Currentzis Rocks Rameau

This was the most unusual orchestra concert I have ever seen--and one of the best. By the end of the evening the usually staid Salzburg audience members were not only giving a standing ovation, but about half the audience refused to leave and seemed content to keep clapping in unison until the orchestra came back for another encore (which they did not)!

Where I come from, every performer gets a standing ovation which is partly out of enthusiasm, partly because of uncomfortable wooden pews and partly because the audience are getting ready to leave. This is not the case in Salzburg where a standing ovation is so rare that I don't think I recall one in the many concerts I have attended here. So what magic did Greek, but resident in Russia, conductor Teodor Currentzis wield?

The concert began in darkness with the only light coming from the stand lights of the harpsichord, flute, violin and viola da gamba as they played one of the intimate chamber pieces from Pièces de clavecin en concerts. This was followed by an overture to a Rameau opera as the lights came up. The orchestra, Currentzis' own musicAeterna now based in St. Petersburg, is a full-sized orchestra with ten first and ten second violins with winds in proper proportion. Last night the band also included harpsichord, theorbo and three percussionists with all the wind players on historic instruments.

Last night I witnessed one of those things that cause me to have such deep respect for orchestral musicians. I was in the second row, very close to the first violins and one of the fourth desk violinists had a string break early in the first set. I heard the snap and, as I am a guitarist, immediately recognized the sound. It looked like the 4th, G string to me. All he had time to do was flip it out of the way and he continued to play the whole of the set without missing a note!! Don't ask me how. Between sets of pieces he slapped on a new string and retuned. Wow.

But what was really remarkable last night was the basic conception of the music, what I have characterized as Currentzis rocks Rameau. Currentzis is of the wiggly-finger school of conducting (à la Gergiev) and one of the delights was watching him wiggle his fingers as he conducted his soprano in extended trills. He leaps in the air, stamps his feet and occasionally wanders among the orchestra, sometimes with a drum. Oh, and so does the orchestra: leap in the air, stamp their feet and occasionally wander around. Everything is done to de-formalize and re-energize the approach to the music and while I am usually skeptical of this kind of thing, last night it was done superbly well.

A lot of the performance was done in semi-darkness with just stand lights and the first half ended with the whole orchestra trooping offstage in darkness as they continued to play the last refrain of a contredanse from Les Boréades.

The second half was as good as the first with excerpts from Rameau operas including arias brilliantly sung by soprano Nadezhda Pavlova. Towards the end of the evening the minimal formality seemed to break down even further as conductor Currentzis said they were going to do three encores--oh, by this time of the night the audience was clapping after every piece! I'm not sure what the first two were, but for the last, a famous rondeau from Les Indes Galantes that I have posted here a couple of times, the choir, missing up to this point, came out and stood just in front of the stage. So the only time they appeared was for the final encore. But they brought the house down. And Salzburg applauded as I have rarely heard them. Here is a photo from just before the choir came out--sorry, missed getting a shot of them.

And here, just to give you a taste of the evening is a performance of that rondeau from Les Indes Galantes that I have posted here before:

Now you are going to have that stuck in your head for the next day! There is a clip of this same piece conducted by Correntzis in a 2016 performance in Vienna, but there is no video and the sound isn't great. But have a listen to the Currentzis performance as it certainly will show you how he uses the percussion:

Rameau for violin and guitar

Continuing my series of posts on transcriptions for violin and guitar. This piece by Rameau does not have the ideal texture for transcription for violin and guitar, but it works quite well and it is so very beautiful I make no apologies! The guitar needs to be tuned in low D. It is not hard to play, you just have to know that it is in rondeau form which means that you play (and repeat if you wish) the first section up to the double bar, then you play the first reprise, then repeat the first section again. You then jump to the second reprise and finish by ending with the first section. This can be summarized as A(A)BACA.

There is an absolutely sublime performance by Grigory Sokolov on piano, an encore from a concert in Berlin a few years ago.

The Resplendent M. Rameau!

I have, from time to time, mentioned Jean-Philippe Rameau, but have devoted surprisingly little space to him given how important a composer he is. He did after all, literally, write the book on harmony! So let us take some time and celebrate this remarkable composer.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, by Jacques Aved, 1728

Just to whet your appetite, here is a rondeau from his opera-ballet Les Indes galantes:

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 - 1764) is famous for being one of the leading composers and theorists of the 18th century. He, along with François Couperin, is the glory of the French Baroque. His greatest works were operas and he did not embark on this phase of his life until he was nearly fifty. He achieved early fame with his Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels, published in 1722, which attempts to discover the fundamental principles underlying tonal harmony and does a pretty good job of it. He says:

Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 456-458). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

Despite his best efforts and those of others, including Paul Hindemith, it is not quite possible to derive the rules of harmony from the overtone series or by dividing a string into its parts, and Rameau acknowledges this when he later says

No rules have yet been devised to teach composition in all its present perfection. Every skillful man in this field sincerely confesses that he owes all his knowledge to experience alone.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 482-484). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

Rameau focuses on the fundamental importance of the fifth:

The sounds which form the fifth and the fourth are included in the divisions of the undivided string and are consequently generated by the fundamental sound. With regard to intervals, however, only the octave and the fifth are directly generated by the fundamental sound. The fourth is merely a result of the octave, since it arises from the difference between this octave and the fifth.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 967-969). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

 It must be confessed that as a writer Rameau was confusing, awkward and prolix and his explanations are often difficult to sort out. Here is his explanation of the relationship between the three different possible inversions of a major chord:

The major perfect chord is formed from the three numbers 4:5:6. If we raise 4. to its octave, we shall have 5:6:8; this forms the chord called the sixth chord, because the sixth is heard between the two extreme sounds. If we then raise 5 to its octave, we shall have 6:8:10; this forms another chord called the six-four chord, because the sixth and the fourth are heard between the two upper sounds and the lowest sound (to which all intervals of a chord should be compared). If we then raised 6 to its octave, we should have 8:10:12, which is in the same proportion as 4:5:6.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 1365-1369). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

What he terms 4:5:6 we would call a major chord in root position: CEG. If you raise the C an octave you obtain the chord EGC which is notated in figured bass as a 6 chord (meaning that the C is now a sixth above the bass, E). Then if you then raise the E an octave you have the chord GCE which is, in figured bass notation, referred to as a 6/4 chord because the two notes above are now at the intervals of a sixth and a fourth. This is taught to every beginning music student and it was in fact Rameau that first laid out a coherent theory of inversion which provided a rational foundation for the theory of harmony and gave him wide recognition as a music theorist, as famous in his own field as Isaac Newton was in physics.

But it is for his compositions that he is most know today. Neglected for nearly two hundred years, it is only in the last fifty or so years that his music has been unearthed and restored to its previous glory. He was not a prolific composer, but his few suites for harpsichord are justly appreciated today. Fanciful names were typical of the French clavecinistes. Here is one of his most delightful pieces Les Niais de Sologne avec six doubles meaning "The Simpletons of Soulogne with six variations." This is Trevor Pinnock on harpsichord:

In recent years Grigory Sokolov has given some extraordinary performances of Rameau on piano. This is Les Cyclopes:

But his greatest achievements were in the realm of opera. Here is the overture to Hippolyte and Aricie:

And, if you have the time, here is a complete performance of Les Indes galantes, though I should warn you, as it is a recent production (Bordeaux, 2014) while the instruments are original, the costuming most certainly is not. The opening ballet, for example, is danced by a whole troupe of nude dancers though the singer is somewhat clothed. Rest assured that later on the costume department does come up with some items so the entire opera is not performed in the nude! Blogger won't embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BxKd_2hCBQ

(I would have put up the less-controversial and perhaps more faithful version by William Christie, but I could not find it on YouTube.)

If you want a less, uh, "galant" version, here is the closing Chaconne:

My expertise does not extend to dance, so I am not sure how much if any of this choreography is the original. I'm pretty sure that they had dance notation, so perhaps it is. But again, the costuming is likely not!

Enjoy!

Listening to Les Tendres Plaintes

I labeled this "reception history" even though it isn't quite that. Think of it as the first draft of a reception history. That term, by the way, refers to a way of doing musicology where you examine the history of how a piece or a style or a composer was received by audiences over time. It can be quite interesting. But it does raise the problem of understanding how people listen.

I've listened to a piece by Rameau, Les Tendres Plaintes, a few times recently for different reasons: it is on a recent CD of Grigory Sokolov, there are a couple of clips of it on YouTube and I was sharing them with a couple of friends and I just transcribed it for violin and guitar to see what that would sound like. So I noticed a couple of things about how I listen to it. By that I basically mean my moment to moment reactions which vary from occasion to occasion, of course.

Here is the clip I have watched the most:

Now I will try to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness account of my reactions:

...those trills! and then how silvery the ring of the melody...
...the trills in the melody and the accompaniment are offset, intentionally kept unaligned.
(there are actually several different kinds of ornaments I am calling "trills" here: Rameau has a table in the front of his book naming and describing them: the cadence is a trill from the note above and the pincé is to the note below. We tend to call them a trill and a mordent respectively. There is also a cadence apuyée, where the first note is held longer and the double cadence which is a cadence that ends with a turn.)
...he does just a hint of notes inégales in the bass line that connects the first two phrases...
...when he gets to the descending sequence that begins the 1re Reprise, it is so lovely that I just start swaying my head from side to side...
..that A major chord that ends the 1re Reprise is always a surprise... the piece is in D minor, but the 1re Reprise is in A minor...
...he handles the refrain so differently the second time: a crisper inégale in the bass with an added cadence...
...the 2de Reprise (in F major) is almost whimsical, but at the same time wistful...
...the last refrain is even more beautiful... the high A in the second phrase is I think the most delicate note I have ever heard from a piano--it is like a guitar harmonic or an orchestral bell hit with a feather...

Let me show you the score I have been looking at. These two pages are from Rameau's Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode by which he means that he has an explanatory preface about how to play them. The table of ornaments is from there:

And here is the score to Les Tendres Plaintes:

Click to enlarge

This is a very simple piece, of course. Just that theme in D minor which has two eight-measure phrases, the first ending on the dominant and the second on the tonic. Then another two phrases in A minor, then the theme again followed by the second reprise (or episode) in F major but this time both phrases end on the tonic, and finally the theme again. You just should bear in mind that Jean-Philippe Rameau literally wrote the book on harmony--it was his Traité de L'Harmonie of 1722 that formalized the theory of tonal harmony and the basic principles are still followed today.

Here is a portrait of Rameau done in 1760:

Masterpieces of Music: Jean-Philippe Rameau

Apart from Couperin, the other great French Baroque composer is Rameau, born in 1683 and died in 1764.

His greatest fame came late in life when he became the master of French opera, but before then he published a number of books of wonderful harpsichord music and, in 1722, possibly the most important book of music theory every published, the Traité de L’Harmonie: Reduite à ses Principes naturels. This was the first book to systematically discuss all the harmonic discoveries and innovations of the Baroque that began around 1600 with Giulio Caccini's Le nuove musiche. One of the basic observations that Rameau made was that the chords C E G, E G C and G C E are not three different chords, but three versions of the same chord. This may seem obvious to us, but the funny thing is that a lot of great discoveries are like that: obvious only as soon as some genius points them out. You might compare this with Newton's thoughts on gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple. Rameau's idea was that the chord C E G is the root-position version of a C major chord, while the ones that have E and G in the bass, but the same three notes, are inversions of a C major chord. A perfectly simple and useful idea that is taught in every music theory class to this very day. Here is the title page of the first edition of Rameau's book:

Rameau's harpsichord music is inventive and virtuosic. Here is "Tambourin", the last movement of the E minor suite from his Pièces de Clavecin of 1724:

And here is the rather gentler "Les Tendres Plaintes" from the D minor suite in the same collection:

From the age of fifty, Rameau devoted himself almost exclusively to opera and it was this that made him famous in the eyes of the public. Here is the overture to Zaïs, an "heroic pastorale":

I think we can hear why his operas were such a success!

UPDATE: After Nathan Shirley commented on "Tambourin" I just have to add another favorite. Here is Leonhardt playing several pieces--the one I recommend is the first, "La Triomphante":