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Lark

Hello all,

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:

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound,

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,

Tis love of earth that he instills,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows

to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings

In light, and then the fancy sings.

Enjoy!

T

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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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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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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