Franck Piano Quintet Program Notes Beethoven. Piano concerto (Toccata). We now have piano concertos by three composers called Tchaikovsky. The first is written in B flat. Duration: 0'47', 754 kB. The franc also commonly distinguished as the French franc (FF), was a currency of France. Between 13, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre.
Frank Martin, 1890-1974 The 20th century Swiss composer Frank Martin is not even mentioned in standard “listener’s guides” to Classical music, chamber music or otherwise. A descendant of French Huguenots (devout Calvinists who fled persecution in France and resettled in various places including Geneva), Martin would turn to composing deeply religious choral and instrumental music in his final years producing some of the most highly regarded sacred vocal works of the 20th century. But his instrumental music is equally marvelous. Martin’s most widely known work is the novel Petite symphonie concertante featuring piano, harpsichord, harp and two small string orchestras. Martin played piano and harpsichord and throughout all of his music he displays a great sensitivity to timbre and its combinations in dazzling ensemble textures.
Even in a symphonic concerto, he displays a masterful chamber music sensibility. Posted in Comments Off. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), 1824-1825 Beethoven’s Op.
127 is the first of his legendary “late quartets,” six string quartets that comprise Beethoven’s final and perhaps greatest musical achievement. Besides some aborted sketches, he had not worked significantly in the genre for over a decade since the Op.
95 “Serioso” quartet of 1810. In the interim, Beethoven composed his final piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis and the 9th Symphony, all magnificent works of a towering stature. The last piano sonatas, “late” in the same profound sense as the late quartets would be, inaugurated several of the stylistic traits of his final period: innovative forms bordering on fantasia, sublime beauty, deeply intimate emotion, epic lengths, superhuman virtuosity and a beautiful obsession with seemingly inexhaustible variation. Beethoven’s final music seems to plumb the depths from the personal to the universal and still, somehow, beyond: transcendental.
Posted in Comments Off. Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), 1921 The chamber music of Paul Hindemith is rare on the concert stage these days. This is somewhat ironic, perhaps doubly so.
For most of his life in the first half of the 20th century, Hindemith was considered one of Germany’s greatest composers. In addition, one of his chief aesthetic concerns was Gebrauchsmusik, music for use in everyday life with a practical purpose.
In opposition to the increasingly arcane and alienating music from a musical ivory tower pursing “art for art’s sake,” Hindemith hoped to engage the common man, fulfilling his need to make and enjoy music as a natural capacity. Nonetheless, after his death, Hindemith and his prolific output have seemed to largely elude both the avant-garde and the man on the street. Hindemith was an immensely gifted and multifaceted musician. Showing early promise and becoming a working professional by his early teens, he eventually learned to play just about every instrument in the orchestra, performed as a soloist (viola and violin), toured with a string quartet for several years (the original Amar Quartet which he founded), conducted, taught, became a pioneer in early music performance, wrote numerous books and still managed to compose prolifically and skillfully in every standard musical genre.
Posted in Comments Off. Family Business For a program by the Musical genius can be found in musicians and composers from all kinds of circumstances, even against all odds. But history shows a vivid pattern of musical families, even dynasties. The latest research suggests that musical aptitude and talent is rooted in nature, in our genes to some extent, as well as nurture: how that musical proclivity is encouraged, supported and nourished. Serial 4804062 update. With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that music “runs” in families: a combination of genes and lifestyle. This marvelous program is inspired by musical families, the Bach’s, the Mozart’s, and the Mendelssohn’s.
In addition, Family Business highlights the issue of nature without nurture, where 18th and 19th century women, daughters, sisters and wives, were socially discouraged from pursuing their musical gifts as their male counterparts were free to do. This resonates with contemporary debates on gender in the tech world. It is refreshing to note that Mozart and Mendelssohn both had sisters who were equal prodigies, while the very first computer programmer was a woman: Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Posted in Comments Off. Yinam Leef (1953) (1997) The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, Yinam Leef is an Israeli composer, born in Jerusalem, educated in Israel and the United States and currently the chairman of the Department of Composition, Conducting and Theory at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy and Dance. His composition teachers have included Mark Kopytman, Richard Wernick, George Rochberg, George Crumb and Luciano Berio.
Leef’s substantial output includes concerti, symphonies, choral works and a variety of chamber music including two string quartets. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) By 1919, just barely into his first decade as a professional composer, Stravinsky was well on his way towards becoming one of the most important and sensational new composers of the 20th century. His successful partnership with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in Paris yielded three stunning ballet scores for massive orchestra, the works for which Stravinsky is most famous today: The Firebird (1910), Petroushka (1911) and the Rite of Spring (1913). Despite his stunning achievements, 1919 found Stravinsky stranded in Lausanne, Switzerland in rather dire financial straits. WWI had made a desperate shambles of Europe sapping any hope for staging large concerts or obtaining new commissions while the Russian Revolution cut Stravinsky off from his family fortune as well as any hopes for ongoing royalty payments. Rising to the occasion, nonetheless, Stravinsky and his French-speaking, Swiss writer friend Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz schemed a new work to be “narrated, performed and danced” by a small troupe that could easily be mounted in small, makeshift venues, even outdoors, all with modest costs.
The scenario was derived from Alexander Afanasiev’s collection of Russian folk tales, a story about a soldier returning home from the front with a magic violin that he foolishly trades with the devil for a book promising great riches in what proves to be an ill-fated Faustian bargain. Posted in Comments Off. Dmitri Shostakovich, 1906-1975 Shostakovich is frankly a 20th century Beethoven. He wrote tons of symphonies, string quartets, film scores, piano music, operas and songs, and his music seems to speak so vividly to so many listeners. While much of his music is epic, intense, dark and rife with spiky modernisms, Shostakovich composed many beautiful, “classical” pieces full of lyricism, personality, fine craftsmanship and sheer musical delight. Among his incidental music, ballets and suites you will find many gems, the likes of which inspired Lev Atovmian, a student of Shostakovich, to arrange these five pieces for violin duo with piano accompaniment. As a very young man, Shostakovich had a job playing piano at the theatre for silent movies improvising a live soundtrack on the fly.
These vignettes make a reel of compelling scenes, each one a little short story including a prelude, an elegy and three different dances, each more lively than the last. Posted in Comments Off. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, 1844-1908, 1879 (finished by Maximilian Steinberg in 1939) Rimsky-Korsakov was a highly significant musical figure within late 19th century Russia whose influence would reverberate westward making a strong impression on Debussy, Ravel and other 20th century composers. He is celebrated for his brilliant and original orchestration in such classics as Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and Scheherazade that expanded the orchestral palette along with a new exotic “Orientalisim” that ultimately become inspiration for the French impressionists. Rimsky-Korsakov is often regarded as the chief “architect” of Russian Nationalism during an age when composers across Europe were seeking to express their native cultures, a diversity of “otherness” rising against the fundamentally Austro-Germanic aesthetic of the classical canon. Perhaps the most vivid expression of Nationalism was opera with its natural ability to leverage the mother tongue as well as indigenous folklore traditions. Rimsky-Korsakov thought of himself primarily as an opera composer producing a rich oeuvre comprising at least 15 operas, a further source orchestral suites and extracts associated with his fame.
It is therefore somewhat surprising to learn that he composed chamber music, particularly considering some additional details of his historical and cultural context. Posted in Comments Off. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), (1944) Since the latter part of the 20th century following his death in 1975, the string quartet cycle of Dmitri Shostakovich has come to be regarded as extraordinarily significant. While his fifteen symphonies command attention and demonstrate his creative and prodigious career, they were large spectacles staged for grand public expression subject to broad scrutiny by a totalitarian regime, subject, as well, to the changing complex public image Shostakovich chose, or was forced, to display.
Classical Music Program Notes
The string quartets are different. They are private, personal, intimate and true. They embody music Shostakovich wrote for colleagues, friends, family and himself. And it is particularly this dichotomous context that makes the fifteen string quartets so compelling. Within the music, one finds startling and original music of profound, visceral affect, ample creative genius, but also something of the actual life of Shostakovich: a personal diary of poignant reactions, reflections and dark visions.
As the (incomplete) cycle spans some thirty-six years of his life, from the age of thirty-two to less than a year before his death, one can follow the quartets and thereby follow Shostakovich, an immensely creative and sensitive Soviet citizen weathering the myriad personal and global devastations of the 20th century. Posted in Comments Off.
The Lancashire Chamber Orchestra will perform Mahler’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor “Serioso” this Saturday, March 17 at Christ Church in Lancaster. More concert information Beethoven (arr. Mahler)- String Quartet in F minor, op. 95 “Serioso” We are taught to think of Beethoven as having three basic styles that he went through in his career- the early style of the op. 18 quartets, the early piano sonatas and the 1 st and 2 nd symphonies, then the great middle style typified by the 3 rd and 5 th symphonies as well as the op 59 quartets, the Violin Concerto and the 4 th and 5 th piano concerti, and finally that late style as heard in the op 110 and 111 piano sonatas, the 9 th Symphony and the late quartets.
In doing so, listeners might easily overlook a small, but vitally important and fascinating, period of Beethoven’s career that took place during the difficult years of transition between the middle and late periods of his life. It is fascinating to look through the catalogue of Beethoven’s middle period and to see where the most astonishing masterpieces must have been sitting on his desk at the same time. The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies and the Violin Concerto, for instance, were all written at virtually the same time. However, after this flowering, Beethoven faced an extended personal and professional crisis, and during this nearly-decade-long struggle, he wrote very little. What he did write, however, remains fascinating.
Perhaps the greatest typical feature of the middle period, particularly works like the Violin Concerto, was Beethoven’s tendency to stretch forms to their absolute limit. The first movement of the Violin Concerto is 30 minutes long, nearly twice the length of the F minor String Quartet performed this evening. In the works of this transitional period, Beethoven not only abandons extended structures, he abandons long musical gestures. Phrase lengths tend to be shortened, transitions, when there are any, are abrupt.
It is as if he has removed all the padding and ornamentation from the music and left only what he felt was most essential. This “Serioso” quartet and the last two cello sonatas, which are typical of this period, are among his most direct and intense works- intense even by Beethovenian standards. It is music from a genius in the midst of an intense personal and artistic crisis. The first movement is a brusque Allegro which contrasts a violent first theme which lasts only a few seconds with a gently lamenting chorale theme, which likewise only lasts a few bars. The movement is dramatic and explosive in a character reminiscent of the first movement of the 5 th Symphony, but all the drama is over in only four minutes- less than the length of the introductions to the 4 th or 5 th piano concerti or the Violin Concerto.
The second movement, marked Allegretto, takes the place of a slow movement, and is one of Beethoven’s most perfect creations. A simple march theme in the cellos sets up a soulful melody in the first violins, followed by a haunting fugue. These three ideas are developed with exquisite completeness in just a few short minutes. The third movement functions like a scherzo, but Beethoven is not joking around- his tempo marking is “Allegro assai vivace ma serioso.” The theme of the main section is one of his most rhythmically complex creations, the trio is a wondrous chorale accompanied by a gentle perpetual motion in the first violin.
The finale begins with the only really slow music in the piece- seven bars of the most chromatic and despairing music imaginable. The main part of the finale that follows is in a rather sad and lyrical character- the darkness of this quartet seems boundless at times. However, the coda is one of Beethoven’s most startling turns.
For the first time in the work, he turns to F major, and music that is almost frivolous in nature. The contrast is so great and the change so sudden and incomprehensible that one cannot help but feel there is a sort of bitterness in the laughter of this ending, as though Beethoven is telling us that life is a bit of a joke.
This piece was one of three string quartets that Mahler arranged for string orchestra during his early years at the Vienna Philharmonic (the others were Beethoven’s op 131, which is lost, and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden). Of the three, this is the only one to have been performed by Mahler, although the premiere was a near fiasco, with hecklers booing loudly throughout and condemning Mahler for tampering with the music of Beethoven. In fact, Mahler made the arrangement with great restraint, adding a bass part only in a few sections (the author has actually expanded the bass part considerably for this performance) and he changed none of Beethoven’s music. Notes by Kenneth Woods c. 2007 Kenneth Woods.