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."