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Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, Op. 3, No. 10 (RV 580) First movement: Allegro Beginning in 1703 and intermittently for many decades, Antonio Vivaldi served as music factotum at the Pio Ospedale della Pietá in Venice, an institution devoted to the care and education of abandoned, orphaned and indigent girls, with a special emphasis on musical training (no Dickensian work house or Dotheboys Hall this). In addition to his duties as virtuoso violinist, violin teacher, orchestra director and instrument purchaser, Vivaldi served as resident composer, producing hundreds of works for various instruments and ensembles, including nearly 450 concerti, usually at a rate of more than two per month. The resident girls were trained in both string and wind instruments, including the organ, and as part of their training Vivaldi composed concertos for every instrument and instrument combination. Many of them were apparently written with specific girl soloists in mind. What is often overlooked, however, is that Ospedale also housed boys, teaching carpentry, blacksmithing and other trades. We have no idea whether the boys’ program was as successful as the girls’ since the names of the artisans who worked in Venice’s palaces and churches are generally unknown. Vivaldi saw to it that his music reached far beyond the boundaries of Venice. Around 1711 an Amsterdam firm issued his first published concertos as Opus 3, entitled L’estro armonico (The Harmonic Fancy), a set of 12 concertos, four each for one, two or four violins, and four with added cello. They are at the boundary between the old tradition of the Sonata da chiesa (church sonata) with its stately slow-fast-slow-fast movements, and the newer three- movement concerto form (fast-slow-fast). L’estro armonico was a sensation, becoming the most influential music publication of the first half of the eighteenth century. J.S. Bach admired these works and transcribed some of them as harpsichord concerti, including this one, No. 10, which became Bach’s Concerto for Four Harpsichords, BWV 1065. The Concerto for Four Violins is in the modern, three-movement form with two allegro movements flanking a slow movement. This structure eventually became the standard for nearly all concerti through the twentieth century. Each of the four violins has an independent virtuoso role that at times simply involves each soloist repeating the same phrase four separate times on the same pitch or in sequences. At other times, however, the four play together in four-part harmony. In the spirited opening movement the four violins have totally independent musical lines, interplaying and interacting as in a concerto grosso for four different instruments. | ||||||||||
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Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 “Adagio on Hebrew Melodies for Cello and Orchestra” One of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century Romanticism in music was the rise of the virtuoso violin or piano soloist, influenced by those two great showmen, Niccoló Paganini and Franz Liszt. Nearly all composers of the period tried their hand at satisfying the insatiable demand for new virtuosic concertos, and some of them are remembered today primarily for their contribution to this genre. Other instruments did not fare as well. The cello, which in the late Baroque and early Classical periods inspired many concertos, especially at the hands of Antonio Vivaldi and Luigi Boccherini, fell into disfavor in the nineteenth century. Only the concertos of Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Dvorák and Lalo have maintained their popularity. One other work for cello and orchestra from that period is Max Bruch’s Kol Nidreii. One of the minor figures of German late Romanticism, Bruch spent most of his career moving around Germany from one minor post to another. Only in 1891 were his talents finally recognized, and he became professor of composition at the prestigious Berlin Conservatory. Among his students were Ottorino Respighi and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Bruch was a musical conservative who, drawing his inspiration from Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, had little use for the musical innovations of the late nineteenth century. Since his youth, he had been a prodigious composer, best known for his choral works. Today, however, he is remembered mainly for his Violin Concerto in g minor, his Scottish Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, and Kol Nidrei, based on a melody from the Jewish liturgy for the evening of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). The prayer – in Aramaic – which releases Jews from all vows made during the year, has over the centuries been taken as a reason to distrust Jews. The text, however, refers not to vows made to other people, but only to those made to God, in recognition of the fact that human beings cannot adequately fulfill such promises. During the anti-Semitic persecutions of the past two millennia, Jews understood Kol Nidrei (All Vows) to annul forced conversions to Christianity, which would have been regarded as vows to God. Bruch composed Kol Nidrei in 1881, while serving as conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic. According to his letters he became acquainted with the Kol nidrei (All Vows) and a few other Jewish melodies from the chief cantor of Berlin. He wrote” "...I became acquainted with Kol nidrei and a few other songs... in Berlin through the Lichtenstein family, who befriended me. Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement.” After an orchestral introduction, the cello enters with the main theme, derived directly from the liturgical melody. i  The theme for the second part is taken from Isaac Nathan’s 1815 anthology A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, for which Nathan persuaded Lord Byron to provide English poetic texts. The result was Byron’s set of 28 poems called Hebrew Melodies. Bruch took his second theme from the melody from Byron's poem “O weep for those that wept on Babel's stream." | ||||||||||
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Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28 Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy who wrote his first piano compositions at age three. At ten he made his formal debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, playing Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos, and as encore offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas from memory! In his youth he was considered an innovator, but by the time he reached maturity he became a conservative pillar of the establishment, trying to maintain the classical musical tradition in France. As an accomplished organist and pianist – he premiered his five piano concertos – his technique was elegant, effortless and graceful. But neither his compositions nor his pianism were ever pinnacles of passion or emotion. Berlioz noted that Saint-Saëns “...knows everything but lacks inexperience.” One of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century Romanticism in music was the rise of the virtuoso violin or piano soloist, influenced by those two great showmen, Niccoló Paganini and Franz Liszt. Nearly all composers of the period admired their dazzling technique and tried their hand at satisfying the insatiable demand for new virtuosic concertos; some of the composers are remembered today primarily for their contribution to this genre. Saint-Saëns composed the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in 1863 for famed Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate. The violinist fell in love with it, making it a staple of his repertoire and in the process contributing to Saint-Saëns’ growing international reputation. The work is divided into two main parts: a slow melancholy introduction followed by a lively virtuosic rondo with a syncopated Spanish flavor. The tempo gradually picks up and the work ends in a spectacular coda. | ||||||||||
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Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 “You don’t know what it is like always to hear that giant marching along behind me,” Brahms wrote to the conductor Hermann Levi, in reference to Beethoven. As a classically oriented composer who revered Beethoven, Brahms found writing a symphony a daunting proposition. It took fame, respectability, middle age and numerous false starts before he finally finished his First Symphony at age 43, after at least 14 years’ gestation. An earlier attempt at a symphony, in 1854, ended up, after numerous transformations, as part of the d minor Piano Concerto and the German Requiem. Despite Brahms’s reputation and the positive anticipation of the public, the Symphony, premiered in 1876, was at first coolly received. The rigorous classical form baffled the public and critics, who expected something more romantic and innovative. Wagner, Liszt and programmatic music were all the rage and most critics considered the classical form backward looking and reactionary. But it was not long before the Symphony’s riveting power was recognized, along with its own contribution to symphonic innovation. If, indeed, the First Symphony cannot strictly be considered program music, it nevertheless unfolds with great drama – even, one might say, a musical plot. While the typical classical symphony gave the greatest weight to the first movement, ending with a faster rousing finale, often a dance, Mozart, in his last three symphonies, and Beethoven in the Third, Fifth and especially the Ninth Symphonies, recast the pattern. In these works, the finale provides the culmination to the entire symphony. When listening to Brahms’s First, one can easily imagine the composer’s reticence at treading in the great man’s shadow. Nevertheless, his combined sense for musical drama and structure prevailed as he launched what conductor Hans von Bülow called “The Tenth.” Only Mendelssohn in his Symphony No. 3, “The Scottish,” had trod that path. The ominous pounding of the timpani under slow ascending and descending chromatic scales, fragmentary motives & and the ambiguous tonality of the Introduction poses a musical question – actually more of a demand – that remains unresolved until the final movement. It is one of the most spine-chilling introductions in all of classical music, made more so by the contrasting secondary theme, a trio for the oboe, flute and cellos – which, incidentally, is never heard again . The following Allegro fleshes out motives from the Introduction into a full-fledged theme, developing it with an almost savage energy that threatens to obscure the traditional sonata form . But Brahms was a classicist and introduces two new subsidiary themes into the Allegro, a gentle oboe theme, the mate to the one in the Introduction, followed by another stormy chromatic one with an ascending chromatic scale and its resulting tonal ambiguity, in keeping with the overall mood of the movement. The middle two movements are a respite from the drive of the first. The Andante sostenuto second movement, a classic ABA form, is in E major, although with a highly modified repeat, reminiscent of Beethoven's variations in the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony. The theme of this movement is in two phrases, the first concluding with a motive that Brahms uses in different musical contexts throughout. & The end of the second phrase recalls the opening of the Allegro in the first movement. The oboe solo is a mate to the solo for the same instrument in the introduction, beginning what becomes a pattern for Brahms in this symphony of foreshadowing and recalling motivic elements from movement to movement. Shortly afterwards, he hints at the main theme of the third movement to come in a brief duet for flute and oboe. All in all, it is lovely, albeit melancholy, and still fraught with the unresolved tension of the work as a whole.The third movement, a modified scherzo form, is more of an intermezzo that opens with a lilting clarinet theme, suggested already in the preceding movement. It does, however, include a trio. The contrapuntal accompaniment to the repeat of the clarinet theme, after the Trio section, foreshadows the principal theme from the Finale. Rumbling timpani now returns us to the serious business of resolving the tensions raised in the first movement, and the resolution appears none too optimistic with its creeping pizzicato strings and sforzando appoggiaturas in the winds. This return to the mood of the first movement Allegro reminds us of the unresolved issues, but suddenly, as if from behind a cloud, an alpenhorn calls out, answered by the flute, turning the turgid c minor into a resounding C major chorale-like melody. The alpenhorn solo has its own little history. In 1868, eight years before the Symphony was premiered, Brahms had quarreled with his friend, and probably secret love, Clara Schumann, about whether she should cut back on her concretizing to spend more time at home with her eight children. That September, he sent her a mollifying postcard with the alpenhorn theme scrawled on it to the words, ”High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousand fold.” Of course, the introduction of the chorale tune is not the final statement. Brahms develops it and a series of subsidiary themes with emotional force, but with less brutality than the first movement . The chorale does battle with the music from the stormy introduction to emerge triumphant in an exultant coda, again reminiscent of Beethoven's excited finales. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2010 | ||||||||||
