Folk 'N' Fancy - May 20 & 21, 2023

PROGRAM NOTES

Béla Bartók
(Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary in 1881; died in New York City in 1945)

Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 68, BB 76

(The six movements are described by their Hungarian subtitles followed by the English translation)

1. Joc cu bâtǎ (Stick Dance). Allegro moderato

2. Brâul (Sash Dance). Allegro

3. Pê-loc (In One Spot). Andante

4. Buciumeana (Dance from Bucium). Moderato

5. Poargǎ româneascǎ (Romanian Polka). Allegro

6. Mǎrunţel (Fast Dance). Allegro

For the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, studying traditional folk music was a passion — it was of interest to him anthropologically and nationalistically, as well as musically. But it was the musicality of folksong that was most important to him, and folksongs informed, often outright, much of his composing. When he began to discover the riches of the folksongs from Transylvania around 1903, Bartók said he had “found” his own voice as well. From that point on, his tireless love for traditional music blossomed, becoming one of his musical lodestars for the rest of his life.

The set of six folk dances featured in our concert comes from Bartók’s second collecting trip to Transylvania (then politically a part of Hungary) in 1910–12, when he was able to make field recordings using the then-new technology of wax cylinders. Bartók first reimagined these dances as a short piano suite entitled “Hungarian Folk Dances” in 1915. He kept this title when he rearranged the work for a small orchestra in 1917. The orchestrated version, however, was not published until after the restructuring of Europe that followed World War I, and by that time Transylvania had become part of Romania. Thus, the orchestra version was published as “Romanian Folk Dances,” and this is the name we continue to use today. The melodies of these dances are mostly true to the dances Bartók originally recorded, but since such dances were typically played solo on a regional fiddle or indigenous “peasant” flute, Bartók added harmonic accompaniment. The brilliant brevity of this set of dances — all six of them are typically performed in under seven minutes even with a pause between each — and the dances’ light, but deeply effective, harmonizations have made Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances one of his most popular works.

(1) Stick Dance. Bartók reportedly heard two Romani (Gypsy) fiddlers romping with this first tune. Such Transylvanian stick dances, according to the Dutch author Martinus Nijhoff, were danced by men as “a solo dance, with various figures [dance movements] the last of which—as a consummation—consists of kicking the room’s ceiling.” The dance is as graceful as it is lively, and here, it is especially tuneful.

(2) Sash Dance. This dance has a particularly sweet and carefree melody. It likely is part of a courtship dance in which the female dancer uses a sash or a decorative belt as a prop; one can imagine her flashing flirtatious smiles over her shoulder.

(3) In One Spot. This a stamping dance, and Bartók imaginatively scored it for drone-like strings with a piccolo solo played overtop (Bartók said he first heard this song played on a peasant’s flute, an instrument akin to a penny whistle,) Transylvanian “stamping” could be as much about being seductively graceful as about athleticism. Indeed, the exotic-sounding mode (key) that Bartók exploits here reminds us of the Turkish-infused music that once was played in the area during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, when the whole region was a part of the Ottoman Empire, before it came under Hungarian rule.

(4) Dance from Bucium. There’s little documentation now of what social purpose this dance, also called the “Horn Dance,” from Bucium might have served in 1910. The area of Bucium, where Bartók collected this tune, was once a Roman military post in northeastern Transylvania, and the area likely saw quite a few travelers from foreign lands drift through. The tempo of this dance in Bartók’s original recording was much faster than it is recast here, where it is much more pensive with echoes of nostalgia permeating the beautiful tune. Again, the mode (key) sounds exotic like the preceding dance, reminding us of how musical elements likely traveled through this crossroad of Bucium.

(5) Romanian Polka. This polka was the Transylvanian version of the well-known polka that originated in what is now the Czech Republic and spread rapidly through Europe in the 1800s. Bartók captures brilliantly the rowdy and joyful character of its Transylvanian manifestation. This polka is set in three-bar phrases — two measures with three beats, ending with one measure having only two beats. The odd two-beat measure apparently allowed for a quick change of partners.

(6) Fast Dance. This final dance is two fast dances separated by a split-second pause. A fast dance is typically a hyperactive dance for couples arranged in columns of males and females. Fast fiddling and syncopation accompany the dancing, along with foot stamping and thigh slapping (recreated here with loud musical accents). The first dance in this pair is indeed fast and extremely brief and vibrant. The second dance is even faster and more exuberant. Together, they constitute an exhilarating ending to this wonderful early work. And as a footnote, you can detect here a precursor to the whirling, exciting final movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which he composed three decades later in 1945, shortly before his death.

Amanda Harberg
(Born in Philadelphia in 1973)

Elegy

Amanda Harberg is one of the most gifted and sought-after American composers right now. She has been commissioned by many of our leading orchestras as well as dozens of regional and chamber groups. She is also currently the primary film-score composer for the documentary film company Common Good Productions. Her Elegy has been played worldwide and recorded on Naxos American Classics.

Alongside her distinguished career as an award-winning composer, the Julliard-trained Harberg is also a celebrated concert pianist. She has performed with such world-class orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony, among others.

Perhaps just as important as her composing and performing, Harberg is a deeply committed educator of composition, piano, music theory, aural skills and contemporary music history. For nearly a decade she has distinguished herself as professor of composition at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Jersey. This dedication to teaching has likely deepened her appreciation for those who taught her. And this is what inspired her to create one of her most poignant compositions, Elegy. Ms. Harberg explains the work’s origin as follows:

Elegy began as a prayer. The initial musical ideas came to me when I found out that my beloved piano teacher, Marina Grin, was terminally ill. But the full realization of the piece only emerged spontaneously after I learned of her passing. Elegy is dedicated to the memory of Marina Grin, who first showed me how to live a life in music.

Ms. Harberg originally wrote her Elegy for violin and piano. Soon afterward, she recast it for viola solo and string orchestra, the version featured in our concert. The work unfolds in the same way that news of great sadness always tends to sink in — slowly, as the mind initially struggles to grasp the immensity of what’s happened. At the very opening, the lower strings hum and pulse, filled with grief, everything in surreal slow motion. The upper strings then speak softly in a slow-burning, descending, five-note motif, as if that grief is sinking deeply into the heart. Before the motif can end, the solo viola — as the voice of the bereaved — comes in, speaking two downward-falling notes that float above time and space, deeply sorrowed. In this vein, Elegy moves through episodes — dialogues between strings and solo viola, like dialogues between emotions and the words we strive to give them — diving often into searing sadness but mostly allowing the grief to be processed and to come out into the open air. Throughout, the viola draws us inward, with its distinctly beautiful voice, into the heart’s narrative. About midway through the work, the viola bends (portamento) its initial two-note motif upward, as if by great intentional might, as though the bereaved refuses to keep casting eyes downward. From this point on, Harberg pushes the Elegy, bit by bit, into a memorial of tonal gratitude for her departed mentor, until the strings collectively rise together higher and higher into the light of the sky, to end this extremely moving work.

As the renowned virtuoso violist Brett Deubner (for whom Harberg wrote her highly acclaimed Viola Concerto in 2012), said:

The raw sadness followed by uplifting hope as the work ascends to the heavens is the stuff of great composers such as Barber, Tchaikovsky, and Elgar.… Her Elegy is still, in my opinion, her finest work to date.

Franz Danzi
(Born in Schwetzingen [near Mannheim], Germany in 1763; died in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1826)

Sinfonia Concertante in B-flat major for Flute, Clarinet and Orchestra, Op. 41

1. Allegro moderato

2. Larghetto

3. Polonaise — Allegretto

Franz Danzi was born near Mannheim, Germany into a dedicatedly musical family. His father, a friend of Mozart, was the principal cellist in the Mannheim Orchestra (which was rapidly becoming well known in Europe at the time), and his mother was a singer. Together, both parents tutored the young Danzi in cello, voice, and piano. During this period, the city of Mannheim itself was becoming well known, too, as a place where new musical ground was being broken while baroque style evolved into the classical style.

Danzi later became the teacher and close friend of Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), who would become famous for writing the first successful German operas in a new romantic style. Together, Danzi and Weber were best known in their lifetimes as composers of opera and for voice. But Danzi also excelled in writing for winds and almost single-handedly created the first repertoire of works in the wind quintet genre. His gifts in writing for winds became recognized only later in his life as the taste for small wind ensemble music grew dramatically around the turn of the 19th century.

Danzi also wrote numerous sinfonia concertantes. In the later decades of the 18th Century, the sinfonia concertante began to emerge from the baroque concerto grosso, which featured several solo instruments in dialogue with a small orchestra. The sinfonia concertante was, in effect, a hybrid between what would become the classical symphony as we know it today and the solo-instrument concerto. Even while Haydn and Mozart were perfecting the classical symphony, Danzi and others (including Mozart) continued to experiment with the sinfonia concertante, and the latter retained its popularity well into the classical era. One of the great joys of the sinfonia concertante form is the delicate balance the full symphony and lots of soloistic moments for several instruments. A splendid example of this is Danzi’s Sinfonia Concertante for Flute, Clarinet and Orchestra, published in 1814, which succeeds imaginatively in this balance.

In the first movement, Allegro moderato, the orchestra’s introductory themes brim with lyricism. The entrance of the soloists, first the clarinet and then the flute, continues a theme that the orchestra has just passed along to them, and the moment is expressly joyful. And thus begins this marvelous sinfonia, which includes a back-and-forth dance of solos and duets between the clarinet and flute, with chamber-like accompaniments from the orchestra, phrase-trading between the soloists and the full orchestra, and moments when the clarinet and flute delicately blend into the fabric with all the instruments. The themes are cheery and light and enriched with colorful harmonic turns, and the writing for the two soloists only gets more inventive and virtuosic as the movement progresses.

The middle movement, Larghetto, is a smilingly relaxed love duet. It begins with a harmoniously shared moment between the soloists and the orchestral winds. Then the clarinet initiates the duet over gently plucked strings, to be joined by the flute. This movement showcases Danzi’s exeptional talent for writing perfectly for the two wind instruments together. His love of opera clearly shines here, too, as everything in this movement rings of song.

The final movement is a polonaise, a dance form from Poland that had become wildly popular throughout Europe in Danzi’s time. Danzi’s Polonaise is almost disarmingly filled with zest, delight, and magically tuneful themes. Most exceptional is the virtuosic demands the flute and clarinet must meet, both as soloists and in playing together as a duo. When the work concludes, it’s impossible not to be smiling in admiration both for the soloists’ virtuosity and for Danzi’s masterful writing.

Charles-François Gounod
(Born in Paris in 1818; died in Saint-Cloud, France in 1893)

Symphony No 1 in D major

1. Allegro molto

2. Allegretto moderato

3. Scherzo. Non troppo presto

4. Finale. Adagio — Allegro vivace

The French composer Charles Gounod is mainly remembered today as an opera composer. His great opera Faust (1859) was so popular worldwide that when New York’s Metropolitan Opera House opened its doors in 1883, Faust was its obvious inaugural choice. But, of course, Gounod wrote more than operas and in these other genres he brought his superlative operatic gifts of lyricism. His Symphony No. 1 is an excellent example of this; it is lyrical, fresh, and altogether a melodic showcase. Gounod wrote the first of his only two symphonies in 1853 and 1854. He began it as a kind of exercise to hone his composing skills in writing “absolute” music — music for its own sake untethered to a story or poem, as opera and songs demanded. In this regard, one of Gounod’s great heroes was Mozart. (Gounod once remarked that when he died, as soon as he had managed to wade through all the necessary introductions with the Holy Trinity, he would immediately ask to meet Mozart.)

Indeed, this entire symphony, and especially the first movement (Allegro molto), reflects the charm and lightness of many of Mozart’s symphonies — but with the addition of Gounod’s especially winsome singability and some more modern harmonies. The first theme includes a wonderful little hitch, like a musical hiccup, at the end of many bars that propel the pacing forward, as well as create a feeling of levity. Gounod, however, provides dramatic contrast as the movement progresses — dynamic outbursts, and beautifully crafted passages in darker keys. But another of Gounod’s great talents is also on display here, as well as in this entire symphony — his exceptional skill in writing for winds. Particularly, he focuses often on the oboe and bassoon, two instruments that we’ll hear much more of throughout the symphony. The movement ends with zest and a momentary flurry from the French horn, which will return at the conclusion of the last movement.

The second movement, Allegretto moderato, is wonderfully inventive. It begins with a very melodic but somewhat ambiguous theme that evokes a stroll on a perfect day that is unhurried yet preoccupied by troubling thoughts. A second and very lovely theme by the flute and oboe over pizzicato (plucked) basses soon follows and feels like the easy-going counterpart to the first — as if clearing the head and enjoying the outing. Gounod begins to dress both of those themes with light touches of clever counterpoint and countermelodies in both the strings and winds, suggesting that he might launch into variations on those themes. Instead, though, he begins a light fugue. As the fugue fills up with all the voices playing in counterpoint to each other, the work coalesces into running unison notes that bring us to this movement’s final magical section. Gounod takes tiny slices of all the movement’s themes and has them flit here and there in what seem like random places and instruments (though uncannily keeping a completely coherent melodic line), and this wonderful movement comes to its close with three quietly plucked notes.

The third movement, Scherzo, is not the wild kind of scherzo-romp that Beethoven might have written. Rather, it’s easy-going, almost lazy, and harkening back to the dance minuets of the classical period, only with the added depth of the larger orchestra for which Gounod composed. The themes here are delightfully tuneful and seem almost tailor-made for singing. The Scherzo’s Trio (middle section) showcases a genteel duet between oboe and bassoon.

The Finale movement begins with a slow and serious introduction, a rather classically Mozartian approach. This prolongs the anticipation of the excitement to come and introduces the rapid, four-note motif that will permeate the rest of the Finale. Soon the Allegro vivace (fast and lively) begins, and the effect is as if we have been placed onto a galloping horse, alive with verve and excitement. Gounod also includes some brief but comical moments in this movement: Early on, several unresolved chords that linger with fermatas (markings that keep a note, or rest, held indefinitely, playing with our sense of momentum. Next, Gounod adds two trumpet solos in the vein of heralding horns, as if launching off into a hunt. Then the timpani and French horns revisit this hunting motif with vigor (and recall the end of the first movement). And just before the end, those unresolved, previously suspended chords appear again, as if trying to delay the final notes. But when they do indeed arrive, Gounod presents them resolutely to end this superb symphony with great cheer.