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.