Longmont Symphony Orchestra
Robert Olson, conductor
John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine (3/13/04)
Richard Strauss: Death and Transfiguration, Op.24 (3/14/04)
Also, Charley talks with violinist Jerilyn Jorgensen about her recitals with pianist Cullan Bryant this weekend.
Benjamin Britten: "Perpetual Motion" (2nd movement) & "Waltz" (4th movement) from Suite, Op.6
Jerilyn Jorgensen, violin; Cullan Bryant, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/13/09 MS
Wes Devore: In the Middle of Nowhere
Felix Mendelssohn: Andante & Rondo Capriccioso, Op.14
Wes Devore, piano
NCA (11/8/08) 2:56 + 6:44
John Adams (b.1947): Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in New Hampshire. He studied the clarinet, and later composition with Leon Kirchner at Harvard. Moving to California in 1971, he worked in a warehouse, then joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory. He was composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra from 1979-1985. His opera Nixon in China won a Grammy in 1989 and his Violin Concerto won the Grawemeyer Award in 1995.
Commissioned for the opening concert of the Great Woods Festival in Mansfield, Massachusetts, Short Ride in a Fast Machine was first performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, on June 13, 1986. The work is subtitled ``Fanfare for Great Woods.''
Asked to explain the title, Adams replied: ``You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn't?'' Accordingly, the score is marked ``Delirando'' (frenzied), with a relentless clacking of the woodblock, which Adams calls ``almost sadistic.''
The score calls for 2 piccolos, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 synthesizers, timpani, percussion and strings.
Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), Opus 24
During 1889, the last year of his contract as third conductor at the Munich Court Opera, Strauss completed the tone poem Death and Transfiguration. Strauss conducted the first performance on June 21, 1890 at a music festival in Eisenach. It was well received. After a Viennese performance three years later, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote of the ``realistic vividness'' of the score.
The program for the work is best described by Strauss himself. In a letter, he said that the music depicts ``the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist. The sick man lies in bed, asleep, with heavy irregular breathing; friendly dreams conjure a smile on the features of the deeply suffering man; he wakes up; he is once more racked with horrible agonies; his limbs shake with fever--as the attack passes and the pains leave off, his thoughts wander through his past life; his childhood passes before him, the time of his youth with its strivings and passions and then, as the pains already begin to return, there appears to him the fruit of his life's path, the conception, the ideal which he has sought to realize, to present artistically, but which he has not been able to complete, since it is not for man to be able to accomplish such things. The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.''
The music was so convincing that nearly sixty years later, on his own deathbed, Strauss wrote to his daughter-in-law: ``Dying is just as I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.'' His friend Alexander Ritter was moved to write a poem on the subject, a more elaborate telling of the original Strauss program. The composer approved, and the poem was printed with the score.
There are four main sections in the work. A slow introduction depicting illness and sleep leads to an agitated representation of the struggle with death. Some calm returns as dreams and childhood memories figure in the third part. But--to quote the Ritter poem--``the iron hammer of Death threatens its last blow,'' and the final section imparts the transfiguration, or ``deliverance from the world.''
The work is scored for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, tam-tam, 2 harps and strings.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Thursday January 28, 2010
Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances, Opus 45 (10/23/09)
Also, Charley anticipates the Denver Young Artists Orchestra's concert Sunday.
Ottorino Respighi: “St. Michael Archangel”(2nd movement) from Church Windows
Denver Young Artists Orchestra/ Scott O'Neil)
NCA (11/9/08) 5:50
And, Charley anticipates the Veronika String Quartet's appearance with the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs this weekend.
Franz Schubert: Quartettsatz in C minor, D.703
Veronika String Quartet (Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 102308 MS
Dmitri Shostakovich: "Allegretto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.3 in F major, Op. 73 5:13
Veronika String Quartet
(Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 10/1/09 MS
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Symphonic Dances, Opus 45
I. Non allegro
II. Andante con moto: tempo di valse
III. Lento assai; Allegro vivace
A few months before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff complained of lacking the ``strength and fire'' to compose. When friends reminded him of the Symphonic Dances, he replied: ``Yes, I don't know how that happened. That was probably my last flicker.''
Rachmaninoff's ``last flicker'' was begun during the summer of 1940 on an estate in Long Island. By August, he wrote to conductor Eugene Ormandy: ``Last week I finished a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called Fantastic Dances. I should like to play the piece for you.''
Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff had second thoughts about the title. ``It should have been called just Dances,'' he said, ``but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestras.'' At one point he even considered titles for the three movements--``Midday,'' ``Twilight'' and ``Midnight''--but abandoned the idea in favor of the Italian tempo designations.
By the time Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the work on January 4, 1941, Rachmaninoff had settled on the title Symphonic Dances.
A New York performance three days later received a lukewarm reception. The World-Telegram reported that ``the composer took a bow from the stage. The prolonged applause was doubtless a tribute to himself rather than to his music, for the novelty nowhere rises to his best standards....The piece teems with weird sounds, some of them just plain echoes. Mr. Rachmaninoff's orchestra is definitely haunted, especially the wind section, which is a real rendezvous of ghosts.''
Olin Downes, writing in the New York Times, was more perceptive: ``The dances are simple in outline, symphonic in texture and proportion. The first one, vigorously rhythmed and somewhat in a pastoral vein, is festive in the first part and more lyrical and tranquil in the middle section. The second Dance begins with a muted summons, or evocation, of the brass, a motto repeated in certain places, and for the rest there are sensuous melodies, sometimes bitter-sweet, sometimes to a Viennese lilt--and Vienna is gone.
``In the last Dance, the shortest, the most energetic and fantastical of the three, an idea obtrudes which has obsessed the musical thinking of Rachmaninoff these many years--the apparition, in the rhythmical maze, of the terrible old plain chant, the Dies Irae.
``The Dances have no ostensible connection with each other. They could easily reflect a series of moods, presented in a certain loose sequence--of Nature, and memories, and reveries with some Dead Sea fruit in them--all unpretentious, melodic, sensuously colored and admirably composed music.''
At the end of the score, Rachmaninoff had written ``I thank Thee, Lord!'' It was his last major work. Two and half years after its completion, he died in Beverly Hills, California.
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances, Opus 45 (10/23/09)
Also, Charley anticipates the Denver Young Artists Orchestra's concert Sunday.
Ottorino Respighi: “St. Michael Archangel”(2nd movement) from Church Windows
Denver Young Artists Orchestra/ Scott O'Neil)
NCA (11/9/08) 5:50
And, Charley anticipates the Veronika String Quartet's appearance with the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs this weekend.
Franz Schubert: Quartettsatz in C minor, D.703
Veronika String Quartet (Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 102308 MS
Dmitri Shostakovich: "Allegretto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.3 in F major, Op. 73 5:13
Veronika String Quartet
(Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 10/1/09 MS
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Symphonic Dances, Opus 45
I. Non allegro
II. Andante con moto: tempo di valse
III. Lento assai; Allegro vivace
A few months before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff complained of lacking the ``strength and fire'' to compose. When friends reminded him of the Symphonic Dances, he replied: ``Yes, I don't know how that happened. That was probably my last flicker.''
Rachmaninoff's ``last flicker'' was begun during the summer of 1940 on an estate in Long Island. By August, he wrote to conductor Eugene Ormandy: ``Last week I finished a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called Fantastic Dances. I should like to play the piece for you.''
Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff had second thoughts about the title. ``It should have been called just Dances,'' he said, ``but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestras.'' At one point he even considered titles for the three movements--``Midday,'' ``Twilight'' and ``Midnight''--but abandoned the idea in favor of the Italian tempo designations.
By the time Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the work on January 4, 1941, Rachmaninoff had settled on the title Symphonic Dances.
A New York performance three days later received a lukewarm reception. The World-Telegram reported that ``the composer took a bow from the stage. The prolonged applause was doubtless a tribute to himself rather than to his music, for the novelty nowhere rises to his best standards....The piece teems with weird sounds, some of them just plain echoes. Mr. Rachmaninoff's orchestra is definitely haunted, especially the wind section, which is a real rendezvous of ghosts.''
Olin Downes, writing in the New York Times, was more perceptive: ``The dances are simple in outline, symphonic in texture and proportion. The first one, vigorously rhythmed and somewhat in a pastoral vein, is festive in the first part and more lyrical and tranquil in the middle section. The second Dance begins with a muted summons, or evocation, of the brass, a motto repeated in certain places, and for the rest there are sensuous melodies, sometimes bitter-sweet, sometimes to a Viennese lilt--and Vienna is gone.
``In the last Dance, the shortest, the most energetic and fantastical of the three, an idea obtrudes which has obsessed the musical thinking of Rachmaninoff these many years--the apparition, in the rhythmical maze, of the terrible old plain chant, the Dies Irae.
``The Dances have no ostensible connection with each other. They could easily reflect a series of moods, presented in a certain loose sequence--of Nature, and memories, and reveries with some Dead Sea fruit in them--all unpretentious, melodic, sensuously colored and admirably composed music.''
At the end of the score, Rachmaninoff had written ``I thank Thee, Lord!'' It was his last major work. Two and half years after its completion, he died in Beverly Hills, California.
Wednesday January 27, 2010
Colorado Music Festival
Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Olav van Hezewijk, oboe
Johann Sebastian Bach: Oboe Concerto in F major, BWV 1053 20:53
Wolfgang Mozart: Symphony No. 31 in D major, K.297 (Paris) 17:29 (7/15/07)
Also, Charley talks with violinist Jerilyn Jorgensen about her recitals with pianist Cullan Bryant this weekend.
Benjamin Britten: "Perpetual Motion" (2nd movement) & "Waltz" (4th movement) from Suite, Op.6
Jerilyn Jorgensen, violin; Cullan Bryant, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/13/09 MS
And, Charley anticipates the Colorado Chamber Players' collaboration with St. John's Cathedral Sunday.
D'Arcy Reynolds: "The Camel Yard" (opening section) from Cloven Dreams (2:34)
Gordon Jacob: "Gavotte" (2nd movement) from Four Fancies
Colorado Chamber Players (Paul Nagem, Flute; Paul Primus, Violin; Barbara Hamilton-Primus, Viola; Judith McIntyre, Cello)
CPR Performance Studio 1/16/09 MS
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Oboe Concerto in F major,
BWV 1053
I. [Allegro]
II. Siciliano
III. Allegro
After working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach was appointed cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. He moved family and furniture in May of 1723. His job description included duties as civic director of music, and this meant numerous odious encounters with the Town Council. He complained of ``superiors who are strange people, with little regard for music.''
Some relief from his official duties came in 1729, when he was asked to direct the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, a group founded 25 years earlier by Telemann. During the winter, they performed every Friday night at Gottfried Zimmermann's coffeehouse. In the warmer months, they moved outdoors in the garden for concerts every Wednesday afternoon.
For these concerts, Bach resurrected a number of violin and oboe concertos that he had written in Cöthen and transcribed them for keyboard and strings. The F major Concerto is a reconstruction of a lost work whose component parts have survived. As best scholars can figure, the oboe concerto came first, then material from it was used in later cantata movements, a keyboard concerto and even a work for organ and voice that Bach wrote as a proficiency test for his eldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Phillip Emmanuel.
In three cantata movements from 1726 the solo line is allocated to the organ. The first two movements of the oboe concerto appear in the Cantata No. 169 (Gott soll allein mein Herze haben) and the last movement in the Cantata No. 49 (Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen). The keyboard concerto in E major (BWV 1053) comes from the same sources, if not from the oboe concerto version itself.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 31 in D major, K.297 (300a) [Paris]
I. Allegro assai
II. Andante
III. Allegro
Mozart had not composed a symphony in four years when, in June of 1778, Joseph Legros, the director of the Paris Concerts Spirituels, commissioned one. Mozart and his mother had arrived in Paris from Mannheim only three months earlier.
Mozart's Paris Symphony was introduced on June 18, 1778. The rehearsals were a trial. ``Never in my life have I heard a worse performance,'' he wrote to his father. ``You have no idea how they twice bumbled and scraped through it.'' At the actual concert, ``the audience was quite carried away--and there was a tremendous burst of applause. I was so happy that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off the the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice.''
Legros said that ``this was the best symphony ever written'' for the Concerts Spirituels. He then asked for a new second movement, as he found the first version too long. Mozart duly supplied a new second movement for the second performance in August. ``Each is right in its way,'' he said, ``for they have different characters; however, I like the second still better.''
Commentators disagree on what influences are at work in the symphony. Alfred Einstein says that it is ``characteristic of the Mannheim-Paris style. In the first movement it even parodies that style to a slight degree.'' It begins with a precise unison attack by the strings, an effect much boasted by the Parisian orchestra. ``What a fuss the oxen here make of this trick!'' said Mozart. ``The devil take me if I can see any difference! They all begin together, just as they do in other places.''
The opening movement also features ``pompous runs in the strings characteristic of the French overture,'' writes Einstein, and ``impressive unison passages for the strings against sustained tones in the winds. But that is where the parody, or the connivance to please the French taste, ends. Mozart's ambition was far too great, and there was too much dependent on the success of the work, for him not to take it seriously. The fact that the last of the three movements was the most successful does honor to the taste of the Parisians. The second theme of this movement is a fugato, supplying the natural material for development; it does not return in the recapitulation--one of the strokes of genius in this masterful movement, which hovers continually between brilliant tumult and graceful seriousness.''
Jens Peter Larsen calls the work ``the first fully mature symphony in the Viennese classical style.'' But H.C. Robbins Landon writes: ``It is not really a Viennese classical symphony at all, but rather a conscious attempt to write an orchestral work in the grand Mannheim style.''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Olav van Hezewijk, oboe
Johann Sebastian Bach: Oboe Concerto in F major, BWV 1053 20:53
Wolfgang Mozart: Symphony No. 31 in D major, K.297 (Paris) 17:29 (7/15/07)
Also, Charley talks with violinist Jerilyn Jorgensen about her recitals with pianist Cullan Bryant this weekend.
Benjamin Britten: "Perpetual Motion" (2nd movement) & "Waltz" (4th movement) from Suite, Op.6
Jerilyn Jorgensen, violin; Cullan Bryant, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/13/09 MS
And, Charley anticipates the Colorado Chamber Players' collaboration with St. John's Cathedral Sunday.
D'Arcy Reynolds: "The Camel Yard" (opening section) from Cloven Dreams (2:34)
Gordon Jacob: "Gavotte" (2nd movement) from Four Fancies
Colorado Chamber Players (Paul Nagem, Flute; Paul Primus, Violin; Barbara Hamilton-Primus, Viola; Judith McIntyre, Cello)
CPR Performance Studio 1/16/09 MS
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Oboe Concerto in F major,
BWV 1053
I. [Allegro]
II. Siciliano
III. Allegro
After working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach was appointed cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. He moved family and furniture in May of 1723. His job description included duties as civic director of music, and this meant numerous odious encounters with the Town Council. He complained of ``superiors who are strange people, with little regard for music.''
Some relief from his official duties came in 1729, when he was asked to direct the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, a group founded 25 years earlier by Telemann. During the winter, they performed every Friday night at Gottfried Zimmermann's coffeehouse. In the warmer months, they moved outdoors in the garden for concerts every Wednesday afternoon.
For these concerts, Bach resurrected a number of violin and oboe concertos that he had written in Cöthen and transcribed them for keyboard and strings. The F major Concerto is a reconstruction of a lost work whose component parts have survived. As best scholars can figure, the oboe concerto came first, then material from it was used in later cantata movements, a keyboard concerto and even a work for organ and voice that Bach wrote as a proficiency test for his eldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Phillip Emmanuel.
In three cantata movements from 1726 the solo line is allocated to the organ. The first two movements of the oboe concerto appear in the Cantata No. 169 (Gott soll allein mein Herze haben) and the last movement in the Cantata No. 49 (Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen). The keyboard concerto in E major (BWV 1053) comes from the same sources, if not from the oboe concerto version itself.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 31 in D major, K.297 (300a) [Paris]
I. Allegro assai
II. Andante
III. Allegro
Mozart had not composed a symphony in four years when, in June of 1778, Joseph Legros, the director of the Paris Concerts Spirituels, commissioned one. Mozart and his mother had arrived in Paris from Mannheim only three months earlier.
Mozart's Paris Symphony was introduced on June 18, 1778. The rehearsals were a trial. ``Never in my life have I heard a worse performance,'' he wrote to his father. ``You have no idea how they twice bumbled and scraped through it.'' At the actual concert, ``the audience was quite carried away--and there was a tremendous burst of applause. I was so happy that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off the the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice.''
Legros said that ``this was the best symphony ever written'' for the Concerts Spirituels. He then asked for a new second movement, as he found the first version too long. Mozart duly supplied a new second movement for the second performance in August. ``Each is right in its way,'' he said, ``for they have different characters; however, I like the second still better.''
Commentators disagree on what influences are at work in the symphony. Alfred Einstein says that it is ``characteristic of the Mannheim-Paris style. In the first movement it even parodies that style to a slight degree.'' It begins with a precise unison attack by the strings, an effect much boasted by the Parisian orchestra. ``What a fuss the oxen here make of this trick!'' said Mozart. ``The devil take me if I can see any difference! They all begin together, just as they do in other places.''
The opening movement also features ``pompous runs in the strings characteristic of the French overture,'' writes Einstein, and ``impressive unison passages for the strings against sustained tones in the winds. But that is where the parody, or the connivance to please the French taste, ends. Mozart's ambition was far too great, and there was too much dependent on the success of the work, for him not to take it seriously. The fact that the last of the three movements was the most successful does honor to the taste of the Parisians. The second theme of this movement is a fugato, supplying the natural material for development; it does not return in the recapitulation--one of the strokes of genius in this masterful movement, which hovers continually between brilliant tumult and graceful seriousness.''
Jens Peter Larsen calls the work ``the first fully mature symphony in the Viennese classical style.'' But H.C. Robbins Landon writes: ``It is not really a Viennese classical symphony at all, but rather a conscious attempt to write an orchestral work in the grand Mannheim style.''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Tuesday January 26, 2010
Friends of Chamber Music
Miró String Quartet; Shai Wosner, piano
Leoš Janáček: In the Mist
Leoš Janáček: String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters) (2/18/09)
Also, Antonin Dvořák: Scherzo (Furiant: Molto vivace) [3rd movement] & Finale (Allegro) from Piano Quintet in A major, Op.81
Shai Wosner, piano; Axel Strauss, Chee-Yun, violins; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Alisa Weilerstein, cello 11:15
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/18/06)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928): String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters)
I. Andante--Con moto--Allegro
II. Adagio—Vivace—Andante—Presto—Allegro—Vivo--Adagio
III. Moderato—Adagio--Allegro
IV. Allegro—Andante--Con moto—Adagio--Tempo I
In 1917, at the age of sixty-two, Janáček fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, who was twenty-seven. The relationship continued for ten years, right up to Janáček’s death in 1928. On January 29 of that year, he began his second string quartet. “I’ve begun to write something nice,” he wrote to her. “Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters.’ I think that it will sound delightful. There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.”
He completed the piece on February 19. “Today I managed to write a piece in which the earth moves,” he reported. “This work will be dedicated to you. You are the cause of it and composing it has been my greatest joy.”
Not wishing “to deliver up my feelings to the tender mercies of fools,” Janáček changed the title to “Intimate Letters.”
The Moravian Quartet came to Janáček’s house in Brno to rehearse the new work on May 18. “It’s going to be beautiful,” he said, “outside all conventional composition….It’s my first composition to spring from directly-experienced emotion.” After the final rehearsal on June 27, he wrote to Kamila: “They played with fire as if they themselves were writing Intimate Letters….I think that I shall write nothing deeper or more truthful….Everything is somehow coming to an end by itself! It’s as if I were never to take up my pen again.” Janáček was prophetic: the first performance was given by the Moravian Quartet in Brno on September 11, 1928, one month after Janáček’s death from pneumonia.
The music is profoundly autobiographical. The first movement, he told Kamila, represents “the impression when I saw you for the first time…Mine alone the speaking; yours—just surprised silence.” In the second movement, “you are giving birth. Just like you, falling from tears into laughter, that’s how it sounds.” The third movement “is bright and carefree, but dissolves into an apparition which resembles you.” “Let it be jolly,” he said of the last movement, “and then dissolve into a vision resembling your image, translucent as mist….It is the sound of my fear for you, not exactly fear, but yearning, yearning which is fulfilled by you.”
Miró String Quartet; Shai Wosner, piano
Leoš Janáček: In the Mist
Leoš Janáček: String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters) (2/18/09)
Also, Antonin Dvořák: Scherzo (Furiant: Molto vivace) [3rd movement] & Finale (Allegro) from Piano Quintet in A major, Op.81
Shai Wosner, piano; Axel Strauss, Chee-Yun, violins; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Alisa Weilerstein, cello 11:15
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/18/06)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928): String Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Letters)
I. Andante--Con moto--Allegro
II. Adagio—Vivace—Andante—Presto—Allegro—Vivo--Adagio
III. Moderato—Adagio--Allegro
IV. Allegro—Andante--Con moto—Adagio--Tempo I
In 1917, at the age of sixty-two, Janáček fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, who was twenty-seven. The relationship continued for ten years, right up to Janáček’s death in 1928. On January 29 of that year, he began his second string quartet. “I’ve begun to write something nice,” he wrote to her. “Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters.’ I think that it will sound delightful. There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.”
He completed the piece on February 19. “Today I managed to write a piece in which the earth moves,” he reported. “This work will be dedicated to you. You are the cause of it and composing it has been my greatest joy.”
Not wishing “to deliver up my feelings to the tender mercies of fools,” Janáček changed the title to “Intimate Letters.”
The Moravian Quartet came to Janáček’s house in Brno to rehearse the new work on May 18. “It’s going to be beautiful,” he said, “outside all conventional composition….It’s my first composition to spring from directly-experienced emotion.” After the final rehearsal on June 27, he wrote to Kamila: “They played with fire as if they themselves were writing Intimate Letters….I think that I shall write nothing deeper or more truthful….Everything is somehow coming to an end by itself! It’s as if I were never to take up my pen again.” Janáček was prophetic: the first performance was given by the Moravian Quartet in Brno on September 11, 1928, one month after Janáček’s death from pneumonia.
The music is profoundly autobiographical. The first movement, he told Kamila, represents “the impression when I saw you for the first time…Mine alone the speaking; yours—just surprised silence.” In the second movement, “you are giving birth. Just like you, falling from tears into laughter, that’s how it sounds.” The third movement “is bright and carefree, but dissolves into an apparition which resembles you.” “Let it be jolly,” he said of the last movement, “and then dissolve into a vision resembling your image, translucent as mist….It is the sound of my fear for you, not exactly fear, but yearning, yearning which is fulfilled by you.”
Monday January 25, 2010
Strings in the Mountains Music Festival
Reinhold Gliére: Tarantella, Op.9 No. 2
Evan Premo, double bass; Katherine Collier, piano (8/9/06) 6:06
Johannes Brahms: “Scherzo” (2nd movement) & “Andante” (3rd movement) from Piano Quartet in C minor, Op.60
Jonathan Feldman, piano; Xiao-Dong Wang, violin; Yizhak Schotten, viola; Young Song, cello (8/2/06) 13:50
Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 9 in E flat major, Op.117
Miami String Quartet (8/9/06) 24:59
Also, Charley anticipates the Telling Stories show "Culture Shock" on Saturday.
Benjamin Britten: "Andante sostenuto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.1 in D major, Op.25
KVOD Performance Studio 9/29/09 MS
And, Charley talks with Telling Stories den mother, Jennie Dorris.
Reinhold Gliére: Tarantella, Op.9 No. 2
Evan Premo, double bass; Katherine Collier, piano (8/9/06) 6:06
Johannes Brahms: “Scherzo” (2nd movement) & “Andante” (3rd movement) from Piano Quartet in C minor, Op.60
Jonathan Feldman, piano; Xiao-Dong Wang, violin; Yizhak Schotten, viola; Young Song, cello (8/2/06) 13:50
Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 9 in E flat major, Op.117
Miami String Quartet (8/9/06) 24:59
Also, Charley anticipates the Telling Stories show "Culture Shock" on Saturday.
Benjamin Britten: "Andante sostenuto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.1 in D major, Op.25
KVOD Performance Studio 9/29/09 MS
And, Charley talks with Telling Stories den mother, Jennie Dorris.
Friday January 22, 2010
Charley anticipates Sunday's Englewood Arts Presents concert with Yumi Hwang-Williams and Michael Thornton.
Ernest Bloch: "Vidui" (Contrition): "Un poco lento" (1st movement) from Baal Shem
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; Dror Biran, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/9/09 MS
Ludwig van Beethoven: “Allegro moderato” (1st movement) from Horn Sonata in F major, Op.17 (6:07)
Michael Thornton, horn; Anne Epperson, piano
CPR Performance Studio 12/15/05 MS
John Adams: Road Movies 17:37
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; David Korevaar, piano
CPR Performance Studio 060608 MS
Franz Strauss: Nocturno, Op.7 (5:51)
Michael Thornton, horn; Anne Epperson, piano
CPR Performance Studio 12/15/05 MS
Wolfgang Mozart: “Adagio—Allegro” (1st movement) from Duo in B flat major, K.424
Yumi Hwang Williams, violin; Basil Vendryes, viola
CPR Performance Studio 030309 JP
Felix Mendelssohn: "Allegro vivace" (1st movement) from Sonata in F Major (1838)
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; Dror Biran, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/9/09 MS
Ernest Bloch: "Vidui" (Contrition): "Un poco lento" (1st movement) from Baal Shem
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; Dror Biran, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/9/09 MS
Ludwig van Beethoven: “Allegro moderato” (1st movement) from Horn Sonata in F major, Op.17 (6:07)
Michael Thornton, horn; Anne Epperson, piano
CPR Performance Studio 12/15/05 MS
John Adams: Road Movies 17:37
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; David Korevaar, piano
CPR Performance Studio 060608 MS
Franz Strauss: Nocturno, Op.7 (5:51)
Michael Thornton, horn; Anne Epperson, piano
CPR Performance Studio 12/15/05 MS
Wolfgang Mozart: “Adagio—Allegro” (1st movement) from Duo in B flat major, K.424
Yumi Hwang Williams, violin; Basil Vendryes, viola
CPR Performance Studio 030309 JP
Felix Mendelssohn: "Allegro vivace" (1st movement) from Sonata in F Major (1838)
Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin; Dror Biran, piano
CPR Performance Studio 11/9/09 MS
Thursday January 21, 2010
Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Olga Kern, piano
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40 (10/23/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Benedetto Lupo's appearance with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra this weekend.
Nino Rota: Concerto Soirée
Benedetto Lupo, piano; Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana/ Massimo de Bernart
Nuova Era 7063 5-9 19:54
Charley anticipates the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado's "Mozart by Candlelight" concert this weekend.
Georg Philipp Telemann: Oboe Concerto in C minor
Debra Nagy, oboe; Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado 8:32
NCA (5/1/09)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40
I. Allegro vivace
II. Largo
III. Allegro vivace
The most neglected of Rachmaninoff's concertos, the Fourth dates from as early as 1911, when he wrote an Étude-Tableau in C minor, originally intended for his Opus 33 set but withdrawn. In 1914 a Russian musical periodical mentioned that he was working on a concerto. A year later, Rachmaninoff complained of ``being unable to control either the work or myself and so I gave up working.''
It wasn't until 1926 that he resumed work on the Concerto, first in New York and later in Dresden, where he completed it in August. He was concerned about the length of the piece and remarked to his old friend Nikolai Medtner that ``it will probably be performed like `The Ring' on several evenings in succession.''
After the first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski on March 18, 1927, Rachmaninoff played the Concerto in New York and other cities to generally negative critical reaction. Calling the work ``long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry,'' Pitts Sanborn wrote that ``Mme. Cécile Chaminade might safely have perpetrated it on her third glass of vodka.'' Lawrence Gilman said the Concerto ``remains as essentially nineteenth century as if Tchaikovsky had signed it.''
Rachmaninoff made revisions in the score during the summer of 1927 and still more revisions in 1941.
After a typical upward sweep by the orchestra, the piano enters with the first theme, derived from the earlier Étude-Tableau. A more lyrical second theme follows, and a development section based primarily on a fragment of the first theme. The middle movement's melody reminded some critics of the nursery tune Three Blind Mice. Indeed, Rachmaninoff reprimanded Medtner for not noticing the music's resemblence to Schumann's Piano Concerto. A transition based on the same Étude-Tableau leads directly to the Finale, which features themes both brilliant and lyrical, as well as reminiscences of the first two movements.
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Olga Kern, piano
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40 (10/23/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Benedetto Lupo's appearance with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra this weekend.
Nino Rota: Concerto Soirée
Benedetto Lupo, piano; Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana/ Massimo de Bernart
Nuova Era 7063 5-9 19:54
Charley anticipates the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado's "Mozart by Candlelight" concert this weekend.
Georg Philipp Telemann: Oboe Concerto in C minor
Debra Nagy, oboe; Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado 8:32
NCA (5/1/09)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40
I. Allegro vivace
II. Largo
III. Allegro vivace
The most neglected of Rachmaninoff's concertos, the Fourth dates from as early as 1911, when he wrote an Étude-Tableau in C minor, originally intended for his Opus 33 set but withdrawn. In 1914 a Russian musical periodical mentioned that he was working on a concerto. A year later, Rachmaninoff complained of ``being unable to control either the work or myself and so I gave up working.''
It wasn't until 1926 that he resumed work on the Concerto, first in New York and later in Dresden, where he completed it in August. He was concerned about the length of the piece and remarked to his old friend Nikolai Medtner that ``it will probably be performed like `The Ring' on several evenings in succession.''
After the first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski on March 18, 1927, Rachmaninoff played the Concerto in New York and other cities to generally negative critical reaction. Calling the work ``long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry,'' Pitts Sanborn wrote that ``Mme. Cécile Chaminade might safely have perpetrated it on her third glass of vodka.'' Lawrence Gilman said the Concerto ``remains as essentially nineteenth century as if Tchaikovsky had signed it.''
Rachmaninoff made revisions in the score during the summer of 1927 and still more revisions in 1941.
After a typical upward sweep by the orchestra, the piano enters with the first theme, derived from the earlier Étude-Tableau. A more lyrical second theme follows, and a development section based primarily on a fragment of the first theme. The middle movement's melody reminded some critics of the nursery tune Three Blind Mice. Indeed, Rachmaninoff reprimanded Medtner for not noticing the music's resemblence to Schumann's Piano Concerto. A transition based on the same Étude-Tableau leads directly to the Finale, which features themes both brilliant and lyrical, as well as reminiscences of the first two movements.
Wednesday January 20, 2010
Lakewood Cultural Center Performing Arts Series
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Claude Debussy: Preludes No.3 (The Wind in the Plain), No.4 (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air), No.5 (The Hills of Anacapri), No.6 (Footsteps in the Snow), No.7 (What the West Wind saw) & No.8 (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), Book I
Frédéric Chopin: Waltzes No.9 in A flat major, Op.69 No.1 (L'adieu), No.11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1& No.5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)
Alexander Scriabin: Etudes No.10 in D flat major, No.11 in B flat minor & No.12 in D sharp minor (Patetico), Op.8 (11/5/09)
Also, Leopold Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, Jr.
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907507 Track 13 9:59
Charley anticipates the Albers Trio's recital at the Lakewood Cultural Center tomorrow.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: "Andante" (3rd movement) from Cello Sonata in G minor, Op.19
Julie Albers, cello; Orion Weiss, piano
Artek 22 Track 3 5:39
Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Preludes, Book I
No. 3. Le vent dans la plaine (The Wind in the Plain): Animé
No. 4. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air): Modéré
No. 5. Les collines d'Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri): Très modéré (Roy Howat: from a bottle of Italian wine?)
No. 6. Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow): Triste et lent
No. 7. Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest (What the West Wind has seen): Animé et tumultueux
No. 8. La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair): Très calme et doucement expressif
Like Bach and Chopin, Debussy wrote a set of keyboard preludes. Bach did it twice in The Well Tempered Clavier, covering all the major and minor keys. Debussy's single effort, with no sequence of keys--indeed, five keys were not used at all--was divided into two books of twelve each. The first was sketched in 1907; the actual composition took just two months in 1910. A clue to his intent might be a remark we made before starting the second book. “Who can ever know the secret of musical composition?" he said. "The noise of the sea, the curve of the horizon, the wind in the leaves, the cry of a bird; all leave impressions on us. And suddenly, when one least wills it, one of those memories spills out of us and expresses itself in musical language.” To indicate the primacy of the music over the inspirations, he printed the titles at the ends of the scores.
"The Wind in the Plain" (No.3) comes from the epigraph to Paul Verlaine's poem “C'est l'extase” from Ariettes oubliées, which Debussy had set as a song cycle in 1887. “The wind on the plain holds its breath” is a line from a poem by Simon-Charles Favart. In his biography of Debussy, Oscar Thompson refers to "the racing lilt of lively breeze, with here and there a momentary gust of biting wind. But this is no tempest. It ends in thin air, wisplike, on a note marked "laissez vibrer" (let it vibrate) instead of gravitating to an expected cadence."
"The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air" (No.4) is a line from Baudelaire's poem Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), which Debussy set as a song in 1889. Thompson calls it "melancholy, languorous music, sensuous in every detail, if not strictly the poet's 'vertiginous waltz.' The air is heavy with perfumes and vibrant with sounds that seem to swoon in the dying day. All the senses, with those of touch and smell added to those of sight and hearing, seem to enter into the caress and the gentle intoxication of this fantasy."
Roy Howat thinks No. 5 ("The Hills of Anacapri") was inspired by the label on a bottle of Italian wine? Again, Thompson describes "a snatch of folksong and a hint of cowbells, a carefree popular refrain, with its frank tune passed from bass to trebl; a songlike middle section with diatonic harmonies leading on to a badinage of tunes and bells, fragmentarily recalled, the a close marked 'lumineux' (luminous) as if there were blazing sunlight in a tonic chord with added sixth."
There is no traceable source of the inspiration for "Footsteps in the Snow" (No.6). Debussy directed that the rhythm "should have the sonorous value of a melancholy ice-bound landscape." André Suarès remarked that "this stumbling rhythm, persistent, like a false step on q treacherous surface, the step of a foot which slips and catches itself, evokes marvelously the gray horizon over a pale expanse of ice. But how much more the crushing silence of space where the heart can be heard beating and almost stops, sick with unhappiness, haunted by melancholy, palpitating with doubts and regrets. The little breath of wind which holds the snowflake every now and then in its falling, only to toss it aside; the long, interminable road; the nostalgia for the light which is not there and for the warm caress: this solitude, infinite, in a word, the solitude of our soul, wandering along absorbed in itself, a solitude which all the deserts and all of the winters of earth never approach."
"What the West Wind has seen" (No.7) was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Garden of Paradise,” in which the four winds recount their recent feats. The West Wind (Zephyr) comes from the Atlantic, bringing storms and shipwrecks, with the sounds of Spanish guitars in the coda. Thompson claims the music represents "the vision of a hurricane and of a sea lashed to a fury, but retaining the sensation of a nightmare rather than of terror actually experienced."
No.8 was inspired by one of Leconte de Lisle's Scottish Songs about “the girl with the flaxen hair, the beauty with lips of cherry,” or even Robert Burns's “Lass with the lint white locks.” Roland Nadeau says “the soft initial melody begins unharmonized; we are stirred by a sense of gradual apparition. There is a strong suggestion of the pentatonic mode, which...tends to generate gentle, transparent chords. Debussy draws upon this tendency to produce a delicate sheen, an harmonic texture that just fits the mood of the poem.”
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849): Waltzes
No. 9 in A flat major, Op.69 No. 1 (L'adieu)
No. 11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1
No. 5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)
Pianist John Ogden called Chopin's waltzes "the brightest jewels in the greatesty salons of the time." Louis Ehlert said they are dances of the soul and not of the body. James Hunker referred to "their animated rhythms, insouciant airs and brilliant, coquettish atmosphere, the true atmosphere of the ballroom."
The Waltz No.9 was a gift for Marie Wodzinska, with whom Chopin was in love. When he departed after a visit with her family 1835, she wrote: “On Saturday, after you had left us, we all walked sadly about the drawing room where you had been with us a few minutes earlier. Our eyes were filled with tears...You were the sole topic of conversation. Felix repeatedly asked me to play that Waltz (the last thing you played and gave to us). They enjoyed listening as I enjoyed playing, for it brought back the brother who had just left.”
After Chopin's death in 1849, his childhood friend Julian Fontana returned from America to Paris, so he could prepare various works for publication that had never been issued. Though Fontana had studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, scholars wonder if Fontana might have "completed" some unfinished Chopin scores. The Waltz No.11 is among these. In it, writes Frank Cooper, Chopin “opposed an initial joyous outburst with a central section both songlike and sentimental.” It was later orchestrated and used in the ballet Les Sylphides.
The Waltz No. 5 dates from 1840. “If Chopin had written it for dancing," wrote Robert Schumann, "more than half of the dancers would necessarily be represented by countesses. This waltz is aristocratic to the tips of its toes.” In his book on Chopin, Huneker writes: "The prolonged trill on E flat, summoning us to the ballroom, the suggestive interminglinbg of rhythms, duple and triple, the coquetry, hesitation passionate avowal and the superb coda, with its echoes of evening--have not these episodes a charm beyond compare?" Herbert Weinstock writes, "In reality a potpourri of, or free fantasy on, waltz melodies, the A-flat major is held together very loosely by recurrences of the chief melodies and by constant reappearances of a promenade-like interlude...a device very like that used by Schumann in Carnaval."
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915): Etudes, Op.8
No.10 in D flat major
11 in B flat minor
12 in D sharp minor (Patetico)
A classmate of Rachmaninoff's at the Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin was also a virtuoso pianist, who slept with Chopin's scores under his pillow. His Twelve Etudes, Op.8, published in 1895, are said to owe a debt to Chopin. In liner notes to his recordings of the works, pianist Morton Estrin has a caution: "Why should this come as a great surprise?" wonders pianist Morton Estrin, "Every significant piano work owes something to the composer who virtually invented the instrument. What is surprising--and wonderful--is that Scriabin, who was in his early twenties when he composed these pieces, had something to add to Chopin, something very individual to say."
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Claude Debussy: Preludes No.3 (The Wind in the Plain), No.4 (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air), No.5 (The Hills of Anacapri), No.6 (Footsteps in the Snow), No.7 (What the West Wind saw) & No.8 (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), Book I
Frédéric Chopin: Waltzes No.9 in A flat major, Op.69 No.1 (L'adieu), No.11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1& No.5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)
Alexander Scriabin: Etudes No.10 in D flat major, No.11 in B flat minor & No.12 in D sharp minor (Patetico), Op.8 (11/5/09)
Also, Leopold Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, Jr.
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907507 Track 13 9:59
Charley anticipates the Albers Trio's recital at the Lakewood Cultural Center tomorrow.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: "Andante" (3rd movement) from Cello Sonata in G minor, Op.19
Julie Albers, cello; Orion Weiss, piano
Artek 22 Track 3 5:39
Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Preludes, Book I
No. 3. Le vent dans la plaine (The Wind in the Plain): Animé
No. 4. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air): Modéré
No. 5. Les collines d'Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri): Très modéré (Roy Howat: from a bottle of Italian wine?)
No. 6. Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow): Triste et lent
No. 7. Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest (What the West Wind has seen): Animé et tumultueux
No. 8. La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair): Très calme et doucement expressif
Like Bach and Chopin, Debussy wrote a set of keyboard preludes. Bach did it twice in The Well Tempered Clavier, covering all the major and minor keys. Debussy's single effort, with no sequence of keys--indeed, five keys were not used at all--was divided into two books of twelve each. The first was sketched in 1907; the actual composition took just two months in 1910. A clue to his intent might be a remark we made before starting the second book. “Who can ever know the secret of musical composition?" he said. "The noise of the sea, the curve of the horizon, the wind in the leaves, the cry of a bird; all leave impressions on us. And suddenly, when one least wills it, one of those memories spills out of us and expresses itself in musical language.” To indicate the primacy of the music over the inspirations, he printed the titles at the ends of the scores.
"The Wind in the Plain" (No.3) comes from the epigraph to Paul Verlaine's poem “C'est l'extase” from Ariettes oubliées, which Debussy had set as a song cycle in 1887. “The wind on the plain holds its breath” is a line from a poem by Simon-Charles Favart. In his biography of Debussy, Oscar Thompson refers to "the racing lilt of lively breeze, with here and there a momentary gust of biting wind. But this is no tempest. It ends in thin air, wisplike, on a note marked "laissez vibrer" (let it vibrate) instead of gravitating to an expected cadence."
"The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air" (No.4) is a line from Baudelaire's poem Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), which Debussy set as a song in 1889. Thompson calls it "melancholy, languorous music, sensuous in every detail, if not strictly the poet's 'vertiginous waltz.' The air is heavy with perfumes and vibrant with sounds that seem to swoon in the dying day. All the senses, with those of touch and smell added to those of sight and hearing, seem to enter into the caress and the gentle intoxication of this fantasy."
Roy Howat thinks No. 5 ("The Hills of Anacapri") was inspired by the label on a bottle of Italian wine? Again, Thompson describes "a snatch of folksong and a hint of cowbells, a carefree popular refrain, with its frank tune passed from bass to trebl; a songlike middle section with diatonic harmonies leading on to a badinage of tunes and bells, fragmentarily recalled, the a close marked 'lumineux' (luminous) as if there were blazing sunlight in a tonic chord with added sixth."
There is no traceable source of the inspiration for "Footsteps in the Snow" (No.6). Debussy directed that the rhythm "should have the sonorous value of a melancholy ice-bound landscape." André Suarès remarked that "this stumbling rhythm, persistent, like a false step on q treacherous surface, the step of a foot which slips and catches itself, evokes marvelously the gray horizon over a pale expanse of ice. But how much more the crushing silence of space where the heart can be heard beating and almost stops, sick with unhappiness, haunted by melancholy, palpitating with doubts and regrets. The little breath of wind which holds the snowflake every now and then in its falling, only to toss it aside; the long, interminable road; the nostalgia for the light which is not there and for the warm caress: this solitude, infinite, in a word, the solitude of our soul, wandering along absorbed in itself, a solitude which all the deserts and all of the winters of earth never approach."
"What the West Wind has seen" (No.7) was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Garden of Paradise,” in which the four winds recount their recent feats. The West Wind (Zephyr) comes from the Atlantic, bringing storms and shipwrecks, with the sounds of Spanish guitars in the coda. Thompson claims the music represents "the vision of a hurricane and of a sea lashed to a fury, but retaining the sensation of a nightmare rather than of terror actually experienced."
No.8 was inspired by one of Leconte de Lisle's Scottish Songs about “the girl with the flaxen hair, the beauty with lips of cherry,” or even Robert Burns's “Lass with the lint white locks.” Roland Nadeau says “the soft initial melody begins unharmonized; we are stirred by a sense of gradual apparition. There is a strong suggestion of the pentatonic mode, which...tends to generate gentle, transparent chords. Debussy draws upon this tendency to produce a delicate sheen, an harmonic texture that just fits the mood of the poem.”
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849): Waltzes
No. 9 in A flat major, Op.69 No. 1 (L'adieu)
No. 11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1
No. 5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)
Pianist John Ogden called Chopin's waltzes "the brightest jewels in the greatesty salons of the time." Louis Ehlert said they are dances of the soul and not of the body. James Hunker referred to "their animated rhythms, insouciant airs and brilliant, coquettish atmosphere, the true atmosphere of the ballroom."
The Waltz No.9 was a gift for Marie Wodzinska, with whom Chopin was in love. When he departed after a visit with her family 1835, she wrote: “On Saturday, after you had left us, we all walked sadly about the drawing room where you had been with us a few minutes earlier. Our eyes were filled with tears...You were the sole topic of conversation. Felix repeatedly asked me to play that Waltz (the last thing you played and gave to us). They enjoyed listening as I enjoyed playing, for it brought back the brother who had just left.”
After Chopin's death in 1849, his childhood friend Julian Fontana returned from America to Paris, so he could prepare various works for publication that had never been issued. Though Fontana had studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, scholars wonder if Fontana might have "completed" some unfinished Chopin scores. The Waltz No.11 is among these. In it, writes Frank Cooper, Chopin “opposed an initial joyous outburst with a central section both songlike and sentimental.” It was later orchestrated and used in the ballet Les Sylphides.
The Waltz No. 5 dates from 1840. “If Chopin had written it for dancing," wrote Robert Schumann, "more than half of the dancers would necessarily be represented by countesses. This waltz is aristocratic to the tips of its toes.” In his book on Chopin, Huneker writes: "The prolonged trill on E flat, summoning us to the ballroom, the suggestive interminglinbg of rhythms, duple and triple, the coquetry, hesitation passionate avowal and the superb coda, with its echoes of evening--have not these episodes a charm beyond compare?" Herbert Weinstock writes, "In reality a potpourri of, or free fantasy on, waltz melodies, the A-flat major is held together very loosely by recurrences of the chief melodies and by constant reappearances of a promenade-like interlude...a device very like that used by Schumann in Carnaval."
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915): Etudes, Op.8
No.10 in D flat major
11 in B flat minor
12 in D sharp minor (Patetico)
A classmate of Rachmaninoff's at the Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin was also a virtuoso pianist, who slept with Chopin's scores under his pillow. His Twelve Etudes, Op.8, published in 1895, are said to owe a debt to Chopin. In liner notes to his recordings of the works, pianist Morton Estrin has a caution: "Why should this come as a great surprise?" wonders pianist Morton Estrin, "Every significant piano work owes something to the composer who virtually invented the instrument. What is surprising--and wonderful--is that Scriabin, who was in his early twenties when he composed these pieces, had something to add to Chopin, something very individual to say."
Tuesday January 19, 2010
Lakewood Cultural Center Performing Arts Series
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita No.6 in E minor, BWV 830
Samuel Barber: Piano Sonata, Op.26 (11/5/09)
Also, Franz Josef Haydn: Piano Sonata No.58 in C major, Hob.XVI:48
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907507 1,2 10:50
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Partita No.6 in E minor, BWV 830
I. Toccata
II. Allemande
III. Courante
IV. Air
V. Sarabande
VI. Tempo di Gavotta
VII. Gigue
Bach's first published work—his Opus One--was a set of partitas for keyboard. He had just taken a new job as cantor of the Thomas Church in Leipzig. His predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, had published two volumes titled Clavier-Ŭbung (Keyboard Practice), consisting of seven suites each called “Parthie” (partita). Inspired by Kuhnau's example, in 1726 Bach began his own Clavier-Ŭbung. He even bought an ad in the paper: “Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, wanting to publish a work of harpsichord suites, and having already begun it with the first Partita, and intending to continue it now and then until the work is complete, informs amateurs of the harpsichord of this, and that the composer of this work is himself the publisher.”
He continued adding partitas until 1731, when he issued six of them as “Keyboard Practice, consisting of Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, Minuets and other Gallantries; composed to delight the hearts of music lovers by Johann Sebastian Bach...Opus 1.” The endeavor was not a financial success: there was no second edition.
But they soon caught on. Writing in 1802, biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel called them “euphonious, expressive and always original compositions...Any one who learned to play a few pieces out of them well could make a great success with them.”
In Bach's day the term “partita” had come to mean a suite of dance movements. The standard sequence was Allemande—Courante—Sarabande—Gigue, but new dances--Minuet, Gavotte, Bourree and Passepied--were soon inserted between the other movements. In the case of the Sixth Partita, Bach inserted an Air between the Courante and Sarabande.
In liner notes to Rosalyn Tureck's recording, Christoph Wolff refers to “...the huge conception of the Toccata, with its opening and closing sections forming the buttresses to the great central fugue; the florid freedom of the Allemande, the extraordinarily imaginative flight of figuration in the Courante. Momentary suspension of these complex figurations brings relief in the simple, lyrical Air, but his movement is followed by one of the most rhapsodic compositions ever written by Johann Sebastian.”
Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Piano Sonata in E flat minor, Op.26
I. Allegro energico
II. Allegro vivace e leggiero
III. Adagio mesto
IV. Allegro con spirito (Fuga)
"I would like to find a good large work by an American composer," said pianist Vladimir Horowitz. He found one when, in 1947, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers commissioned Barber to write a piano sonata in honor of the 25th anniversary of the League of Composers. Horowitz would have first performance rights for the 1949-50 season.
The composition of the Sonata didn't come easily. He tried to start it in Italy, but returned to the United State in 1948. "There are so may distractions i Rome that I accomplished precisely nothing," he reported. "The Sonata had started off so well here in January. 1st movement finished--but then Italy seemed to stop the progress: so I came back here....For a month nothing happened: not an idea worth jotting down....Last week, at last, an idea, and I've just finished the second movement--a scherzo. So now I don't want to move again until it is finished....I'll just continue my hermit-like existence until the Sonata is finished. I don't force things, but six months without writing a note is disarming, and makes me feel I have no reason to exist. Anyway, it moves ahead now, and I shall just plug away. The first two movements are good, i think. Now a slow movement-finale."
When Horowitz saw the three movements he told Barber "the sonata would sound better if he made a very flashy last movement, but with content. So he did that fugue, which is the best thing in the sonata." Again Barber was stalled, when he received a call from Wanda Horowitz (the pianist's wife, and conductor Arturo Toscanini's daughter). She told him, "the trouble with you is you're stitico (constipated). That's what you are, a constipated composer." That did the trick. "That made me so mad," said Barber, "that I ran out to my studio and wrote that [fugue] in the next day."
Horowitz played the work in Havana, Cuba on December 9, 1949. The official premiere took place at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 1950. Glenn Gunn wrote in the Washington Times-Herald: "The sound of the instrument has not been exploited in like manner by any twentieth-century composer." Richard Keith of the Washington Post described of the last movement fugue as "one of the most musically exciting and technically brilliant pieces of writing yet turned out by an American." Later, on tour with the Sonata. Horowitz told a reporter: "This sonata is terrific... Barber's music is like him: aristocratic and full of taste, and also very American. That is why I am proud to present it."
In her definitive biography of the composer, Barbara B. Heyman writes: "...though not revolutionary in its formal structure--it adheres to traditional designs for each movement--is a monumental masterpiece of its time. Its strength lies in the remarkable alliance between long sweeping melodic ideas that are distinctive to Barber's musical imprint and the modern harmonic language and structural techniques that are idiomatic to the eclectic musical style of the twentieth century. The first movement is generated from an extraordinary economy of thematic material, and the sonata form is more aptly delineated by melodic design than by harmonic structure (the home key of E minor is not fully ascertained until the coda)....Twelve-tone rows appear in three movements, not as a rigid technique of organization but as one of many agents of in Hans Tischler's words, 'logical patterning'." As an example, she points to the third movement's "accompaniment patterns, over which a lyrical melody is fused but never in conflict with, sometimes even contributing to, the tonal structure of the movement."
Heyman calls the second movement "an evanescent, scherzolike dance movement in a rondo form....The four-voice fugue of the fourth movement may well be the most brilliant twentieth-century example of the genre. Barber uses the traditional structure...There are conventional fugal devices...but in no sense is this an academic exercise or a fossilized resurrection of the form. Syncopated rhythms and 'blue-note' harmonies associated with American jazz are integrated into the fabric of the music."
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita No.6 in E minor, BWV 830
Samuel Barber: Piano Sonata, Op.26 (11/5/09)
Also, Franz Josef Haydn: Piano Sonata No.58 in C major, Hob.XVI:48
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907507 1,2 10:50
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Partita No.6 in E minor, BWV 830
I. Toccata
II. Allemande
III. Courante
IV. Air
V. Sarabande
VI. Tempo di Gavotta
VII. Gigue
Bach's first published work—his Opus One--was a set of partitas for keyboard. He had just taken a new job as cantor of the Thomas Church in Leipzig. His predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, had published two volumes titled Clavier-Ŭbung (Keyboard Practice), consisting of seven suites each called “Parthie” (partita). Inspired by Kuhnau's example, in 1726 Bach began his own Clavier-Ŭbung. He even bought an ad in the paper: “Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, wanting to publish a work of harpsichord suites, and having already begun it with the first Partita, and intending to continue it now and then until the work is complete, informs amateurs of the harpsichord of this, and that the composer of this work is himself the publisher.”
He continued adding partitas until 1731, when he issued six of them as “Keyboard Practice, consisting of Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, Minuets and other Gallantries; composed to delight the hearts of music lovers by Johann Sebastian Bach...Opus 1.” The endeavor was not a financial success: there was no second edition.
But they soon caught on. Writing in 1802, biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel called them “euphonious, expressive and always original compositions...Any one who learned to play a few pieces out of them well could make a great success with them.”
In Bach's day the term “partita” had come to mean a suite of dance movements. The standard sequence was Allemande—Courante—Sarabande—Gigue, but new dances--Minuet, Gavotte, Bourree and Passepied--were soon inserted between the other movements. In the case of the Sixth Partita, Bach inserted an Air between the Courante and Sarabande.
In liner notes to Rosalyn Tureck's recording, Christoph Wolff refers to “...the huge conception of the Toccata, with its opening and closing sections forming the buttresses to the great central fugue; the florid freedom of the Allemande, the extraordinarily imaginative flight of figuration in the Courante. Momentary suspension of these complex figurations brings relief in the simple, lyrical Air, but his movement is followed by one of the most rhapsodic compositions ever written by Johann Sebastian.”
Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Piano Sonata in E flat minor, Op.26
I. Allegro energico
II. Allegro vivace e leggiero
III. Adagio mesto
IV. Allegro con spirito (Fuga)
"I would like to find a good large work by an American composer," said pianist Vladimir Horowitz. He found one when, in 1947, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers commissioned Barber to write a piano sonata in honor of the 25th anniversary of the League of Composers. Horowitz would have first performance rights for the 1949-50 season.
The composition of the Sonata didn't come easily. He tried to start it in Italy, but returned to the United State in 1948. "There are so may distractions i Rome that I accomplished precisely nothing," he reported. "The Sonata had started off so well here in January. 1st movement finished--but then Italy seemed to stop the progress: so I came back here....For a month nothing happened: not an idea worth jotting down....Last week, at last, an idea, and I've just finished the second movement--a scherzo. So now I don't want to move again until it is finished....I'll just continue my hermit-like existence until the Sonata is finished. I don't force things, but six months without writing a note is disarming, and makes me feel I have no reason to exist. Anyway, it moves ahead now, and I shall just plug away. The first two movements are good, i think. Now a slow movement-finale."
When Horowitz saw the three movements he told Barber "the sonata would sound better if he made a very flashy last movement, but with content. So he did that fugue, which is the best thing in the sonata." Again Barber was stalled, when he received a call from Wanda Horowitz (the pianist's wife, and conductor Arturo Toscanini's daughter). She told him, "the trouble with you is you're stitico (constipated). That's what you are, a constipated composer." That did the trick. "That made me so mad," said Barber, "that I ran out to my studio and wrote that [fugue] in the next day."
Horowitz played the work in Havana, Cuba on December 9, 1949. The official premiere took place at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 1950. Glenn Gunn wrote in the Washington Times-Herald: "The sound of the instrument has not been exploited in like manner by any twentieth-century composer." Richard Keith of the Washington Post described of the last movement fugue as "one of the most musically exciting and technically brilliant pieces of writing yet turned out by an American." Later, on tour with the Sonata. Horowitz told a reporter: "This sonata is terrific... Barber's music is like him: aristocratic and full of taste, and also very American. That is why I am proud to present it."
In her definitive biography of the composer, Barbara B. Heyman writes: "...though not revolutionary in its formal structure--it adheres to traditional designs for each movement--is a monumental masterpiece of its time. Its strength lies in the remarkable alliance between long sweeping melodic ideas that are distinctive to Barber's musical imprint and the modern harmonic language and structural techniques that are idiomatic to the eclectic musical style of the twentieth century. The first movement is generated from an extraordinary economy of thematic material, and the sonata form is more aptly delineated by melodic design than by harmonic structure (the home key of E minor is not fully ascertained until the coda)....Twelve-tone rows appear in three movements, not as a rigid technique of organization but as one of many agents of in Hans Tischler's words, 'logical patterning'." As an example, she points to the third movement's "accompaniment patterns, over which a lyrical melody is fused but never in conflict with, sometimes even contributing to, the tonal structure of the movement."
Heyman calls the second movement "an evanescent, scherzolike dance movement in a rondo form....The four-voice fugue of the fourth movement may well be the most brilliant twentieth-century example of the genre. Barber uses the traditional structure...There are conventional fugal devices...but in no sense is this an academic exercise or a fossilized resurrection of the form. Syncopated rhythms and 'blue-note' harmonies associated with American jazz are integrated into the fabric of the music."
Monday January 18, 2010
Charley talks with Boulder Philharmonic music director Michael Butterman about Saturday's concert.
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Michael Butterman, conductor; Hiroko Okada Hellyer, Peter Hellyer, Paul Mulliken, percussion
Leonard Bernstein: Fancy Free Ballet 28:20
Russell Peck: The Glory and the Grandeur 15:22 (10/4/08)
Also, Charley anticipates Christopher Taylor's appearance with the Boulder Philharmonic Saturday.
Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes No.7 in E flat major ("Eroica") & No.10 in F minor
Christopher Taylor, piano
Liszt Digital 005 7,10 10:03
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Fancy Free Ballet
I. Enter Three Sailors: Very fast four
II. Scene at the Bar: Poco meno mosso
III. Enter Two Girls: Fast and hot
IV. Pas de deux: Very slowly
V. Competition Scene: Opening tempo
VI. Three Dance Variations
Variation 1 (Galop): Presto
Variation 2 (Waltz): Allegretto grazioso
Variation 3 (Danzon): Strong, moderate
quarters
VII. Finale: Tempo come prima
One night during the fall of 1943, there was a knock on Leonard Bernstein’s door. It was dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who had a story outline for a one-act ballet titled Fancy Free and wanted to hear some of Bernstein’s music.
“Funny you should ask that,” Bernstein said, “because this afternoon in the Russian Tea Room I got this tune in my head and I wrote it down on a napkin.” Bernstein sang the melody, and “Jerry went through the ceiling. He said, ‘That’s it, that’s what I had in mind!’ We went crazy. I began developing the theme right there in his presence….Thus the ballet was born.”
It was Bernstein’s first ballet. He conducted the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 18, 1944. There were almost twenty curtain calls that night and more than 160 performances to follow. The press was ecstatic. “Just exactly ten degrees north of terrific,” said the New York Times. Time magazine praised the dancing, which it called “acrobatic, a specialty rhumba [danzon], soft shoe adagio, eccentric jitterbugging, knee-drops, slapstick and a violent, half-hidden free-for-all under the bar.”
Bernstein described the story in a program note: “From the moment the action begins, with the sound of a juke box wailing behind the curtain, the ballet is strictly Young America of 1944. The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamp post, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers pricked out with a crazy pattern of lights, making a dizzying background. Three sailors explode on the stage; they are on 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls. The tale of how they first meet one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet.”
It was Bernstein’s sister Shirley who recorded the blues song “Big Stuff” heard playing on a jukebox as the curtain rises. Bernstein made a suite from the ballet for a performance by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1945.
Russell Peck (b.1945): The Glory and the Grandeur
``I think it's very possible for people to be excited by what the orchestra has to offer,'' says Russell Peck. ``For me the orchestra offers transportation to heights, depths, mysteries, and revelations that simply are not accessible by other means.'' Since 1983 Peck has been writing works which receive frequent performances beyond their premieres.
Born in Detroit, Peck received three degrees from the University of Michigan. His teachers have included Clark Eastham, Leslie Bassett, Ross Lee Finney, Gunther Schuller and George Rochberg. He has received the Koussevitzky Prize and two Ford Foundation Fellowships, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been guest composer at the Gaudeamus Contemporary Music Festival in the Netherlands, and composer-in-residence with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. A recent Albany Records compact disk features four of his works, including The Glory and the Grandeur, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.
The Glory and the Grandeur is an exciting work both visually and musically, featuring three percussion soloists who perform in front of the orchestra. It has been greeted by standing ovations ever since its first performance by the Greensboro Symphony and The Percussion Group/Cincinnati, conducted by Paul Anthony McRae, on October 18, 1988. After a performance by the Alabama Symphony, the work was called ``the hit of the evening, drawing lots of `yips', a few `yups', and cheers from all corners of the hall.'' The Sacramento Symphony's performance prompted the remark that Peck ``continues to surprise concert hall audiences with the diversity of his talents and a willingness to risk his musical neck.''
The title, from Edgar Allen Poe, ``shouldn't be taken to imply a heavy monumentality,'' Peck says. ``The volume of sound is certainly monumental on occasion, but the intent is more to glorify and celebrate the natural glitter of percussion.''
The Glory and the Grandeur is a true show piece. At times the effect is like a ``perpetual motion,'' with players hopping from one station to another. At others, the lyric qualities of the percussion soloists are exploited, as in the ``tranquillo'' section toward the beginning. The changing location of the sound itself is the idea much of the time, especially in the opening group drum cadenza.
The three percussion soloists are busy throughout the piece. At the beginning, says Peck, ``they play rhythmic antiphony from widely separated drum stations, then gather at the metal instruments of vibraphone, bells, and Chinese cymbals and gongs. At one point in the composition all three perform together on one marimba. The finale section builds a rapid pace of color changes as the players hasten among different instruments, and concludes with the orchestra supporting a return to the spirit of the opening.''
The Glory and the Grandeur was included on WPBY's ``Symphonic Wonder Works,'' a video performance of the West Virginia Symphony's Young People's Concert in 1991. It won the Gold Award in the Music Video Stage/Concert Performance category of the 25th Annual Worldfest-Houston at The Houston International Film and Video Festival.
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Michael Butterman, conductor; Hiroko Okada Hellyer, Peter Hellyer, Paul Mulliken, percussion
Leonard Bernstein: Fancy Free Ballet 28:20
Russell Peck: The Glory and the Grandeur 15:22 (10/4/08)
Also, Charley anticipates Christopher Taylor's appearance with the Boulder Philharmonic Saturday.
Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes No.7 in E flat major ("Eroica") & No.10 in F minor
Christopher Taylor, piano
Liszt Digital 005 7,10 10:03
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Fancy Free Ballet
I. Enter Three Sailors: Very fast four
II. Scene at the Bar: Poco meno mosso
III. Enter Two Girls: Fast and hot
IV. Pas de deux: Very slowly
V. Competition Scene: Opening tempo
VI. Three Dance Variations
Variation 1 (Galop): Presto
Variation 2 (Waltz): Allegretto grazioso
Variation 3 (Danzon): Strong, moderate
quarters
VII. Finale: Tempo come prima
One night during the fall of 1943, there was a knock on Leonard Bernstein’s door. It was dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who had a story outline for a one-act ballet titled Fancy Free and wanted to hear some of Bernstein’s music.
“Funny you should ask that,” Bernstein said, “because this afternoon in the Russian Tea Room I got this tune in my head and I wrote it down on a napkin.” Bernstein sang the melody, and “Jerry went through the ceiling. He said, ‘That’s it, that’s what I had in mind!’ We went crazy. I began developing the theme right there in his presence….Thus the ballet was born.”
It was Bernstein’s first ballet. He conducted the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 18, 1944. There were almost twenty curtain calls that night and more than 160 performances to follow. The press was ecstatic. “Just exactly ten degrees north of terrific,” said the New York Times. Time magazine praised the dancing, which it called “acrobatic, a specialty rhumba [danzon], soft shoe adagio, eccentric jitterbugging, knee-drops, slapstick and a violent, half-hidden free-for-all under the bar.”
Bernstein described the story in a program note: “From the moment the action begins, with the sound of a juke box wailing behind the curtain, the ballet is strictly Young America of 1944. The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamp post, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers pricked out with a crazy pattern of lights, making a dizzying background. Three sailors explode on the stage; they are on 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls. The tale of how they first meet one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet.”
It was Bernstein’s sister Shirley who recorded the blues song “Big Stuff” heard playing on a jukebox as the curtain rises. Bernstein made a suite from the ballet for a performance by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1945.
Russell Peck (b.1945): The Glory and the Grandeur
``I think it's very possible for people to be excited by what the orchestra has to offer,'' says Russell Peck. ``For me the orchestra offers transportation to heights, depths, mysteries, and revelations that simply are not accessible by other means.'' Since 1983 Peck has been writing works which receive frequent performances beyond their premieres.
Born in Detroit, Peck received three degrees from the University of Michigan. His teachers have included Clark Eastham, Leslie Bassett, Ross Lee Finney, Gunther Schuller and George Rochberg. He has received the Koussevitzky Prize and two Ford Foundation Fellowships, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been guest composer at the Gaudeamus Contemporary Music Festival in the Netherlands, and composer-in-residence with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. A recent Albany Records compact disk features four of his works, including The Glory and the Grandeur, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.
The Glory and the Grandeur is an exciting work both visually and musically, featuring three percussion soloists who perform in front of the orchestra. It has been greeted by standing ovations ever since its first performance by the Greensboro Symphony and The Percussion Group/Cincinnati, conducted by Paul Anthony McRae, on October 18, 1988. After a performance by the Alabama Symphony, the work was called ``the hit of the evening, drawing lots of `yips', a few `yups', and cheers from all corners of the hall.'' The Sacramento Symphony's performance prompted the remark that Peck ``continues to surprise concert hall audiences with the diversity of his talents and a willingness to risk his musical neck.''
The title, from Edgar Allen Poe, ``shouldn't be taken to imply a heavy monumentality,'' Peck says. ``The volume of sound is certainly monumental on occasion, but the intent is more to glorify and celebrate the natural glitter of percussion.''
The Glory and the Grandeur is a true show piece. At times the effect is like a ``perpetual motion,'' with players hopping from one station to another. At others, the lyric qualities of the percussion soloists are exploited, as in the ``tranquillo'' section toward the beginning. The changing location of the sound itself is the idea much of the time, especially in the opening group drum cadenza.
The three percussion soloists are busy throughout the piece. At the beginning, says Peck, ``they play rhythmic antiphony from widely separated drum stations, then gather at the metal instruments of vibraphone, bells, and Chinese cymbals and gongs. At one point in the composition all three perform together on one marimba. The finale section builds a rapid pace of color changes as the players hasten among different instruments, and concludes with the orchestra supporting a return to the spirit of the opening.''
The Glory and the Grandeur was included on WPBY's ``Symphonic Wonder Works,'' a video performance of the West Virginia Symphony's Young People's Concert in 1991. It won the Gold Award in the Music Video Stage/Concert Performance category of the 25th Annual Worldfest-Houston at The Houston International Film and Video Festival.
Friday January 15, 2010
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Michael Butterman, conductor; Misha Dichter and Cipa Dichter, pianists
Johann Sebastian Bach: "Air" from Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068 5:12
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concerto in E flat major for Two Pianos, K.365 23:14
Aaron Copland: "Hoe-Down" from Rodeo (2/14/09)
Also, Charley talks with Boulder Philharmonic music director Michael Butterman about next week's concert.
Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes No.2 in A minor, No.3 in F major ("Landscape"), No.4 in D minor ("Mazeppa") & No.5 in B flat major ("Will-o'-the-wisps")
Christopher Taylor, piano
Liszt Digital 2-5 21:16
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068
II. Air
After working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach was appointed cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. He moved family and furniture in May of 1723. His job description included duties as civic director of music, and this meant numerous odious encounters with the Town Council. He complained of ``superiors who are strange people, with little regard for music.''
Some relief from his official duties came in 1729, when he was asked to direct the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, a group founded 25 years earlier by Telemann. During the winter, they performed from eight to ten o'clock every Friday night at Gottfried Zimmermann's coffeehouse. In the warmer months, they moved outdoors in the garden for concerts from four to six o'clock on Wednesday afternoons.
All four of the Suites for Orchestra were played at these concerts. Apparently, the Third Suite was composed during 1730-31 in Leipzig. In 1830 Felix Mendelssohn played the Third Suite for the 80-year-old Goethe. ``He took great pleasure'' in it, Mendelssohn recalled. ``The opening was so pompous and so aristocratic, he told me, that one could clearly see a procession of elegantly dressed people descending a grand staircase.'' Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the Suite since Bach's day on February 15, 1838 in Leipzig.
In Bach's time, a ``suite'' of dance movements was preceded by an ``Ouverture,'' after the innovations of Jean Baptiste Lully. To complicate matters, the entire sequence of movements--``Ouverture'' plus suite of dances--was also called an ``Ouverture.'' Nowadays, to complicate matters further, the entire enterprise is called a ``suite.''
After the ``Ouverture'' in the Third Suite comes the ``Air,'' made famous by August Wilhelj's arrangement for violin and piano titled ``Air on the G String.'' The work is scored for 2 oboes, 3 trumpets, timpani, strings and continuo.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Concerto in E flat major for Two Pianos, K.365 (316a)
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondeux: Allegro
The Concerto for Two Pianos was completed in January of 1779, shortly after Mozart returned from his visit to Paris and Mannheim. He probably intended to play it with his sister. If he did, it was a private performance and no contemporary account survives.
At the first public performance--in Vienna on November 23, 1781--the other pianist, besides Mozart, was ``the fat daughter of Herr von Aurnhammer,'' as Mozart called her.
Josephine Aurnhammer was apparently in love with Mozart, much to his consternation since at the time he was earnestly courting Constanze Weber, whom he later married. Mozart described Josephine in a letter: ``If a painter wanted to portray the devil to the life, he would have to choose her face. She is as fat as a farm-wench, perspires so that you feel inclined to vomit, and goes about so scantily clad that really you can read as plain as print: `Pray, do look here'.'' However unpleasant she may have been to look at, Mozart respected her piano-playing: ``the young lady is a fright, but plays enchantingly.''
Eric Blom says that the Concerto is ``not a great work, but technically a most attractive one by reason of the composer's joy in the special problem of coordinating two keyboards. His effects are sometimes quite unlike what could have been obtained from any other combination, as though they came from some transfigured, heavenly barrel-organ.''
Calling it ``a work of joy,'' Cuthbert Girdlestone writes: ``The tone of the work is one of dignity, worthy of expression in the presence of sovereigns. The impulsive themes of Mozart's previous concerto (K.271) have no counterparts here save in the rondo where a more `unbuttoned' gaiety, as Beethoven would have said, is always allowable; the composer's personality asserts itself more discreetly and the purely physical go of its predecessor is absent from the first movement. But if it is less full of fun, it is more graceful and of fairer countenance. The less ambitious flight is made up for by a breadth and ampleness in its themes and proportions which was lacking in the restless earlier concerto.''
The Concerto is scored for 2 pianos, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings.
Michael Butterman, conductor; Misha Dichter and Cipa Dichter, pianists
Johann Sebastian Bach: "Air" from Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068 5:12
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concerto in E flat major for Two Pianos, K.365 23:14
Aaron Copland: "Hoe-Down" from Rodeo (2/14/09)
Also, Charley talks with Boulder Philharmonic music director Michael Butterman about next week's concert.
Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes No.2 in A minor, No.3 in F major ("Landscape"), No.4 in D minor ("Mazeppa") & No.5 in B flat major ("Will-o'-the-wisps")
Christopher Taylor, piano
Liszt Digital 2-5 21:16
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068
II. Air
After working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach was appointed cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. He moved family and furniture in May of 1723. His job description included duties as civic director of music, and this meant numerous odious encounters with the Town Council. He complained of ``superiors who are strange people, with little regard for music.''
Some relief from his official duties came in 1729, when he was asked to direct the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, a group founded 25 years earlier by Telemann. During the winter, they performed from eight to ten o'clock every Friday night at Gottfried Zimmermann's coffeehouse. In the warmer months, they moved outdoors in the garden for concerts from four to six o'clock on Wednesday afternoons.
All four of the Suites for Orchestra were played at these concerts. Apparently, the Third Suite was composed during 1730-31 in Leipzig. In 1830 Felix Mendelssohn played the Third Suite for the 80-year-old Goethe. ``He took great pleasure'' in it, Mendelssohn recalled. ``The opening was so pompous and so aristocratic, he told me, that one could clearly see a procession of elegantly dressed people descending a grand staircase.'' Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the Suite since Bach's day on February 15, 1838 in Leipzig.
In Bach's time, a ``suite'' of dance movements was preceded by an ``Ouverture,'' after the innovations of Jean Baptiste Lully. To complicate matters, the entire sequence of movements--``Ouverture'' plus suite of dances--was also called an ``Ouverture.'' Nowadays, to complicate matters further, the entire enterprise is called a ``suite.''
After the ``Ouverture'' in the Third Suite comes the ``Air,'' made famous by August Wilhelj's arrangement for violin and piano titled ``Air on the G String.'' The work is scored for 2 oboes, 3 trumpets, timpani, strings and continuo.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Concerto in E flat major for Two Pianos, K.365 (316a)
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondeux: Allegro
The Concerto for Two Pianos was completed in January of 1779, shortly after Mozart returned from his visit to Paris and Mannheim. He probably intended to play it with his sister. If he did, it was a private performance and no contemporary account survives.
At the first public performance--in Vienna on November 23, 1781--the other pianist, besides Mozart, was ``the fat daughter of Herr von Aurnhammer,'' as Mozart called her.
Josephine Aurnhammer was apparently in love with Mozart, much to his consternation since at the time he was earnestly courting Constanze Weber, whom he later married. Mozart described Josephine in a letter: ``If a painter wanted to portray the devil to the life, he would have to choose her face. She is as fat as a farm-wench, perspires so that you feel inclined to vomit, and goes about so scantily clad that really you can read as plain as print: `Pray, do look here'.'' However unpleasant she may have been to look at, Mozart respected her piano-playing: ``the young lady is a fright, but plays enchantingly.''
Eric Blom says that the Concerto is ``not a great work, but technically a most attractive one by reason of the composer's joy in the special problem of coordinating two keyboards. His effects are sometimes quite unlike what could have been obtained from any other combination, as though they came from some transfigured, heavenly barrel-organ.''
Calling it ``a work of joy,'' Cuthbert Girdlestone writes: ``The tone of the work is one of dignity, worthy of expression in the presence of sovereigns. The impulsive themes of Mozart's previous concerto (K.271) have no counterparts here save in the rondo where a more `unbuttoned' gaiety, as Beethoven would have said, is always allowable; the composer's personality asserts itself more discreetly and the purely physical go of its predecessor is absent from the first movement. But if it is less full of fun, it is more graceful and of fairer countenance. The less ambitious flight is made up for by a breadth and ampleness in its themes and proportions which was lacking in the restless earlier concerto.''
The Concerto is scored for 2 pianos, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings.
Thursday January 14, 2010
Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Olga Kern, piano
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Isle of the Dead, Op.29
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43 (10/18/09)
Also, Sergei Rachmaninoff: “Serenade” from Fantasy Pieces, Op.3
Olga Kern, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907399 Track 8 3:03
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43
In May of 1934, Rachmaninoff was confined to a hospital in Switzerland for a minor operation. There he made plans for his latest composition. Returning to his villa near Lucerne, ``from morn to night'' he said, he worked on his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He completed it on August 18.
``Two weeks ago I finished a new piece,'' he wrote to a friend, ``it's called a Fantasia for piano and orchestra in the form of variations on a theme by Paganini....The thing's rather difficult; I must begin learning it.'' He did learn it, as he was the soloist at the first performance on November 7, 1934 in Baltimore. Leopold Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The theme is Paganini's Caprice No. 24 in A minor, Op. 1, which Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and others, even Paganini himself, had also used for variations. In Rachmaninoff's version, an introduction and the first variation preceded the actual statement of Paganini's theme, then there are 23 more variations. The seventh and tenth variations also use the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead.
The composer may have had a program in mind. In a letter to the choreographer Michel Fokine, he suggested the Rhapsody as a possible subject for a ballet. ``Why not resurrect the legend about Paganini, who, for perfection in his art and for a woman, sold his soul to an evil spirit?'' he wondered. ``All the variations which have the Dies Irae represent the evil spirit....Paganini himself appears in the theme.'' On June 30, 1939, a new ballet titled Paganini, a Fantastic Ballet in Three Scenes was given in London.
Biographer Geoffrey Norris writes: ``Rachmaninoff's melodic gift, even if it is a gift now applied to somebody else's melody, is nowhere more apparent than in the 18th variation of the Paganini Rhapsody, and his skill as an architect is rarely exemplified more clearly than in his organization of these 24 variations, finely conceived into an entirely logical and close-knit structure....These aspects, with a subtle wit and careful, discerning orchestration, typical of his late works, combine to place the Rhapsody at the peak of his works for piano and orchestra.''
The score calls for solo piano, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, side drum, triangle, glockenspiel, harp and strings.
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Olga Kern, piano
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Isle of the Dead, Op.29
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43 (10/18/09)
Also, Sergei Rachmaninoff: “Serenade” from Fantasy Pieces, Op.3
Olga Kern, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907399 Track 8 3:03
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43
In May of 1934, Rachmaninoff was confined to a hospital in Switzerland for a minor operation. There he made plans for his latest composition. Returning to his villa near Lucerne, ``from morn to night'' he said, he worked on his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He completed it on August 18.
``Two weeks ago I finished a new piece,'' he wrote to a friend, ``it's called a Fantasia for piano and orchestra in the form of variations on a theme by Paganini....The thing's rather difficult; I must begin learning it.'' He did learn it, as he was the soloist at the first performance on November 7, 1934 in Baltimore. Leopold Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The theme is Paganini's Caprice No. 24 in A minor, Op. 1, which Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and others, even Paganini himself, had also used for variations. In Rachmaninoff's version, an introduction and the first variation preceded the actual statement of Paganini's theme, then there are 23 more variations. The seventh and tenth variations also use the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead.
The composer may have had a program in mind. In a letter to the choreographer Michel Fokine, he suggested the Rhapsody as a possible subject for a ballet. ``Why not resurrect the legend about Paganini, who, for perfection in his art and for a woman, sold his soul to an evil spirit?'' he wondered. ``All the variations which have the Dies Irae represent the evil spirit....Paganini himself appears in the theme.'' On June 30, 1939, a new ballet titled Paganini, a Fantastic Ballet in Three Scenes was given in London.
Biographer Geoffrey Norris writes: ``Rachmaninoff's melodic gift, even if it is a gift now applied to somebody else's melody, is nowhere more apparent than in the 18th variation of the Paganini Rhapsody, and his skill as an architect is rarely exemplified more clearly than in his organization of these 24 variations, finely conceived into an entirely logical and close-knit structure....These aspects, with a subtle wit and careful, discerning orchestration, typical of his late works, combine to place the Rhapsody at the peak of his works for piano and orchestra.''
The score calls for solo piano, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, side drum, triangle, glockenspiel, harp and strings.
Wednesday January 13, 2010
Colorado Music Festival
Jon Nakamatsu, piano; Colorado Music Festival Chamber Players (Calin Lupanu, Monica Boboc, violins; Matthew Dane, viola; Bjorn Ranheim, cello)
Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44 30:09 (7/17/07)
Robert Schumann (arr. Franz Liszt): Widmung (Dedication), Op.25 No. 1
Jon Nakamatsu, piano
CPR Performance Studio 042409 MS
Johannes Brahms: “Allegro appassionato” (1st movement) from Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op.120 No.1
Jon Manasse, clarinet (barefoot); Jon Nakamatsu, piano (shod), Charley Samson, page-turner (barefoot)
CPR Performance Studio 050909 MS
Frédéric Chopin: Fantasy-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op.66 5:17
Jon Nakamatsu, piano
Strings in the Mountains Music Festival (8/17/04)
Also, Charley anticipates cellist Mary Artmann's recital this Friday in Pueblo.
Mendelssohn: "Adagio-–Allegro vivace" (1st movement) from String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13 ("Ist Es Wahr?") 8:17
Veronika String Quartet (Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 031209 MS
Jon Nakamatsu, piano; Colorado Music Festival Chamber Players (Calin Lupanu, Monica Boboc, violins; Matthew Dane, viola; Bjorn Ranheim, cello)
Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44 30:09 (7/17/07)
Robert Schumann (arr. Franz Liszt): Widmung (Dedication), Op.25 No. 1
Jon Nakamatsu, piano
CPR Performance Studio 042409 MS
Johannes Brahms: “Allegro appassionato” (1st movement) from Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op.120 No.1
Jon Manasse, clarinet (barefoot); Jon Nakamatsu, piano (shod), Charley Samson, page-turner (barefoot)
CPR Performance Studio 050909 MS
Frédéric Chopin: Fantasy-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op.66 5:17
Jon Nakamatsu, piano
Strings in the Mountains Music Festival (8/17/04)
Also, Charley anticipates cellist Mary Artmann's recital this Friday in Pueblo.
Mendelssohn: "Adagio-–Allegro vivace" (1st movement) from String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13 ("Ist Es Wahr?") 8:17
Veronika String Quartet (Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 031209 MS
Tuesday January 12, 2010
Friends of Chamber Music
Belcea String Quartet
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No.7 in F major, Op.59 No.1(Rasumovsky) (10/28/09)
Also, Charley anticipates the Albers Trio's appearance at the Lakewood Cultural Center on January 21.
Gregor Piatigorsky: Variations on a Paganini Theme
Julie Albers, cello; Orion Weiss, piano
Artek 22 Track 9 14:18
In 1805 the Russian ambassador to the Viennese court, Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky, commissioned Beethoven to write three string quartets. According to a later biographer, Razumovsky “lived in Vienna like a prince, encouraging art and science, surrounded by a luxurious library and other collections, and envied by all; what advantages accrued from all this to Russian affairs is another question.”
Accordingly, Beethoven’s Opus 59 Quartets are nicknamed the “Razumovsky Quartets,” with Russian themes incorporated into two of them. In his book on Beethoven’s string quartets, Joseph Kerman calls them “a trio of sharply characterized, consciously differentiated individuals.” The premieres of all three were given by Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s quartet in February, 1807.
Musicians, audiences and critics alike were impressed but mystified by the music. The violinist Felix Radicati wrote: “Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad—-for these pieces are not music….I said to him that he surely did not consider these works to be music? To which he replied, ‘Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!’”
One critic called them “deeply thought through and of excellent workmanship but not comprehensible to the public.” As late as 1821, the second quartet was called “important but…unpopular…bizarre.” In short, they were quite a departure from Beethoven’s earlier Opus 18 quartets.
Belcea String Quartet
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No.7 in F major, Op.59 No.1(Rasumovsky) (10/28/09)
Also, Charley anticipates the Albers Trio's appearance at the Lakewood Cultural Center on January 21.
Gregor Piatigorsky: Variations on a Paganini Theme
Julie Albers, cello; Orion Weiss, piano
Artek 22 Track 9 14:18
In 1805 the Russian ambassador to the Viennese court, Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky, commissioned Beethoven to write three string quartets. According to a later biographer, Razumovsky “lived in Vienna like a prince, encouraging art and science, surrounded by a luxurious library and other collections, and envied by all; what advantages accrued from all this to Russian affairs is another question.”
Accordingly, Beethoven’s Opus 59 Quartets are nicknamed the “Razumovsky Quartets,” with Russian themes incorporated into two of them. In his book on Beethoven’s string quartets, Joseph Kerman calls them “a trio of sharply characterized, consciously differentiated individuals.” The premieres of all three were given by Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s quartet in February, 1807.
Musicians, audiences and critics alike were impressed but mystified by the music. The violinist Felix Radicati wrote: “Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad—-for these pieces are not music….I said to him that he surely did not consider these works to be music? To which he replied, ‘Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!’”
One critic called them “deeply thought through and of excellent workmanship but not comprehensible to the public.” As late as 1821, the second quartet was called “important but…unpopular…bizarre.” In short, they were quite a departure from Beethoven’s earlier Opus 18 quartets.
Monday January 11, 2010
Lakewood Cultural Center Performing Arts Series
Benny Kim, violin; Anne Epperson, piano
Johann Sebastian Bach: Violin Sonata No. 4 in c minor, BMV 1017 16:05
Camille Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75 24:54 (1/31/07)
Also, Charley anticipates cellist Mary Artmann's recital this Friday in Pueblo.
Ludwig van Beethoven: "Allegro con brio" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.1 in F major, Op.18 7:05
Dmitri Shostakovich: "Allegretto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.3 in F major, Op. 73 5:13
Veronika String Quartet
(Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 10/1/09 MS
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Violin Sonata No. 4 in c minor, BMV 1017
I. Siciliano: Largo
II. Allegro
III. Adagio
IV. Allegro
In 1717 Bach assumed his new position as court conductor to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. “My gracious prince loved and understood music,” he later recalled. “I expected to end my days there at Cöthen.” Unfortunately, Prince Leopold later married a very unmusical woman and his interest in music would become, according to Bach, “somewhat tepid.”
Much of Bach’s instrumental music dates from his tenure at Cöthen (1717-1723), including a set of six sonatas for violin and keyboard, which probably date from sometime after 1720. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, said “they may be reckoned among Bach’s first masterpieces of this kind….The violin part demands a master. Bach knew the possibilities of this instrument, and spared it as little as he spared his clavier.”
The first five sonatas conform to the church sonata movement scheme: slow-fast-slow-fast. The violin’s melody in the opening of the fourth sonata anticipates the alto aria “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion.
Writing in 1774, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel counted the sonatas “among the best works of the dear late father. They sound very good even now and give me much pleasure, regardless of the fact that they are over fifty years old. There are some adagios among them which one cannot compose more melodiously at the present time.”
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75
I. Allegro agitato--Adagio
II. Allegretto moderato--Allegro molto
“I live in music like a fish in water,” said Saint-Saëns. “I write music as an apple tree produces apples.” In an age when most French composers pursued opera, Saint-Saëns concentrated on instrumental music. Comparing himself to Georges Bizet, he remarked, “We pursue a different ideal, he seeking passion and life above all things, I running after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.” In 1871 Saint-Saëns founded the Société nationale de musique, whose purpose was to encourage French chamber music.
The first of his two violin sonatas was written in 1885 and dedicated to the Belgian violinist Martin-Pierre-Joseph Marsick. The two has just completed a recital tour of Switzerland and the sonata was probably a thank-you gift.
The work has two movements, each with two sections. In his liner notes to James Ehnes’s recording, Don Anderson writes, “The first half of the opening movement is restless and dramatic, lightened by a runny second theme. It segues into an Adagio of exceptional lyric sweetness. The second movement opens with a lightly dancing, scherzo-like section; a series of solemn piano chords heralds the steeple-chase virtuoso excitement of the finale.”
Benny Kim, violin; Anne Epperson, piano
Johann Sebastian Bach: Violin Sonata No. 4 in c minor, BMV 1017 16:05
Camille Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75 24:54 (1/31/07)
Also, Charley anticipates cellist Mary Artmann's recital this Friday in Pueblo.
Ludwig van Beethoven: "Allegro con brio" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.1 in F major, Op.18 7:05
Dmitri Shostakovich: "Allegretto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.3 in F major, Op. 73 5:13
Veronika String Quartet
(Veronika Afanassieva and Karine Garibova, violins, Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaia, viola; Mary Artmann, cello)
CPR Performance Studio 10/1/09 MS
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Violin Sonata No. 4 in c minor, BMV 1017
I. Siciliano: Largo
II. Allegro
III. Adagio
IV. Allegro
In 1717 Bach assumed his new position as court conductor to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. “My gracious prince loved and understood music,” he later recalled. “I expected to end my days there at Cöthen.” Unfortunately, Prince Leopold later married a very unmusical woman and his interest in music would become, according to Bach, “somewhat tepid.”
Much of Bach’s instrumental music dates from his tenure at Cöthen (1717-1723), including a set of six sonatas for violin and keyboard, which probably date from sometime after 1720. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, said “they may be reckoned among Bach’s first masterpieces of this kind….The violin part demands a master. Bach knew the possibilities of this instrument, and spared it as little as he spared his clavier.”
The first five sonatas conform to the church sonata movement scheme: slow-fast-slow-fast. The violin’s melody in the opening of the fourth sonata anticipates the alto aria “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion.
Writing in 1774, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel counted the sonatas “among the best works of the dear late father. They sound very good even now and give me much pleasure, regardless of the fact that they are over fifty years old. There are some adagios among them which one cannot compose more melodiously at the present time.”
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75
I. Allegro agitato--Adagio
II. Allegretto moderato--Allegro molto
“I live in music like a fish in water,” said Saint-Saëns. “I write music as an apple tree produces apples.” In an age when most French composers pursued opera, Saint-Saëns concentrated on instrumental music. Comparing himself to Georges Bizet, he remarked, “We pursue a different ideal, he seeking passion and life above all things, I running after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.” In 1871 Saint-Saëns founded the Société nationale de musique, whose purpose was to encourage French chamber music.
The first of his two violin sonatas was written in 1885 and dedicated to the Belgian violinist Martin-Pierre-Joseph Marsick. The two has just completed a recital tour of Switzerland and the sonata was probably a thank-you gift.
The work has two movements, each with two sections. In his liner notes to James Ehnes’s recording, Don Anderson writes, “The first half of the opening movement is restless and dramatic, lightened by a runny second theme. It segues into an Adagio of exceptional lyric sweetness. The second movement opens with a lightly dancing, scherzo-like section; a series of solemn piano chords heralds the steeple-chase virtuoso excitement of the finale.”
Friday January 8, 2010
Charley talks with violinist Leila Josefowicz about her appearance with the Colorado Symphony tonight and tomorrow.
Also, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival
Alisa Weilerstein, cello; Adam Neiman, piano; Colin Jacobsen, violin; Chee-Yun, violin; Max Mandel, viola
Stravinsky: Italian Suite from Pulcinella
Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57 (7/20/04)
And, Manuel Ponce (arr. Jascha Heifetz): Estrellita
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 Track 8 3:26
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57
Prelude: Lento
Fugue: Adagio
Scherzo: Allegretto
Intermezzo: Lento
Finale: Allegretto
Soon after the premiere of the First String Quartet in 1938, the Beethoven Quartet asked for something they could play with Shostakovich as pianist. “I shall definitely write you a quintet and play it with you,” he said to the Quartet’s leader, Dmitry Tsiganov.
The Piano Quintet was completed on September 14, 1940, between the composition of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The first performance took place in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on November 23, 1940. The Scherzo and Finale were encored, a practice so common that the Quintet was often described as a work “in five movements of which there are seven.” It won the Stalin Prize the following May.
"Hearing the Piano Quintet for the first time in 1941," recalled composer Bernard Stevens, "during the first great Nazi assault on the USSR, was for me a profoundly moving experience. I realized the greatness of a musical mind that could speak in such simple and direct terms….With this work Shostakovich spoke with a universal voice. No longer would the understanding of his music be in any way dependent on knowledge of and sympathy for its Soviet background.”
The opening Prelude begins with a solemn piano solo in the style of a Bach prelude. This is then answered by the quartet and followed by a restrained and serious Fugue, which starts with muted strings, later joined by the piano playing low octaves.
According to Ian MacDonald in The New Shostakovich, there are two ways to take this Quintet, either as "pure music," without any topical allusions, or as "a volatile hybrid of the abstract and representational." He points to the next three movements as perhaps reflecting the times in which it was written.
The usual meaning of scherzo as a "joke" is loaded with more allusions. "Far from being harmlessly high-spirited," he writes, "the scherzo is a clumsy rustic dance with brutal undertones….Its hammering of tell-tale repeated notes is loutish, not mischievous, and the 'wrong notes' in the piano part are as sarcastic as those in the second movement of Prokofiev's contemporary Sixth Piano Sonata. This, in other words, is another allusion to the 'revolt against intelligence'--Stalin's generation of cultureless country bullies. In the same way, the return of the keening lamentation of the first two movements in the intermezzo should move the heart--but not to the extent that the mind overlooks the menacing stalk of the piano's staccato bass-line."
"To the Jewish-Gypsy anguish of the intermezzo's closing bars, the finale responds in the manner of a kindly babushka murmuring 'never mind, never mind'--the sound of credulous self-deception (and a version of the 'betrayal' motif, itself to be found on violin in the previous movement). The second subject, announced with naïve grandeur by the piano, inverts the fanfare traditionally played to signal the coming of the clowns at Russian circuses, quickly drumming up such excited throngs of repeated notes that it loses track of its own chords. On cue, the babushka returns, drowsily reiterating 'never mind' in the bass-register of the piano like a cooing woodpigeon, before a puzzled recollection of the Quintet's intermezzo momentarily stills the music's placid motion. But the finale is too foetally asleep to be troubled by the composer's forebodings and its blandness resumes, linking arms with the 'clowns' theme and wandering dreamily off into the wings."
MacDonald relates this to Stalin's dismissal of intelligence that German forces were massing. On June 21, 1941, he said, "We are starting a panic over nothing." Six hours later, the Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force, and 3.5 million German troops stormed the border.
In the Quintet, says MacDonald, Shostakovich "stands in storm-light at the edge of a great darkness, crying like Cassandra of coming catastrophe. Hearing him, Russia stirs vaguely in her dreams before rolling over and going back to sleep--a vision at once comic and terrible which could have come from no other composer."
Also, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival
Alisa Weilerstein, cello; Adam Neiman, piano; Colin Jacobsen, violin; Chee-Yun, violin; Max Mandel, viola
Stravinsky: Italian Suite from Pulcinella
Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57 (7/20/04)
And, Manuel Ponce (arr. Jascha Heifetz): Estrellita
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 Track 8 3:26
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57
Prelude: Lento
Fugue: Adagio
Scherzo: Allegretto
Intermezzo: Lento
Finale: Allegretto
Soon after the premiere of the First String Quartet in 1938, the Beethoven Quartet asked for something they could play with Shostakovich as pianist. “I shall definitely write you a quintet and play it with you,” he said to the Quartet’s leader, Dmitry Tsiganov.
The Piano Quintet was completed on September 14, 1940, between the composition of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The first performance took place in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on November 23, 1940. The Scherzo and Finale were encored, a practice so common that the Quintet was often described as a work “in five movements of which there are seven.” It won the Stalin Prize the following May.
"Hearing the Piano Quintet for the first time in 1941," recalled composer Bernard Stevens, "during the first great Nazi assault on the USSR, was for me a profoundly moving experience. I realized the greatness of a musical mind that could speak in such simple and direct terms….With this work Shostakovich spoke with a universal voice. No longer would the understanding of his music be in any way dependent on knowledge of and sympathy for its Soviet background.”
The opening Prelude begins with a solemn piano solo in the style of a Bach prelude. This is then answered by the quartet and followed by a restrained and serious Fugue, which starts with muted strings, later joined by the piano playing low octaves.
According to Ian MacDonald in The New Shostakovich, there are two ways to take this Quintet, either as "pure music," without any topical allusions, or as "a volatile hybrid of the abstract and representational." He points to the next three movements as perhaps reflecting the times in which it was written.
The usual meaning of scherzo as a "joke" is loaded with more allusions. "Far from being harmlessly high-spirited," he writes, "the scherzo is a clumsy rustic dance with brutal undertones….Its hammering of tell-tale repeated notes is loutish, not mischievous, and the 'wrong notes' in the piano part are as sarcastic as those in the second movement of Prokofiev's contemporary Sixth Piano Sonata. This, in other words, is another allusion to the 'revolt against intelligence'--Stalin's generation of cultureless country bullies. In the same way, the return of the keening lamentation of the first two movements in the intermezzo should move the heart--but not to the extent that the mind overlooks the menacing stalk of the piano's staccato bass-line."
"To the Jewish-Gypsy anguish of the intermezzo's closing bars, the finale responds in the manner of a kindly babushka murmuring 'never mind, never mind'--the sound of credulous self-deception (and a version of the 'betrayal' motif, itself to be found on violin in the previous movement). The second subject, announced with naïve grandeur by the piano, inverts the fanfare traditionally played to signal the coming of the clowns at Russian circuses, quickly drumming up such excited throngs of repeated notes that it loses track of its own chords. On cue, the babushka returns, drowsily reiterating 'never mind' in the bass-register of the piano like a cooing woodpigeon, before a puzzled recollection of the Quintet's intermezzo momentarily stills the music's placid motion. But the finale is too foetally asleep to be troubled by the composer's forebodings and its blandness resumes, linking arms with the 'clowns' theme and wandering dreamily off into the wings."
MacDonald relates this to Stalin's dismissal of intelligence that German forces were massing. On June 21, 1941, he said, "We are starting a panic over nothing." Six hours later, the Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force, and 3.5 million German troops stormed the border.
In the Quintet, says MacDonald, Shostakovich "stands in storm-light at the edge of a great darkness, crying like Cassandra of coming catastrophe. Hearing him, Russia stirs vaguely in her dreams before rolling over and going back to sleep--a vision at once comic and terrible which could have come from no other composer."
Thursday January 7, 2010
Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 44 (10/16/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Leila Josefowicz's appearance with the Colorado Symphony this weekend.
George Gershwin (arr. Jascha Heifetz): Prelude No.2
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 Track 11 3:47
Felix Mendelssohn: "Allegro molto appassionato" (1st movement) from Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64
Leila Josefowicz, violin; Colorado Music Festival Orchestra/ Michael Christie
Colorado Music Festival (7/6/06) 12:47
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 44
I. Allegro moderato
II. Adagio non troppo
III. Allegro
``When I compose I am a slave,'' wrote Rachmaninoff. ``Beginning at nine in the morning I allow myself no respite until after eleven at night. A poem, a picture, something concrete helps me immensely. There must be something real before my mind to convey a definite impression, or the ideas refuse to appear.''
In two separate sessions in Switzerland in 1935 and 1936, the ideas appeared for the Third Symphony. It had been almost thirty years since his last symphony.
Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the work on November 6, 1936. The reviews were mixed. The Symphony was praised for its ``sincerity and personal accent,'' its ``technique and skill in orchestration,'' and its ``impassioned stress.'' However, one review called it ``a chewing over again of something that never had importance to start with.''
Rachmaninoff was resigned. ``The critics are not helpful,'' he told a reporter. ``When my first symphony was first played they said it was so-so. Then when my second was played they said the first was good, but the second was so-so. Now that my third has been played, they say my first and second are good but that my--oh, well, you see how it is.''
When Sir Henry Wood conducted the Third Symphony in Liverpool, he wrote: ``The work impresses me as being of the true Russian romantic school; one cannot get away from the beauty and melodic line of the themes and their logical development. As did Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff uses the instruments of the orchestra to their fullest effect. Those lovely little phrases for solo violin, echoed on the four solo woodwind instruments, have a magical effect in the slow movement. I am convinced that Rachmaninoff's children will see their father's third symphony take its rightful place in the affection of that section of the public which loves melody.''
Biographer Geoffrey Norris writes: ``Of all Rachmaninoff's late works, the Third Symphony is the one that most resolutely looks back to his mature Russian years in the impassioned turn of the phrases, the rich string writing and the soaring cello tunes. The Third is pervaded by a pithy, chant-like motto theme, heard in the opening bars on clarinets, horns and cellos. But the Third differs from his other symphonies in having only three movements, with a sharp-edged scherzo incorporated into the central slow movement. It is here, and in the buoyant finale, that we can detect certain stylistic features peculiar to the works of his later years: a rhythmic crispness, a pungent spice to the harmonies and a sparer, more discriminating use of the orchestra, with particular attention being paid to the percussion and to the individual tone qualities of solo instruments. Running through the whole symphony, though, is Rachmaninoff's unmistakable strain of nostalgia and Slavic melancholy, here so pronounced that we may perhaps regard the Third Symphony as the most Russian-sounding of them all.''
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, flutes, English horn, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon, horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings.
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 44 (10/16/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Leila Josefowicz's appearance with the Colorado Symphony this weekend.
George Gershwin (arr. Jascha Heifetz): Prelude No.2
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 Track 11 3:47
Felix Mendelssohn: "Allegro molto appassionato" (1st movement) from Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64
Leila Josefowicz, violin; Colorado Music Festival Orchestra/ Michael Christie
Colorado Music Festival (7/6/06) 12:47
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 44
I. Allegro moderato
II. Adagio non troppo
III. Allegro
``When I compose I am a slave,'' wrote Rachmaninoff. ``Beginning at nine in the morning I allow myself no respite until after eleven at night. A poem, a picture, something concrete helps me immensely. There must be something real before my mind to convey a definite impression, or the ideas refuse to appear.''
In two separate sessions in Switzerland in 1935 and 1936, the ideas appeared for the Third Symphony. It had been almost thirty years since his last symphony.
Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the work on November 6, 1936. The reviews were mixed. The Symphony was praised for its ``sincerity and personal accent,'' its ``technique and skill in orchestration,'' and its ``impassioned stress.'' However, one review called it ``a chewing over again of something that never had importance to start with.''
Rachmaninoff was resigned. ``The critics are not helpful,'' he told a reporter. ``When my first symphony was first played they said it was so-so. Then when my second was played they said the first was good, but the second was so-so. Now that my third has been played, they say my first and second are good but that my--oh, well, you see how it is.''
When Sir Henry Wood conducted the Third Symphony in Liverpool, he wrote: ``The work impresses me as being of the true Russian romantic school; one cannot get away from the beauty and melodic line of the themes and their logical development. As did Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff uses the instruments of the orchestra to their fullest effect. Those lovely little phrases for solo violin, echoed on the four solo woodwind instruments, have a magical effect in the slow movement. I am convinced that Rachmaninoff's children will see their father's third symphony take its rightful place in the affection of that section of the public which loves melody.''
Biographer Geoffrey Norris writes: ``Of all Rachmaninoff's late works, the Third Symphony is the one that most resolutely looks back to his mature Russian years in the impassioned turn of the phrases, the rich string writing and the soaring cello tunes. The Third is pervaded by a pithy, chant-like motto theme, heard in the opening bars on clarinets, horns and cellos. But the Third differs from his other symphonies in having only three movements, with a sharp-edged scherzo incorporated into the central slow movement. It is here, and in the buoyant finale, that we can detect certain stylistic features peculiar to the works of his later years: a rhythmic crispness, a pungent spice to the harmonies and a sparer, more discriminating use of the orchestra, with particular attention being paid to the percussion and to the individual tone qualities of solo instruments. Running through the whole symphony, though, is Rachmaninoff's unmistakable strain of nostalgia and Slavic melancholy, here so pronounced that we may perhaps regard the Third Symphony as the most Russian-sounding of them all.''
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, flutes, English horn, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon, horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings.
Wednesday January 6, 2010
Colorado Music Festival
Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Glenn Einschlag, bassoon
Richard Wagner: Siegfried Idyll 19:42
Marjan Mozetich: Concerto for Bassoon and Strings with Marimba 21:47 (7/15/07)
Also, Charley anticipates Leila Josefowicz's master class at the Lamont School of Music tomorrow and her appearances with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Friday and Saturday.
Felix Mendelssohn: 1st movement from String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op.80
(Leila Josefowicz, violin; Jennifer Koh, violin; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Thomas Kraines, cello)
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/8/03)
John Novacek: "Intoxication" & "Full Stride Ahead" from Four Rags
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 1,4 3:27
Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Siegfried Idyll
Siegfried Idyll was written as a surprise present for Wagner's bride Cosima on her thirty-third birthday. It also celebrated the birth of their first son Siegfried.
The first performance took place on Christmas Day, 1870 on the staircase of the Wagners' villa at ``Triebschen'' near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Wagner had organized a small band of musicians, who rehearsed in secret and crept into the house at 7:30 in the morning to awaken the sleeping Cosima with the music. By a strange coincidence, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a house guest at the time.
Cosima was stunned. ``As I awoke,'' she later recalled, ``my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so was all the rest of the household.''
The original title for the work was Triebschen Idyll, with Fidi's Bird Song and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870. ``Fidi'' was the parents' nickname for young Siegfried. ``Orange sunrise'' refers to the wallpaper in Cosima's bedroom.
After its initial early morning performance, Siegfried Idyll was played twice more during that Christmas Day in 1870. The assembled musicians also played the Wedding March from Lohengrin and a sextet by Beethoven.
Wagner considered the music too personal for public performance, but in 1878 money worries forced him to sell it. Cosima wrote in her diary: ``My secret treasure is becoming common property; may the joy it will give mankind be commensurate with the sacrifice that I am making.''
Various themes in Siegfried Idyll date back to 1864, so it was the opera Siegfried that borrowed from the Idyll, and not the reverse, as is often supposed. The Idyll also contains the German folk song Schlaf', Kindchen, schlafe (Sleep, Little Child, Sleep).
Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Glenn Einschlag, bassoon
Richard Wagner: Siegfried Idyll 19:42
Marjan Mozetich: Concerto for Bassoon and Strings with Marimba 21:47 (7/15/07)
Also, Charley anticipates Leila Josefowicz's master class at the Lamont School of Music tomorrow and her appearances with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Friday and Saturday.
Felix Mendelssohn: 1st movement from String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op.80
(Leila Josefowicz, violin; Jennifer Koh, violin; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Thomas Kraines, cello)
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/8/03)
John Novacek: "Intoxication" & "Full Stride Ahead" from Four Rags
Leila Josefowicz, violin; John Novacek, piano
Philips 462 948 1,4 3:27
Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Siegfried Idyll
Siegfried Idyll was written as a surprise present for Wagner's bride Cosima on her thirty-third birthday. It also celebrated the birth of their first son Siegfried.
The first performance took place on Christmas Day, 1870 on the staircase of the Wagners' villa at ``Triebschen'' near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Wagner had organized a small band of musicians, who rehearsed in secret and crept into the house at 7:30 in the morning to awaken the sleeping Cosima with the music. By a strange coincidence, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a house guest at the time.
Cosima was stunned. ``As I awoke,'' she later recalled, ``my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so was all the rest of the household.''
The original title for the work was Triebschen Idyll, with Fidi's Bird Song and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870. ``Fidi'' was the parents' nickname for young Siegfried. ``Orange sunrise'' refers to the wallpaper in Cosima's bedroom.
After its initial early morning performance, Siegfried Idyll was played twice more during that Christmas Day in 1870. The assembled musicians also played the Wedding March from Lohengrin and a sextet by Beethoven.
Wagner considered the music too personal for public performance, but in 1878 money worries forced him to sell it. Cosima wrote in her diary: ``My secret treasure is becoming common property; may the joy it will give mankind be commensurate with the sacrifice that I am making.''
Various themes in Siegfried Idyll date back to 1864, so it was the opera Siegfried that borrowed from the Idyll, and not the reverse, as is often supposed. The Idyll also contains the German folk song Schlaf', Kindchen, schlafe (Sleep, Little Child, Sleep).
Tuesday January 5, 2010
Friends of Chamber Music
Belcea String Quartet
Franz Josef Haydn:String Quartet No. 25 in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, Hob.III:32
Benjamin Britten: String Quartet No.3, Op.94 (10/28/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Chee-Yun's recital at the Vilar Performing Arts Center tomorrow.
Bach: "Allegro" (3rd movement) from Double Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043
(Anthea Kreston, Chee-Yun, solo violins; Henry Gronnier, Timothy Fain, violins; Thomas Diener, viola; Eric Gaenslen, cello; Peter Lloyd, double bass; Kathleen McIntosh, harpsichord)
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/29/03) 5:11 From Vail 11.
Jules Massenet: Meditation from Thaïs
Chee-Yun, violin; Akira Eguchi, piano
Denon 17473 Track 13 4:29
Belcea String Quartet
Franz Josef Haydn:String Quartet No. 25 in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, Hob.III:32
Benjamin Britten: String Quartet No.3, Op.94 (10/28/09)
Also, Charley anticipates Chee-Yun's recital at the Vilar Performing Arts Center tomorrow.
Bach: "Allegro" (3rd movement) from Double Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043
(Anthea Kreston, Chee-Yun, solo violins; Henry Gronnier, Timothy Fain, violins; Thomas Diener, viola; Eric Gaenslen, cello; Peter Lloyd, double bass; Kathleen McIntosh, harpsichord)
Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (7/29/03) 5:11 From Vail 11.
Jules Massenet: Meditation from Thaïs
Chee-Yun, violin; Akira Eguchi, piano
Denon 17473 Track 13 4:29
Monday January 4, 2010
Lakewood Cultural Center Performing Arts Series
Claremont Trio
Franz Josef Haydn: Piano Trio in E major, Hob.XV:28 16:52
Leon Kirchner: Piano Trio No. 2 17:10 (3/22/07)
Also, Charley anticipates Chee-Yun's recital at the Vilar Performing Arts Center Wednesday.
Felix Mendelssohn: "Andante espressivo" (2nd movement), "Scherzo: Molto allergro quasi presto" (3rd movement) & "Finale: Allegro appassionatao" (4th movement) from Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op.66
Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music Ensemble (Wendy Chen, piano; Chee Yun, violin; Andres Diaz, cello) 17:00 (3/1/06)
Claremont Trio
Franz Josef Haydn: Piano Trio in E major, Hob.XV:28 16:52
Leon Kirchner: Piano Trio No. 2 17:10 (3/22/07)
Also, Charley anticipates Chee-Yun's recital at the Vilar Performing Arts Center Wednesday.
Felix Mendelssohn: "Andante espressivo" (2nd movement), "Scherzo: Molto allergro quasi presto" (3rd movement) & "Finale: Allegro appassionatao" (4th movement) from Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op.66
Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music Ensemble (Wendy Chen, piano; Chee Yun, violin; Andres Diaz, cello) 17:00 (3/1/06)
Thursday December 31, 2009
New Year's Eve Beethoven Bash
7:00pm Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
Berlin Philharmonic / Herbert von Karajan
DG 429036 50:03
7:53pm Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Opus 60
Colorado Music Festival Orchestra
Michael Christie, conductor
35:19 (7/10/08)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 1 in C major, Opus 21
I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio; Allegro molto e vivace
Sketches for the finale of Beethoven's First Symphony were found amongst counterpoint exercises for his teacher, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, dating from 1794. Most of the writing probably took place during the year before the first performance, on April 2, 1800 in Vienna.
The newspapers noted that ``Herr Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a grand concert for his benefit in the Royal Imperial Court Theater.'' The program also contained a Mozart symphony, two excerpts from Haydn's The Creation, Beethoven's Septet and one of the first two piano concertos, as well as improvisations at the piano by Beethoven. ``A new grand symphony with complete orchestra, composed by Herr Ludwig van Beethoven'' was listed last. It must have been a long evening. The concert started at 6:30 and probably didn't end until around 10:00.
A review mentioned that ``at the end one of his symphonies was performed in which there is considerable art, novelty and a wealth of ideas. The only flaw was that the wind instruments were used too much, so that the symphony is more like a piece for military band than a real orchestral work.'' The writer noted how badly the orchestra played: ``The faults of this orchestra...became all the more evident since Beethoven's compositions are difficult to execute....How, under such circumstances, is even the most excellent composition to be effective?''
A critic of the Leipzig performance two years later described the work as ``intellectual, powerful, original and difficult, but here and there somewhat over-rich in detail.'' By 1805, when the Eroica Symphony was terrifying musical conservatives, the same critic regarded the First as a ``noble work of art. All the instruments are splendidly used, an unusual wealth of ideas is magnificently and gracefully displayed and yet consistency, order and light reign throughout.''
The supposed dissonance that begins the First Symphony horrified the French critics, who said that Beethoven's music ``was a peril to art.'' Berlioz, for one, disagreed: ``This work, by its form, melodic style and harmonic and instrumental sobriety, is altogether distinct from the other compositions of Beethoven that succeeded it. The composer evidently remained under the influence of Mozart's ideas while writing it; these he sometimes enlarges but he everywhere imitates with ingenuity.''
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, George Grove wrote: ``The finish and care observable throughout the work are very great. Beethoven began with the determination, which stuck to him during his life, not only of thinking good thoughts, but of expressing them with as much clearness and intelligibility as labour could effect; and this Symphony is full of instances of such thoughtful pains.''
Beethoven had originally intended to dedicate the First Symphony to his former employer in Bonn, the Elector Maximilian Franz. But the Elector died before publication and the dedication was changed to Baron van Swieten, the great friend of Mozart and Haydn.
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 2 in D major, Opus 36
I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio
II. Larghetto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro molto
Sketches for the Second Symphony date from as early as 1800. Most of the work was done during the summer and fall of 1802, about the time that Beethoven realized the “roaring” in his ears would lead to total deafness.
The first performance took place in Vienna on April 5, 1803. It was a typically mammoth all-Beethoven concert. Besides the Second Symphony, the program included the First Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives.
Rehearsals began at eight that same morning. According to an eyewitness, “it was a terrible rehearsal, and at half past two everybody was exhausted and more or less dissatisfied. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (one of Beethoven’s patrons)…had sent for bread and butter, cold meat and wine, in large baskets. He pleasantly asked all to help themselves, and this was done with both hands, the result being that good nature was restored again.”
After the premiere, the Second Symphony was criticized for its “striving for the new and surprising.” A Leipzig performance a year later moved one reviewer to describe the work as “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, though bleeding to death, furiously beats about with its tail in the finale.” But for Hector Berlioz, “in this symphony, everything is noble, energetic, proud.”
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, George Grove wrote: “The Second Symphony is a great advance on the First….The advance is more in dimensions and style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced and are specially connected in our minds with the name of Beethoven….The first movement is distinctly of the old world, though carried out with a spirit, vigor, and effect, and occasionally with a caprice, which are nowhere surpassed, if indeed they are equaled, by Haydn and Mozart. Nor is there anything in the extraordinary grace, beauty, and finish of the Larghetto to alter this…nor in the Finale, grotesque and strong as much of it is: it is all still of the old world, till we come to the Coda, and that, indeed, is distinctly of the other order.”
Grove regards the Second Symphony as “the culminating point of the old pre-Revolution world, the world of Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man had before penetrated, of which no man had even dreamed, but which is now one of our dearest possessions, and will always be known by his immortal name.”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
I. Allegro con brio
II. Marcia funèbre: Adagio assai
III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro molto
As early as the spring of 1798, so the legend goes, the French ambassador to Vienna, General Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, suggested that Beethoven write a symphony about Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, Napoleon was one of Beethoven's idols, but it wasn't until 1801 that the composer first sketched ``Third Symphony, written on Bonaparte.'' He worked on it during 1803 in the countryside near Vienna and finished during the spring of 1804.
The title page originally read ``Grand Symphony composed on Bonaparte.'' But in May, 1804, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor. Beethoven flew into a rage, tore up the title page, and bellowed: ``Is he too no more than a mere mortal? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!'' He later gave the symphony a new title, ``heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man,'' and dedicated it to his patron Prince Lobkowitz.
After several private performances, the Third Symphony received its first public performance in Vienna on April 7, 1805. One critic found the work ``strident and bizarre,'' but another recognized ``the true style of really great music.'' The Director of the Prague Conservatory banned the piece as a ``dangerously immoral composition.''
When the Third Symphony was published, Beethoven included a note, requesting that ``this Symphony, being purposely written much longer than is usual, should be performed nearer the beginning rather than at the end of a concert...if it is heard too late it will lose for the listener, already tired out by previous performances, its own proposed effect.'' At the première, one heckler in the audience exclaimed, ``I'd give a kreutzer with pleasure if it would only end.'' But others were undeterred by the size of the Third Symphony. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia once insisted on hearing it three times in a single evening.
Paul Henry Lang called the Eroica ``one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.'' For Richard Wagner, ``the first movement embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly-gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth.'' When, in 1821, Beethoven heard the news of Napoleon's death, he remarked: ``Well, I've written the funeral oration for that catastrophe seventeen years ago,'' referring to the second movement, a funeral march. Donald Francis Tovey said the third movement is ``the first in which Beethoven fully attained Haydn's desire to replace the minuet by something on a scale comparable to the rest of a great symphony.'' The Finale is a set of twelve variations on a tune Beethoven first used in a little country dance in 1801, then again in The Creatures of Prometheus ballet and also in the Eroica Variations for piano. Edward Downes comments that ``each variation is a little cosmos in itself and the sum of them is overwhelming.''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Opus 60
I. Adagio; Allegro vivace
II. Adagio
III. Allegro vivace
IV. Allegro ma non troppo
Beethoven had already begun his C minor Symphony (No. 5) when he and his patron, Prince Franz Lichnowsky, visited Count Franz von Oppersdorf at his castle in Silesia. The Count's private orchestra played Beethoven's Second Symphony for the guests. The host then commissioned a new symphony from the composer.
Setting aside the Fifth, Beethoven started a new symphony in B flat major. Most of the work was done in the autumn of 1806. By November, the Symphony--now known as the Fourth--was finished. Beethoven wrote to his publishers: ``I cannot give you the promised symphony yet--because a gentleman of quality has taken it from me.'' In fact, Beethoven never sent the score to Count Oppersdorf. All he ever received was the dedication to the published edition.
The first performance of the Fourth Symphony probably took place at the Viennese palace of another Beethoven patron, Prince Franz Joseph Lobkowitz. Two all-Beethoven concerts were given there during March of 1807. The programs included the first four symphonies, the Coriolan Overture, excerpts from Fidelio and a piano concerto. One review noted that ``richness of ideas, bold originality and fullness of power, which are the particular merits of Beethoven's muse, were very much in evidence to everyone at these concerts; yet many found fault with the lack of a noble simplicity and the all too fruitful accumulation of ideas which on account of their number were not always adequately worked out and blended, thereby creating the effect more often of rough diamonds.'' Another critic noted the new Beethoven symphony ``which has pleased, at most his fanatical admirers.''
Carl Maria von Weber, then a rash twenty-year-old, wrote an article on Beethoven's Fourth Symphony that he would later regret. In it, he portrayed the violin complaining of having to ``caper about like a wild goat'' in order to ``execute the no-ideas of Mr. Composer.''
Referring to its place between the mighty Eroica (No. 3) and Fifth Symphonies, Robert Schumann called the Fourth ``a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.'' Hector Berlioz found the Fourth ``generally lively, nimble, joyous, or of a heavenly sweetness.''
Berlioz loved this symphony. After the seminal slow introduction, he writes, ``the first movement is almost entirely given up to joyfulness....As far as the Adagio--it escapes analysis. It is so pure in form, the melodic expression is so angelic and of such irresistible tenderness, that the prodigious art of the workmanship disappears completely.''
Sir Donald Francis Tovey found great fun in the last two movements. Towards the end of the third, he says, ``the two horns blow the whole movement away.'' The last movement contains what he calls ``The Great Bassoon Joke,'' when the solo bassoon clowns the return of the main theme.
The Symphony is scored for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro
“So often heard,” Robert Schumann wrote of the Fifth Symphony, “it still exercises its power over all ages, just as those great phenomena of nature that, no matter how often they recur, fill us with awe and wonder. This Symphony will go on centuries hence, as long as the world and world's music endure.”
According to Beethoven's biographer, Alexander Thayer, “this wondrous work was no sudden inspiration. Themes for (three of the movements) are found in sketchbooks belonging, at the very latest, to the years 1800 and 1801.” After interrupting himself to write the Fourth Symphony, Beethoven finished the Fifth in the spring of 1808.
Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Fifth, the program included the Sixth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the Mass in C major, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud....Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.”
“In spite of several faults which I could not prevent,” said Beethoven, “the public received everything most enthusiastically.” Critic Amadeus Wendt wrote: “Beethoven's music inspires in its listeners awe, fear, horror, pain, and that exquisite nostalgia that is the soul of romanticism.” E.T.A. Hoffmann called the Fifth “one of the most important works of the master whose position in the first rank of composers of instrumental music can now be denied by no one....It is a concept of genius, executed with profound deliberation, which in a very high degree brings the romantic content of the music to expression.”
In 1830, Mendelssohn played the first movement on the piano for Goethe, who said: “It is tremendous--quite crazy--one is almost afraid the house will collapse; and imagine how it must sound in the orchestra!” Of the celebrated four notes that begin the movement, Beethoven is supposed to have said: “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” Much has been made of this remark, most of it nonsense. Pointing to the same four notes in the Fourth Piano Concerto, theorist Heinrich Schenker wondered, “Was this another door on which Fate knocked or was someone else knocking at the same door?” By coincidence, the rhythm of the four notes corresponds to the Morse code for the letter “V.” That, coupled with Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” gesture, inspired the BBC to use the phrase as a signature during World War II.
Sir Donald Francis Tovey compared the second movement to Shakespeare's heroines, for “the same courage, the same beauty of goodness, and the same humor.” Berlioz claimed that the third movement produces “the inexplicable emotion that one experiences under the magnetic gaze of certain individuals.” With the finale, writes George Grove, “all the noisy elements at Beethoven's command in those simpler days (burst) like a thunder-clap into the major key and into a triumphal march.”
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 6 in F major, Opus 68 (Pastoral)
I. Allegro ma non troppo (Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the Country)
II. Andante molto mosso (Scene by the Brook)
III. Allegro (Merry Gathering of Country Folk)
IV. Allegro (Thunderstorm, Tempest)
V. Allegretto (Shepherd's Song, Happy, Thankful Feelings after the Storm)
``How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do,'' wrote Beethoven. ``My bad hearing does not trouble me here. In the country, every tree seems to speak to me, say `Holy! Holy!' In the woods, there is enchantment which expresses all things.''
Beethoven's thoughts on imitating Nature in music were scribbled in the sketches for his Sixth Symphony as early as 1803. ``All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far,'' he scribbled. ``Anyone who has an idea of country-life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles.'' During the summer of 1808, he finished his Pastorale Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life, complete with programmatic titles for all five movements.
Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Sixth, the program included the Fifth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the C major Mass, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: ``There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud....Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.''
Beethoven cautioned against taking the movement titles too literally. In a letter to his publisher, he described the Sixth as ``an expression of feeling rather than a description.''
Nevertheless, Hector Berlioz, for one, imagined very specific activities when hearing the opening movement, ``Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the Country.'' ``The herdsmen begin to appear in the fields,'' he wrote, ``their pipes are heard afar and near. Ravishing phrases caress one's ears deliciously, like perfumed morning breezes. Flocks of chattering birds fly overhead; and now and then the atmosphere seems laden with vapors; heavy clouds flit across the face of the sun, then suddenly disappear, and its rays flood the fields and woods with torrents of dazzling splendour.''
Anton Schindler described being taken by Beethoven to a valley near Heiligenstadt. ``Here I composed the `Scene by the Brook' (second movement),'' he said, ``and the yellowhammers up there, the quails, nightingales and cuckoos round about, composed with me.'' Modern ornithologists maintain that Beethoven's ``yellowhammer song'' is incorrect, if anything resembling more the buzzing of insects.
Schindler said that the third movement, ``Merry Gathering of Country Folk,'' was inspired by Austrian tavern bands. ``Beethoven asked me if I had not observed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and remaining entirely quiet, then awakening with a start, throwing in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, but generally in the right key, and then falling asleep again: he had tried to copy these poor people in his Pastorale Symphony.''
Berlioz wrote of the fourth movement (``Thunderstorm, Tempest''): ``Listen to those gusts of wind, laden with rain; those sepulchral groanings of the basses; those shrill whistles of the piccolo, which announce that a fearful tempest is about to burst. The hurricane approaches, swells; an immense chromatic streak, starting from the highest notes of the orchestra, goes burrowing down into its lowest depths, seizes the basses, carries them along, and ascends again, writhing like a whirlwind, which levels everything in its passage. Then the trombones burst forth; the thunder of the timpani redoubles its fury. It is no longer merely a wind and rain storm: it is a frightful cataclysm, the universal deluge, the end of the world.''
Berlioz called the finale (``Shepherd's Song, Happy Thankful Feelings after the Storm'') ``a hymn of gratitude. Everything smiles. The shepherds reappear; they answer each other on the mountain, recalling their scattered flocks; the sky is serene; the torrents soon cease to flow; calmness returns, and with it the rustic songs, whose gentle melodies bring repose to the soul.''
Donald Francis Tovey cautioned against the interpretive excesses of Berlioz and others. ``In the whole symphony,'' he wrote, ``there is not a note of which the musical value would be altered if cuckoos and nightingales, and country folk, and thunder and lightning, and the howling and whistling of the wind, were things that had never been named by man, either in connection with music or with anything else.''
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 7 in A major, Opus 92
I. Poco sostenuto; Vivace
II. Allegretto
III. Presto; Assai meno presto
IV. Allegro con brio
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was completed in the late spring or early summer of 1812. It wasn't performed publicly until December 8, 1813 at a concert in Vienna to benefit wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers. Also on the program was Beethoven's Wellington's Victory.
Beethoven himself conducted. The composer Ludwig Spohr described the scene: ``The execution was quite masterly, despite the uncertain and often ridiculous conducting of Beethoven....It is a sad misfortune for anyone to be deaf; how then should a musician endure it without despair? Beethoven's almost continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.''
A review of the concert reported that the Symphony ``deserved the loud applause and the exceptionally good performance it received....This symphony...is the richest melodically and the most pleasing and comprehensible of all Beethoven symphonies.'' Beethoven regarded the Seventh as ``among my best works.''
Not everyone shared Beethoven's opinion. After a performance in Leipzig, Clara Schumann's father suggested that the music could only have been written by someone who was very, very drunk. When the Seventh was played before the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Carl Maria von Weber remarked that Beethoven was ``now quite ripe for the madhouse.'' Twelve years later, Weber conducted the London Philharmonic's performance of the Beethoven Seventh. Apparently Weber had changed his mind about the piece.
It was Wagner who dubbed the Seventh ``the apotheosis of the dance, the dance in its highest condition, the happiest realization of the movements of the body in ideal form.'' He wrote: ``If anyone plays the Seventh, tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle, fall to dancing!'' Wagner once demonstrated his theory by dancing to the Seventh Symphony, accompanied by Franz Liszt at the piano.
``It would require more than a technical yardstick to measure the true proportion of this Symphony--the sense of immensity which it conveys,'' writes John N. Burk. ``Beethoven seems to have built up this impression by willfully driving a single rhythmic figure through each movement, until the music attains (particularly in the body of the first movement, and in the Finale) a swift propulsion, an effect of cumulative growth which is akin to extraordinary size.''
After a long introduction, the opening movement launches into a persistent rhythmic propulsion that Ernest Walker found virtually unparalleled elsewhere. The second movement, according to Marion M. Scott, is ``marvelous...full of melancholy beauty.'' Beethoven's biographer Alexander Thayer says the trio of the third movement is based on an Austrian pilgrims' hymn. In the Finale, George Grove discovered ``a vein of rough, hard, personal boisterousness, the same feeling which inspired the strange jests, puns and nicknames which abound in his letters.''
There is a story about Beethoven wandering around the park after the 1814 performance of the Seventh. He stopped to buy cherries from two young maids, who said: ``There is no charge to you. We were at the concert and heard your beautiful music!''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93
I. Allegro vivace e con brio
II. Allegretto scherzando
III. Tempo di menuetto
IV. Allegro vivace
The year 1812 found Beethoven in ill health. His doctor advised treatment at the Bohemian baths at Teplitz. Beethoven did so, and on his way home, stopped at Linz to visit his brother Johann. There, in October, he finished his Eighth Symphony, which had been rattling around in his brain and sketchbooks for over a year.
Beethoven’s patron Archduke Rudolf arranged a private performance the following year in Vienna. The first public performance took place on February 27, 1814, also in Vienna. Also on the program that night were the Seventh Symphony, a vocal trio and Wellington’s Victory.
The Eighth was not well received. One review said: “The greatest interest of the listeners seemed centered on this the newest product of Beethoven’s muse, and expectation was tense, but this was not sufficiently gratified after the single hearing, and the applause which it received was not accompanied by that enthusiasm which distinguishes a work which gives universal delight; in short, it did not create a furor.” Beethoven maintained that the Eighth Symphony was unloved “because it is so much better” than the Seventh. He would often refer to his Eighth as “my little symphony in F.”
Wagner regarded the work as “characteristic of the man, mingling tragedy with farce and a Herculean vigor with the games and caprices of a child.”
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, Sir George Grove wrote: “At this time of life (41) his love of fun and practical joking had increased so much in him as to have become a habit; his letters are full of jokes; he bursts into horse-laughs on every occasion; makes the vilest puns, and bestows the most execrable nicknames….He had an express term for this state of things: `unbuttoned’ was his own word for it….The work might with propriety be called the Humorous Symphony--often terribly humorous; for the atmosphere of broad rough enjoyment which pervades the first and last movements is in the former darkened by bursts of unmistakable wrath.”
The second movement is based on a canon Beethoven had written the previous spring for Johann Mälzel, who claimed to have invented of the metronome. Hence, the ticking accompaniment in the music.
Describing the Symphony as “frankly a little darling--happiness incarnate and a masterpiece of character and conciseness,” biographer Marion M. Scott calls the third movement “a delicious blend of beauty and humor, where the bassoon solo completes the enchantment, and the whole movement is very Viennese in the easy sway of the tunes. The opening of the finale is typical Beethoven, with immense vitality in the rhythms and violent dynamic contrasts. The second subject, however, is a piece of pure loveliness that rises suddenly into view by one of those step-of-one-degree harmonic transitions that Beethoven uses when he has something most special to say.”
The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, as well as timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125 ("Choral")
I. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
II. Molto Vivace--Presto--Molto Vivace
III. Adagio molto e cantabile--Andante moderato
IV. Allegro assai
As early as 1793, Beethoven was thinking of setting Friedrich von Schiller's Ode to Joy to music. A friend reported to the poet's sister that ``he intends to set Schiller's Ode stanza by stanza, and I expect something great as he is devoted to the lofty and sublime.'' Beethoven's notebooks record ``disjointed fragments from Schiller's Ode,'' but nothing much came of the project for some time.
Meanwhile, the theme for what would later become the second movement of the Ninth Symphony appeared in 1815. His pupil Carl Czerny claimed that the tune occurred to him while listening to the twittering of sparrows. The violinist Karl Holz maintained that Beethoven was inspired by the idea of gnomes popping in and out of their hiding places in the forest.
Three years later, Beethoven was planning a ``pious song in a symphony in the ancient modes.'' Later, he told the critic Friedrich Rochlitz: ``I have been thinking for some time about three more great works. A lot of it is all ready--in my head, of course. First I must get the following off my chest: two great symphonies, each different from my others, and an oratorio.'' Eventually, the two symphonies would merge into one, and the oratorio would become the Missa Solemnis.
``It is long since I have been able to bring myself to write easily,'' Beethoven complained in 1822. ``I sit and think and think. The ideas are there, but they will not go down on paper. I dread the beginning of large works. Once begun, it's all right.'' That year, he sketched the opening movement of the Ninth and was again toying with the Schiller Ode as a finale.
That same year the London Philharmonic Society commissioned a symphony from Beethoven, who welcomed the opportunity to compose ``for the first artists of Europe....Beethoven can compose, God be thanked--though he can do nothing else in this world.''
On August 16, 1823, Beethoven wrote to his nephew: ``Today I really began my service to the Muses.'' He was finally composing the Ninth Symphony in earnest. He had doubts about the choral finale, though, and sketched a ``finale instrumentale.'' This music would later become the last movement of the A minor string quartet (Op. 132).
The Schiller Ode eventually prevailed. Beethoven's friend Anton Schindler reported: ``When he reached the development of the fourth movement there began a struggle such as is seldom seen. The object was to find a proper manner of introducing Schiller's Ode. One day entering the room he exclaimed `I have it! I have it!' With that he showed me the sketchbook bearing the words, `Let us sing the song of the immortal Schiller,' whereupon a solo voice began directly the hymn, to joy.''
By early 1823, the Ninth was finished. Despite his promises to the London Philharmonic, it was put into rehearsal in Vienna. The contralto soloist, Karoline Unger, called Beethoven a ``tyrant over all the vocal organs'' to his face. He refused to change a note. Whereupon she turned to the soprano and remarked, ``Well, then we must go on torturing ourselves in the name of God.''
The first performance took place on May 7, 1824. Beethoven, completely deaf, sat in the middle of the orchestra, with a score. The conductor, Michael Umlauf, instructed the orchestra and chorus to ``pay no attention whatever to Beethoven's beating of the time.''
Sir George Grove later talked to Fräulein Unger and gave the following account: ``The master, though placed in the midst of this confluence of music, heard nothing of it at all and was not even sensible of the applause of the audience at the end of his great work, but continued standing with his back to the audience, and beating the time, till Fräulein Unger turned him, or induced him to turn around and face the people, who were still clapping their hands, and giving way to the greatest demonstrations of pleasure. His turning around, and the sudden conviction thereby forced on everybody that he had not done so before because he could not hear what was going on, acted like an electric shock on all present, and a volcanic explosion of sympathy and admiration followed, which was repeated again and again, and seemed as if it would never end.'' Anton Schindler told Beethoven later, ``the whole audience was impressed, crushed by the greatness of your work.''
Sir Donald Francis Tovey writes: ``The great problem for Beethoven in the composition of the Ninth Symphony was obviously that of providing a motive for the appearance of the chorus. The general scheme of the whole symphony as a setting for Schiller's Ode is simple and satisfactory enough. The first movement gives us the tragedy of life. The second movement gives us the reaction from tragedy to a humor that cannot be purely joyful.... The slow movement is beauty of an order too sublime for a world of action; it has no action, and its motion is that of the stars in their courses....But it is a fundamental principle in Beethoven's art that triumph is to be won in the light of common day....Beethoven's plan is to remind us of the first three movements just as they have been described above; and to reject them one by one as failing to attain the joy in which he believes. After all three have been rejected, a new theme is to appear, and that theme shall be hailed and sung as the Hymn of Joy.''
The Ninth Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum and strings.
Text for Choral Finale
(Baritone Solo, Quartet and Chorus)
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!
(O Friends, no more of these
sad tones! Let us rather
raise our voices together
in more pleasant and joyful tones!)
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
(Joy, thou shining spark of God,
Daughter of Elysium!
With fiery rapture, Goddess,
We approach thy shrine.
Your magic reunites those
Whom stern custom has parted,
All men will become brothers
Under your protective wing.)
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freudes Freund zu sein,
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesen Bund!
(Let the man who has had the fortune
To be a helper to his friend.
And the man who has won a noble woman,
Join in our chorus of jubilation!
Yes, even if he holds but one soul
As his own in all the world!
But let the man who knows nothing of this
Steal away alone and in sorrow.)
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub steht von Gott!
(All the world's creatures draw
Draughts of joy from Nature's breast
Both the just and the unjust
Follow in her gentle footsteps.
She gave us kisses and wine
And a friend loyal unto death;
She gave the joy of life to the lowliest,
And to the angels who dwell with God.)
(Tenor Solo and Chorus)
Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen.
(Joyous, as His suns speed
Through the glorious order of Heaven,
Hasten, Brothers, on your way
Of joyous deeds to victory.)
(Chorus)
Seid umschlungen Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brüder! Über'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stüzt nieder Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.
(Be embraced, all ye Millions!
With a kiss for all the world!
Brothers, beyond the stars
Surely dwells a loving Father.
Do you kneel before him, O Millions?
Do you feel the Creator's presence?
Seek him beyond the stars!
He must dwell beyond the stars.)
7:00pm Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
Berlin Philharmonic / Herbert von Karajan
DG 429036 50:03
7:53pm Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Opus 60
Colorado Music Festival Orchestra
Michael Christie, conductor
35:19 (7/10/08)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 1 in C major, Opus 21
I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio; Allegro molto e vivace
Sketches for the finale of Beethoven's First Symphony were found amongst counterpoint exercises for his teacher, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, dating from 1794. Most of the writing probably took place during the year before the first performance, on April 2, 1800 in Vienna.
The newspapers noted that ``Herr Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a grand concert for his benefit in the Royal Imperial Court Theater.'' The program also contained a Mozart symphony, two excerpts from Haydn's The Creation, Beethoven's Septet and one of the first two piano concertos, as well as improvisations at the piano by Beethoven. ``A new grand symphony with complete orchestra, composed by Herr Ludwig van Beethoven'' was listed last. It must have been a long evening. The concert started at 6:30 and probably didn't end until around 10:00.
A review mentioned that ``at the end one of his symphonies was performed in which there is considerable art, novelty and a wealth of ideas. The only flaw was that the wind instruments were used too much, so that the symphony is more like a piece for military band than a real orchestral work.'' The writer noted how badly the orchestra played: ``The faults of this orchestra...became all the more evident since Beethoven's compositions are difficult to execute....How, under such circumstances, is even the most excellent composition to be effective?''
A critic of the Leipzig performance two years later described the work as ``intellectual, powerful, original and difficult, but here and there somewhat over-rich in detail.'' By 1805, when the Eroica Symphony was terrifying musical conservatives, the same critic regarded the First as a ``noble work of art. All the instruments are splendidly used, an unusual wealth of ideas is magnificently and gracefully displayed and yet consistency, order and light reign throughout.''
The supposed dissonance that begins the First Symphony horrified the French critics, who said that Beethoven's music ``was a peril to art.'' Berlioz, for one, disagreed: ``This work, by its form, melodic style and harmonic and instrumental sobriety, is altogether distinct from the other compositions of Beethoven that succeeded it. The composer evidently remained under the influence of Mozart's ideas while writing it; these he sometimes enlarges but he everywhere imitates with ingenuity.''
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, George Grove wrote: ``The finish and care observable throughout the work are very great. Beethoven began with the determination, which stuck to him during his life, not only of thinking good thoughts, but of expressing them with as much clearness and intelligibility as labour could effect; and this Symphony is full of instances of such thoughtful pains.''
Beethoven had originally intended to dedicate the First Symphony to his former employer in Bonn, the Elector Maximilian Franz. But the Elector died before publication and the dedication was changed to Baron van Swieten, the great friend of Mozart and Haydn.
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 2 in D major, Opus 36
I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio
II. Larghetto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro molto
Sketches for the Second Symphony date from as early as 1800. Most of the work was done during the summer and fall of 1802, about the time that Beethoven realized the “roaring” in his ears would lead to total deafness.
The first performance took place in Vienna on April 5, 1803. It was a typically mammoth all-Beethoven concert. Besides the Second Symphony, the program included the First Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives.
Rehearsals began at eight that same morning. According to an eyewitness, “it was a terrible rehearsal, and at half past two everybody was exhausted and more or less dissatisfied. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (one of Beethoven’s patrons)…had sent for bread and butter, cold meat and wine, in large baskets. He pleasantly asked all to help themselves, and this was done with both hands, the result being that good nature was restored again.”
After the premiere, the Second Symphony was criticized for its “striving for the new and surprising.” A Leipzig performance a year later moved one reviewer to describe the work as “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, though bleeding to death, furiously beats about with its tail in the finale.” But for Hector Berlioz, “in this symphony, everything is noble, energetic, proud.”
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, George Grove wrote: “The Second Symphony is a great advance on the First….The advance is more in dimensions and style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced and are specially connected in our minds with the name of Beethoven….The first movement is distinctly of the old world, though carried out with a spirit, vigor, and effect, and occasionally with a caprice, which are nowhere surpassed, if indeed they are equaled, by Haydn and Mozart. Nor is there anything in the extraordinary grace, beauty, and finish of the Larghetto to alter this…nor in the Finale, grotesque and strong as much of it is: it is all still of the old world, till we come to the Coda, and that, indeed, is distinctly of the other order.”
Grove regards the Second Symphony as “the culminating point of the old pre-Revolution world, the world of Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man had before penetrated, of which no man had even dreamed, but which is now one of our dearest possessions, and will always be known by his immortal name.”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
I. Allegro con brio
II. Marcia funèbre: Adagio assai
III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro molto
As early as the spring of 1798, so the legend goes, the French ambassador to Vienna, General Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, suggested that Beethoven write a symphony about Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, Napoleon was one of Beethoven's idols, but it wasn't until 1801 that the composer first sketched ``Third Symphony, written on Bonaparte.'' He worked on it during 1803 in the countryside near Vienna and finished during the spring of 1804.
The title page originally read ``Grand Symphony composed on Bonaparte.'' But in May, 1804, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor. Beethoven flew into a rage, tore up the title page, and bellowed: ``Is he too no more than a mere mortal? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!'' He later gave the symphony a new title, ``heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man,'' and dedicated it to his patron Prince Lobkowitz.
After several private performances, the Third Symphony received its first public performance in Vienna on April 7, 1805. One critic found the work ``strident and bizarre,'' but another recognized ``the true style of really great music.'' The Director of the Prague Conservatory banned the piece as a ``dangerously immoral composition.''
When the Third Symphony was published, Beethoven included a note, requesting that ``this Symphony, being purposely written much longer than is usual, should be performed nearer the beginning rather than at the end of a concert...if it is heard too late it will lose for the listener, already tired out by previous performances, its own proposed effect.'' At the première, one heckler in the audience exclaimed, ``I'd give a kreutzer with pleasure if it would only end.'' But others were undeterred by the size of the Third Symphony. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia once insisted on hearing it three times in a single evening.
Paul Henry Lang called the Eroica ``one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.'' For Richard Wagner, ``the first movement embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly-gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth.'' When, in 1821, Beethoven heard the news of Napoleon's death, he remarked: ``Well, I've written the funeral oration for that catastrophe seventeen years ago,'' referring to the second movement, a funeral march. Donald Francis Tovey said the third movement is ``the first in which Beethoven fully attained Haydn's desire to replace the minuet by something on a scale comparable to the rest of a great symphony.'' The Finale is a set of twelve variations on a tune Beethoven first used in a little country dance in 1801, then again in The Creatures of Prometheus ballet and also in the Eroica Variations for piano. Edward Downes comments that ``each variation is a little cosmos in itself and the sum of them is overwhelming.''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Opus 60
I. Adagio; Allegro vivace
II. Adagio
III. Allegro vivace
IV. Allegro ma non troppo
Beethoven had already begun his C minor Symphony (No. 5) when he and his patron, Prince Franz Lichnowsky, visited Count Franz von Oppersdorf at his castle in Silesia. The Count's private orchestra played Beethoven's Second Symphony for the guests. The host then commissioned a new symphony from the composer.
Setting aside the Fifth, Beethoven started a new symphony in B flat major. Most of the work was done in the autumn of 1806. By November, the Symphony--now known as the Fourth--was finished. Beethoven wrote to his publishers: ``I cannot give you the promised symphony yet--because a gentleman of quality has taken it from me.'' In fact, Beethoven never sent the score to Count Oppersdorf. All he ever received was the dedication to the published edition.
The first performance of the Fourth Symphony probably took place at the Viennese palace of another Beethoven patron, Prince Franz Joseph Lobkowitz. Two all-Beethoven concerts were given there during March of 1807. The programs included the first four symphonies, the Coriolan Overture, excerpts from Fidelio and a piano concerto. One review noted that ``richness of ideas, bold originality and fullness of power, which are the particular merits of Beethoven's muse, were very much in evidence to everyone at these concerts; yet many found fault with the lack of a noble simplicity and the all too fruitful accumulation of ideas which on account of their number were not always adequately worked out and blended, thereby creating the effect more often of rough diamonds.'' Another critic noted the new Beethoven symphony ``which has pleased, at most his fanatical admirers.''
Carl Maria von Weber, then a rash twenty-year-old, wrote an article on Beethoven's Fourth Symphony that he would later regret. In it, he portrayed the violin complaining of having to ``caper about like a wild goat'' in order to ``execute the no-ideas of Mr. Composer.''
Referring to its place between the mighty Eroica (No. 3) and Fifth Symphonies, Robert Schumann called the Fourth ``a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.'' Hector Berlioz found the Fourth ``generally lively, nimble, joyous, or of a heavenly sweetness.''
Berlioz loved this symphony. After the seminal slow introduction, he writes, ``the first movement is almost entirely given up to joyfulness....As far as the Adagio--it escapes analysis. It is so pure in form, the melodic expression is so angelic and of such irresistible tenderness, that the prodigious art of the workmanship disappears completely.''
Sir Donald Francis Tovey found great fun in the last two movements. Towards the end of the third, he says, ``the two horns blow the whole movement away.'' The last movement contains what he calls ``The Great Bassoon Joke,'' when the solo bassoon clowns the return of the main theme.
The Symphony is scored for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro
“So often heard,” Robert Schumann wrote of the Fifth Symphony, “it still exercises its power over all ages, just as those great phenomena of nature that, no matter how often they recur, fill us with awe and wonder. This Symphony will go on centuries hence, as long as the world and world's music endure.”
According to Beethoven's biographer, Alexander Thayer, “this wondrous work was no sudden inspiration. Themes for (three of the movements) are found in sketchbooks belonging, at the very latest, to the years 1800 and 1801.” After interrupting himself to write the Fourth Symphony, Beethoven finished the Fifth in the spring of 1808.
Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Fifth, the program included the Sixth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the Mass in C major, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud....Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.”
“In spite of several faults which I could not prevent,” said Beethoven, “the public received everything most enthusiastically.” Critic Amadeus Wendt wrote: “Beethoven's music inspires in its listeners awe, fear, horror, pain, and that exquisite nostalgia that is the soul of romanticism.” E.T.A. Hoffmann called the Fifth “one of the most important works of the master whose position in the first rank of composers of instrumental music can now be denied by no one....It is a concept of genius, executed with profound deliberation, which in a very high degree brings the romantic content of the music to expression.”
In 1830, Mendelssohn played the first movement on the piano for Goethe, who said: “It is tremendous--quite crazy--one is almost afraid the house will collapse; and imagine how it must sound in the orchestra!” Of the celebrated four notes that begin the movement, Beethoven is supposed to have said: “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” Much has been made of this remark, most of it nonsense. Pointing to the same four notes in the Fourth Piano Concerto, theorist Heinrich Schenker wondered, “Was this another door on which Fate knocked or was someone else knocking at the same door?” By coincidence, the rhythm of the four notes corresponds to the Morse code for the letter “V.” That, coupled with Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” gesture, inspired the BBC to use the phrase as a signature during World War II.
Sir Donald Francis Tovey compared the second movement to Shakespeare's heroines, for “the same courage, the same beauty of goodness, and the same humor.” Berlioz claimed that the third movement produces “the inexplicable emotion that one experiences under the magnetic gaze of certain individuals.” With the finale, writes George Grove, “all the noisy elements at Beethoven's command in those simpler days (burst) like a thunder-clap into the major key and into a triumphal march.”
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 6 in F major, Opus 68 (Pastoral)
I. Allegro ma non troppo (Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the Country)
II. Andante molto mosso (Scene by the Brook)
III. Allegro (Merry Gathering of Country Folk)
IV. Allegro (Thunderstorm, Tempest)
V. Allegretto (Shepherd's Song, Happy, Thankful Feelings after the Storm)
``How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do,'' wrote Beethoven. ``My bad hearing does not trouble me here. In the country, every tree seems to speak to me, say `Holy! Holy!' In the woods, there is enchantment which expresses all things.''
Beethoven's thoughts on imitating Nature in music were scribbled in the sketches for his Sixth Symphony as early as 1803. ``All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far,'' he scribbled. ``Anyone who has an idea of country-life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles.'' During the summer of 1808, he finished his Pastorale Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life, complete with programmatic titles for all five movements.
Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Sixth, the program included the Fifth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the C major Mass, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: ``There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud....Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.''
Beethoven cautioned against taking the movement titles too literally. In a letter to his publisher, he described the Sixth as ``an expression of feeling rather than a description.''
Nevertheless, Hector Berlioz, for one, imagined very specific activities when hearing the opening movement, ``Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the Country.'' ``The herdsmen begin to appear in the fields,'' he wrote, ``their pipes are heard afar and near. Ravishing phrases caress one's ears deliciously, like perfumed morning breezes. Flocks of chattering birds fly overhead; and now and then the atmosphere seems laden with vapors; heavy clouds flit across the face of the sun, then suddenly disappear, and its rays flood the fields and woods with torrents of dazzling splendour.''
Anton Schindler described being taken by Beethoven to a valley near Heiligenstadt. ``Here I composed the `Scene by the Brook' (second movement),'' he said, ``and the yellowhammers up there, the quails, nightingales and cuckoos round about, composed with me.'' Modern ornithologists maintain that Beethoven's ``yellowhammer song'' is incorrect, if anything resembling more the buzzing of insects.
Schindler said that the third movement, ``Merry Gathering of Country Folk,'' was inspired by Austrian tavern bands. ``Beethoven asked me if I had not observed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and remaining entirely quiet, then awakening with a start, throwing in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, but generally in the right key, and then falling asleep again: he had tried to copy these poor people in his Pastorale Symphony.''
Berlioz wrote of the fourth movement (``Thunderstorm, Tempest''): ``Listen to those gusts of wind, laden with rain; those sepulchral groanings of the basses; those shrill whistles of the piccolo, which announce that a fearful tempest is about to burst. The hurricane approaches, swells; an immense chromatic streak, starting from the highest notes of the orchestra, goes burrowing down into its lowest depths, seizes the basses, carries them along, and ascends again, writhing like a whirlwind, which levels everything in its passage. Then the trombones burst forth; the thunder of the timpani redoubles its fury. It is no longer merely a wind and rain storm: it is a frightful cataclysm, the universal deluge, the end of the world.''
Berlioz called the finale (``Shepherd's Song, Happy Thankful Feelings after the Storm'') ``a hymn of gratitude. Everything smiles. The shepherds reappear; they answer each other on the mountain, recalling their scattered flocks; the sky is serene; the torrents soon cease to flow; calmness returns, and with it the rustic songs, whose gentle melodies bring repose to the soul.''
Donald Francis Tovey cautioned against the interpretive excesses of Berlioz and others. ``In the whole symphony,'' he wrote, ``there is not a note of which the musical value would be altered if cuckoos and nightingales, and country folk, and thunder and lightning, and the howling and whistling of the wind, were things that had never been named by man, either in connection with music or with anything else.''
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 7 in A major, Opus 92
I. Poco sostenuto; Vivace
II. Allegretto
III. Presto; Assai meno presto
IV. Allegro con brio
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was completed in the late spring or early summer of 1812. It wasn't performed publicly until December 8, 1813 at a concert in Vienna to benefit wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers. Also on the program was Beethoven's Wellington's Victory.
Beethoven himself conducted. The composer Ludwig Spohr described the scene: ``The execution was quite masterly, despite the uncertain and often ridiculous conducting of Beethoven....It is a sad misfortune for anyone to be deaf; how then should a musician endure it without despair? Beethoven's almost continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.''
A review of the concert reported that the Symphony ``deserved the loud applause and the exceptionally good performance it received....This symphony...is the richest melodically and the most pleasing and comprehensible of all Beethoven symphonies.'' Beethoven regarded the Seventh as ``among my best works.''
Not everyone shared Beethoven's opinion. After a performance in Leipzig, Clara Schumann's father suggested that the music could only have been written by someone who was very, very drunk. When the Seventh was played before the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Carl Maria von Weber remarked that Beethoven was ``now quite ripe for the madhouse.'' Twelve years later, Weber conducted the London Philharmonic's performance of the Beethoven Seventh. Apparently Weber had changed his mind about the piece.
It was Wagner who dubbed the Seventh ``the apotheosis of the dance, the dance in its highest condition, the happiest realization of the movements of the body in ideal form.'' He wrote: ``If anyone plays the Seventh, tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle, fall to dancing!'' Wagner once demonstrated his theory by dancing to the Seventh Symphony, accompanied by Franz Liszt at the piano.
``It would require more than a technical yardstick to measure the true proportion of this Symphony--the sense of immensity which it conveys,'' writes John N. Burk. ``Beethoven seems to have built up this impression by willfully driving a single rhythmic figure through each movement, until the music attains (particularly in the body of the first movement, and in the Finale) a swift propulsion, an effect of cumulative growth which is akin to extraordinary size.''
After a long introduction, the opening movement launches into a persistent rhythmic propulsion that Ernest Walker found virtually unparalleled elsewhere. The second movement, according to Marion M. Scott, is ``marvelous...full of melancholy beauty.'' Beethoven's biographer Alexander Thayer says the trio of the third movement is based on an Austrian pilgrims' hymn. In the Finale, George Grove discovered ``a vein of rough, hard, personal boisterousness, the same feeling which inspired the strange jests, puns and nicknames which abound in his letters.''
There is a story about Beethoven wandering around the park after the 1814 performance of the Seventh. He stopped to buy cherries from two young maids, who said: ``There is no charge to you. We were at the concert and heard your beautiful music!''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93
I. Allegro vivace e con brio
II. Allegretto scherzando
III. Tempo di menuetto
IV. Allegro vivace
The year 1812 found Beethoven in ill health. His doctor advised treatment at the Bohemian baths at Teplitz. Beethoven did so, and on his way home, stopped at Linz to visit his brother Johann. There, in October, he finished his Eighth Symphony, which had been rattling around in his brain and sketchbooks for over a year.
Beethoven’s patron Archduke Rudolf arranged a private performance the following year in Vienna. The first public performance took place on February 27, 1814, also in Vienna. Also on the program that night were the Seventh Symphony, a vocal trio and Wellington’s Victory.
The Eighth was not well received. One review said: “The greatest interest of the listeners seemed centered on this the newest product of Beethoven’s muse, and expectation was tense, but this was not sufficiently gratified after the single hearing, and the applause which it received was not accompanied by that enthusiasm which distinguishes a work which gives universal delight; in short, it did not create a furor.” Beethoven maintained that the Eighth Symphony was unloved “because it is so much better” than the Seventh. He would often refer to his Eighth as “my little symphony in F.”
Wagner regarded the work as “characteristic of the man, mingling tragedy with farce and a Herculean vigor with the games and caprices of a child.”
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, Sir George Grove wrote: “At this time of life (41) his love of fun and practical joking had increased so much in him as to have become a habit; his letters are full of jokes; he bursts into horse-laughs on every occasion; makes the vilest puns, and bestows the most execrable nicknames….He had an express term for this state of things: `unbuttoned’ was his own word for it….The work might with propriety be called the Humorous Symphony--often terribly humorous; for the atmosphere of broad rough enjoyment which pervades the first and last movements is in the former darkened by bursts of unmistakable wrath.”
The second movement is based on a canon Beethoven had written the previous spring for Johann Mälzel, who claimed to have invented of the metronome. Hence, the ticking accompaniment in the music.
Describing the Symphony as “frankly a little darling--happiness incarnate and a masterpiece of character and conciseness,” biographer Marion M. Scott calls the third movement “a delicious blend of beauty and humor, where the bassoon solo completes the enchantment, and the whole movement is very Viennese in the easy sway of the tunes. The opening of the finale is typical Beethoven, with immense vitality in the rhythms and violent dynamic contrasts. The second subject, however, is a piece of pure loveliness that rises suddenly into view by one of those step-of-one-degree harmonic transitions that Beethoven uses when he has something most special to say.”
The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, as well as timpani and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125 ("Choral")
I. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
II. Molto Vivace--Presto--Molto Vivace
III. Adagio molto e cantabile--Andante moderato
IV. Allegro assai
As early as 1793, Beethoven was thinking of setting Friedrich von Schiller's Ode to Joy to music. A friend reported to the poet's sister that ``he intends to set Schiller's Ode stanza by stanza, and I expect something great as he is devoted to the lofty and sublime.'' Beethoven's notebooks record ``disjointed fragments from Schiller's Ode,'' but nothing much came of the project for some time.
Meanwhile, the theme for what would later become the second movement of the Ninth Symphony appeared in 1815. His pupil Carl Czerny claimed that the tune occurred to him while listening to the twittering of sparrows. The violinist Karl Holz maintained that Beethoven was inspired by the idea of gnomes popping in and out of their hiding places in the forest.
Three years later, Beethoven was planning a ``pious song in a symphony in the ancient modes.'' Later, he told the critic Friedrich Rochlitz: ``I have been thinking for some time about three more great works. A lot of it is all ready--in my head, of course. First I must get the following off my chest: two great symphonies, each different from my others, and an oratorio.'' Eventually, the two symphonies would merge into one, and the oratorio would become the Missa Solemnis.
``It is long since I have been able to bring myself to write easily,'' Beethoven complained in 1822. ``I sit and think and think. The ideas are there, but they will not go down on paper. I dread the beginning of large works. Once begun, it's all right.'' That year, he sketched the opening movement of the Ninth and was again toying with the Schiller Ode as a finale.
That same year the London Philharmonic Society commissioned a symphony from Beethoven, who welcomed the opportunity to compose ``for the first artists of Europe....Beethoven can compose, God be thanked--though he can do nothing else in this world.''
On August 16, 1823, Beethoven wrote to his nephew: ``Today I really began my service to the Muses.'' He was finally composing the Ninth Symphony in earnest. He had doubts about the choral finale, though, and sketched a ``finale instrumentale.'' This music would later become the last movement of the A minor string quartet (Op. 132).
The Schiller Ode eventually prevailed. Beethoven's friend Anton Schindler reported: ``When he reached the development of the fourth movement there began a struggle such as is seldom seen. The object was to find a proper manner of introducing Schiller's Ode. One day entering the room he exclaimed `I have it! I have it!' With that he showed me the sketchbook bearing the words, `Let us sing the song of the immortal Schiller,' whereupon a solo voice began directly the hymn, to joy.''
By early 1823, the Ninth was finished. Despite his promises to the London Philharmonic, it was put into rehearsal in Vienna. The contralto soloist, Karoline Unger, called Beethoven a ``tyrant over all the vocal organs'' to his face. He refused to change a note. Whereupon she turned to the soprano and remarked, ``Well, then we must go on torturing ourselves in the name of God.''
The first performance took place on May 7, 1824. Beethoven, completely deaf, sat in the middle of the orchestra, with a score. The conductor, Michael Umlauf, instructed the orchestra and chorus to ``pay no attention whatever to Beethoven's beating of the time.''
Sir George Grove later talked to Fräulein Unger and gave the following account: ``The master, though placed in the midst of this confluence of music, heard nothing of it at all and was not even sensible of the applause of the audience at the end of his great work, but continued standing with his back to the audience, and beating the time, till Fräulein Unger turned him, or induced him to turn around and face the people, who were still clapping their hands, and giving way to the greatest demonstrations of pleasure. His turning around, and the sudden conviction thereby forced on everybody that he had not done so before because he could not hear what was going on, acted like an electric shock on all present, and a volcanic explosion of sympathy and admiration followed, which was repeated again and again, and seemed as if it would never end.'' Anton Schindler told Beethoven later, ``the whole audience was impressed, crushed by the greatness of your work.''
Sir Donald Francis Tovey writes: ``The great problem for Beethoven in the composition of the Ninth Symphony was obviously that of providing a motive for the appearance of the chorus. The general scheme of the whole symphony as a setting for Schiller's Ode is simple and satisfactory enough. The first movement gives us the tragedy of life. The second movement gives us the reaction from tragedy to a humor that cannot be purely joyful.... The slow movement is beauty of an order too sublime for a world of action; it has no action, and its motion is that of the stars in their courses....But it is a fundamental principle in Beethoven's art that triumph is to be won in the light of common day....Beethoven's plan is to remind us of the first three movements just as they have been described above; and to reject them one by one as failing to attain the joy in which he believes. After all three have been rejected, a new theme is to appear, and that theme shall be hailed and sung as the Hymn of Joy.''
The Ninth Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum and strings.
Text for Choral Finale
(Baritone Solo, Quartet and Chorus)
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!
(O Friends, no more of these
sad tones! Let us rather
raise our voices together
in more pleasant and joyful tones!)
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
(Joy, thou shining spark of God,
Daughter of Elysium!
With fiery rapture, Goddess,
We approach thy shrine.
Your magic reunites those
Whom stern custom has parted,
All men will become brothers
Under your protective wing.)
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freudes Freund zu sein,
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesen Bund!
(Let the man who has had the fortune
To be a helper to his friend.
And the man who has won a noble woman,
Join in our chorus of jubilation!
Yes, even if he holds but one soul
As his own in all the world!
But let the man who knows nothing of this
Steal away alone and in sorrow.)
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub steht von Gott!
(All the world's creatures draw
Draughts of joy from Nature's breast
Both the just and the unjust
Follow in her gentle footsteps.
She gave us kisses and wine
And a friend loyal unto death;
She gave the joy of life to the lowliest,
And to the angels who dwell with God.)
(Tenor Solo and Chorus)
Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen.
(Joyous, as His suns speed
Through the glorious order of Heaven,
Hasten, Brothers, on your way
Of joyous deeds to victory.)
(Chorus)
Seid umschlungen Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brüder! Über'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stüzt nieder Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.
(Be embraced, all ye Millions!
With a kiss for all the world!
Brothers, beyond the stars
Surely dwells a loving Father.
Do you kneel before him, O Millions?
Do you feel the Creator's presence?
Seek him beyond the stars!
He must dwell beyond the stars.)
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