to explore the colors and timbres of the cello together, decided to enter the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. With the deadline quickly approaching, Venturelli's return to the States came sooner than anticipated, and all quarantine guidelines and safety measures were taken. The following twelve days were filled with preparation, rehearsals, and one final recording session of all the required repertoire before the quartet exploded onto the scene.

“The pandemic may have dampened and muted many concert stages, hopes, and livelihoods for artists and musicians, but music has limitless possibilities to heal and restore. Since its illustrious debut, the quartet has continued to play together and prepare new repertoire for upcoming concerts. With their untamable desire to create, change, and ultimately bring joy through music, He, Lee, Kay, and Venturelli are more excited than ever to explore and expand the possibilities of a cello quartet. Through its music, the Galvin Cello Quartet hopes to celebrate and convey the values of friendship, creativity, and resilience in an ever-changing world.”

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One thing I've always stressed is how “music is not always logical” and that applies to the theory that organizes these twelve pitches we have into various combinations of different chords and scales composers use to create the music we play or listen to as well as more obvious things like terminology. If the Galvin Cello Quartet is an ensemble of four cellos, why is Schubert's Cello Quintet for a string quartet with an additional cello rather than for five cellos? 

On a more practical side, you might also wonder how much music out there is originally written for four cellos?

Looking at the printed program, you'll notice seven of the ten works for Wednesday's concert are listed as arrangements – and since Gershwin's Preludes are not originally for Cello Quartet, make that eight. That leaves two works: the Prayer by Luigi Forino, and “Time and Timelessness” by Zev Malina. One was written by a cello teacher in Rome in the early-20th Century, possibly for four of his students. The other began as a request from four friends who happened to be cellists and schoolmates of the composer and was completed in timely fashion just this past December for the Galvin's appearance with Market Square Concerts.

When I was in graduate school many (many) years ago (and a wanna-be cello-player), many of my cellist-friends would have impromptu “cello parties” to sight-read Bach Chorales or some of the Preludes & Fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (wild, I know...). So I imagine similar social if verifiably nerdy behavior from the 1970s might not be very different from the early-1900s or the present day, musicians being musicians.

Because the cello has an upper range that extends well into the upper territory of the violin, and its lower strings supply a bass register not available to the violin – only a cellist would therefore point out how this makes the cello a superior instrument – an ensemble of cellos offers an even wider variety of sonorities, especially considering if one cello can play two sustained notes on two strings, four cellos can sustain eight-note chords. Not to mention playing chords on all four strings could result in 16-note chords! This creates a wealth of textures comparable to a choir or a whole string section. Adding to that certain effects like pizzicato (plucking the strings) or those ethereal high-register harmonics can produce a whole canvas of sounds with a variety of shades and colors. 

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Luigi Forino, a name not likely to be familiar or even recognizable unless you're also a cellist, was a cello teacher at Rome's famed Conservatory of St. Cecilia (named after the Patron Saint of Music) and while he wrote a great deal of music in his day – as a teacher, much of it intended for his students – the only piece I can find on-line is this “Prayer” (Op.27/3).

“Les prières, mélodies réligieuses pour 4 vcelles. [published by] Offenbach, André” is listed (in French) in a German “monthly bulletin” for 1909 which, since it included other works by Brahms & Handel, is more a list of recently published sheet music now available to the public rather than announcing a newly composed work. Exactly when it was written is apparently uncertain – best guess would be between 1905 and 1909, then.

Since the title is in the plural, the assumption is this is a set of prayers, not a movement out of a suite called “Prayer.” The score of No. 3 is subtitled San Francesco parla alle tortola with an epigram: “O sirrochie mie, tortole semplici innocenti e caste.... Fioretti-XXII.” This is from “The Little Flowers of St. Francis,” a collection of stories about St. Francis and his early followers compiled early in the 14th Century. The relevant text in an on-line translation would be “O my sisters, simple, innocent, and chaste turtle-doves, why do you let yourselves be taken? Now I desire to save you from death and to make nests for you, so ye may bring forth fruit and multiply, according to the commandments of our Creator.”

Here's a performance recorded by the Galvin Cello Quartet in 2021:

(You can also follow the score in this video.) 

No. 3 is also dedicated to Francisco P. Roget. While I can't find anything about him specifically, he could be a friend or colleague of the composer or perhaps one of his cello students, maybe a member of the quartet he'd written for (if he wrote for a specific quartet). Are there four prayers, each one dedicated to a different cellist? Or perhaps Sig. Roget's a member of the Franciscan Order, or someone who simply likes doves? Or just a friend named Francis? (The logic of composers can sometimes defy the usual perception of logic.) Were they a pre-existing group, this cello quartet – were they migliori amici violoncellisti (best-friend cellists) or some random conglomeration put together by their teacher?

It might be just as fanciful to hear the soft fluttering of wings in some of the accompanimental figures of Forino's meditation on St. Francis, or “coos” in those isolated pairs of notes that decorate the melody, but whatever the mood, certainly the serenity and simplicity of St. Francis “talking to the turtle-doves” permeates the entire piece, even with its dramatic climax before the opening music's return.

Luigi Forino (1868-1936)

So who was Luigi Forino? His father Ferdinando was a cellist well known in Rome who played in the orchestra at the Teatro Apollo, Rome's largest “lyric theater” where Verdi's Trovatore had been premiered in 1853 (among many other famous works) and in addition to the usual fantasies and paraphrases on famous operatic tunes, he also composed two cello concertos and “numerous” cello sonatas. (It's important also to keep in mind Italy's claim to musical fame in the 19th Century was almost exclusively operatic: Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini (among many others) never wrote a body of instrumental works. So if Sig. Forino was not an operatic composer but "only" a composer of instrumental works, this would make him, in the eyes of the Italian public, a composer not likely to gain much recognition.)

Luigi, born in 1868, became Principal Cellist of the Teatro Apollo in 1882 when he was around 14, after his father left to pursue a career in chamber music – he became a member of a piano quintet with pianist/composer Giovanni Sgambatti whose 2nd Piano Quintet had received a rare airing at “Music at Gretna” around 2007, as I recall.

In 1890, Luigi and his younger brother, 14-year-old pianist Ettore (who'd studied with Sgambatti, himself a student of Liszt's), went to Buenos Aires when Luigi was named Director of the National Conservatory of Argentina. However, Luigi soon returned to Italy in 1894, eventually becoming a teacher at Rome's Conservatory of St. Cecilia (which Sgambatti had founded in 1870). Like his father, Luigi also composed a cello concerto as well as several sonatas, etudes and “methods” for the cello, plus a one-act opera, Bacchus in 1898 and a cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Afternoon in the Roman Countryside, in 1913. By comparison, Respighi, who would break the mold as a famous, largely instrumental Italian Composer in the 20th Century, wrote the first of his Roman Trilogy, The Fountains of Rome, in 1916; also, incidentally, Respighi had become a professor of composition at St. Cecilia in 1913. Small world, no?

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If you were thinking “who's Luigi Forino?”, imagine a concert-goer in, say, California who might be looking at this program and wondering “who's Zev Malina?”

Zev Malina in 2021

Regular concert-goers in Harrisburg, however, have watched and listened to Zev Malina as he grew up and, now soon to be 22, his official biography is already impressive: he's “already established himself as an up-and-coming American composer. He has received several prestigious awards, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award in 2020, the National Young Composers’ Challenge in 2017 and 2018 (orchestral division,) and first prize in the 12th Fidelio Piano Composition Competition. Zev’s music has been performed by the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, The Florida Orchestra, Market Square Concerts, as well as at readings by the performing ensembles at the Brevard Music Center Summer Festival and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He is currently a junior in the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, where he studies composition with Karim Al-Zand.”

Over the years, I've heard many young composers who, understandably, did not yet have an understanding of what makes music “tick” – for that matter, many older composers, too – but from the very beginning, Zev Malina possessed that innate sense which works so effortlessly, so “just right,” you sit back and say “this kid knows what he's doing!” I've thought that when I heard his setting of a children's book, “Blueberries for Sal” as part of a Bar Mitzvah project, and I continue to look forward to each new piece to see how that understanding continues to express itself – no pressure, mind you – as he explores what makes him “tick” and he finds his mature voice (Time and Timelessness, indeed...).

Here's what the composer wrote about his newest piece:

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When I first entered the Shepherd School of Music, my freshman class featured (among others) no wind players and four cellists. Within the semester, my compositional peer Jaylin Vinson had written a piece for them, and they officially became the Cello Besties—they have an Instagram and everything; it’s very cute. I was naturally thrilled when they asked if I would write a piece for them, and I soon set to work on what would become Time and Timelessness.

The title “Time and Timelessness,” though snagged from an impressively nonsensical sentence my dad once used in a college essay, represents the central drama of my piece quite well: across the five sections of this single movement, there is a recurring tension between rhythmically metered, “timed” music, and freer, almost improvisatory, “timeless” music. In the first section, a lyrical, chant-like theme is presented amidst a fuzzy aura of sound, before the second section barges in with grotesque, almost mechanical rhythmic drive. As unmetered flourishes start sneaking back into the texture, the rhythmic intensity dissolves into the third section, in which recurring loose, improvisatory moments are interrupted by each of the cellists. These moments and their interruptions get more agitated as one cello screeches the chant-like theme over a tumultuous mire of upward surges from the other three cellos, finally reaching a fever pitch in the very high registers of the instrument. The energy dies down, but only briefly, as the highly rhythmic music of the second section returns with a vengeance. After a few timid interruptions, the chant-like theme returns in fully harmonized glory, expanded to embrace the previously violent musical material of the second and fourth sections. Time and Timelessness demonstrates some of my most personally ambitious and experimental writing, and I am honored to have it performed by the Galvin Quartet. Thank you for listening!

– Zev Malina 

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Since "Time and Timelessness" has yet to be performed, if you're curious what music Zev Malina was writing a few years ago, here's the composer playing his "Schemin', a tribute to Zez Confrey" performed with Market Square Concerts in April, 2021, at Whitaker Center:

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The Mozart Family c.1780: Nannerl, Wolfgang, mother Anna Maria (d.1778), father Leopold

My next composer – he opens the program, officially – is well-known enough to need “no introduction” (not that that's going to stop me). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of those wonders that defies explanation, how, after hearing his sister's piano lesson, he then went over to the keyboard and began “picking out thirds” (not single notes but intervals) when he was 3 years old, pleased with the sounds he was making; how, a year later, his father Leopold (a stage-father if ever there was one) would play simple minuets for him and the boy would play them back “flawlessly.” Maria Anna (“Nannerl” as everyone called her) also recalled how, at 5, her brother would make up little pieces he would play for the family and which their father would write down.

The Divertimento in D Major, K.136, was the first of a set of three composed early in 1772 shortly before or just after his 16th birthday. If you're not familiar with those “K Numbers,” they refer to Köchel's catalogue of Mozart's works, listed in chronological order (as far as one could know at the time), so at 16 Mozart had already composed apparently 135 other works. He and his father had just come back from another job-hunting trip to Italy – Leopold was determined to find a decent job for his talented son as court composer somewhere other than Salzburg which he felt was a “go-nowhere” position – and while he had a commission for a large-scale opera for Milan in late-December, he dashed off a set of three string quartets meant for after-dinner music at some Salzburg aristocrat's house. Officially, Mozart's job at the court of Salzburg's Prince-Archbishop (whom he despised and vice-versa) was “concertmaster” for the court orchestra and supplying something for “easy listening” for one of his court noblemen was considered “duties-as-assigned.” 

It's difficult to listen to this music and think it was the result of an assignment for a gig – something practical, and something probably no one was really going to be listening to except for the sheer pleasure of having “nice music” going on in the background.

Whatever Mozart thought of these pieces – certainly not as demanding of his concentration and creativity as the opera would be – they certainly sound effortless and, by extension to us in the Present Day, flawless; so perfectly, classically balanced, imaginative without resorting to a collection of clichéd formulas, they strike us as the work of a mature creativity.

Usually, “divertimento,” along with numerous other synonyms like “serenade” or “notturno” or “cassation,” was something applied to “lighter music” unlike a string quartet which, as it would eventually develop, was considered more “serious” music. They could be composed for any possible combination, usually small in number, but in this case, Mozart wrote them for four stringed instruments, probably replacing the cello of the quartet with a double bass (typical for the genre).

While it's more likely to be performed by a string orchestra – for some reason, it's also known as “Salzburg Symphony No. 1” – here's Quatour Ebèn recorded in 2012 (please ignore the rude late-comer photobombing the foreground...):

What's in a name? Whatever Mozart called them, the title “Divertimento” was written on the manuscript in someone else's handwriting – apparently not his father's, either; perhaps a cataloguer at the court music library? Whatever the story behind it, enjoy it: that's what it's meant for.

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2024 is one of those rare years we actually get to celebrate Gioacchino Rossini's birthday on the date he was born: February 29th, 1792. He may not have been the prodigy Mozart, Schubert, or Mendelssohn were (those six string sonatas of his, written when he was 12, notwithstanding), but his first opera was performed when he was 18. When his most famous opera, The Barber of Seville, was first produced (a failure, by the way), he was 24. In all, he composed 39 operas, many of them successes but also many of them failures. It was a very tough market and the competition was, as far as the music world is concerned, rather "cut-throat."  

After what became his last opera, William Tell (a huge success for a huge opera) in 1829, it's quite possible he might've decided, after writing almost four hours of music, he'd had enough. The physical effort was one thing, not to mention the nastiness of the opera world's business and politics, or his dissatisfaction with new trends in “contemporary” music, but there was also one of the biggest fears any successful artist has to deal with: “What's next?”

Whatever the reasons were, Rossini chose to “retire” from composing. He could certainly afford to, but he was only 37 years old: surely, he'd want to continue composing something? His career lasted 19 years; after he “retired,” he survived another almost 40 years. 

A man who enjoyed the Good Life, Rossini joked his doctor had advised him to give up either “Wine, Women, or Song” and so he decided “Song” was the one he could most easily do without. There was certainly more to it than that: musicologists (if no one else) still argue about the “why?” behind his retirement and it's just as possible his health was as much at the root of it, given all the effort he'd spent on his career so far. He was being treated for the after-effects of the 19th Century's primary medical scourge, in Rossini's case gonorrhea, and the ensuing arthritis and possible “manic depression” (now called Bipolar II) he suffered from may have had as much of an impact on his desire not to “put himself through all that again.”

Despite announcing his retirement – some say he had planned William Tell would be his last opera while he was writing it – he still continued to compose, just not the vast canvases grand operas required: there was a series of miniatures grouped together as Soirées musicales over the next five years, plus he began his Stabat Mater in 1831 though it took him ten years to finish, a luxury he wouldn't've had writing a new opera for a production deadline. After a stay in Italy, he returned to Paris in 1844 and it was rumored he was setting to work on a new opera, this one about Joan of Arc (not true: or at least, nothing came of it); a pastiche based on earlier works not yet heard in Paris turned into a “new” opera about Robert (the) Bruce (see the heroic pattern here, following William Tell's success?) which, whatever Rossini's involvement in it was (very little, creatively), it was a quickly dismissed, old-fashioned failure.

Rossini in 1850

After spending years in Bologna and then Florence (where he was ultimately buried), Rossini returned to Paris in 1855 as much because he needed the best medical help possible (friends “feared for his sanity”) as because he enjoyed Paris' “Good Life.” He could throw lavish parties for such guests as Franz Liszt, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Anton Rubinstein and other musical luminaries whenever they passed through Paris. Rossini even met Richard Wagner at one of his parties in 1860 when the newly exiled German firebrand was in town to oversee that disastrous production of Tannhäuser, speaking of “contemporary musical trends.”

Billing himself as a “fourth-class pianist,” Rossini accompanied Sarasate and Joachim at some of these Musical Saturdays, one of the hottest tickets in a city awhirl with social events. For these, he composed over 150 miniatures, mostly songs and piano pieces but some instrumental pieces as well, later collected into a series of nine volumes, only four of which Rossini called Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of [my] Old Age): too good to pass up, eventually they were all given that title.

Many of the pieces bore self-deprecating titles, others nonsensical ones (“Pretentious Prelude” and “Inoffensive Prelude,” for example, look forward to Erik Satie's “True Flabby Preludes (for a dog)” or the “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear”) so once Rossini's “sins” were edited for publication after his death (his widow sold the entire collection almost immediately after his death in 1868) many of them were given “more appropriate” titles.

Curiously, one of them, “Une larme” (A Tear), written in 1858 (making it one of the earliest of these “Sins” which he'd begun the year before) was published as a piece for cello and piano, but an earlier manuscript with the same title surfaced several years later, written pour basse: did he mean the “double bass” or the way a cello was often referred to in the 18th Century in a string quartet for two violins, “alto et basse”? Badly written for the then-modern bass, was it perhaps something he wrote for one party, then revised for a cellist at a later party? After all, Rossini was no stranger to recycling his own music (the “Barber of Seville” Overture had already been used for two operas before!). Regardless, the published version is subtitled “Theme and Variations for Violoncello and Piano,” – violoncello technically means “little bass” – the different variations giving it an almost operatic variety of emotions, an aria-without-words, if you will. Was Rossini, now 66, shedding a tear for the Glory Days of his Youth? If anything, the finale is far from wistful.

Here is the cello-and-piano version accompanied by the composer's manuscript:

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David Popper

If you're a cellist (or related to one), you'd be familiar with a lot of David Popper's music. As a teacher, he wrote a great many etudes and “methods” (pieces for young students to develop their technique and style), but as a performer he wrote four concertos, numerous works usually called “salon pieces” – short works like his famous “Elfentanze” and various dances. There are 81 opus numbers in his catalogue plus a ton of transcriptions and arrangements published without opus numbers.

Born in Prague and growing up in a Jewish family, he spent most of his career in Vienna as a member of the Hofoper (now the Vienna State Opera Orchestra) and was briefly the cellist of the famed Helmesberger Quartet. Leaving both to pursue a solo career in 1873, giving recitals across Europe with his pianist-wife, Popper eventually settled in Budapest in 1886 after Liszt recommended him for a teaching post at the conservatory there (now the Franz Liszt Academy) where he remained until he retired, dying near Vienna in 1913. Though born in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, and because he spent a large part of his career at the Budapest Conservatory, he's sometimes identified as a Hungarian composer though Mahler, also Jewish and born in Bohemia and who also spent a good part of his early career in Budapest, is not considered a Hungarian composer. But such are the vagaries of the political boundaries and ethnic cultures of 19th Century Europe...

One of Popper's more popular pieces is the Polonaise de concert, the first of two, written in 1877 and published the following year as his Op.14.

(Whether you're a cellist or not, if you want to hear more of Popper's music, here's a collection of 20 short pieces, not, alas, including the Polonaise Op.14, recorded in 1969 by the great Hungarian cellist Janos Starker who studied with a student of Popper's.)

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Debussy in 1908

A better known name is Claude Debussy, generally described as an Impressionist however vague (if not inaccurate) that might be. Clearly, Debussy was a musician so tuned in to the visual arts many of his compositions bear descriptive titles, many of which (yes) could be called “impressionistic.”

His studio was full of photographs and postcards of art both great and merely appealing, whether these were direct musical influences or not. Marcel Proust described similar habits among several of his characters – Charles Swann, for instance, describing a woman he's seen in terms of a particular famous painting – in In Search of Lost Time, the massive novel he was working on during Debussy's final years. It would be amusing (if pointless) to imagine, scanning through a list of Debussy's works and seeing descriptive titles like “Claire de lune (Moonlight)” or “Footsteps in the snow,” what Debussy's Pinterest account might've been like if he'd had access to social media.

Between late-1909 and early-1910, Debussy composed a set of 12 preludes for solo piano (a few years later, he would publish a second volume of 12 more), each one given a specific, painterly title (rather than being Prelude No. 8 in G-flat Major). But in the case of La fille aux cheveux de lin (usually translated as “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”), completed mid-January of 1910, the image comes not from a painting (I remember a teacher telling me it was “like listening to the Mona Lisa”) but from a poem by Leconte de Lisle who, in one of his “Scottish Songs” (as he called this 1854 collection) describes a young girl, the object of some typically forlorn lover, sitting among flowers in bloom with her “golden” hair “when love in the summer sun sang with the lark.” As a young man in the early-1880s, Debussy set this poem as a song dedicated to his then girlfriend, but the only thing in common with the 1910 Prelude is its title.

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The program also includes two major figures in the history of the Argentine Tango: Astor Piazzolla and his idol, the great tango singer Carlos Gardel.

Gardel was born Charles Gardès in Toulouse, France, in 1890. His father, already married, abandoned the family. The mother, posing as a widow, arrived in Buenos Aires with her 2-year-old son and set up life there as a laundress. While there would be some controversy over his birthplace – Toulouse or Buenos Aires or a town in Uruguay – his boyhood nickname was “El francesito” or “Frenchie.”

Eventually, Gardel, having taken the Spanish form of his French name, began singing in the bars and at private parties, and in 1917, when he was 27, had his first major success with his first recording which became a big hit throughout Latin America. The following year, Gardel's father resurfaced in Argentina and offered to marry Gardels' mother and legitimize their son. Instead, Gardel told her she didn't need this man in her life and neither did he: “I do not even wish to see him.”

Meanwhile, in Mar del Plata, Argentina's “second city,” Astor Piazzolla was born to first-generation Italian immigrants and four years later, after the family moved to Greenwich Village, then a tough neighborhood of New York City, he grew up listening to recordings of Carlos Gardel. Piazzolla's father spotted a bandoneón – an accordion-like instrument used in Argentina's tango-bands – in a pawn shop and gave it to his son when he was 8.

The tango, by then, had become the National Dance of Argentina and is still the musical face of Argentina among the wider world. Begun in the 1880s out of a combination of African slave roots and other immigrant cultures from Spain and Cuba in the port district of Buenos Aires, primarily, as well as Uruguay, across the river. Looked down upon by upper-class society, its working-class origins eventually evolved into sensual dances that became a craze not only in Argentina but also, by 1912, in Paris and a year later in New York City and (I'm trying to imagine this) Finland.

Gardel was soon finding fame and fortune in Paris where he sold 70,000 records in his first three months there, and later made several films both there and in America in the mid-1930s showcasing his singing and movie-star looks.

Piazzolla at 14 (l.) & Gardel (r.) in the 1935 film, El día que me quieras (The Day That You Love Me)

In 1932, Piazzolla composed his first tango and began studying music with a student of Rachmaninoff's who taught him to play Bach on his bandoneón. Two years later, he met Carlos Gardel who was so impressed by the boy, now 14 years old, he offered him a cameo appearance in one of his films and asked if he would join his band on their upcoming tour. Gardel had just composed what would eventually become one of his best-known songs, Por una cabeza (a Spanish horse-racing term the equivalent of winning “by a nose” or, in this case, literally “by a head”). Unfortunately – at the time but fortunately for the future of the tango – Piazzolla's father forbid his son to accept, saying he was too young: maybe later?

That tour took Gardel and his band to Medellin, Colombia, where, on June 24, 1935, his plane collided with a transport plane, killing him, his lyricist Alfredo la Pera, several members of his band and some friends and business associates traveling with the tour. (Speaking of what if...?)

Here is the Galvin Cello Quartet playing Gardel's Por una cabeza in a 2022 performance at Northwestern University's Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall:

Piazzolla, returning to Argentina, began playing in various tango bands and in 1941 met the pianist Artur Rubinstein on one of his tours who suggested he study classical music, given his love of Bach, and examine the works of Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ravel. He would listen to orchestra rehearsals at the Teatro Colón in the morning, then play in the tango-clubs at night, while studying with Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. By 1954, he entered a competition with a new orchestral work whose premiere had been marred by a fist-fight after some in the audience felt a bandoneón (much less the two Piazzolla had scored it for) did not belong in a symphony orchestra! Regardless, he won a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, one of the greatest music teachers of the 20th Century who counted among her students a variety of Americans ranging from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter to Philip Glass.

Piazzolla's story, then, takes another turn: dissatisfied with his style, lacking what he felt was an original voice, Piazzolla, still playing in Paris' tango-clubs by night, reluctantly played some of his tangos for Boulanger who pointed out this was “the real Piazzolla.” And so he basically decided, rather than writing orchestral music inspired by Stravinsky and Bartók, he should concentrate on integrating his knowledge of “what makes music tick” into what he knew best – the tango.

Piazzolla in 1971

It's not that his creation of a new style, obviously called Nuevo Tango, was universally accepted among tango-fans: many were upset by his abandoning the traditional world of Gardel's tangos, keeping in mind we are now twenty years after Gardel's death. His “formula” to explain the New Tango was the sum of “tango + tragedy + comedy + whorehouse” – the tango originated, after all, in the bordellos of working-class Buenos Aires. In the 1960s, he composed a series of “Angel Pieces” which were used in a play about “an angel who tries to heal the broken spirits of humans in a house in Buenos Aires, only to die in a knife fight.”

La Muerte del Ángel is a rare example of bringing a fugue to a knife-fight. Different sources may indicate it was composed in 1959 but later added to incidental music for a 1962 play “Tango of the Angel,” before he turned it into a suite for his tango quintet. The story behind “The Death of the Angel” describes the knife-fight in which the Angel is killed, complete with stabbing chords. But yes, it begins as a three-voice fugue just as the classically-trained Piazzolla, championed as a young man by Alberto Ginastera and studying composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, having discovered Bach from the hands of a student of Rachmaninoff's, would have understood this centuries-old symbol of intellectualized music transplanted onto the tango's whorehouse roots.

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Another famous composer on the program is George Gershwin whose roots are planted firmly in the popular music of New York City's Tin Pan Alley. Showing early talent when his parents bought a piano so his older brother Ira could take piano lessons (he did not want to but the instrument fascinated 10-year-old George). He would drop out of school at 15 to become a “song-plugger” in a music shop on that legendary block of W.28th Street featuring several well-known music stores where he made $15 a week. In 1916, he sold his first song which earned the 17-year-old 50 cents.

In 1919, Al Jolson asked to sing his latest song, “Swanee,” in one of his shows, and all kinds of people began to take notice. One of those was the band-leader Paul Whiteman who was planning a concert of “cross-over” music mixing classical and jazz. Having forgotten he'd agreed to it, Gershwin composed the piece – it was supposed to be a concerto for piano and orchestra – at white-heat: Ferde Grofé was brought in to orchestrate it (writing for instruments something Gershwin had never studied) and many of the original score's pages had markings penciled in for Whiteman: “wait for nod,” for instance, before starting the next orchestral section. Why? Because Gerswhin hadn't had time to write down the whole piano part, whether he was improvising it (“on the spot”) or recalling what he'd meant to write down. And so, suddenly, Gershwin found himself with a whole new career after February 12th, 1924, with his Rhapsody in Blue.

Gershwin in 1926

Two years later, he began thinking about a set of 24 Preludes – like Bach or Chopin or Debussy – which he intended to call The Melting Pot. Rather than abstract or picturesque names (as Debussy had done – see above), each of Gershwin's preludes were to be inspired by a dance from a different immigrant culture. But he soon whittled it down from 24 to 7 for public performance, then eliminated 1 of those (it would later become “A Short Story” for violin and piano) and, by the time it came to the publisher, two more ended up on the cutting room floor, including one that was too close to the Concerto in F he'd premiered the year before. So now there were 3...

The first was inspired by a dance from northeastern Brazil. Gershwin himself called the second one “a sort of blues lullaby.” He called the third one “Spanish” without further explanation.

We can only imagine what we've lost when Gershwin abandoned the other 21 preludes he'd planned (or realized he wouldn't have time to compose), but a greater loss is wondering what we might have had had he not died of a brain tumor at the age of 38.

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Vivaldi, c.1723

Certainly, neither the composer nor the music needs any help from me for you to enjoy his Four Seasons. Antonio Vivaldi, a.k.a. “The Red Priest” (powdered wigs aside, it was because of his unusual red hair rather than for his political leanings), was in fact a priest who also served as a music teacher and composer-in-residence for one of the largest church-run orphanages in Venice. Technically, the Ospedale della Pietà was a home for orphans and abandoned children, and only one of several in the city, and one famous for its music school and its all-girl performing organizations (typically, the boys learned a trade; the girls were given music lessons). Also technically, though an ordained priest by the age of 25, Vivaldi suffered from what we would call asthma which made it difficult for him to perform mass. An excellent violinist, he was instead appointed to the staff of the Ospedale as a music instructor and he soon began composing concertos, cantatas and other works for his students.

Each year, the renewal of his contract was put to a vote by the Ospedale's board and in 1709 it was 7-to-6 against him, so he was fired. After a time as a free-lance musician in the city, Vivaldi was called back to the Ospedale by a unanimous vote in 1711.

While we mostly think of him as a composer of concertos, he also wrote large-scale choral works and even operas (his first attempt dating from 1715). His style was considered too “new” for the more conservative members of the Church, so despite his popular success (never a big plus among the religious orders) he remained in almost constant trouble. 20 years later, Vivaldi referred to his “94 operas” in a letter, though we know of only 50 he composed. After a stint as a court composer in Mantua and then Milan – was he on leave from the Ospedale or had he been fired again? – he moved to Rome in 1722 when he was invited to play before Pope Benedict XIII who then had him reinstated in Venice (yeah, probably fired...). That year, he produced four new operas. But he also published a collection of a dozen violin concertos he called Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione or “The Contest Between Harmony and Invention.” Whatever you may know about the rest of them, the first four are known collectively as “The Four Seasons.”

Since we think of him as a composer writing for orphan girls in his music classes, it might come as a surprise that these were written between 1718 and 1721 when he was at the court in Mantua as a composer and performer. So it's safe to assume they were composed for his own performance. And it would be safe to say they also helped spread Vivaldi's reputation far beyond the canals of Venice: as early as 1726, Bach used a theme from the “Spring” Concerto for an aria in his cantata, Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende? (Who knows how near to me my end?), BWV.27, and, in subsequent decades, French composers turned them into motets, a series of flute concertos, and another for hurdy-gurdy (!). In modern times, they've also survived transformation by rock bands and trance music. There's even a “shred guitar” version of the finale of “Summer” (also used by a Russian “thrash metal” band). Retitled "For Seasons," it was even recomposed using algorithms to portray climate change between 1725 and 2019 (a particularly crucial challenge to modern-day Venice).

But Vivaldi, whether he knew it or not, was breaking ground when this music was published some 300 years ago with corresponding sonnets, each movement corresponding to something described in the poems. This alone was “new,” not just the idea of describing a winter scene or even chirping birds in springtime. Known as “program music,” even when Beethoven began his Pastoral Symphony in 1806, this was still considered “new and unusual.” Thunderstorms and birds are one thing, but to imitate barking dogs, stamping feet, buzzing gnats? I'm sure the good board members of the Ospedale were duly horrified...

I'm going to go “old-fashioned” here and use videos by the Netherlands Bach Society, recorded in 2016 with violinist Shunske Sato, playing “period instruments” in a “historically-informed style,” whether it's the way Bach might have heard it or not. If you're interested in arrangements for koto ensemble, a thrash-metal band, or sundry electronics, you're perfectly welcome to dive into the Googleverse on your own!

The program concludes with just two of Vivaldi's Four Seasons: we'll begin with WINTER. Whatever the weather may be the night of the concert (remember the groundhog predicted an early spring!), certainly the two snow storms from last week will bring much of this music to life for you. 

Allegro non molto - To tremble from cold in the icy snow,
In the harsh breath of a horrid wind;
To run, stamping one's feet every moment,
Our teeth chattering in the extreme cold
Largo - Before the fire to pass peaceful,
Contented days while the rain outside pours down.
Allegro - We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously,
for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and,
rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds course through the home
despite the locked and bolted doors...
this is winter, which nonetheless
brings its own delights. 

While Spring may be just around the corner, the Galvin Cello Quartet's program concludes with SUMMER:

Allegro non molto - Under a hard season, fired up by the sun
Languishes man, languishes the flock and burns the pine
We hear the cuckoo's voice;
then sweet songs of the turtledove and finch are heard.
Soft breezes stir the air, but threatening
the North Wind sweeps them suddenly aside.
The shepherd trembles,
fearing violent storms and his fate.
Adagio e piano – Presto e forte - The fear of lightning and fierce thunder
Robs his tired limbs of rest
As gnats and flies buzz furiously around.
Presto - Alas, his fears were justified
The Heavens thunder and roar and with hail
Cut the head off the wheat and damages the grain. 

- Dick Strawser