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D Major

Hello all,

This past weekend I had the privilege of hearing Maxim Vengerov (violin) and Polina Osetinskaya (piano) in recital. They played several works by Brahms and Schumann (as well as three encores by Rachmaninoff!), but their performance of Prokofiev’s second violin sonata was the highlight of the evening. I thought I’d share that piece with you this week.

I titled today’s post “D Major” because I’m not sure there is another piece that more fully captures the brightness, energy, and zest of that key. The sonata’s gregarious nature is all the more interesting given the fact that Prokofiev composed it under extremely difficult circumstances. He was evacuated from Moscow in 1941 when the Nazis invaded Russia, but he had to keep moving to avoid being caught in the fighting. Along with his wife Mira, Prokofiev traveled thousands of miles from Nalchik village in the Caucasus Mountains to Tbilisi, Georgi and through Kazakhstan to the city of Perm in the Ural Mountains. Somehow, Prokofiev managed to continue composing during this time. Among other things, he composed his opera War and Peace, the ballet Cinderella, and his second violin sonata.

All four movements of the sonata strictly adhere to the age-old sonata format – presentation, development, and recapitulation. But they also feature Prokofiev’s unmistakably playful and modern style, and Prokofiev does not hesitate to mix in fragments of previous melodies—or abrupt harmonic shifts—to trick the listener into thinking he is deviating from sonata form. The result is a listening experience that is at once exhilarating and familiar.

Enjoy!

T

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Emerson #3

Hello all,

This week’s music is Bela Bartok’s third string quartet, performed by the renowned Emerson String Quartet.

Ask any musician over forty what they think of when they hear the words “Emerson String Quartet” and they will probably tell you they think of the Bartok recordings. The first of the Emerson’s nine Grammy awards came for their recording of the six Bartok string quartets in 1988. At the time, the Emerson was the only ensemble who had ever attempted the Herculean task of recording all six.

Bartok’s third string quartet, written during the 1920s, synthesizes his love of Hungarian folk tunes and the raw physicality of his late modernist style. Bartok seemed to have a way of making dissonance sound punchy, exciting, almost dance-like. You’ll hear this throughout the quartet, juxtaposed with smooth, nocturnal conversations between the instruments and surging outbursts of physicality. Listen for the way Bartok incorporates unique string-playing techniques like glissandos (slides), pizzicato (plucking), harmonics, and con sordino (playing behind the bridge) into the music.

Enjoy!

T

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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 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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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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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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Shostakovich Strings #6

Hello all,

This week’s music, which will complete our series on the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, is the String Quartet No. 12, performed by the Jerusalem Quartet.

You may remember from one of the earliest installments in this series that all of Shostakovich’s string quartets were premiered by the Beethoven String Quartet. Because of this, Shostakovich dedicated each of his last four string quartets to a member of the Beethoven Quartet. The twelfth string quartet is thus dedicated to the first violinist, Dmitri Tsyganov.

Those of you who have been with us for a while are probably used to string quartets having four movements. And most of Shostakovich’s string quartets follow this pattern. The twelfth quartet, however, contains only two movements. The first movement begins with a 12-tone row on the cello, perhaps a nod to Arnold Schoenberg’s popular experiments with twelve-tone music. (Shostakovich, it should be said, was not a believer in Schoenberg’s system). This establishes a searching mood, a sense that the movement is seeking closure and is unable to find it. The second movement, however, offers the answers the first movement sought. Listen here for Shostakovich’s brilliant creativity when it comes to rhythm. He creates multiple shifting rhythmic texture that overlap in fascinating ways. After a long, dark passage for solo cello, Shostakovich brings back the initial melody in an epic, breathtaking switch to a major key, the ultimate answer to the unsettled 12-tone row that began the quartet.

It is worth mentioning that Shostakovich’s later string quartets (those composed after the eighth) are controversial. Some listeners like them, others despise them. I am not personally a fan of his later string quartets, with the possible exception of the twelfth, because they seem to get away from the brilliance of the eighth. With that said, I think there is much to enjoy in the twelfth string quartet, and its harmonic journey from dissonance to resolution is, I believe, a fitting way to end our series.

Enjoy!

T

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Shostakovich Strings #5

Hello all,

This week’s music is the most famous of Shostakovich’s string quartets, the eighth, performed by the legendary Emerson Quartet.

Shostakovich was in East Germany to write the score for a film about the bombing of Dresden when the inspiration for the eighth string quartet arrived. Three days later, the composition was completed. Shostakovich dedicated it to the “memory of victims of war.”

The eighth string quartet is, in my opinion, the most emotionally powerful of Shostakovich’s string quartets. Indeed, it is one of the most emotionally powerful works of art to come out of the twentieth century. It is a work of shattering strength and tremendous depth, the kind of work that can leave a listener stunned in their chair, the kind of work that can raise memories long buried and remind us of the fragility and rapidity of life. It is a work that plumbs the depths of human psychology. Like Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, it is a consumate artistic masterpiece.

All five movements of the quartet feature quotations from Shostakovich’s earlier compositions. For instance, first symphony and first cello concerto are reference in the first movement, and the reference to his own initials we saw last week in his fourth string quartet is scattered throughout the second, third, and fifth movements. Shostakovich is reported to have said about the quartet that it was “written in memory of its composer,” which suggests the references to his name were a sort of preemptive requiem.

What should you listen for? If I answered that question completely, this post would turn into a PhD thesis. But here are a few things to keep an ear out for:

  • Shostakovich’s name. It’s everywhere. As we saw last week, Shostakovich signed his name D-E flat-C-B natural in his tenth symphony, his fourth string quartet, and now his eighth string quartet (a permutation of his initials, DSCH, with the B natural substituting the H in German musical nomenclature). Shostakovich places this little signature all over the place, in every key and instrumentation imaginable.
  • The second movement. There’s simply nothing like it. This is Russian music at its fire-breathing, hair-raising best.
  • The symbolism in the fourth movement. The start of the fourth movement features a low drone in the first violin, interrupted by three loud strikes that get repeated several times until they reach a harmonic resolution. These strikes represent the gunfire of warfare, and the droning sound of the first violin represents the sound of distant aircraft. Once the strikes resolve, the droning becomes the first four notes of the dies irae portion of the Catholic requiem mass (which is ironically the same notes as Shostakovich’s signature, DSCH, just in a different order). To call this kind of musical symbolism powerful would be a gross understatement.
  • The fifth movement’s tribute to Bach. As we saw last week, Shostakovich could not resist paying homage to his hero, J.S. Bach, in almost everything he wrote. And the fifth movement is structured in a classic Bach-style fugue. It’s easy to miss because of the achingly sad, elegiac beauty of the fifth movement, but the fugue is there, hiding just under the surface.

Enjoy!

T

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Shostakovich Strings #3

Hello all,

We are continuing our series on the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich with the fourth movement of his fourth string quartet, performed by our old friends, the Jerusalem Quartet.

For those of you familiar with Shostakovich’s work, you can hear elements of his later style in the somewhat dissonant tendencies of the fourth movement. His love of certain forms of dissonance—and in particular, flattened scale degrees—stemmed from his love of Jewish folk music. To Shostakovich, Jewish folk music was “close to my idea of what music should be.” He wrote: “Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express their despair in dance music. All folk music is lovely, but I can say that the Jewish folk music is unique.”

Yet when he was writing this string quartet in 1949, Shostakovich was adamant that it would never be performed. A year earlier, he had been fired from his position as professor at the Moscow Conservatory because of his public opposition to Soviet ideological correctness. And Stalin had banned all Jewish music and literature only a few months before the quartet was composed. Shostakovich was therefore certain that his fourth string quartet would remain unheard for the foreseeable future. As it turned out, the quartet was not heard publicly for many more years. It received its first public performance nine months after Stalin died.

The fourth movement (starting at 14:12 of the video) begins with a simple viola melody inspired by a Jewish folk tune. But don’t let its simplicity deceive you! Wait a few minutes and Shostakovich will be pounding it through dense, multi-layered fugal imitation and dozens of changing meters. He combines the sadness of the Jewish folk melody with the violent excitement of a pulsing dance motif that creates an unforgettable blend of adrenaline and terror.

Enjoy!

T  

4 – last movt starts at 14:12

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Shostakovich Strings #2

Hello all,

This week’s music, as we return to our series on the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, is the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2, performed by the Jerusalem Quartet.

The dark, elusive second string quartet could not be more different than the youthful vigor of the first string quartet (https://thisweeksmusic.com/2022/12/13/shostakovich-strings-1/). Written six years after that first foray into the chamber music realm, the second string quartet reflects the recent Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the heaviness of war. It is intense, unrelenting, and often dissonant.

Shostakovich wrote his second string quartet while staying at a retreat center for writers and composers outside of Moscow. It was later premiered by the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble that Shostakovich ultimately chose to premiere all of his string quartets. I find this choice of ensemble particularly interesting, given that Shostakovich’s compositions, like Beethoven’s, are often divided into three chronological categories: early, middle, and late.

The fourth movement (starting at 24:04) is based on a folk tune that Shostakovich featured in his second piano trio. First, you will hear a sombre (and, in my opinion, extremely Russian-sounding) E-flat minor dialogue between the first violin and the cello. The two instruments trade the folk tune back and forth until the viola ushers the ensemble into a second folk tune in A minor. Shostakovich then puts this new theme through a series of ever-intensifying variations that culminate in a frenzy of punched chords. The movement concludes with a recapitulated variation of each theme and a full-throated and stirring rendition of the original folk tune.

Enjoy!

T