One year after the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg, his erstwhile teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote his one and only violin concerto in 1936. Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles by this point, forced to flee Nazi Germany due to his Jewish ancestry. He and Berg had been in frequent contact by mail, of course, though it is unlikely Schoenberg had heard Berg's concerto, or even seen the score. Berg passed away in December of 1935, soon after completing his concerto. The Violin Concerto by Schoenberg was premiered in December 1940 by Louis Krasner, the same violinist who commissioned and premiered the Berg concerto.
Instead of redoing my discussion of this piece, I am going to send you to a fairly lengthy post I did on it last year:
I have a feeling that this series will not be able to continue too much longer, simply because, due to copyright restrictions, I do not have easy access to the scores and without those, my comments would tend to the superficial. Some pieces I would like to cover are the Ebony Concerto by Stravinsky, the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich, the Clarinet Concerto by Copland and so on. But I don't have access to those scores. So I might do a few posts just touching on a few concertos and leave it at that. I would like to comment on the concertos by Philip Glass, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, for example, but without the scores, I can't delve too deeply. I might do a post on guitar concertos as I have played quite a few of them. But this lengthy series of posts is coming to an end, so if you have any suggestions as to a good theme for a new series, just leave them in the comments.
In the post I linked above, the clip is of Hilary Hahn playing the Schoenberg concerto, which is a really wonderful performance. Here is an interesting little clip where Arnold Schoenberg's grandson asks Hilary Hahn the same questions that his grandfather asked Louis Krasner when he was performing it.
There are just a few concert works for orchestra that have an element of dramatic choreography. The most famous is Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 45 that I have posted about here. Among many unusual musical elements in the score is the added stage direction at the end that instructs each musician, as his part ends (the last section, one by one, eliminates all the players and ends with just two violins) to blow out the candle on his music stand and steal offstage. Read my post for the details. The only other piece that I can think of that does something similar is the Violin Concerto by Berg. But this aspect is largely unknown.
Let me start at the beginning. According to Wikipedia, Berg was commissioned to write this concerto by Louis Krasner but he didn't start on it for some months because he was writing the opera Lulu. When the daughter of Alma and Walter Gropius, Manon Gropius, tragically died at age 18 of polio, he set aside the opera and began to write the Violin Concerto as a homage to her. It was completed in August 1935 and was Berg's last completed composition. He died four months later of blood poisoning.
The Violin Concerto is a very rich and complex piece that has attracted criticism for that very reason. The complexities come both from the inspiration for the piece, which led Berg to attempt to
translate the young girl’s characteristics into musical characters (Berg, from a letter to Willi Reich)
There are also several elements that are problematic for a serial composer. Here is the row of the piece:
Normally, one of the functions of a row is to avoid tonal references, but this one strongly suggests them. As Wikipedia notes:
the first three notes of the row make up a G minor triad; notes three to five are a D major triad; notes five to seven are an A minor triad; notes seven to nine are an E major triad; and the last four notes (B, C♯, E♭, F) and the first (G) together make up part of a whole tone scale.
While the piece is certainly not tonal in a very definite way, tonality seems to hover over it and there are several sections that do have the feeling of a tonal center, especially the end that has the strong feeling of a cadence in B flat:
Two other elements that appear are the interweaving of a Carinthian folk tune into the second part of the last movement:
Finally, also in the second part of the last movement, Berg quotes and does variations on the Bach chorale "Es ist genug" from Cantata 60:
The interesting thing to note here is that the first four notes of the chorale melody are a whole-tone scale, which overlaps with the last four notes of Berg's row.
So, from the point of view of serial theory, there are all sorts of problems with this piece! But for the same reasons, it is a favorite with audiences.
The music is enormously complex and in this post all I can do is give a brief introduction. But I want to go back to that dramatic element I mentioned before. Towards the end of the piece there is a climactic passage in which the solo violin begins a plaint (Klagegesang) in which it is joined by another violin, then the rest, then the violas and so on until all the strings are united in this melody before separating into their individual parts. Here is how the beginning of that section looks in the score:
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This section has been described (in the liner notes to the Pinchas Zukerman recording conducted by Pierre Boulez) as follows:
Employing quasi- dramatic elements, Berg in the score instructs the soloist to take over the leadership of the violins and violas “audibly and visibly.” These are to join him gradually, only to break away from him again “in just a demonstrative a manner.”
I wrote a paper on this in graduate school that, alas, I no longer have. But my recollection was that a better interpretation of Berg's instructions are that the solo violinist enjoins the other strings to join in with him by gesturing for them to stand up as they play the plaint (with the exception of the cellos, of course. Here is the instruction from the score blown up:
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Unfortunately, I can't make out exactly what the German says, so I am relying on my memory of the research I did for the paper. In the clip I am going to put up of a performance of the work, the soloist steps back, aligning himself with the section violins, which is, I think, the opposite of what Berg is asking for: they are to join him "audibly and visibly". That is, they join in with what he is playing and they stand up with him. This is never done, at least not that I have seen when I have seen this piece performed live. Here is a performance from the 2012 Proms with Frank-Peter Zimmerman, violin and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Daniele Gatti, conductor:
The section that I have been talking about, with the instruction from Berg about the strings joining together in the plaint, comes at the 20:24 mark in the clip. As you can see, the soloist steps back and the concertmaster joins him in the melody followed by the other strings.
There are yet more complexities suggested by this section that I also explored in my (lost) paper. Adolf Hitler had come to power in 1933 and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria was looming (it took place in March 1938). Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew, had already emigrated to the US and had just won a teaching position in California. In correspondence with him Berg referred to people of like mind joining together to resist the Nazi takeover. Perhaps at that moment in time, that seemed like a possibility. In any case, I'm afraid I can't substantiate any of this as I no longer have my research materials. So feel free to ignore the suggestion!
I was just going to mention this piece and go right on to the Berg Violin Concerto, but I changed my mind so here is a short post on the Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24 by Webern, composed in 1934. The piece is tightly-constructed using a twelve-tone row, each three-note segment of which is a version of the others:
The first trichord being the prime form, the next three are, respectively, the retrograde inversion (backwards and upside down), the retrograde (backwards) and the inversion (upside down). Here is the first movement with the score:
Apart from that, I just don't have much to say about it. One interesting thing about this kind of writing is how quickly the possibilities were exhausted and even after the principles of serialism were extended to other parameters like rhythm, dynamics and articulations, how quickly that was exhausted as well. The repertoire of serialism is not really large.
The relationship between this piece and previous concertos is tenuous. It is obviously not a solo concerto in the Baroque, Classical or Romantic modes. It is more like a Baroque concerto grosso for a group of solo instruments, but without the orchestral accompaniment. This is like a crystalline distillation of music. I suppose, if you like this sort of thing, it is a masterpiece. But to start sensing that, you would have to listen to it many times. It does have its unique appeal, but despite the fond hopes of his admirers, I doubt that we will ever hear Webern's music whistled in the street.
This piece, usually just called his Piano Concerto No. 1, was written in 1933, just two years after the Stravinsky Violin Concerto we discussed last week. Shostakovich was quite young, twenty-seven, and he wrote this for his own use as a performer (he was an accomplished pianist). It bubbles with youthful exuberance. The Wikipedia article I linked above cites a book on Shostakovich as pianist in saying that the concerto is "an experimentation with a neo-baroque combination of instruments." I don't have the book handy, so I haven't read the argument for that, but as there is nothing exclusively Baroque about the combination of piano, trumpet and strings, I suspect that it might be because this superficially reminds one of a concerto grosso with more than one solo instrument. But the way the music unfolds is very un-Baroque. It is full of quotations and the piano completely dominates with the trumpet offering witty asides from time to time. The piece, while certainly possessing a neo-Classical flavor, is quite unique.
Unfortunately, I cannot come up with the score for this piece (though I did find that of his second piano concerto, dedicated to his son Maxim) so you won't get any music examples.
At this time in Shostakovich's career he was writing a great deal of music for film, theater and ballet and was becoming quite well-known as a result. Shortly after completing his opera Lady Macbeth and a set of preludes for piano, he began work on this concerto, his first foray into a large symphonic form since his Symphony No. 1 of several years earlier. Early comments from Shostakovich's ex-composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg referred to the piece's brash hodge-podge of styles which included quotes from Beethoven, Haydn and Mahler as well as stylistic references to music-hall and jazz styles. In the last movement, where the trumpet comes to occupy a role nearly as important as the piano, we hear fanfares that always seem to be on the verge of quoting the William Tell Overture of Rossini--a theme that recurs in his Symphony No. 15.
I think that while the Piano Concerto No. 1 is certainly not the kind of ideological "statement" that might have come from another composer of the time, it has shown itself to be a successful piece over the years, popular with both performers and audiences. It reveals a side of Shostakovich that those familiar with his symphonies and string quartets may not know: the young pianist who, to support his family, played piano in cinemas to accompany silent films (later, he was commissioned to compose scores for silent films). Shostakovich's ballets, film and theater music are very little known, but in this concerto, we get a taste of what they are like.
Again, sorry for the lack of musical examples, but I think you will enjoy this music even in their absence. Here is Khatia Buniatishvili, piano; Rainer Küblböck, trumpet with the Vienna Symphony conducted by Philippe Jordan:
From now on I am going to run into the problem of accessing the scores as many will be still under copyright, such as the one for the present work. You will often see in regard to Stravinsky compositions that they were "revised in 1947" or thereabouts. The reason for this was not necessarily a sudden urge to edit old compositions such as Petroushka or the Rite of Spring, it was rather that, due to the Russian Revolution and a couple of world wars, Stravinsky had lost his copyright for his earlier music and needed to reestablish it. Hence the revised versions, which were copyrighted.
The violin concerto, as we learn from the Wikipedia article, was written in the summer of 1931. There is an interesting note in the article:
Early in the compositional process, Stravinsky devised a chord which stretches from D4 to E5 to A6. One day while he and Dushkin were having lunch in a Paris restaurant, he sketched the chord on a napkin for the violinist, who thought the chord unplayable, to Stravinsky's disappointment. On returning home, however, Dushkin tried it out on his violin and was surprised to discover it was actually quite easy to play. He immediately telephoned Stravinsky to say that it could be played after all. The composer later referred to this chord as his "passport to the Concerto".
Well, ok. That is in fact the first thing the violin plays:
And the first movement ends with a similar chord:
But, as Greg House used to say on House, MD, if you're happy, I'm..... (long pause). Which is my convoluted way of saying, I don't really see how this is a passport to anything. The Violin Concerto is certainly in Stravinsky's neo-classical style, which succeeded his earlier what we might call Russian primitivist modernist style typified by the Rite of Spring. Stravinsky's neo-classical style was instigated by a commission from Diaghilev who wanted a ballet score based on the 18th century commedia dell'arte figures and with an 18th-century-flavored score. Stravinsky was originally cool to the idea, but, looking over some manuscripts from the period, he got interested and produced the ballet Pulcinella:
The music is altered with modified phrasing, rhythms, harmonies and cadences, but the 18th century feeling is very clear. As time went on Stravinsky, while still taking older music for inspiration, departed further and further from the models. The first movement of the Violin Concerto, titled "Toccata" (an 18th century genre featuring a lot of free passage-work) shows how he altered the models. The phrases are a montage of fragments and the harmony is clever and unexpected. But the recurring ritornello-like figures function, as they did in the 18th century, as guideposts through the piece. Here is that first movement in a version I choose because it contains the score of the violin part:
And here is the last movement Capriccio, played by Hilary Hahn:
She kind of plays that to death, doesn't she? Stravinsky managed to be perhaps the last really famous, in a broad sense, composer of classical music by writing music, like this, that, while certainly having some modernist "street cred", also has enough traditional musical fabric, both melodic and rhythmic, to be accessible to most audiences. I suppose that Philip Glass and John Luther Adams do too, but they somehow don't quite seem to get over the bar in that they are not nearly as known generally in the way Stravinsky was.
If this is Tuesday, it is time for another installment in my concerto guide. I was inspired to do this by two excellent series that Tom Service did in The Guardian. The first was a year-long survey of contemporary composers and the second was a year-long survey of the symphony. I greatly enjoyed following along and disagreeing with Tom! But they were still about the best attempts at music education that you can find in the mass media these days. Anyway, I thought, someone should do one on the concerto, an equally long-lived genre that has survived quite well to the present day.
I am going in chronological order so the next important concerto after last week's Piano Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev is the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev, completed in 1917, but not premiered until 1923 at the Paris Opera. On the same program was Stravinsky's Octet for Wind Instruments conducted by the composer.
What strikes me initially about this piece is how very lyrical it is compared to the red meat aggressiveness of the piano concertos. It is fascinating how different solo instruments affect the composer's approach.
The first movement opens quietly with a long, wandering violin solo marked sognando (dreamily):
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This texture, with the violin joined by solos from the flute and oboe, accompanied by minimal strings, goes on for quite a while. According to Wikipedia:
He composed the concerto's opening melody in 1915, during his love affair with Nina Mescherskaya.
The movement becomes more and more energetic and finally introduces a trill motif:
This is followed by another new theme, this one marked narrante (narratively, as if telling a story). That's a very odd sort of instruction, but we just saw it last week in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto.
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The tempo is still the opening Andantino, but with this skipping theme festooned with grace notes, it feels as if we are in a faster tempo. Shorter and shorter note values appear and the violin is soon engaged in this kind of virtuoso passagework:
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This all comes to an end with a pause and the music begins again, still in the same tempo, but the violin introduces a pizzicato theme:
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This leads to entirely new kinds of passagework for the violin:
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This is using stopped notes interspersed with open strings, an effect we call campanella on the lute and guitar--not sure what it is called on the violin. This ultimately culminates in a strumming passage that you would swear was from a guitar concerto:
Things ultimately slow down and a new tempo is introduced: Andante assai (Assai più lento che la prima volta) meaning much slower than the first tempo. In a characteristically Prokovian move, he creates a unique, crystalline texture that I am tempted to call "fairy dust" that is a kind of strange recapitulation. He returns to the original D major and the original 6/8 time signature (the narrante theme was in 4/4), but now the flute has the wandering melody while the solo violin and harp accompany with 32nd notes:
And that, believe it or not, takes us to the end of the movement. He has transmuted the opening theme into "something rich and strange" to quote Ariel's song from The Tempest.
Now let's listen to the whole piece. Here is Hilary Hahn with the Spanish Radio Orchestra:
Continuing our journey through the concerto in the 20th century, the next one of interest, chronologically, is the Violin Concerto No. 1 of Béla Bartók, which was completed in 1908. It was inspired by an intense romantic attachment Bartók had formed to Stefi Geyer, a gifted violinist who later taught at the Zurich Conservatory.
Stefi Geyer
Alas, this was a doomed romance as Ms. Geyer was not interested, neither in Bartók, nor in Othmar Schoenk who also wrote a concerto for her! She refused the dedication and the concerto was never performed during either of their lifetimes and not premiered until 1958.
It is a powerful work, despite its early provenance: Bartók was only 27 at the time of composition. It is in the form of a rhapsody: two movements, slow then fast. It begins with the violin alone:
Soon joined by the first violin section:
It is in the wandering chromatic melodic style that perhaps had, even this early, taken some inspiration from the folk music of the Carpathian Basin that attracted Bartók's interest later on as a scholar of folk music. One of the ways Bartók developed to structure music was to use tonal relationships to relate the large sections while the surface melodic patterns are organized in other ways. We will get into this more as we look at other concertos by Bartók. Perhaps the biggest influence at the moment of this composition, apart from the ineffable mystique of Stefi Geyer, was that of Debussy which we can also see in the Fourteen Bagatelles, also from 1908.
Without further ado, let's have a listen to the two-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 of Bartók. This is José Maria Blumenschein, Violin with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting the Youth orchestra of NRW:
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog may remember that I did a whole bunch of posts on Sibelius a year or two ago. I talked about a lot of the symphonies, especially how he begins and ends them. But I also did a fairly substantial post on the Violin Concerto. It was composed in 1904 and begins our coverage of the concerto in the 20th century. I won't rehash my original post, which was in March of 2014, but just send you there to read it:
I know I didn't put up a Concerto Guide post last week. Every time I sat down to start one that old New Yorker cartoon kept popping into my head and I lost the will to write. You know the one: there is this little kid standing on stage next to a piano. He is dressed in evening garb and addressing the audience saying: "and now, God help us all, Rach three." I just couldn't get that out of my head, especially as it looked like the next concerto I was going to do was either Rachmaninoff Two or Three.
The problem is that I just don't think I can do a Music Salon post on a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. Usually I am on the other side of the ideological divide between the Serialists and the Traditionalists. Usually I think that the Serialists and their fellow travelers were simply dogmatic in their insistence that the traditional forms were tired, exhausted clichés. But when I listen to Rachmaninoff I think, well, perhaps in this case they were right. Rachmaninoff's piano concertos are all that piano concertos should be: noble, virtuosic, then tender and lyrical. They are a bit like what Chopin might have written if he had written a mature concerto. So what's the problem?
As I see it, a composer can write a concerto that we hear as being noble, adventurous or tender and lyrical and it can be a great success. But if the composer's goal is to show us how noble and virtuoso or tender and lyrical he can be, in other words if that is his actual goal instead of making a piece of music, then the result will be, sorry to say, kitsch. Kitsch as in a painting by Thomas Kinkaid:
Or a movie by Steven Spielberg that does nothing but push our emotional buttons from beginning to end.
See, that's everything that we like, right there. A pretty little country church, just like the one we wished we had attended when we were young; tall trees, mountains in the distance, a babbling brook and over all the delicate hues of sentiment. With Rachmaninoff we have an extension of the romanticism of Tchaikovsky, but, to me at least, it is genuine passion turned to mere sentiment, a haunting melody become a nice pretty tune. It is very well done, the technique, both pianistic and compositional, but you can certainly see why composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky would think that this is exactly what had to be killed in order for music, their music that is, to move forward.
But you really have to hear this for yourself, so here is Yuja Wang with Yuri Temirkanov conducting the Verbier Festival Orchestra in the Piano Concerto No. 2 of Sergei Rachmaninoff:
That was composed around 1900 so it brings this phase of the Concerto Guide to an end. Next up is the 20th century and a surprising revival of the energy and adventure of the solo concerto with remarkable works by Schoenberg, Bartók, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Berg, Glass, Salonen and just about everyone else.
I have been looking around for a good concerto from the 1880s, but haven't run across one, so if a reader has a suggestion, leave it in the comments. I might pop back and take up the Brahms Double Concerto, composed in 1887. So I am jumping to the 1890s, 1895 to be precise, when Dvořák completed his Cello Concerto. This was certainly not the first cello concerto as Vivaldi alone wrote a couple of dozen, C. P. E. Bach wrote a few, Haydn a couple, Boccherini (himself a cello virtuoso) wrote another dozen and there are isolated examples by Tartini and Stamitz. But it is safe to say that before the Dvořák concerto none of these had achieved any widespread popularity. Dvořák himself was reluctant to compose a concerto for cello for a long time because of concerns about its viability as a solo instrument against a full orchestra. Bear in mind that all the previous concertos for solo cello were for fairly small orchestra, not the large romantic orchestra that Dvořák wrote for. He may have finally been convinced by hearing a couple of performances of a cello concerto written by Victor Herbert in New York where Dvořák was directing the National Conservatory. In any case, he took up the task and delivered the first great cello concerto that established the genre and prompted many other composers in the 20th century to write concertos for the cello. The piece is substantial, about the same length as the Beethoven Violin Concerto. It follows the usual fast-slow-fast three movement form. Dvořák follows the example of Beethoven and Brahms in giving a full orchestral tutti before the soloist enters. The orchestra gets to present all the main themes, which the cello then re-presents. If not well-written, this might feel redundant, but the cello part is so resonant and richly ornamented that it is not a problem. Indeed, you might start to think that the typical romantic ploy of giving a big bombastic opening to the solo instrument as we have seen in Grieg, Tchaikovsky and others, is just a bit gimmicky. Here is the first theme, vaguely folk-like sounding because of the lowered 7th degree, given to the clarinet in A:
And here is how the cello presents that same theme (bass clef):
Here is a lyric theme first given to the horns:
And here is how the cello handles that theme (beginning in bass clef):
I won't go picking apart the rest of this lovely concerto. As is usual with Dvořák the themes are song-like and memorable. There is an inherent lyricism in this concerto, even though the cello part is very virtuosic with some very high registers and some difficult double-stopping. Here is a great performance by Jacqueline du Pré, the uniquely talented cellist whose career ended tragically young, at age 28, when she contracted multiple sclerosis.
Last week we looked at the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky which was composed in 1878 (which I neglected to mention) and is in the key of D major. This week I am going to take up the Violin Concerto of Brahms which was also composed in 1878 (big year for violin concertos!) and is also in D major. The great Violin Concerto by Beethoven is another in D major. Why is D major such a popular key for violin concertos? The answer has to do with the tuning: the strings of the violin are tuned G D A E:
which means that you have easily available not only the tonic, D, but also the subdominant, G, and dominant, A. As a bonus, the E string is the dominant of the dominant. This is of great advantage in writing virtuoso figuration and polyphony. Great advantage to the player, that is! While you can play in any key on violin, some keys offer more possibilities with less effort. Guitar concertos tend to be written in keys like D, A and E major for the same reasons.
Brahms' model for this piece was the Beethoven Violin Concerto and it vies with it for length and seriousness. Brahms did not find an opening as brilliantly original as Beethoven's (which I talked about here), but he followed the Beethoven model (and the 18th century model in general) in giving the orchestra a substantial opening in which a number of themes appear before the entrance of the soloist. But he departs from the 18th century model as far as harmony goes. Schubert was one of the first to widen the scope of harmony so that both the major and minor modes were virtually interchangeable and this is Brahms' practice here. The opening for the orchestra simply outlines tonic harmony in D major (with the rich resonance of violas and cellos doubled by bassoons):
A nice eight-measure phrase ending with a half-cadence on V. This is followed by a phrase in C major and then this theme in the violins:
This is a strong statement in D minor, but is followed by a continuation returning to D major. This is telling the listener that the key of D is going to include both the major and minor versions. Before the solo violin enters there is another theme that even more strongly presents D minor by means of its viiº7:
Bear in mind the key signature is two sharps. Then, at measure 90, we finally have the solo violin with this cadenza-like phrase:
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The violin continues with a lot of (very lovely) figuration that simply repeats the kinds of harmonies we have already heard in the orchestra (a lot of D minor) before finally presenting a theme which turns out to be that opening we first heard in low register, now given in a very high register:
This is followed by more varied figuration and then the solo violin takes up a theme that we heard in the orchestra just before the solo entry. This provides an energetic, rhythmic contrast and makes use of that open E first string to add a pedal over the harmonies. The key is A minor:
(Mind you, in the last measure he is tonicizing the dominant E.) The next important theme we hear is given to the solo violin and seems like a new one. This is a device used by Mozart: as the problem in concertos is that you have two expositions, one for the orchestra and one for the soloist, how do you make this interesting? What Mozart often did was give some entirely new theme(s) to the soloist.
This is the most distinct theme we have heard so far, the only one we are likely to go away humming and he has been saving it until now, measure 206! Though this theme is new, it also sounds awfully familiar (the mark of a great theme) and the reason is that Brahms has been preparing for it since the beginning. It is solidly in D major and has been set up in subtle ways. The outlining of the triads, plus the hemiola (turning two measures of 3/4 into one measure of 3/2), plus the arpeggio eighth-notes have all been heard before. This is a trick that Sibelius was very fond of. Each of his symphonies tends to have One Big Theme that he prepares you for from the beginning. For example the big theme of the last movement of the Symphony No. 5 we hear in a nascent form at the end of the first movement.
The development is shared pretty equally between the orchestra and the soloist, though she gets to introduce one new theme that is a variation on previous material:
The recapitulation starts at measure 381 and is as you would expect. Brahms did not write a cadenza for this concerto. Most soloists seem to play the one by Joachim, who consulted with Brahms on the violin writing and gave the premiere. He opened the concert with the Beethoven Violin Concerto!!
I won't say anything about the other movements as I think this is enough analysis for today. Let's listen to my favorite violinist Hilary Hahn, with Paavo Järvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra:
Three years after completing his First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in a single month while taking a rest cure in a Swiss resort on Lake Geneva. Here is the Wikipedia article which gives some interesting details about the initial reaction to the piece.
It was this piece that was my introduction to classical music. Before hearing this, at age 17 or 18, my exposure had been very limited. Where I grew up there were no concert halls, no orchestras, just the occasional traditional musician like my mother, who was an "old-time fiddler". There were no radio stations broadcasting classical music, either. So when a friend of mine put on an LP of this piece one day, it was a complete revelation.
Listening to it now I am struck by a number of things: first of all, it is a tremendous advance over the First Piano Concerto that I discussed last week. This piece is much more coherent in its structure. The whole first movement is based on one theme and some variants of it. It is very protean, however and the variations on the theme are extensive. Oddly enough, I am reminded of a Mozart piano concerto. Like Mozart, this whole movement seems spontaneous, flowing freely. The violin dominates throughout. Indeed, we don't get much of a tutti until measure 127! There really are only three major tuttis in the movement: that one, another that sets up the violin cadenza and the coda, shared with the violin. A tutti, by the way, is when the whole orchestra is let loose. Usually, in this concerto, it is only parts of the orchestra, accompanying the violin.
The movement starts with a brief orchestral introduction before the violin enters with a lyric mini-cadenza, followed by its statement of the theme:
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The second theme, which is really a variation of the first theme, is presented on the violin as follows:
Here is that first big orchestral tutti:
Here is a variation in G major for the solo violin:
And here is a variant using dotted rhythms:
One fascinating thing about this concerto as compared to the piano concerto, is how very lyrical it is, another way in which it reminds me of Mozart. Tchaikovsky is not the only one to display much more lyricism in the composition of a violin concerto as opposed to a piano concerto. We see something similar with Prokofiev, whose piano concertos are often very percussive, but whose violin concertos are very lyrical.
Let's listen to this superb performance with Itzak Perlman and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra:
I don't think I have included a cello concerto in this series to date. As we will see, the concerto for cello became quite popular towards the end of the 19th century with Dvořák's from 1895 being a huge success. That indefatigable concerto composer Antonio Vivaldi actually wrote 27 concertos for cello (and for virtually every other solo instrument short of the harmonica and ophicleide) but they have not become as well known as his violin concertos and I didn't pick any for inclusion in this series. There is no cello concerto by Mozart and while there are a couple by Haydn, he is not particularly known as a concerto composer. Beethoven wrote the unusual Triple Concerto for violin, cello and piano, but I think that the first concerto for cello alone to achieve much renown in the 19th century is the one I am going to look at today, the Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, op. 33 by Camille Saint-Saëns composed in 1872. The long-lived Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921) is in the second generation of French Romantic composers after Hector Berlioz. As a young man he was influenced by the first generation of Romantics, Schumann and Liszt, and the later Wagner. But, like most French musicians of the time, he adhered to a more conservative classicism in his own career. He was a church organist and, for a few years, professor of music, during which he taught both Ravel and Fauré. Saint-Saëns' cello concerto shows the influence of both Robert Schumann's piano concerto and the cyclic technique of Franz Liszt. Here is the opening:
As you can see, instead of an opening orchestral statement of the theme or themes (typical of 18th century concertos), after an opening forte chord in the orchestra, the cello begins with a virtuoso flourish, which turns out to be the first theme. The model for this is the Schumann Piano Concerto which influenced most 19th century concerto composers. One innovation is that the concerto, while in the three traditional sections, fast-slow-fast, fuses these into one (20 minute) movement with no pauses. The last section, after recapitulating material from the first movement or section, ends with a new theme for the cello. The second movement or section is a minuet in the unusual key of B flat (with excursions into G minor), the Neapolitan!
Incidentally, Mozart occasionally inserted a minuet into the last movement of a piano concerto. You could consider this Saint-Saëns concerto as single movement with an interpolated minuet. In any case, it is somewhat innovative, though with classical precedent and, above all, very charming. Let's have a listen. Here is a live performance by the great Mstislav Rostropovich. The London Philharmonic is conduced by Carlo Maria Giulini:
The next concerto chronologically is the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A minor by the Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps. Completed in 1859, it is the most popular of his six violin concertos. In his own performing career he leaned away from the superficial opera potpourris that were so popular at the time and towards a more classical repertoire, specifically of Beethoven. As a composer he was encouraged by both Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz.
I chose this piece for a couple of reasons: it is a good example of the mid-19th century violin concerto with its wealth of passion and expressivity. IMSLP does not have the full score, just a violin/piano arrangement. It begins like this with the minor dramatic mood so much in favor for 19th century concertos (which undoubtedly goes back to the Mozart D minor piano concerto):
The other reason is that this was on a Pinchas Zuckerman album I used to own many years ago. I would listen to it every morning to remind me that the universe had a transcendental dimension: music!
Let's listen to a performance. This is Shlomo Mintz, Violin with the Sinfonieorchester des Südwestfunks (Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra) conducted by Myung-Whun Chung:
Hilary Hahn is just releasing a new recording pairing the 4th Violin Concerto of Vieuxtemps with the 5th Violin Concerto of Mozart. This is the kind of thing an artist of her stature tends to do: rather than recording the same popular works by the same composers, she introduces us sometimes to new composers as in her encore album, or to less known works by familiar composers, such as the Vieuxtemps 4th Concerto here. UPDATE: Alas, that one was taken down. Here is a different performance, also with Hahn:
Interesting piece. I think you can see why the 5th is popular. But the 4th is perhaps structurally more interesting with its contrasting moods and unconventional layout.
Concertos for solo instruments, unless they are for instruments played by the composer to some level of virtuosity, often require the collaboration of a solo instrumentalist. What I mean is that if I intend to write a violin concerto, as I probably do, I will consult frequently with a violinist as to the technical possibilities and limitations. Examples of this are numerous and include the composition of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in collaboration with the violinist Samuel Dushkin and the Brahms Violin Concerto, written with advice from its dedicatee Joseph Joachim. Notice that this intimate kind of collaboration between composer and soloist is something that has only become the usual practice since the middle of the 19th century--Beethoven, for example, did not seem to require consultation with a violinist on his concerto. I think the main reason for this is that the level of virtuosity expected in a concerto was raised considerably by Paganini and Liszt, both virtuosos of their instruments, and therefore other composers followed suit. As most composers (though not Berlioz) were pianists, they needed no advice on writing for piano, but when it came to the violin, they did.
The guitar has proven even more challenging for composers as the complexity of what chords and configurations are possible on the six strings is even greater than the four of the violin. Exactly how much collaboration Joaquin Rodrigo required in writing his first concerto for guitar, the Concierto de Aranjuez is an interesting question. It was written for Regino Sanz de la Maza in 1939 and premiered by him in 1940. This concerto is so demanding that I have some doubts that anyone, in 1940 (with the exception of Andrés Segovia), had sufficient technique to deliver a successful performance. I don't seem to be able to find any historic recordings of the work, but Wikipedia says that both Regina Sanz de la Maza and Narciso Yepes made early ones. The reason I mention the Aranjuez is that the logical choice for both collaborator and dedicatee in 1939 would likely have been Segovia but, alas, due to the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 39) both he and Rodrigo were living in exile, Segovia in Montevideo, Uruguay and Rodrigo in Paris, France. So perhaps that was why Rodrigo dedicated his first concerto to Sanz de la Maza. In any case, Segovia never seems to have forgiven him for this perceived slight. Rodrigo tried to make up for it by writing a later concerto for Segovia, the Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, but while he played the Fantasia many times and recorded it, Segovia never once performed the Aranjuez in public. But this does not seem to have delayed in the slightest the work's enormous popularity. As someone who has played the Aranjuez quite a number of times I can state that whatever concerto you might propose to the music director, they are likely to ask you to play the Aranjuez!
I relate this in order to set up a contrast with the fate of another concerto. When preparing the post on the Schumann Piano Concerto I read the very interesting Wikipedia article about his Violin Concerto. This piece is largely unknown and rarely performed and I didn't even get around to listening to it as my attention was on the Piano Concerto. But thanks to one of my frequent commentators I went back and listened to it. He mentioned that he thought it was just as great as the Mendelssohn and after giving it a listen, I think I agree. So why is this concerto so obscure? Here is the relevant passage in the Wikipedia article:
Though Joachim performed Schumann’s Fantasie, he never performed the Violin Concerto. After playing it through with the Hannover Court Orchestra (of which Joachim was the concertmaster) for Schumann in October 1853, Joachim retained the manuscript for the rest of his life. After Schumann’s attempted suicide in February 1854 and subsequent decline and death in a sanatorium in Endenich, Joachim evidently suspected the Concerto was a product of Schumann’s madness and thought of the music as morbid. Joachim’s biographer Andreas Moser reproduced a letter in which Joachim discussed Schumann’s Concerto as showing ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’, though ‘certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist’.
Joachim’s opinion prevailed on the composer’s widow Clara and on Brahms, and the work was not published in the Complete Edition of Schumann’s works and was in effect kept secret throughout the 19th century.
Joachim deposited the manuscript of the concerto with the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and stated in his will (he died in 1907) that the work should be neither played nor published until 100 years after the composer's death, i.e. until 1956.
This whole bizarre story is a testimony to the enormous influence of Joseph Joaquim, probably the greatest violinist of the 19th century, though there was also Paganini. It is odd that his opinion could be accepted by both Clara Schumann and Brahms. And still odder that Joachim seems to have acquired the rights to the concerto, of which he disapproved, so that he could impose his wishes as to its being kept secret for 100 years! Read Wikipedia for the equally odd circumstances of the work's rediscovery and premiere.
The thing is, this is a fine work. I think I agree with my commentator that I like it at least as much as the Mendelssohn concerto. Here, listen for yourself and decide. Here is the Schumann Violin Concerto (composed in 1853, premiered in 1937) played by Frank Peter Zimmermann with the WDR Sinfonieorchester - Kölner Philharmonie conducted by: Jukka Pekka Saraste:
Imagine if Andrés Segovia had been given control over the score to the Aranjuez!
Apologies for the hiatus! I got very busy for a few days and was not able to do any posting.
Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was born into a prominent Jewish family though raised without religion and later baptised as a Christian. Am I correct in thinking that he is the first composer of Jewish descent that we have encountered in our concerto guide? Mendelssohn was the most gifted musical prodigy in history after Mozart (and Rosen places him even higher). As a teenager he was powerfully influenced by late Beethoven, or at least, aspects of late Beethoven. Mendelssohn, while possessing great lyric gifts, did not seem to inherit the bedrock grittiness of Beethoven.
Looking at both the Schumann Piano Concerto we talked about last week and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I think it is safe to say that both composers were working in the shadow of Beethoven. Music was taking a new direction and it was being crafted to appeal to a new audience. Paganini and Liszt were discovering that the middle class concert audiences, so much larger than the aristocratic ones of the previous generations, had a liking for sheer instrumental virtuosity. Composers like Schumann and Mendelssohn combined some of that with a lyrical touch because, as Stephen Spielberg has discovered in our day, mass market audiences also have a taste for sentimentality and melodrama.
Whether or not one composer influenced the other, or whether both had one of the later Beethoven piano concertos in mind, one significant departure from 18th century practice for both of these concertos was to begin with the solo instrument. Schumann has a series of weighty chords where the piano strikes a very dominant attitude and Mendelssohn gives the first theme to the violin before the orchestra states it. Both avoid the typical 18th century practice (occasionally violated, especially by Mozart) of giving the orchestra an opening tutti where they state one or more of the themes. The tidiness of the earlier practice is now giving way to a much more dramatic one: the individual! Stands up! Against the crowd! This was both musically powerful and socially appealing.
Mendelssohn is often accused of being too sweet, too comfortable and lacking the dramatic force that Beethoven possessed. The opening melody, given to the violin, has a wonderful sweep and grace, but it does tend to become rather pedestrian as it progresses. If you compare this theme with those I quoted from the Beethoven Violin Concerto you might be struck by how terse they are compared to how lengthy and flowing this one is:
I mentioned the prominent place that the solo instrument is given at the very beginning: another innovation in the Mendelssohn is movement of the cadenza--fully written out--from the very end of the movement to the transition from the development to the recapitulation. As we will see later this year, Sibelius took this even further and made the violin cadenza into the development in his Violin Concerto. The Classical forms were becoming something of a Procrustean bed for the Romantic composers. They were relaxing and loosening the binding forces of harmonic tension and because of this the formal logic of the Classical forms was becoming less compelling. Using the virtuosity of the cadenza solved, for Mendelssohn the problem of the draining away of tension that sometimes plagued the end of his developments.
Now let's listen to the concerto, one of the most beautiful and charming Violin Concertos ever written. Here is Hilary Hahn with Paavo Jarvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra:
