Gunther Schuller's Best Chamber Picks
April 5, 2009 — 3 pm
Sanders Theatre
Gunther Schuller, Principal Guest Conductor
Irina Muresanu, Violin
Haydn,
Symphony No. 1 in D Major
1. Presto
2. Andante
3. Presto
Mozart,
Violin Concerto No. 3, K216, "Strassburg"
Irina Muresanu, Violin
1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Rondeau
Intermission
Bridge,
There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook
Haydn,
Symphony No. 97 in C Major
1. Adagio. Vivace
2. Adagio ma non troppo
3. Menuetto e Trio. Allegretto
3. Finale: Presto
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 1 in D Major
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. Haydn composed his first symphony by November 25, 1759, possibly as early as 1757. The date of the first performance is unknown. The score calls for two oboes, two horns, strings, and continuo (probably including bassoon). Duration is about 11 minutes.
Four decades cover the span of Haydn's symphonic composition, a span that covered an astonishing range of technical development and unfailingly fresh powers of invention. Modern listeners come to Haydn's symphonies roughly in reverse order, beginning with the dozen magnificent final symphonies that he composed for London in the 1790s, then the half-dozen composed for Paris in the 1780s, and then—with luck—some of the works composed in the 1770s, the 1760s, and the later 1750s.
Yet what is perhaps most striking in starting with Symphony No. 1 is that already, as a young man, largely self taught, in his late 20s, Haydn's music already stands head and shoulders above that of his contemporaries—many of whom had substantial creative gifts—in the organizing power of his musical ideas. In discussing works of a later stage of his career, analysts speak of the "monothematic" opening movements of later symphonies, in which Haydn makes much out of little. But in the first symphony, listeners were probably struck by the sheer variety of his invention, starting with the grand gesture that we have come to call a "Mannheim crescendo," though Mannheim was not the only place were it was found—and there it was most often used as a transition between first and second themes to help drive the change of key, not (as here) at the very beginning of the piece. Each new start brings in some kind of acceleration to keep the energy going until the full pause that sets up the secondary theme. And that enters with the surprise of being, briefly, in the minor. And already Haydn reconceives his recapitulation so that it is not simply a repetition of the exposition with a necessary adjustment of key, but a compressed form that emphasizes the harmonic drive to the end.
The slow movement follows a sonata form pattern in two parts, the second half opening with the main theme in the dominant. Yet throughout, in this quieter movement, Haydn makes a richly varied use of accent and texture to provide variety throughout.
The finale is a lively 3/8 Presto (a favorite character for a light mood), vital in its rhythmic energy from beginning to end.
Even in 1759, without any inkling of how far this young composer was going to go, it was clear that he would stand a head and shoulders above his comrades.
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Violin Concerto No. 3 in G, K216 (Strassburg)
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed the last four of his five violin concertos, K. 207, 211, 216, 218, and 219, between April and December 1775; K. 216 was completed on September 12 and probably had its premiere in Salzburg not long afterward. In addition to the solo instrument, the score calls for two each of oboes and horns plus orchestral strings. Duration is about 24 minutes.
Wolfgang's father Leopold was himself a musician of some note, a violinist and composer, whose great contribution was a violin method, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, published in the very year of Wolfgang's birth and for a long time the standard work of its type. Needless to say, when Wolfgang's musical talent became apparent, the father undertook to devote himself wholeheartedly to his training and exhibition both as a moral obligation and a financial investment. (Alfred Einstein has justly remarked, "The proportions of obligation and investment are not easy to determine.") The training included instruction on both the violin and the harpsichord, with the result that Wolfgang was able to make professional use of his skill on both instruments.
It appears that his devotion to the violin dwindled after he moved permanently to Vienna and left his father's sphere of influence. Certainly in his maturity he preferred the keyboard as the principal vehicle of virtuosity, and it was for the keyboard that he composed his most profound concertos, whether for himself, for his students, or for other virtuosos. But during the earlier years, when he was still concertmaster in the court orchestra of the Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo of Salzburg, playing the violin was one of his duties—one that he fulfilled with some distaste. His father continued to encourage his violin playing. In a letter of 18 October 1777, Leopold wrote, "You have no idea how well you play the violin, if you would only do yourself justice and play with boldness, spirit, and fire, as if you were the first violinist in Europe." Perhaps it was the constant paternal pressure that caused Wolfgang ultimately to drop the violin as a solo instrument. In Vienna he preferred to play the viola even in chamber music sessions, and his concert appearances were as a pianist.
In any case, four of the five violin concertos were all composed during a single year, 1775, while Wolfgang was still concertmaster in Salzburg (the first seems to have been written a year or two earlier). It is not clear whether he wrote them for himself or for Gaetano Brunetti, an Italian violinist also in the Archbishop's orchestra. There is some evidence to suggest the latter possibility: a few years later, when Mozart wrote a new slow movement (Adagio in E major, K. 261) to replace the middle movement of the Fifth Violin Concerto (K. 219), Leopold referred to K. 261 in a letter of 9 October 1777 as having been written for Brunetti "because he found the other one too studied." But that is certainly not solid proof that the original concerto, much less all five of them, was composed for the Italian instrumentalist.
All five of the violin concertos of 1775—when Mozart was but nineteen years old—date from a period when the composer was still consolidating his concerto style and before he had developed the range and dramatic power of his mature piano concertos. They still resemble the Baroque concerto, with its ritornello for the whole orchestra recurring like the pillars of a bridge to anchor the arching spans of the solo sections. Mozart gradually developed ways of using the tutti-solo opposition of the Baroque concerto in a unique fusion with the dramatic tonal tensions of sonata form, but the real breakthrough in his new concerto treatment did not come until the composition of the E-flat piano concerto, K. 271, in January 1777. Thus all of the five violin concertos precede the "mature" Mozart concerto, which is not at all the same thing as saying that they are "immature" pieces.
Even within the space of the nine months during which they were composed, Mozart's concerto technique underwent substantial development, and the last three of the five concertos have long been a regular part of the repertory. Whatever it was that happened during the three months between the composition of the second and third violin concertos, it had the effect of greatly deepening Mozart's art, of allowing him to move beyond the pure decoration of the galant style to a more sinewy and spacious kind of melody. The second theme of the orchestral ritornello has a striking shape that Mozart withholds from re-use until the end of the recapitulation. The development section begins in the dominant minor and moves with purposeful strides through a series of closely related keys back to the tonic and the recapitulation, in which the soloist dominates.
The Adagio is wonderfully dreamy, with muted upper strings in triplets and pizzicato cello and bass imparting some of the same expressive qualities as the slow movement of the much later piano concerto in C, K. 467. The oboes take part in the dialogue with their little interjections in pairs. The Rondeau is a sprightly 3/8 dance in Allegro tempo. At the opening the wind instruments appear only for occasional punctuation, but they play a progressively more important role throughout. The biggest surprise comes with a change of meter (2/2) and the appearance of a totally new idea in G minor, a graceful dance step for the solo violin over pizzicato strings. This runs directly into a livelier tune of folklike character in G major. This two-section minor/major tune has recently been identified as a Hungarian melody known as the "Strasbourger"; hence the present concerto is the one that should bear the nickname "the Strasbourger," not the Fourth Violin Concerto, to which the name is sometimes applied. The wind instruments, having played a more vital role in the G major section, withdraw from prominence for a time after the beginning of the recapitulation, but they return in the whimsical coda to bring the concerto to a surprising and witty ending without any of the stringed instruments.
Frank Bridge
There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook
Frank Bridge was born in Brighton, England, on February 26, 1879, and died in Eastbourne on January 10, 1941. He composed There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook in January 1927. The score calls for flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, horn, harp and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes.
To many music lovers, the name Frank Bridge conjures up only a dim recollection of a brilliant early work for string orchestra by Benjamin Britten, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. From the memory of that work, they may recall that Bridge was the most important teacher of young Britten, who in the Variations returned with interest some of what he had learned. But Frank Bridge deserves recognition as far more than a talented pedagogue sensitive to the needs of a young genius, for he was a highly gifted composer himself, one who in his early years seemed about to enter the mainstream of English musical life occupied by Elgar, Holst, and Walton.
Bridge was an outstanding conductor and violinist (he later took up the viola) whose reputation spread quickly almost from the moment he was accepted on a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1899. He composed many songs and chamber pieces in the first decade of the century, usually geared with great precision to the abilities of the performers and the taste of his audience. His orchestral suite The Sea (1910) entered the repertory, and Bridge himself conducted it with American orchestras in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York on his one visit to this country in 1923. Even in his most sensuous early works, Bridge allied almost ecstatic expressive outbursts with firmly controlled counterpoint, though the overall effect was highly romantic.
Following the First World War, Bridge's music took a turn toward greater intensity and (in the view of his contemporaries) austerity. The darker character of this later music, quite possibly motivated by the horrors of the war and Bridge's own difficult position as a pacifist, moved far beyond what his audiences had come to expect of him. His music took on an increasing flexibility in rhythm and harmonic extensions that sometimes approached the "atonal" style of the early Second Viennese School, with the thorough-going use of motivic relationships in a framework of intense chromaticism.
Bridge admired the music of Alban Berg, and his own works are often the result of his immersion into Berg's art, though he remained fundamentally English in his approach. Still, the conservatism of English musical life in the 1920s and '30s essentially cut Bridge off from his audience, and many of his most important works were undervalued. Today they are beginning to return to the repertory.
Devotees of Shakespeare will immediately place the title of Bridge's one-movement threnody, There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook: it is the beginning of the speech in which Hamlet's mother Gertrude recounts the sad death by drowning of the distracted Ophelia. Though the setting is outdoors, this is not a sweet pastoral, but darker and rather gloomier than similar tone-poems by other English composers of the era. There is a sense of breezes in the trees, but the oboe laments, and the response of the orchestra does little to console. A faster section seems about to turn to a celebration of the joys of nature, but it ends with poignant hesitations, and a solo clarinet plunges into the depths. The piece continues to unfold in a string of sections that almost never repeat material, but carry on to the moving final lament.
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 97 in C Major
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, during the night of March 31/April 1, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. Haydn composed Symphony No. 97 in London in 1792, and it was premiered in early May that year. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes.
Between Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 97, one of the last group of twelve symphonies composed during Haydn's triumphant visits between 1791 and 1795, many things had changed, both in Haydn's work and in the wider world of music. But one thing that remained constant (to the wonder of Haydn's London audience) was the unfailing freshness of the composer's imagination, even after having composed nearly 100 symphonies (to say nothing of hundreds of other compositions), and even when seeming to employ—as he does in the first movement of this C-major symphony—the most threadbare of musical ideas.
Of course the orchestra is now a bit larger; the forms have grown in length and complexity. Symphony No. 97 is more than twice as long as Symphony No. 1. But the ability to keep the momentum going, to surprise with unexpected changes of key or theme or color, has not deserted him in the slightest. All but one of the last twelve symphonies begin with a slow introduction. This one anticipates some of the material that will follow in the Allegro (near the end of the exposition). The relationship between these materials will play a role also in the development and at the end of the movement as well.
The Allegro's main theme is essentially a fanfare, arpeggiating the notes of the C-major triad—not particularly rich in melodic allure, though rhythmically energetic—and it is the rhythmic energy, driving the harmonic modulation to the dominant, that sets up the contrast with a new theme that is essentially a Ländler, a sort of rustic waltz. With this movement, Haydn lays out a structure clear to any listener, because the themes are so straightforward, and the most striking harmonic movements quite naturally stand out from the solid tonal basis of the thematic areas.
The slow movement offers a set of variations (a favorite Haydn genre for this movement). One of the episodes is in the minor. Immediately after this the violins are required to play sul ponticello (on the bridge, which holds the strings taut and apart), while the lower strings occasionally play pizzicato. This effect was entirely novel for orchestral players at this time, and the sound it produced must have made the London audiences gape as they tried to figure out what was happening.
The Minuet and Trio had long been standard for the third movement of his symphonies. Haydn normally divided each of these into two parts, with a repeat sign at the end of each part, so that the music would be heard twice in more or less identical form. But here, for the first time, he writes out the parts in full; this allows him to make changes between the first and second hearing of each part. Normally such changes would be melodic decorations or changes of instrumentation, but in this case, he alters the manner of playing: smoothly, or detached, or detached with strong emphasis. In the Trio, he changes the color of the music at the repeat, and just before the end of the trio, he calls on his concertmaster (and impresario) by name, "Salomon solo ma piano": Salomon is to play a solo an octave above the rest of the strings—"but quietly," so as to add just a touch of a heavenly brilliance on that three-note phrase!
The finale is a spacious rondo with all of the elements built on variants of the opening rondo theme; it ends with a spacious coda.
© Copyright 2009. Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)