“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Yesterday I attended a concert of violin and piano. In conversation with a violinist friend who also attended I mentioned that they simply don't program violin/piano recitals at the Salzburg Festival. She seemed surprised. They do have a lot of piano recitals though.
The concert last night, while seemingly enjoyed by many, was bad, but following the Tolstoy quote, it was bad in its own way. The soloist, according to the biography, had won prizes in fifty (50!) international competitions. And is only twenty-two years old. When I was a young performer I only entered one competition and had to drop out due to a nervous breakdown. The winner of that contest also had a nervous breakdown, but afterwards. His was more serious as, upon returning to Japan, he cut off one of his fingers so he could never play guitar again.
There are hosts of competitions now, it seems, and the path to career is apparently entering all of them. Also, judging by the concert, the key to winning is a ferocious ability to play many, many notes in quick succession, thereby bamboozling the judges. This was a bad, virtuosic concert, but for the audience, they did not seem to be able to perceive how virtuosity could be bad. It was bad because it was musically meaningless. It was virtuoso trash. This was keenly demonstrated when the artists departed from the main elements of the program, 19th century bon-bons, and played a Mozart sonata. This instantly revealed that the pianist was a banger, constantly drowning out the violin, and the violinist had no lyric sense nor grace and elegance. These performers should be enjoined from playing Mozart in public. Thank god they didn't program any Bach.
Good performances, like good families, are alike: they combine passion with grace, clarity with expression and are a delight to listen to. Bad performances can be bad in a thousand ways. This was one of them. Here is that Mozart sonata the way it should be played.
I just ran across this in The Spectator and I can't resist sharing with you:
The previous Friday, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Joonas Ahonen played at Milton Court, and if you’re instinctively wary of PatKop’s cult following I can only say that she walked on in plain black and launched into Schoenberg’s 1949-vintage Phantasy with a vibrato so rich that this determinedly knotty music felt as sensuous (and as generous) as Strauss. There’s no timbre that Kopatchinskaja can’t draw from that violin of hers. She created echoing spaces around a tiny, wire-thin scrap of metallic tone in Webern’s Four Pieces, and dismantled and reassembled Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata like some constructivist sculpture.
The house was packed, and it wanted encores. Kopatchinskaja exploded, shrieking, into a movement from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. More! She challenged us to guess the composer of a Schubert-ish salon piece – a tiny lemon-drop of a thing – and said we couldn’t leave till we’d got it. ‘Xenakis!’ shouted some wag. ‘Mendelssohn’ ventured another, and then everyone was at it while Kopatchinskaja kept shaking her head and waving her bow: ‘No! No! No!’ It turned out to be an unpublished work by the 17-year-old Gyorgy Ligeti, and reader, I called it.
I've been talking about PatKop a few times lately and this is the best description I have seen of her playing. Here she is with the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Yes, she can play the core repertoire:
My CD arrived remarkably quickly so this will be the first of a few posts on this admirable project. First, a comment on the cover design:
Aesthetically, this is interesting, isn't it? It has a distinctly retro or dystopian feel. This perhaps comes from an imagined dystopian, post-apocalypse time when all there is left is beat-up, worn-out typewriters and scraps of old file folders. This is borne out in the introduction where the artist refers to the disasters of the 2020/21 years with the deaths from COVID, the riots, police brutality, wildfires, unemployment and so on. It was a kind of apocalypse and the album is an attempt to give voice to others, the essential task of a classical musician. He concludes:
Over the course of the last 18 months, I've come to think of this project as an anthology, a snapshot in time, documenting a tiny slice of the creative thought and output in this country today. I invite you to stop listening to pundits, extend your ears, open up your imagination, and trust the music to guide you into a challenging, complicated and thrilling sound world--This Is America. --Johnny Gandelsman
The booklet also contains an essay by each composer on their piece, plus the words to those pieces with a text and a track listing.
I apologize if I am a "pundit" though I think of myself more as being a (retired) performer and very part-time composer. So let's work our way slowly through these 22 pieces. The first one is"O" (standing for "oxygen") by Clarice Assad. She sees oxygen as a common theme in the transmission of Covid, the respiratory failure that it often caused, the prevention of breath entering the lungs of George Floyd and so on. "O" is for violin and processed vocal overdubs. Blogger won't embed, but here is a clip from YouTube from the album:
Clarice Assad is the daughter of Sergio Assad of the famous Assad guitar duo. This piece makes excellent use of the violin's capacity for extended, expressive melody. I don't have too much to say after only listening a couple of times, but it seems a very effective piece with a lot of atmospheric weight. There is also a clip on YouTube where she talks briefly about the piece:
That's all I am going to do today. I encourage you to pick up a copy of the album and we can work our way through it together.
Oddly, some of the most interesting articles on classical music sometimes appear in the Wall Street Journal. This one is a fascinating review of a new triple-CD album by Johnny Gandelsman, first violin with the innovative quartet Brooklyn Rider: ‘This is America’ by Johnny Gandelsman Review: A Musical American Mosaic. Not surprisingly, the reviewer is the very fine Allan Kozinn.
The violinist Johnny Gandelsman used the enforced downtime of the pandemic to undertake a commissioning and recording project with several missions. The most practical and quotidian was expanding the solo fiddle repertory. But equally important, Mr. Gandelsman saw the project as a snapshot of our fraught times, and a manifesto on diversity, musical as well as social.
The recording, “This Is America,” just released, presents 24 new scores, accounting for nearly four hours of music on three CDs. It is a lexicon of contemporary styles, from folk-inspired meditations and neo-Romantic works dripping in melody, to post-Minimalist essays that balance repetition, complexity and varying levels of acerbity. Most of the works are unaccompanied; a few set the violin against layers of electronic sound; and in a couple—Marika Hughes’s sweetly harmonized “With Love from J” and Bojan Louis’s “Dólii,” an accompanied poem—Mr. Gandelsman trades in his violin for a tenor guitar, and sings, whistles and recites.
What does this project remind you of? A few years ago a similarly innovative project came from violinist Hilary Hahn who did a very interesting 2-CD album on newly commissioned encores called In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores. I did a series of posts on that project: Hilary Hahn in 3 Parts.
So that is the background to the Hilary Hahn encore project. Let me say that it is a brilliant idea, approached with boldness and conviction. Of course, the traditional violin encore is showing its age as most of them date from around the turn of the century--the last century, not this one! Kreisler came to the concert stage before the First World War and the encores he favored, which are still the ones primarily played, date from that idyllic time. If I were possibly the most formidable violinist of my generation, as I think Hilary is, then I would be looking for a way to put my stamp on the repertoire. Reinventing the encore would not be where I would start, but neither did Hilary. She has previously commissioned a concerto from Jennifer Higdon, professor at the Curtis Institute, where Hilary studied. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Not surprisingly, there isn't a good clip of the piece at YouTube, but it was released by Deutsche Gramophon in a pairing with the Tchakovsky concerto here.
I just ordered a copy of the Gandelsman disc so when it arrives I will do a review of it.
Our local chamber music society is struggling back to offering a normal concert season in the face of considerable difficulties. Mexico is blessed with quite low levels of infection so it is possible to stage concerts indoors though we still have to observe "social distancing" which means that the revenues from ticket sales are half what they should be. Patrons are making up the difference. Yesterday I attended a very fine concert given by New Zealand-born violinist Geneva Lewis who is all of twenty-two years old. She was playing a three-hundred-year-old violin built by Stradivarius. In fact, the very same instrument owned by Joseph Joaquim, the great 19th century virtuoso for whom Brahms wrote his violin concerto--premiered on this very instrument! Lewis was accompanied by the very able Spanish/Dutch pianist Albert Cano Smit.
The whole program was designed as a homage to Joaquim with pieces written for him, by him or by his friends and included works by Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The exception was the Ciaccona from the 2nd Violin Partita by J. S. Bach, included because it was a concert favorite of Joaquim's. After the concert I chatted with the artists and we talked about how hard it is to program that piece. It is certainly the greatest piece ever written for violin and indeed one of the greatest pieces of all time. It tends to overshadow everything else on the program. Lewis ended the first half with it, a good choice. I told her about a program I shared with a violinist many years ago in which, due to a shortage of material, we decided that we would each play a solo. When I asked my colleague what he was going to play he casually announced "the Chaconne." Agh! So what could I possibly play!!
The sound of the 1714 Stradivarius, nicknamed the "Joachim" Stradivarius in honor of its most famous player, is velvety, but capable of both haunting pianissimos and biting fortes. My colleague played a Guarnerius which has perhaps a bit warmer sound.
The program ended with the 3rd Sonata for violin and piano, op. 108 by Brahms, a very fine piece, but not quite on the same level as the Chaconne. Oh yes, both the French version and the Italian version of the name are used. The chaconne is a dance form based on a chord progression reportedly originating in Mexico and coming to light in Spain in the 16th century as a somewhat lascivious dance. By Bach's time it had become a slow and dignified form. Bach's "ciaccona" dwarfs the other movements in the partita and indeed is often claimed to be the longest (at around fifteen minutes) single movement written in the whole Baroque period. It consists of 354 measures varying an eight-measure harmonic progression. It uses a wide variety of violin techniques including extensive arpeggio passages. There is a sizable section in the middle in D major, but most of the piece is in D minor.
I haven't said much about the performance, have I? It was very fine, both technically and musically. For a young virtuoso Geneva Lewis shows a great deal of musical maturity. We can expect great things from her in the future.
Here is a clip of the 2nd Sonata for Violin and Piano by Brahms with Lewis and pianist Dina Vainshtein.
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:
Click to enlarge
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:
Click to enlarge
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!
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:
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:
Click to enlarge
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:
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:
The American violinist, Hilary Hahn, despite her age (34) is a fully-established, major artist who has been performing professionally for over twenty years. Yes, she began playing the violin just before her fourth birthday and premiered with the Baltimore Symphony when she was twelve. Here is her Wikipedia bio. I first mentioned her on this blog a couple of years ago, without knowing anything of her background. The context was a post on Nigel Kennedy and I merely compared a German television performance of a Bach gigue with others. I liked it, though! Here is the link, though I see I shall have to find another clip as the one I linked to is dead. At the time, I probably thought she was German!
The reason for this post is that this will form the first part of a three-post series on Hilary Hahn's remarkable recording project, The Hilary Hahn Encores: in 27 Pieces. That somewhat enigmatic title is actually a simple description. The idea was to update the traditional violin encore repertoire with some new music. It was violinists like Fritz Kreisler (1875 - 1862) who last put their stamp on this interesting genre with pieces like this one:
Like many of the encores that Kreisler used to play, that was written by him, though some he used to pass off as being by others. That one is titled "Tambourin chinois". Here is an entire album of violin encores by various composers including Kreisler. The Kreisler-style encore came in two main varieties: fast, motoric romps like the one above, and touching, expressive pieces like this one:
They show off two important sides of the violin, the extreme virtuosity that it is capable of, and the profound expressivity that it is also capable of.
So that is the background to the Hilary Hahn encore project. Let me say that it is a brilliant idea, approached with boldness and conviction. Of course, the traditional violin encore is showing its age as most of them date from around the turn of the century--the last century, not this one! Kreisler came to the concert stage before the First World War and the encores he favored, which are still the ones primarily played, date from that idyllic time. If I were possibly the most formidable violinist of my generation, as I think Hilary is, then I would be looking for a way to put my stamp on the repertoire. Reinventing the encore would not be where I would start, but neither did Hilary. She has previously commissioned a concerto from Jennifer Higdon, professor at the Curtis Institute, where Hilary studied. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Not surprisingly, there isn't a good clip of the piece at YouTube, but it was released by Deutsche Gramophon in a pairing with the Tchakovsky concerto here.
But just about every young violinist--well, that's not quite true--let's say quite a number of the more adventurous young violinists, have commissioned and performed new concertos for their instrument. But none have taken on the task of completely reshaping possibly the most ossified part of their repertoire: the encore. It is safe to say that Hilary, in her encore project, has renovated and shaken up the encore genre in a permanent way.
It was my idea to take a closer look at the project as soon as I realized what she had done. Because I realized that in addition to recreating an entire genre, that project would also give us a nice cross-section of what composers are up to these days. These are all recently written pieces, by composers in their early 30s like Nico Muhly from the US, to composers in their mid 80s like Einojuhani Rautavaara from Finland.
Before listening, a number of interesting questions come to mind. First of all, the requirements of the commission were that the pieces be under five minutes long (exceeded in a couple of cases) and be written for acoustic violin and piano. Would they also be recognizable as encores in the traditional sense as well, that is, would they tend to fall into one of the two traditional types, either motoric and virtuosic or slow and expressive?
In my second post on the LP, I will review the actual recording itself but for now I will just put up the cover:
I have already listened to the whole CD, which consists of two discs, each almost an hour long. Hilary does not do things by halves! Instead of commissioning five or ten new encores, she commissioned twenty-six and then there was a contest for a twenty-seventh. A whole lot of new music here, which makes it an excellent survey of the contemporary music scene in microcosm.
So that gives me my structure: this post is just background to the project, the second post will look closely at the recording and music itself (insofar as I can without the scores) and the third one will try to draw some aesthetic conclusions. I might even look at some of the other reviews, of which there are quite a few, but only after doing my own first.
My first impression, as I have, up to now, just listened to it through once, is that there are some good pieces here, some pieces in quite a traditional style, some in a very new style, some that sound like so-so improvisations and some that sound like an improvisation by a crazy person. So, it will be interesting to see how my impressions evolve on further listens...
To whet your appetite, here is Hilary doing an interview with one of the composers, Max Richter:
And here is a link to the CD recording on Amazon where you can listen to little samples of each piece. It is very new, only being released in November and in fact, I don't think it will be available internationally until March.
You know what decided me on purchasing this CD? In January Norman Lebrecht mentioned that the biggest-selling classical disc that week was the Hahn encore CD. With 341 sales! That is both exciting and extremely depressing and I blogged about that here. And immediately decided to order the CD.
I'll bet you didn't even know there was such a thing as a guitar built by Stradivarius. The late 17th and early 18th centuries were a particular golden era for the guitar and it was a hugely popular instrument in the royal courts of Europe so it was inevitable he would have built some. There are four guitars by Stradivarius still in existence and here is an excellent website with lots of photos.
There are some modern copies that are played by performers specializing in historical performance, but the Stradivarius guitars occupy a tiny position in the modern musical world, compared to their violin and cello cousins. Why is that?
Here is an interesting thing about guitars and violins. The violin top (and bottom, though that is less important) is vaulted as you can probably see in this photo of a Stradivarius violin:
This gives the top a great deal of structural integrity, making for a long life. The top of the guitar, however, is flat. This top, moreover, is twisted by the tension from the bridge. In a modern instrument this amounts to some 125 lbs of torque. After twenty to thirty years, the acoustic integrity of the top starts to go and significant loss of sound is the result.
But the vaulted top of a violin, with a different sort of bridge entirely and supported internally with a bass bar, is far stronger.
True, the guitar also has internal strutting, which does help, but the flat top makes for a short lifespan compared to the violin.
UPDATE [Oct. 28, 2012]: This post keeps being popular so I am updating it by including a musical clip of Baroque guitar. Here are the first four movements of the best-known suite by Robert de Visée (1655 - 1733) including the Prelude, Allemande, Courante and Sarabande. The guitarist is Rob MacKillop and the guitar looks quite a bit like a reproduction of a Stradivarius.
Whenever I see a particularly noxious piece of music journalism, i.e. most of them, I like to comment on it. But the flip side of that is that I also try to give credit where credit is due. There is an interesting story in the Globe and Mail today about an excellent project of the Canada Council: their musical instrument loan program.
Aspiring young violinists have a huge problem trying to find an suitable instrument that most other instrumentalists just don't have. As a young guitarist, just starting to really come to grips with developing my skills as a performer, one of the things I had to do was replace my student guitar (Yamaha, about $200) with a real concert instrument. You can't learn to expand your dynamic and timbral range without an instrument that can actually do it. My solution was I flew to Madrid and purchased a Jose Ramirez 1a (meaning "primera", i.e. top level concert instrument), the same that Segovia and others had played. The cost, in 1974, was a mere $650! I'm not sure what they cost now, but probably somewhere between $5000 and $10,000.
But if you are a violinist, or cellist, you are faced with a problem of a whole different magnitude. What would it cost to purchase a violin of the finest concert quality? Would you believe $4,000,000? Yes, I'm afraid so. So the Canada Council has a wonderful program to help young violinists. Every three years they hold a competition to win the opportunity to borrow a concert violin from the Musical Instrument Bank. There are thirteen violinists vying to possess thirteen different violins ranging from fine instruments worth $300,000 built in the 18th century, to the heights of instruments built by Guarneri and Stradivari! It is hard to find anything wrong with a project like this.
There are some errors in the story. The claim is made that:
in blind tests, audiological analysts and concert violinists alike have had difficulty distinguishing one fine old fiddle from another.
which is not exactly true. The 'tests' referred to were promoted by a builder of new violins who was eager to show that his instruments were just as good as those old ones. Several question marks hover over how the test was conducted and quite a few very knowledgeable people disagree strongly. All the great concert violinists of today prefer to play the old violins built in Cremona and it isn't just because of the name of the builder. But with only some 500 of the Cremona violins still available, and especially with millions of young Chinese violinists coming along, modern builders are striving to build instruments that will measure up to the best of the 17th and 18th century ones.
Isn't it fascinating that the finest violins ever built, so far, were built in a little town in Italy, Cremona, by three builders, Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari, largely between 1700 and 1750? I can't think of any other example of technology of which this is true. Let's hear one of these violins:
One of the greatest gifts that the world of music gives to those who become musicians is the extraordinary people you may meet. For me the most remarkable person I met in a life of music was the Czech violinist Paul Kling. I taught at the same conservatory as his wife, Taka Kling, a very charming Japanese woman. We even shared a recital together once. But I was very privileged to come to know her husband. Somehow it was decided that one day we would get together and read some music for violin and guitar--Giuliani, I believe. Now at this time I was already an established artist, a graduate of McGill University with a Concert Diploma in classical guitar and chairman of the guitar department at the conservatory. But this experience was extraordinary as I realized quite quickly that Paul was a truly great musician. I had never played chamber music with someone of his quality before. We ended up doing quite a few concerts together and he asked me to come teach at the university where he was chairman of the School of Music.
He had a great sense of humor. A friend of mine and I were just coming out of a concert by a young Canadian cellist, known for her orgasmic expressions while playing, and when we said something critical he replied, in his distinctive Czech accent, "you were expecting maybe Rostropovich?" A young violinist was auditioning for the performance program--this was at the University of Victoria in British Columbia--and she rather brashly said, "why should I come study here instead of one of the bigger music schools?" He said, "Well, I've been fooling everyone for fifty years, I can fool you too." He used to tell a story about his grandfather and father. His grandfather was a doctor and had a good practice. He was prosperous and had a nice house and some land. Then came World War I and after the war they moved all the borders around and now his grandfather's house was in another country. His father also became a doctor, had a nice practice, bought a house and some land. Then came World War II and after the war they moved all the borders and now his father's house was also in another country. "So I became a violinist."
He told me about studying in Vienna. One day he had an amazing lesson in which his teacher told him the great secret of violin-playing. He was so excited afterwards he walked around Vienna for hours, taking the occasional coffee and pastry in the marvelous coffee shops they have. Finally he got back to his apartment and as he went in he suddenly realized he had forgotten what his teacher said! If you were going on a trip somewhere, to France, or the US or Japan or Brazil, he always knew the best restaurants.
He was a violinist of great accomplishment. At seven he played Mozart and Bach concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic. At nine he was broadcast on Austrian radio. He was concertmaster in Tokyo and Louisville, Kentucky. He toured Japan with Herbert von Karajan playing the Brahms violin concerto. Once I lent him a fine recording of Itzak Perlman and John Williams playing music for violin and guitar and all he said when he returned it was "Perlman always plays sharp." I had a listen, and yes, he was right.
Another good friend of mine, also Czech, told me an amazing story about Paul Kling: he was Jewish and when he was quite young, fifteen years old, he was sent to a concentration camp. In 1943 he arrived in Terezin where he played music under the auspices of a program set up by the SS called Freizeitgestaltung. This did not last too long. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. He never spoke of these things, but my friend, a pianist, knew because her parents had also been in Auschwitz. He had brought his violin along with him to Terezin, of course, but no scores. He said later on, “I had everything memorized. And I wasn't thinking of, you know, staying there for a long vacation." What sort of violinist was Paul Kling? He reminded me of Jascha Heifetz more than anyone else. He once said that every great violinist in the 20th century was either a Russian Jew from the Caucasus or studied with one. On one occasion we were doing a recital together and decided that we would each play a solo piece. I called him up and asked him what he had decided on and he said "the Chaconne". The Chaconne, as opposed to all the other chaconnes, is the last movement of the 2nd Partita for solo violin by J. S. Bach and is not only the greatest piece for solo violin, but also one of the greatest pieces from the Baroque Era. Good heavens, I thought, what could I possibly play? His performance was sheer perfection. Here is a brief online biography of Paul Kling. And below is a photo taken when we were doing a chamber music series together. Paul is holding his Guarnerius violin.
Paul Kling, Bryan Townsend, Michael Strutt and Lanny Pollet
I have a CD of Paul playing the Beethoven violin concerto that was presented to him when he was awarded the Cross of Honour for Arts and Letters by the President of Austria. But all I can find of him on YouTube is this performance of the Easley Blackwood Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op 21:
UPDATE: I see there is a new Wikipedia entry for Paul Kling that links to this post. While I am flattered, I must correct an error. Paul passed away in 2005. I simply chose to do a post on him in 2011. For some odd reason, the Wikipedia entry takes the date of my post as the date of his passing. ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks to a commentator, more of Paul Kling has turned up. You can go to YouTube and listen to his recordings of the Violin Sonatas nos. 4 and 5 by Beethoven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m8Q0nrDzxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqRfJFOfUEE
David Garrett is apparently known for being the "world's fastest violinist", attested to by Guinness and everything. Here he is ripping through the "Flight of the Bumblebee", an orchestral interlude from the opera The Tale of Tsar Tsaltan by Rimsky-Korsakov:
This reminds me of a telephone call I received once from someone seeking guitar lessons. He stated that his fondest desire was to play really fast scales, to which I replied "why"? The conversation went downhill from there as it turned out that his favorite genre was 'death-metal' and I said I doubted I could help him. One thing I said that turned him off was that fast scales are just about the most boring thing in music. OK, let's listen to some more of David Garrett. Here he is playing the Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 by J. S. Bach:
He doesn't just play the classics, of course. He also plays a little Metallica:
Should we hear one more, just to get the full picture? I can't quite bear to either listen to or post his mugging of Beethoven, so let's hear the inevitable "Kashmir", originally by Led Zeppelin:
David Garrett seems the ideal crossover artist: he is male-model good-looking, he has tremendous facility and he plays all the usual war-horses, including the new warhorses by Metallica and Led Zeppelin. But he also has that other necessity for real commercial success: no musical expression. I talked about musical expression in this post. There is a lot of music that has a purely utilitarian purpose such as work songs, communal music of various kinds, pure dance music and so on. But most of the music we listen to for aesthetic pleasure involves some kind of individual or group human expression. As Beethoven inscribed on a manuscript of his "Missa Solemnis", "from the heart -- may it go to the heart". Even a halting performance by an inexpert amateur can be genuine human expression. Sometimes, however, in the professional world of music, we hear expression being either neglected or faked. I think that is what is happening with David Garrett. To anyone who actually likes Bach, his Bach is agonizing. The Air played too fast with rock drums? Beethoven put through a blender? On the other hand, Metallica with tender expression? This is fakery and tricks. David Garrett is a male version of Vanessa Mae:
A long time ago a friend and I attended a concert by another crossover artist, a young female cellist who specialized in orgasmic expressions. As we were leaving we ran into another friend, a truly great violinist and we said something critical about the concert. He replied, and you have to imagine this with a Czech accent: "you were expecting maybe Rostropovich"?
There is musical expression and there is something else we might call 'anti-musical' expression--a performance that may amuse or something, but is the very antithesis of real human musical expression. As long as you aren't expecting the real thing. Speaking of:
The piece that really converted me to classical music from being a pop musician was not something by Bach or Beethoven but the Tchaikovsky violin concerto:
To someone whose most exalted ideal of instrumental virtuosity and expression was Eric Clapton, this was quite a revelation! I soon moved on to Debussy, Dvorak and Bach, but continued to be attracted by the expressivity of the violin accompanied by orchestra:
Of course both Bach and Beethoven wrote concertos for the violin. Here is the Bach E-major:
And the Beethoven, which begins, most unusually, with four beats on the tympani:
The violin concerto has endured through four different eras of music history so far, which is an extraordinary thing in itself. Vivaldi wrote innumerable ones in the Baroque:
Mozart added some in the Classical Era:
Brahms and many others in the Romantic Era:
But it was equally popular in the 20th century with a great one by Sibelius:
And another great one by Berg:
Now, in the 21st century, the violin concerto is still going strong with a new one byEsa-Pekka Salonen from 2009 for which he just won an important award:
The amazing longevity of this particular instrumental--well, form isn't quite the right word, nor style--genre?--is that it has proved so adaptable. The structure of the Baroque concerto is quite different from the Classical and so on. In the 20th and 21st centuries entirely new ways of putting together a violin concerto had to be found. But found they were, because the basic idea of a single violinist opposed and in concert with an orchestra is a compelling one that composers never seem to tire of exploring...
