Program Notes for September 10-13, 2009
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Chaconne (from Partita No. 2 BWV 1004, for solo violin)
Johann Sebastian Bach
A hypothetical orchestral model of J. S. Bach’s Chaconne by Mark Starr
From 1717–1723, while serving as music director for the young, music-loving Prince Leopold in Cöthen, Bach is thought to have composed most of his secular instrumental music: the six Brandenburg Concerti, the orchestral suites, the suites for unaccompanied cello, and the three sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.
The last movement of the second partita is Bach’s monumental Chaconne. Its length exceeds that of all of the other four movements in the partita combined, a fact that pales in relation to the magnitude of the work’s technical originality, complexity, and profundity. In a realm all its own, the elusive, awe-inspiring Chaconne occupies a revered place not only within the violin repertoire, but also within the canon of Western music.
Why does this piece have a near mystical hold on so many of its listeners and interpreters? It demands just about the impossible from the violinist, pushing the envelope technically and musically. Part of the immense effect produced by the piece resides in the sheer Herculean effort required of the soloist to play it. As commentator Roger Scruton keenly observed, “The performer’s effort must be heard in the music, but heard too as part of the music.” Bach’s Chaconne pushes both instrument and player to their outer, near excruciating limits.
A highly structured dance type, the chaconne is thought to have originated in South America before migrating to Spain and then to France in the seventeenth century. Bach’s Chaconne is structured on a four-bar repeating bass line that is heard 64 times with a total of 32 variations. In three large sections, it begins in D minor, moves to D major and then returns to D minor.
For nearly 300 hundred years the Chaconne has captured the imaginations of countless performers and listeners, and has produced numerous and widely varying arrangements for organ, string quartet, and piano trio, among others. Andrés Segovia produced a now standard guitar transcription; Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn wrote arrangements for violin with piano accompaniment; and at least 18 piano transcriptions exist, including the well-known version by Ferruccio Busoni. Johannes Brahms created a transcription for left-hand piano solo, about which he wrote in a letter to Clara Schumann: “The Chaconne is in my opinion one of the most wonderful and incomprehensible pieces of music…There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone…The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, all this makes me feel like a violinist!”
The Chaconne is otherworldly, with music that is heard and unheard. It condenses an entire universe of sound replete with multiple voices and rich harmonies produced by one human, one violin, and one bow. As listeners we, too, are called upon to participate in the musical process: to fill in the lines and voices that Bach’s music hints at.
The project of filling in what the solo violin can only suggest in certain passages is what inspired Mark Starr to orchestrate six of Bach’s works for solo instruments, a project he calls Hypothetical Orchestral Models. His arrangement of the Chaconne attempts to answer the question, “What might this particular work by Bach have sounded like if Bach had decided to arrange it for an orchestral ensemble such as was readily available to him at various stages in his career?”
Starr gives us a version of the Chaconne that Bach himself might have heard using instrumental forces that would have been at Bach’s disposal, or one that Bach might have heard in his own mind while composing in order to make manifest what the score inherently implies. Starr describes his conjectural orchestration in this way: “[My arrangement of the] Chaconne uses a string orchestra with harpsichord continuo. This is the same orchestral ensemble that Bach utilized in the Third Brandenburg Concerto in G Major, and also the famous Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major.” Starr has no intention of “improving” Bach, nor does he attempt to compete with the massive early 20th century orchestrations of Stokowksi or Ormandy. “My intention is to show an orchestral aspect of this music that is fundamental to Bach's conception, but that, up-to-now, could only be imagined—but not actually heard in live or recorded performances on the solo violin.”
Concerto for Violin in D minor (BWV 1052)
Johann Sebastian Bach;
Arranged by Robert Reitz
A concerto for violin in D minor by Bach? We’re familiar with his violin concertos in A minor and E major. And yes, there is the concerto for two violins in D minor, but we don’t often hear of a concerto for one violin in D minor. The work we hear in this form owes its existence to transcription, because the only documentation Bach left of this work is a draft of a harpsichord concerto from about 1738. To further confound matters, it was believed for years that this concerto was originally composed for violin. Indeed, in either form this concerto is a work of unique richness and complexity, masterfully advancing the technical capabilities of both keyboard and stringed instruments. As a work featuring keyboard soloist, this concerto dates from 1723–1750, when Bach was in Leipzig and in need of more keyboard repertoire for his Collegium Musicum students to perform; as a result he assembled a set of harpsichord concertos. About 100 years later, Felix Mendelssohn performed this work in his Historical Concerts of 1835 to great acclaim by both the audience and by music critic and composer Robert Schumann; Johannes Brahms also played the concerto and even wrote a cadenza for its first movement.
For years scholars presumed that this keyboard concerto had been recycled from the lost manuscript of a previously composed violin concerto, a theory advanced at least as far back as 1869 by Wilhelm Rust, editor of the first complete works of Bach. It is understandable that such a hypothesis gained traction, given the passagework that seems so naturally suited to the violin.
Yet because a fair amount of Bach’s music is considered lost, there has been much speculation about the origins of works thought to be “missing.” One of today’s leading Bach scholars, Christoph Wolff, contends that “it seems more plausible to see in BWV 1052 an original keyboard work, most likely an organ concerto, that integrates innovative ‘violinistic’ passagework in the absence of a model or prototype for keyboard concerto style.”
While we may never know with absolute certainty what instrument Bach first designated to serve as this concerto’s soloist, we do know that its “violinistic” qualities were not lost on string players. Among the first to rework the piece using violin was renowned violinist Ferdinand David in 1873.
For tonight’s concert, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has chosen to perform a version of the concerto transcribed in 1917 by Robert Reitz, well known in Germany as a violinist, concertizer, and pedagogue. His transcription was the performing version used in recordings over the years by Joseph Szigeti, Igor Oistrakh, and Itzhak Perlman. Information about Reitz is scant, though we do know that he served as director of a Weimar music academy in the 1920s, and that one of his violin students, Marlene Dietrich, reported having lost her innocence in an “uncomfortable” encounter with the “famous Professor Reitz”—an episode documented in The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McClellan.
The concerto adheres to the traditional Italian model of fast-slow-fast. The opening Allegro begins with a statement by the ensemble; the soloist emerges from the group with a response that deepens and intensifies the conversation. The movement is pure drive and energy, demanding remarkable virtuosity of the soloist. The Adagio offers an expressive, plaintive aria in G minor. The lilting final allegro belongs to a soundscape similar to that of the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3; this movement features a cadenza written by Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg. Already in this work, one hears how Bach had both assimilated many of the conventions of the Baroque concerto but also ventured beyond by granting the soloist a greater degree of independence from the ensemble.
Pictures at an Exhibition
Modest Mussorgsky;
Arranged by Clarice Assad
If you are familiar with Pictures at an Exhibition, chances are your first hearing of it was Maurice Ravel’s orchestral transcription, and your experience of the original piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky came later. It has been asserted that were it not for Ravel’s orchestration, listeners might have little familiarity with Mussorgsky’s Pictures. Until recently Ravel’s transcription, made at the behest of Serge Koussevitzky in 1922, had practically eclipsed Mussorgsky’s original 1874 composition, and it still dominates most live and recorded performances. Most concert-goers have heard at least one version of Pictures, yet Mussorgsky never heard it performed during his lifetime.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures has attained a kind of cult status, generating literally hundreds of arrangements: over thirty-five for orchestra, and countless others for every instrumental ensemble and in every musical idiom imaginable. There’s a version for mallet trio, one by the Swingle Singers, and a rock version by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Its influence spans continents, cultures, and disciplines to include the Taiwan Mussorgsky Project and Astronomical Pictures at an Exhibition. In the classical world, conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy wrote and recorded his own orchestral transcription, based on Mussorgsky’s original manuscript. Conductor Leonard Slatkin put out a CD showcasing a different arranger for each picture. There is even an international organization dedicated solely to tracking all of the numerous arrangements of the work in existence.
Like many listeners, both Clarice Assad and Nadja Salerno-Son¬nenberg first experienced Mussorgsky’s Pictures via Ravel. Salerno-Sonnenberg connected with Pictures through an LP in her mother’s record collection. “This piece and [Rimsky-Korsakov’s] Scheherazade were my favorites as a kid…because they were so unbelievably visual. I would sit next to the big speaker and just daydream.” And it was only natural that Ms. Assad—who works as a composer, arranger, and orchestrator—“fell in love with the Ravel version.”
To prepare for her arrangement, Ms. Assad worked with the scores of both Mussorgsky and Ravel, and she viewed Victor Hartmann’s pictures. Ms. Assad was plagued by an “anxiety of influence” given the task of transcribing for small orchestra a work that had already been so masterfully orchestrated by Ravel. In Assad’s words: “How could I possibly improve on Ravel? That huge sound! I was taking away many instruments, and I was worried about dealing with that loss of sonority.”
While Ravel’s orchestration calls for a mob of musicians, Assad’s arrangement calls for strings, piano and a variety of percussion instruments: crotales, hi hat, suspended cymbal, sizzle cymbal, crash cymbal, high, medium and low toms, snare drum, tubular bells, tam tam, vibraslap, glockenspiel, glass chimes, metal chimes, tar, sleigh bells, flexatone, triangle, medium bass drum, large bass drum, woodblocks, brake drum, ceramic tile, and medium metal pipe.
Assad refined her sound palette by calling for the strings of the piano to be plucked and drummed, and asking the strings to play sul ponticello (on the bridge) and glissandi (glides on the string). Assad conceptualized the work by “picturing” the New Century Chamber Orchestra, imagining not only what the piece would sound like, but also what it would look like. In this way, Assad played (and punned) on the visual element in Mussorgsky’s work.
The story surrounding the work’s genesis has become almost legend. Vladimir Stasov, influential art promoter, ardent proponent of Russian culture—and passionate supporter of both Mussorgsky and artist Victor Hartmann—organized an exhibition of some 400 of Hartmann’s works in 1874, the year after Hartmann’s death. Mussorgsky was deeply shaken by the loss of his friend and colleague, with whom he shared a vision for a revitalized and distinctively nationalist Russian style in art. Soon after viewing the exhibition, Mussorgsky immediately began work on the piece. He completed Pictures at an Exhibition in only weeks, and dedicated the suite to his friend Stasov. Mussorgsky died 8 years later, in 1881 at the age of 42. Pictures was published 5 years later, in 1886.
Mussorgsky’s “pictures” do not always reference Hartmann’s pictures; Mussorgsky’s music evokes images as much as they do attitudes and states of mind. There is little documentation from Mussorgsky about his visit to the exhibition; most of our knowledge about Pictures is filtered through comments by Stasov, whose “reading” of Pictures dominates most listeners’ experience.
What the composer did provide in his score were titles for each of the sections, all of which Stasov expanded upon and a few of which he suppressed—likely to downplay any injurious connotations. Mussorgsky gave another clue about his relationship to Pictures in a remark about the work’s Promenade. “My profile,” Mussorgsky wrote, “can be seen in the interludes.”
The Promenade motif serves as frame for most of the pictures. In the first part, the Promenade recurs after each picture; in the second, it functions less independently and suffuses the musical material of the pictures themselves. As one writer on Mussorgsky has suggested, “the Promenade theme, which represents Mussorgsky himself, shows how by the end he has been drawn into the pictures and is no longer viewing them from outside.”
Though most of Hartmann’s works are lost, some have been confirmed as either part of the exhibit or created by Hartmann.
For Clarice Assad, the final movement, La Grande Porte de Kiev, was by far the most difficult movement to arrange. "What I thought at first was that the intensity keeps building. I had to remove all memories of Ravel's version from my head to accomplish this task. It helped to remind myself that this piece was actually written for piano, since there is only so much the piano can do as far as sustaining dynamics. Mussorgsky’s original score markings ask the piano to crescendo where clearly the piano cannot. Then I realized that this movement is all about attitude. Mussorgsky’s dynamic markings were more psychological. He wanted the performer to find a place of deep intensity. Ultimately this is how I approached my arrangement. And I know that this orchestra does an amazing job in creating such deep psychological intensity."