This week’s music is the Allemande from J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for solo cello, performed by Mischa Maisky.
Bach wrote six suites for solo cello between 1717 and 1723 while living Kothen, Germany. The first suite, a part of which you will hear today, has become the most famous of the six. Each suite consists of six movements that represent common baroque dance forms: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, minuet/bouree/gavotte, and gigue. An Allemande was a type of German court dance that involved dancers linking arms and making full or partial turns down a line. Visually, the allemande gave the appearance of a large weave or braid. It was performed primarily by German royalty, and there is an air of courtly majesty in the music.
The six cello suites of J.S. Bach are the foundation of the cello repertoire. Every cellist learns them, and every cello competition requires their performance. They vary in complexity, from simple melodies to rumbling chords, and challenge the cellist in nearly every aspect of technical and musical interpretation.
Fall has arrived, so I thought it was a good time to bring back a piece we’ve heard before that will prepare us for the delights of autumn. Today you will hear the violinist Frederieke Saeijs perform Autumn from Antonio Vivaldi’s famous “Four Seasons” on a 15th-century Italian Guarneri violin. She is accompanied by the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra.
Here’s a quick refresher on the “Four Seasons.” The “Four Seasons” is a set of four violin concertos (or, in the more appropriate Italian plural form, concerti) in which each concerto represents one of the four seasons of the year. The composer is the great Italian violinist Antonio Vivaldi, who penned them around 1716 and later premiered them in Venice to dazzling reviews.
As with the rest of the seasons, Autumn is based on a set of written sonnets. Each movement of the “season” corresponds to one of the sonnets. The first movement’s Allegro, which represents the harvest dance of a drunk farmer (Vivaldi’s subscript says that he has been “inflamed by Bacchus”), is delightfully cheerful. The pensive second movement represents the eventual and peaceful slumber of the tired peasants. The third and final movement depicts a country hunting party setting out a dawn with their horns blaring. If you watch the (incredibly helpful) subtitles that the maker of this video inserted into the video, you’ll be able to see when the hunt begins and what takes place as the hunters journey through the wilderness.
This week’s music is the Prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner’s famous opera Lohengrin. It is performed by the Gurzenich Orchestra under the baton of James Conlon.
Lohengrin is one of the most (over?) dramatic storylines in the opera repertoire. Elsa (no, not the Elsa from Disney’s Frozen) falls in love with a mysterious knight who will not reveal his identity to her. After repeated tries to discover his name, Elsa succeeds in getting the knight to admit – on their wedding night – that he is Lohengrin, a mythical divinity sent to protect Elsa from harm. But there’s a catch: part of Lohengrin’s divinity involves a curse, and the curse means that he must disappear if his identity is ever revealed. He suddenly vanishes, leaving Elsa so stricken with grief that she dies on the spot.
The Prelude to Act III that you will hear today comes right before the wedding, when things are still going well for Elsa. It isn’t long before everything does downhill in a hurry. But at this point, life is still good. Wagner therefore opens the Prelude with a shimmering wave of brass and percussion that create a sense of excitement and forward movement. If you listen closely, you’ll even hear a tambourine near the beginning.
Our music for this week is La Valse by Maurice Ravel, performed by the Orchestre Nationale de France with the legendary Leonard Bernstein conducting.
Ravel initially composed La Valse as a piano duet for his friend Arnold Schoenberg (whose music we’ve heard a couple times before here at TWM). He had often thought of turning it into an orchestral work, but World War I interrupted those efforts. After serving as a driver in the French motor transport corps in the war, Ravel returned to composing in the 1920s. In 1928, he collaborated with ballet choreographer Ida Rubenstein to transpose it for orchestra and create a ballet set in “an imperial court, about 1855.”
One can hear the nostalgic grandeur of the mid-19th century Viennese waltz era combined with the “movie music” modernity of Ravel’s contemporary context. However, the ending of the piece is particularly un-Viennese. Ominous timpani, Brahms-like slides in the strings and brass, and frenetic trumpet lines combine to form an intense and shocking finale. One wonders if this is a result of Ravel’s experiences in World War I and his misgivings about the upper-class “waltz culture” that had contributed to World War I.
This week’s music, in the spirit of the approaching Easter celebration, is Miserere by the Scottish composer James MacMillan, performed by the Swedish choir Sofia Vokalensemble.
Miserere is an eight-part choral work. It is based on the text of Psalm 51, which is oriented around the phrase “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy great mercy.” The lyrics explore the progression from guilt and sin to the hope and redemption that is ultimately found in the resurrected Christ, and MacMillan’s harmonic genius enables him to reflect that progression in the tonal movement of the music. Notice how the piece opens with a sombre free-chanting section in E Minor but ends with a glowing, warm E Major cadence. Along the way, the voices search through a variety of different harmonic contexts and musical atmospheres, reaching a sensational peak that fades into a gentle resolution.
This week’s music is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughn Williams, performed by violinist Hilary Hahn.
The Lark Ascending was inspired by an 1880 George Meredith poem about a skylark in flight. The violin line dips and soars, imitating the path of the bird. The orchestra seems to represent the shifting breeze on which the bird floats. It is a visual picture, created in sound. Vaughn Williams referred to it as his “pastoral romance.”
I think perhaps the best thing I can offer you is the words of the poem on which this piece is based. So without further ado:
This week’s music is Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (nicknamed “the Great”), performed by the London Mozart Players.
Mozart wrote his final three symphonies in the summer of 1788. His untimely death was drawing near, and he had already begun reducing the number of performances he gave. This symphony, in addition to being one of his final musical statements, forecasts the stylistic changes that would soon arrive on the world stage with the birth of Romantic-era music. It hints at a lyricism that is often absent in earlier Classical-era works and begins to expand the orchestral role of previously-ignored instruments like the clarinet, bassoon, and timpani.
The first movement’s hushed, urgent melody and its luscious accompaniment texture are a favorite of listeners around the world. Listen for the ways that Mozart brings this opening theme back throughout the first movement. For instance, in the development (middle) section of the first movement, he suddenly drops into the seemingly random key of F-sharp minor while toying with variations on the original melody.
The third movement is also of interest. At the time of this piece’s composition, the oboe and clarinet were rarely featured in orchestral music. Mozart, however, gives both instruments a prominent role in this part of the symphony. Listen for the oboe solo that recurs throughout the third movement.
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.
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.
This week’s music is Spiegel Im Spiegel by the Estonian composer Arvo Part.
Spiegel im Spiegel is, like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, one of the most powerful pieces of music written in the 20th century. It consists of a single solo line (in this performance, violin) over a piano accompaniment. The title of the 1978 piece means “Mirror in the Mirror,” and it describes how the pieces progresses. The melody, which starts with only two notes, is a repeated set of ascending melodic phrases that are mirrored by a descending mirror phrase. The ascents are broken by periodic returns to the central pitch of A. The piano, mirroring these changes with ascents and descents of its own, plays what are called tintinnabula notes, which are bell-like tones that sound above and below the melodic line following a fixed formula.
Arvo Part’s view of musical performance is relevant to the simple style of this piece: “Everything redundant must be left aside. Just like the composer has to reduce his ego when writing the music, the musician too must put his ego aside when performing the piece.” In a way, the musical atmosphere of Spiegel im Spiegel is a reflection of Part’s own view of music.
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