Angela Hewitt
& Christopher Taylor
By Aaron Grad
Concerto in D Major (“Basel Concerto”) [1946]
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born June 5, 1882 near St. PetersburgDied April 6, 1971 in New York
For string orchestra. Approximately 12 minutes.
Stravinsky waited out World War I in Switzerland, his first adopted homeland in what turned out to be a lifelong exile from Russia. He spent most of the 1920s through 1939 in France, until war once again pushed him west, to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1945, and lived in Los Angeles and later New York until his death in 1971. The first European commission Stravinsky received in the United States came in 1946 from Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and patron, who asked for a new work for the upcoming 20th-anniversary concert of his Basel Chamber Orchestra. Sacher had put his vast fortune and keen musical tastes to good use in those 20 years, commissioning some of the most important pieces of the century, including Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Divertimento from Bartók. For his anniversary concert, held in Basel on January 27, 1947, Sacher premiered three newly commissioned works: Martinu’s Toccata e due canzoni, Honneger’s Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, commonly called the “Basel” Concerto. Stravinsky’s work for string orchestra bears a kinship to an earlier piece known by its site of origin, the 1938 Concerto in E-flat, or “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto. Both works use a traditional three-movement setting and feature soloists pulled out of the ensemble texture, as in the Baroque concerto grosso style. The Concerto in D is less overtly neo-baroque or neo-classical (a style Stravinsky would soon retire), and features a more blurred approach to tonality. It begins with the note F-sharp repeated three times in octaves, joined by a surprising F-major chord. The alternations between F-sharp and F-natural give a hint, however oblique, about the conflict in the piece between D-major and D-minor. The short Arioso slow movement, in contrast, establishes a comfortable B-flat tonality and spins out an elegant violin melody—the kind of music that reveals Stravinsky’s love, since boyhood, for Tchaikovsky—with just enough trickery to maintain a whiff of modernism. The third movement returns to the sounds of crunching intervals and wavering tonality, this time propelled by insistent tremolo repetitions.
Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052 [1738]
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685 in EisenachDied July 28, 1750 in Leipzig
For solo piano and string orchestra. Approximately 24 minutes.
Johann Sebastian Bach spent most of his professional life in church positions, composing sacred music almost exclusively. One of the few periods in which Bach focused on secular music began in 1717 with his move from Weimar to the secular and open-minded court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, where Bach had both the freedom to explore instrumental forms and a talented ensemble to perform the new works. Compositions from this period include the “Brandenburg” concertos, many of the suites for solo instruments, and probably the three extant violin concertos. Church duties again consumed Bach following his 1723 move to Leipzig, but in 1729 he found a new secular outlet when he took a side job as director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, an ensemble of professional and amateur musicians that performed weekly concerts. To meet the high demand for music, Bach regularly mined his catalog of old compositions, especially the instrumental music from Cöthen. In 1738, he assembled a set of six concertos for harpsichord and strings, mostly reworked from earlier violin and oboe concertos. With this set, Bach essentially invented the keyboard concerto genre. The source material for the first keyboard concerto is lost, yet it is an easy guess that the solo part originated on the violin; one need only hear the patterns of repeated D’s, A’s and E’s in the first movement to recognize typical violin passages designed around open strings. Still, Bach’s reworking of old material was never mechanical, and this seminal example of a keyboard concerto demonstrates a keen sense of the harpsichord’s strengths and sonic characteristics. In modern performance practice, a piano and full string sections achieve the same transparent balance that Bach would have desired from the harpsichord and small string groups or even single players on each part. The first movement revolves around a quintessential Bach theme, first declaimed in a stout unison. The characteristic upward leaps (including the pungent interval of a minor-ninth) generate tension that dissipates in smooth descending patterns, only to pressurize again in an ascent that peaks at E-flat. The resolution teases and slows the final approach to the home key of D minor, the sounding of which unleashes rapid keyboard figurations. After compressing so much drama into six measures of unison music, the rest of the movement spotlights components of the theme in a series of energetic episodes, interspersed with ritornello summations. The Adagio movement also begins in unison, with another minor-key line full of inner dialogue and pathos. This time, the piano follows with a delicate new right-hand melody superimposed over the same bass material. The soloist continues to spin serpentine elaborations over recurring, pulsing shapes, until rejoining the ensemble for a solemn unison ending. The Allegro finale charges through quick linear material that plays with the possibilities of repeated tones and three-note fragments, including riffs on stepwise ascents and descents, neighbor notes, and long and short time values.
Sea Orpheus[2009]
PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
Born September 8, 1934 in Salford, England. Resides in Orkney, Scotland.
For piano, flute, violin and string orchestra. Approximately 18 minutes. Commissioned by Orpheus as part of the New Brandenburg Project.
In 1971, Peter Maxwell Davies left England for the remote and picturesque island of Hoy, in the Orkney region just north of mainland Scotland. Nearly four decades later, still living in Orkney, the unassuming composer who goes by Max is one of Britain’s great cultural ambassadors and an international musical icon. His new work, Sea Orpheus, is the final contribution to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s New Brandenburg Project, a series of commissions that tapped leading composers to create works in response to Bach’s six “Brandenburg” concertos. This piece reflects “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5 plus other influences, as Maxwell Davies explains in the following note: Sea Orpheus takes its inspiration from a poem by George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian poet.
There are three movements, played without a break, all based on a Gregorian chant, ‘Tantum Ergo Sacramentum’, which is subject to constant transformation processes, and is present throughout in some form. The work was commissioned as a companion piece to Bach’s Fifth “Brandenburg” Concerto, and has a similar orchestration, with flute and violin solos, and a virtuoso keyboard part, taking full advantage of the modern grand piano. This is the first time I have attempted to write a strictly neo-Classical work, and, as well as from the “Brandenburg” Concerto, I have borrowed techniques from Bach’s Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue. The first movement has alternating fast and slow sections—the fast sections featuring first the solo flute, then the violin, then the piano, with the slow sections expanding the solo cello line at the beginning into ever more elaborate mensuration canons [meaning that the voices progress at different speeds]. There is a cadenza for piano, in three sections interspersed in the first movement, the first section for left hand alone, the second for right hand alone, and the third putting the first two sections together. The second, slow movement features the soloists only, leading to a quick finale, whose progress is interrupted twice by short slow sections, the first for solo piano, and the second for the string orchestra, with figured bass piano. The music ends quietly, with a final reference to The Art of Fugue. © Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Serenade for Strings in E Major, Op. 22 [1875]
ANTONÍN DVORÁK
Born September 8, 1841 near PragueDied May 1, 1904 in Prague
For string orchestra. Approximately 27 minutes.
Dvorák was born in a small Bohemian village, where his father was the local butcher and innkeeper and also played the zither. As a young man, Dvorák’s musical career involved him in all manner of music-making in Prague; he accompanied church services from the organ, played viola in a dance band and the local opera orchestra, taught piano lessons and kept up his composing on the side. He might have spent the rest of his life as a cash-strapped freelance musician had it not been for a series of opportunities that led to the ardent support of a most influential champion, Johannes Brahms.
Dvorák’s rise to fame began with his application in 1874 for Austrian State Stipendium. The panel awarded him 400 gulden, prize money that supported, among other endeavors, composition of the Serenade for Strings over 12 days in May 1875. Dvorák won stipends again in 1875 and 1876, catching the attention of the panel’s newest judge, Brahms. Dvorák’s 1877 application, which included the Serenade, prompted Brahms to recommend Dvorák to the publisher Simrock, writing, “As for the state stipendium, for several years I have enjoyed works sent in by Antonín Dvorák (pronounced Dvorschak) of Prague. Dvorák has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces. In any case, he is a very talented man. Moreover, he is poor! I ask you to think about it!” Simrock soon commissioned Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances; within months of that piece’s 1878 publication, performances had occurred across the continent, and even as far away as London and New York, launching Dvorák’s international career.
The Serenade, as practiced by 18th-century composers, comprised light-hearted music to be performed outdoors at public gatherings in the evening. By the 19th century, composers applied the term more generally to pieces of a pleasing, “night music” character with a loose assemblage of movements, a format that suited Dvorak’s knack for rich and ample melodies. Most of the movements of the Serenade for Strings follow a streamlined three-part structure, with statements of a primary theme (or group of themes) separated by a contrasting middle section. The opening Moderato demonstrates this simple elegance, forgoing an introduction and developmental transitions in favor of music that is nearly always tuneful. Vivid melodies also populate the Waltz, Scherzo and Larghetto, the last of which provides a heartbreaking diversion away from the generally sunny disposition of the piece. The Finale adds a dash of craftiness, with canonic imitation and surprising transitions into new sections. Playful quotations help to bring the work full circle: The touching Larghetto theme coexists with a wry, syncopated accompaniment, and later the mild-mannered Moderato theme provides a trick ending before the boisterous coda.
Copyright © 2009 Aaron Grad