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Farewell Emerson

Hello all,

We’ve done a wide range of series here on This Week’s Music over the past eight (8!) years. We’ve done series on music written for a particular instrument, series on the music of individual composers, and series on entire eras of music. Until now, however, we’ve never done a series about a single ensemble. But I think it is time we do. The legendary Emerson String Quartet will be wrapping up its 47-year career next week, so I thought it would be nice to spend a few weeks listening to their best recordings and performances.

Philip Setzer, Eugene Drucker, Guillermo Figueroa, and Eric Wilson formed the Emerson String Quartet in New York City in 1976. Figueroa was soon replaced on viola by Lawrence Dutton, who remains the ensemble’s violist today. And Wilson was replaced by David Finckel, who remained the (much-loved) cellist of the ensemble until he was succeeded by Paul Watkins in 2013. The ensemble took its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. They made history by not designating a first violinist; instead, they rotated between their two violin players as to who led the quartet. Over the years, the Emerson made more than 30 recordings and won nine Grammys, three Grammophone awards, and the prestigious Avery Fisher prize. Their unmatched discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartok, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvorak. They have taught as faculty-in-residence at Stony Brook University since the mid-1990s and have been given honorary musical doctorates from over twenty other conservatories and universities.

After announcing their retirement this past spring, the Emerson embarked on a jaw-dropping international farewell tour that included over 100 performances of the entire Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann, and Shostakovich string quartet cycles across 60 countries. And if that weren’t enough, they also released three new albums in 2023 alone! (Most ensembles are lucky to do one per year).

All of the Emerson’s recordings are masterful, but their interpretations of four composers in particular have received special commendation: late period Beethoven, Shostakovich, Bartok, and Ives. Thus, for the next four weeks, we will listen to the Emerson’s best recordings and performances of those four composers’ works. And to start things off, we will be listening today to one of their live performances of the first movement of Beethoven’s twelfth string quartet.

The twelfth string quartet is the first chamber music composition in Beethoven’s late period (1822-1825). The first movement is structured in sonata form (opening-development-recapitulation) with a few twists thrown in. For instance, Beethoven opens the movement with a six-bar chorale before introducing the primary theme in bar 7. Later, the choral returns in a bizarre rhythmic structure in which the time signature remains 4/4 but the underlying quarter notes are grouped 5 + 3. Beethoven also included multiple canons in the movement, each one using a different fragment of the opening theme.

Enjoy!

T

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Franck Sonata – Part 2

Hello all,

This week’s music will be the final two movements of the Sonata in A Major for violin and piano by Caesar Franck, performed by John Donkersloot on piano and myself on violin.

As I mentioned when we listened to the first and second movements last week, Franck presents musical ideas in the earlier movements that are then recycled throughout the remainder of the sonata. The third movement is more chromatic and temperamentally unpredictable than the first two movements, but it also revisits the primary themes that were introduced in the second movement and the opening line of the first movement. The movement is titled Fantasia; listen for the violin’s virtuosic solos at the start.

The fourth and final movement is pure lyricism, pure Romanticism, pure elegance. The initial theme, which flows lightly and gracefully through the opening bars, is presented in a canon. A canon is a musical form in which two instruments play the same melody, but in a staggered form (one following the other, always a few bars behind). After a brief detour into the stormy fantasies of the third movement, Franck brings back the lyrical theme to close the sonata with a swelling, soaring A major flourish.

Enjoy!

T

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Franck Sonata – Part 1

Hello all,

The centerpiece of the recital program was the famous Sonata in A Major by the French composer Caesar Franck, a piece that is arguably the cornerstone of the entire violin-piano sonata repertoire. It is a monumental sonata, both in length and musical depth, so I am going to present it to you in two separate posts. This week, we will hear the first and second movements. The third and fourth movements will follow next week.

Franck wrote the sonata as a wedding gift for the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye, a towering figure (both musically and physically) in the late 19th-century musical world. Ysaye, who wrote six famous solo violin sonatas of his own, played the Franck sonata on tour in an effort to bring Franck’s music to the broader public. In doing so, he cemented the work as a mainstay of the violin-piano performance repertoire.

The first movement presents, in the violin’s opening lines, one of the main themes of the sonata. It is slow, ethereal, and reflective. Later, you can hear the second main theme of the sonata in the piano. In this movement, Franck perfectly captured the floating, almost vanishing quality typical of turn-of-the-century French composers.

John deserves the majority of the kudos for the second movement, since Franck (a pianist himself) created a piano part that far outpaces the violin part in its complexity and difficulty. From the very first bar of the movement, the piano hurtles through mountains of devilish D-Minor runs and arpeggios, eventually doubling the violin’s offbeat presentation of the turbulent primary theme. There are two interludes in the madness (listen for fragments of the first movement here!), but both eventually resolve into the primary theme after more roiling piano escapades. After a pell-mell race to the finish, the instruments arrive at a triumphant D-Major chord that bookends the harmonic journey of the movement.

Enjoy!

T

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A Closer Look

Hello all,

I recently shared a video of the performance of my Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano. In that post, I mentioned that one of my goals in writing the sonata was to write music that was distinctly American. Today, I wanted to walk through the first few minutes of the sonata and explain some of the American musical influences that went into it.

The piano opens the work with calm, alternating chords made up of spacious intervals like fifths, sixths, and octaves. Over this foundation emerges the violin, which presents the main melody of the sonata’s first movement. That melody is comprised almost entirely of fourths and fifths, intervals that were popularized in the American musical imagination by Aaron Copland and film composers like Erich Korngold. In this way, even the intervals that comprise the opening melody of the sonata are American.

The opening melody also draws on film music, another uniquely American genre. Some of you may recognize strains of the theme song from the Laura Ingalls Wilder movies hidden in parts of the melody. Notably, that theme song is also comprised of mostly fourths and fifths.

The violin then accelerates fragments of the opening melody, and the instruments descend together into the secondary melody of the first movement, a ragtime. Ragtime is another uniquely American genre, one that has not often been featured in our concert halls. The violin presents the ragtime melody, then passes it to the piano, which elaborates on it with virtuosic runs and flourishes.

Fourths and fifths are again featured in the canon (a musical form in which two instruments play the same melody, but in staggered order) that follows the ragtime section. The violin takes the fragments of the opening melody that it explored earlier and melds them into an accelerating climb. As the instruments near the peak of the phrase, the piano intensifies the excitement with octaves and tenths. At the peak, the two instruments tumble downhill, pushing and pulling in “two versus three” metered combat until crashing together into a resolving D Major chord.

The above video is only the first three minutes of the first movement. The subsequent minutes contain many more examples of the incorporation of American musical heritage into the score. However, hopefully these few paragraphs give you a glimpse of the way I tried to work that heritage into the sonata.

Enjoy,

T

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Liebeslied

Hello all,

John and I including in our program the short song Liebesleid (Love’s Sorrow), by the great 20th-century virtuoso violinist Fritz Kreisler. There’s not much to say about this piece, other than to acknowledge that it is simply beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.

Enjoy!

T

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World Premiere

Hello all,

Today we will be listening to the first movement of a sonata for violin and piano that I composed this past winter. This is my first sonata for violin and piano, and it is also my first foray into chamber music. I’ve been composing for about five years now, but most of what I’ve done previously has been choral or orchestral music.

When I set out to write this sonata, I had two goals. First, I wanted to write tonal music. Since the middle of the 20th century, much of musical world has turned to the 12-tone method (also known as serialism) as the new frontier in music composition. This method, spearheaded by Arnold Schoenberg and theorists like Theodore Adorno, sought to discard the hierarchical structure of the octave in favor of a system in which all twelve semi-tones were equal. In my view, this was a bad development. It has led to a generation of unintelligible, ugly music that the ordinary listener cannot understand or appreciate. My goal is to join with composers like James MacMillan, David Matthews, David Conte, and others who are writing fresh, contemporary music that doesn’t abandon tonality but rather uses it in new and exciting ways.

Second, I wanted to write distinctly American music. While much of the musical academy operates on the assumption that anything European is better than anything American, I believe American music – including jazz, ragtime, film music, blues, fiddle, folk, and more – should be proudly incorporated into our concert halls. To that end, you will hear elements of jazz and ragtime, as well as some movie music elements, in the first movement of the sonata. (The second and third movements, which you won’t hear today, are similar. The second movement is based on an American hymn tune, and the third movement is a mash-up of several different American fiddle tunes). And throughout all of the movements are traces of the American classical music composers, most notably Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, and John Corigliano.

Enjoy!

T

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Something different…

Hello all,

My good friend John and I gave a recital this past weekend. We played three sonatas for violin and piano, starting with the A Major sonata by Mozart, which you will hear today.

The sonata has two movements. The first movement follows the typical sonata format – introduction, development, and recapitulation. The introduction presents the main theme(s) of the movement; the development modulates and explores those themes from new angles; and the recapitulation returns to the original theme(s).

The second movement is a set of variations on a simple theme. Some variations are fast and upbeat, while others are pensive and subdued. But all of them are quintessentially Mozart. Listen for the way the violin and piano take turns presenting each variation.

Enjoy!

T

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Verklarte Nacht

This week’s music is Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, performed by two of the world’s best string quartets.

Schoenberg is one of the most pivotal and polarizing characters in the story of music. His early career include works like Verklarte Nacht, which reveal his unbelievable talent and his complete mastery of tonal harmony. However, later in his career, he came under the influence of the Marxist philosopher Theodore Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School. Soon afterward, Schoenberg began advocating for the “liberation of dissonance,” and his music devolved into unplayable 12-tone serialism. Today, the only Schoenberg compositions that are performed are those from his early years; audiences have made it clear to musicians that the unintelligibility of Schoenberg’s later works do not interest them.

Schoenberg’s early works are in a league of their own, and Verklarte Nacht may be at the top of that league. It bridges the gap between Romantic and 20th-century music like nothing else. You will hear lush, almost Mendelssohn-esque passages, but you will also hear forecasts to the modernism of Prokofiev and Ives. A critic from the Los Angeles Philharmonic said it best: “Lush, dense, highly chromatic yet still just within the bounds of tonality, [Verklarte Nacht] can be regarded as a very late example of 19th century German Romanticism, a natural product of the trajectory from Beethoven and Schubert to Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss.”

Enjoy!

T

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Spring

Hello all,

This week’s music is the “Spring” Sonata No. 5 in F Major by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Italian pianist Enrico Pace.

This four-movement sonata was not originally nicknamed “Spring”—that name was given to it later, by audiences who thought the opening bars of the first movement were reminiscent of a blossoming spring-time meadow—but it was designed to be light-hearted and lyrical. None of the movements feature the dark, powerful motifs so often associated with Beethoven. On the contrary, they are all remarkable cheerful, perhaps even Mozartian.

In the first movement, listen for the way the violin and piano trade the opening line and recycle it through multiple tonalities. Beethoven is a genius at fragmenting a melody, then bringing it back in unexpected ways. The second movement is written in song form, leading some scholars to wonder if it was originally a lullaby. You’ll hear a dance-like trio in the third movement, evidence of Beethoven’s tutelage under the great Franz Joseph Haydn, and the characteristic Rondo that finishes so many sonatas of the Classical era.

Enjoy!

T

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Pie Jesu

Happy Easter all!

To finish our short series on music relating to the celebration of Easter, we will listen to Pie Jesu from the Requiem by the great French composer Gabriel Faure. It is performed by the singers of the ensemble Voces8.

Faure’s Requiem was written as a prayerful tribute to his father. It is somewhat strange that he would have written a Requiem, an inherently religious work, given that he was not religious and described himself as a “sceptic.” Yet Faure’s Requiem is unique among religious compositions in that it avoids the somber, often heavy nature of those works and instead creates a light, serene atmosphere.  

The Pie Jesu is the most well-known portion of the Reqiuem. Most requiems are based on an opening movement titled dies irae, which introduces the thematic material for the entire work and presents the text of the Latin mass. Pie Jesu is simply the last verse of the dies irae.

Enjoy!

T