Born in Lucca, Italy, in 1743; died in Madrid, Spain, in 1805
String Quintet in C Major, Op. 30, No. 6 (G. 324) La Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid (Night Music of the Streets of Madrid)
Le campane de l’Ave Maria (The Ave Maria Bell)
Il tamburo dei Soldati (The Soldier’s Drum)
Minuetto dei Ciechi (The Minuet of the Blind Beggars)
Il Rosario — Largo assai, allegro, largo come prima — (The Rosary)
Passa Calle de Los Manolos — Allegro vivo — (The Passacaglia of
the Street Singers)
Il tamburo (The Drum)
Ritirata — Maestoso — (The Retreat of the Madrid Military Night Watch)
Luigi Boccherini was born in Italy and began his musical life as a cello prodigy. His debut concert occurred when he was 13 in his hometown of Lucca, and soon after, he and his father traveled to Vienna to show off Luigi’s talents. At the age of 22, he impressed audiences in Paris, including the Spanish ambassador to France who encouraged the young Boccherini to go to Madrid. Boccherini arrived in Madrid in 1768, and two years later he became “virtuoso of the chamber and composer of music” for the Royal Court of Infante Luis Antonio, the younger brother of King Charles III of Spain.
A few years later, political machinations led Charles to banish Luis to the small town of Arenas de San Pedro, Spain. Boccherini soon followed Luis, and on the condition of their staying in that small village, the king supported them with a generous patronage. It was here, from 1776 almost until his death in 1805, that Boccherini wrote his finest works. Usually, the only court musicians that Infante Luis had at his disposal in Arenas were members of a small string orchestra, so most of Boccherini’s compositions were for string ensembles. Aside from a few dozen fine symphonies and 12 cello concertos, Boccherini wrote more than 100 string quartets, trios, and sonatas; more than 100 general chamber works; and more than 100 string quintets for various combinations.
Boccherini’s idea of writing string quintets for two violins, one viola, and two cellos (rather than the more typical two violas) came to him in Arenas and was a natural invention for him as a virtuoso cellist. He composed a particularly excellent set of two-cello string quintets in 1780 (counted as G. 319–324), the sixth of which, Quintet in C Major, La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, was a rare programmatic piece describing the many songs and sounds of a typical night in Madrid. The set made its way to Berlin before Boccherini’s death but wasn’t published until much later (first in 1822, and then in 1921 as the first “official” publication in Paris). Boccherini himself said that no one outside Madrid would understand the work because of the quintet’s hyperlocal representations. Nonetheless, the quintet’s fame blossomed throughout Spain, such that Boccherini reused the tune of its last movement (Ritirata) for three of his later works. The entire work is surprisingly inventive for its time, brimming with imagination and delightful tunes and containing interesting instructions from the composer. The movements are quite short (often under a minute, with no movement longer than three minutes), and they occasionally wander into the next movement without much break.
The first movement is one of the shortest and perhaps most ingenious. Titled Le campane de l’Ave Maria, it represents the ringing of a particular set of bells, the Ave Maria church bells, as the main church in Madrid calls the faithful for end-of-day prayers. Boccherini instructs the musicians to pluck their instruments with “all [strings] pizzicato imitating the sound of the bells when the Ave Maria is rung.” Three slow and somber chords — spread throughout the second violin, viola, and two cellos — “strike” three repeated chords in three sequences, with no tune, just representing the hollow, clanging sound of these meaningful bells. With dusk having arrived in Madrid, and the faithful so evocatively called and engaged in prayer, Boccherini moves to his next nocturnal evocation.
The second movement, Il tamburo dei Soldati (The Soldier’s Drum), is played by solo 1st violin. Boccherini instructs the violinist to “imitate a military drum” by forcefully playing a vigorous rhythm on a repeated low C. (Occasionally, the 1st violinist waits offstage until this movement, entering the stage for the first time playing this rhythm.) The effect is dramatic and conjuring — here, the local military barracks are preparing themselves for the night patrol of the city. This passage is brief and marches directly into the third movement.
Next is Minuetto dei Ciechi (The Minuet of the Blind Beggars), in which Boccherini recalls the locally famous groups of blind musicians performing in the streets for charity. Apparently, not all groups were composed of expert musicians, however, as Boccherini instructs the quintet to play con mala grazia (with clumsy grace). He also asks the two cellists to hike their instruments up on their knees and strum them like guitars “with their fingernails.” Over that strumming and some light harmony from the viola, the two violins play a catchy tune that is suitable for dancing but also a little awkward. In the second phrase, the tune is loud and “harsh.” Delightfully redolent of this unique kind of folk ensemble, the whole movement, even with its repeats, lasts less than a minute and a half.
The fourth movement, Il Rosario (The Rosary), brings us inside a church where the prayers of the Rosary are being intoned in harmony by two priests, played by the 1st violin and 1st cello. Bewitchingly, the cello plays high in its register — a third above the violin — creating a very rich sound. Boccherini asks that the two “singers” play “sweetly and gracefully,” without strict attention to tempo. For spiritual emphasis, an acolyte rings a small handbell, represented by the 2nd violin occasionally plucking two high pitches. The tune is contemplative, much like a prayer might be sung, until about one and a half minutes when the tempo speeds up and the entire quintet plays a brief and rousing refrain from the congregation. The officiants return to the prayer, now with the cello playing a reservedly rhapsodic accompaniment and being asked to “imitate a bassoon” — it was customary at the time in Spain for prayers to be sung accompanied by a bassoon or an instrument like it. The sequences alternate several times until the movement ends with the congregation’s final response.
Out of the church and back onto the streets at night for the fifth movement, Boccherini now conjures the Passa Calle de Los Manolos (The Passacaglia of the Street Singers). (The performance of this tune, incidentally, became more famous recently in Peter Weir’s 2003 film, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe.) Manolos were a typical group of singing and playing street buskers that became beloved and yet somewhat notorious in 18th and 19th century Madrid. The manolos strutted with confident grace but were keen on mischief — they distinguished themselves by singing vulgarly in the early evenings, cavorting a little, and attracting attention from passersby. They were generally not appreciated by polite society. Here, the tune Boccherini created is representative of the manolos’ fun-lovingness and swagger. The movement has come to be called a “passacaglia” (a serious Baroque musical structure), but this was at some point confused with its true origins, pasa calle (along the street), in reference to where the manolos would sing and dance seguidillas (a popular Spanish dance form). As the two violins are instructed to strum like guitars, the viola and 2nd cello pluck away at a peppy pace, setting the harmonic field for the 1st cello to sing a song to all who may, or may not, wish to hear. The song is tuneful and filled with little runs that speak bravura in curious phrase lengths, as though the soloist may be inebriated. Out of the blue, the 2nd violin bursts into a rhapsodic and virtuosic little cadenza — obnoxiously intruding — and then fades out. The whole song and dance are repeated, yet interrupted profoundly by the violinist, and the piece then runs straight into the sixth movement, shut down by the military drum.
In Il tamburo (The Drum), the 1st violinist again plays a vigorous rhythm, this time calling the military to signal citywide curfew and the conclusion of the night watch.
This final movement, Ritirata(The Retreat of the Madrid Military Night Watch), begins as the “drum” concludes. The tune is one of Boccherini’s most famous, though in fact it was composed around 1761 by King Charles’s chamber musician, Mauel Espinosa de los Monteros. Monteros’s Ritirata was used to call all soldiers back to their barracks, whether on duty or carousing on leave. Boccherini uses Monteros’s tuneful melody here, transforming it into a rather regal affair in 11 variations. In those variations, different members of the quintet play a perpetually repeated rhythm in imitation of a military drum – beginning with the 1st cello, and then to the 2nd cello, then the 2nd violin, and lastly the viola. Generally, Boccherini wanted this movement to start very quietly, as though the military band’s calling of all wayward soldiers had begun far down the avenue. Gradually, the volume would grow as if the band were approaching and then passes by to fade into the distance and into the night. Other versions exist, however, that do not specify this transit and sonic shift, giving the tune itself more gravitas. The final variation brings this wonderful piece to an end, leaving a delightful feeling of having just experienced an evening in 18th century Madrid.
Franz Schubert
Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1797; died in Vienna, Austria, in 1828
String Quintet in C Major, D. 956
Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Scherzo: Presto — Trio: Andante sostenuto
Allegretto
In the final two years of his life, between 1827 and his death in November 1828, the barely 31-year-old Schubert was a genius on fire with ideas and compositional accomplishments. In this short time, Schubert wrote, or began, more than 60 works spanning nearly every genre, including multiple masterpieces: the C Major Symphony, his last three Piano Sonatas, the song cycle Winterreise, several Masses, and his last instrumental masterpiece, String Quintet in C Major, composed for two violins, one viola, and two cellos. The latter was written in under two weeks, just two months before his death. As the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) said, this astounding period in the great composer’s life may be “the richest and most productive 18 months in our [Western] music history.”
This exceptional quintet has captured many hearts and minds since its posthumous publication in 1853 and is now considered to be Schubert’s greatest chamber piece. With its joyfulness, exquisite lyricism, and intimate emotion, it is widely cherished as one of the most moving pieces in the entire chamber repertoire; words such as “sublime” and “bottomless pathos” have been used to describe it. Having written more than 15 string quartets and countless works for string ensembles, Schubert had previously only dabbled during his teenage years with an all-string quintet. And although the precedent of using two cellos in a string quintet had been set by Italian composer Luigi Boccherini around 1780 (also performed tonight), Schubert was likely unaware of it. Instead, for this late quintet, Schubert was probably inspired by his heroes, Mozart and Beethoven, who had created quintets that included two violas (instead of two cellos). But Schubert’s imagination for sonic density was now entering a magical phase, and this use of two cellos creates amazing fields of sound, dense and singingly rich, rippling with athleticism.
The first movement, Allegro ma non troppo (fast but not too much), opens with a long chord that grows and dims in luminosity and over the next several bars blossoms into a gentle, but slightly restless, short theme. As the movement gathers vitality, at about one minute, Schubert unleashes the exuberant power of the two cellos as they play in unison, octaves, or harmony. The crowning theme of the movement occurs about a minute later, played as a soaring and singing cello duet. This theme is without care, tenderly lyrical and affable, and is often regarded as one of Schubert’s most magnificent. Even with sure moments of dramatic passion, the movement abounds with cheerful freshness and imaginative instrumental combinations, until it winds calmly down to its final bars, first capped with an exclamatory chord, and then with a soft goodbye.
The second movement, Adagio (slowly), is a tempo rarely used by Schubert. This movement is more timeless than slow, as it quietly unfolds. The music is gentle, slyly rhapsodic, and beckoning. The long opening theme is played by the three inner voices of the quintet (the 2nd violin, viola, and 1st cello) which create a slowly winding hymnlike tune that luxuriously harmonizes around itself. Underneath this hymn plucks the 2nd cello, lazily, solidly, unhurriedly. Overtop, the 1st violin gives an equally unhurried, but pensively self-absorbed, commentary, quietly filling in the spaces between the long-held notes of the inner voices’ theme. After about two and a half minutes of this beautiful wandering, Schubert sneaks in a truly sublime chord of B minor — a tonal region that he seemed to save for moments (and works) of greatest pathos. Here, it appears like an apparition of incomparable sadness, and then it vanishes into the next beat. This air of timelessness is interrupted by a dramatic and virtuosic middle section, and then the opening music returns, featuring the 1st violin and 2nd cello in a delicately quiet, yet virtuosic, duet over that long flowing hymn. When their conversation finally calms, the movement settles into a serene, ethereal conclusion.
Schubert had a lifelong love of dance music (he wrote over 500 dances in his short career) and the third movement, Scherzo presto (very fast), is a frolicking dance, complete with country stomping double-stops in the two cellos and hunting-horn heralding in the violins. Every instrument has a demanding role in this manic dancing music, during which Schubert includes a cascade of remarkable key changes (at about one and a half minutes) and bold dissonances. This rowdiness, however, is soothed by an Andante sostenuto (rather slow and sustained) Trio section. Here, Schubert creates the quintet’s most vulnerable moments, lyrical and resigned, almost confessional. And then, the bliss-seeking music of the first section returns to round out the movement and prepare us for the mirthful last movement.
The final movement, Allegretto (somewhat fast), flirts again with dance music, beginning with a very Hungarian-style country dance. It is bucolic, filled with the friendliest of cheer, as it moves oh so nonchalantly through several keys in a matter of seconds. A Viennese-sounding tune is next, followed by other danceable themes, and Schubert cycles cheerfully through them in this Rondo (a structure that cycles and recycles through several musical sections). After a good deal of merriment and some particularly fine virtuosic playing from the 1st violin, at about eight and a half minutes, the movement changes out of dance mode and into a Piu allegro (more fast) trot. Soon after that, the tempo speeds up again to Piu presto (much more fast), which launches the music into an excited sprint to the end, bringing this masterpiece to a close in a blaze of joy.
Born in Bologna, Italy in 1879; died in Rome in 1936
Gli uccelli (“The Birds”), Suite for Small Orchestra, P. 154
1. Preludio
2. La colomba (“The Dove”)
3. La gallina (“The Hen”)
4. L’usignuolo (“The Nightingale”)
5. Il cucù (“The Cuckoo”)
By the late 19th century, composers throughout Europe were rediscovering older music. In Italy, for example, the older forms being adapted and celebrated ranged from the plainchant of the Roman Catholic Church and Gregorian chant of Medieval times to the exquisite music of Italy’s Baroque composers such as Scarlatti, Corelli, and Pergolesi, as well as many other lesser-known musicians. The great Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was one of those engaged in this rediscovery. And although he is typically remembered for his three gigantic Rome-centric orchestral tone poems (particularly The Pines of Rome), he was also very much in the avant-garde of composers who shared a keen interest in early music. Respighi used many “rediscovered” melodies from his “ancient” forebears and recast them into more modern instrumental and harmonic dressings. Starting with his 1902 Suite for Strings, he then achieved some certain popularity with his three instrumental suites collectively entitled Ancient Airs and Dances (composed in 1917, 1923, and 1932).
Perhaps Respighi’s most enjoyable foray into older music was his Gli uccelli (The Birds), composed in 1928, a gloriously fun instrumental suite celebrating and recasting several Baroque composers’ evocations of bird songs. (Respighi had already established himself as a great admirer of birdsong: He created one of the most groundbreaking and enchanting moments in modern symphonic history when he insisted that the first performance of his Pines of Rome in 1924 include a phonograph recording of an actual Italian nightingale. This was the first time recorded sound was used in a classical music concert.)
For his Gli uccelli, Respighi uses a small, Baroque-sized orchestra and begins with a Preludio (Prelude) based on a melody from a harpsichord suite by one of Italy’s most influential keyboard players of the middle Baroque period, Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710). While we bask in this lovely melody of old, Respighi cleverly also uses this Preludio to introduce bits of the bird songs that he will feature in the following movements, delightfully evoking birds in all their quirky glory. After a brief and regal introduction, at just under a minute, the violins begin a series of quickly repeated pitches with the violin bows bouncing off the strings to evoke a sort of manic pecking. Embedded in the pecking, the violins and flute erupt in chirpy upward squeaks, followed by the sound of a cuckoo, then a birdlike chattering from the trumpets, and then a fluttering of wings in the clarinets and, at just after two minutes, a marvelous section of unbridled flight with rapid notes in the violins. The Preludio comes to a gallant close as it returns to the regal music of the opening melody.
The second movement, La colomba (“The Dove”), employs a tune that Respighi discovered in the works of the Parisian Baroque lutenist and composer, Jacques de Gallot (ca. 1625–ca. 1695). Gallot was one of his era’s greatest lute players and known for musical portraits of his human contemporaries as well as of animals, including an alluring composition entitled “Dove.” For his own “Dove,” Respighi uses the oboe to represent this most gentle of winged creatures, making Gallot’s original tune sing with gentleness and mournfulness. The harp strums and plucks gently with a nod to Gallot’s lute. To give his Dove even more character, Respighi has the violins play high, warbled pitches at what seems to be random moments, allowing for the bird’s tendency to flitter back and forth to shine through. Especially enjoyable is the way the melody tracks all around the orchestral instruments — through the basses, flutes, violins, and clarinets — while the flittering warbles grow and spread, as if the Dove is in conversation with the whole bird kingdom. At last, all flutter away into the sky to end the portrait.
In the third movement, La gallina (“The Hen”), Respighi quotes from the French musician, Jean-Phillippe Rameau (1683–1764). Rameau was one of the great composers and theorists of the Baroque era, perhaps most famous today for his 1722 monograph entitled Treatise on Harmony, a scientifically based music theory book on which all modern study in Western music theory is based. But Rameau was equally renowned as a composer, and Respighi turned to Rameau’s engagingly fun composition entitled La poule (“The Hen,” or “gallina” in Italian) from a 1727 harpsichord suite. The main theme here is a manic bird-pecking motive, borrowed from Rameau, that Respighi hinted at in his Preludio. (Rameau directed this motive to be played “like a hen pecking for bugs on the ground,” accompanied by surprised [accented] little chirpy clucks.) Respighi, however, ups the ante: He drops us into an entire field of fidgety, jerky, wildly beautiful feathered hens and creates a comically dramatic sense of seriousness to all their cavorting. Soon, this hen motive is heard nearly everywhere in the orchestra, even in the lower registers, suggesting that the roosters are marching into the pecking joy, too, creating an absolutely magical fantasy. The magic ends, appropriately, with a muted trumpet call evoking the beginnings of a rooster crowing.
The tune for the fourth movement, L’usignuolo (“The Nightingale”), comes from the very early Broque period in Holland when the great blind composer Jacob van Eyck (c. 1590–1657) wrote a piece for solo recorder that reimagined an old folksong entitled “Engels Nachtegaeltje” (“English Nightingale”). The nightingale’s song clearly bewitched Respighi — we’ve already noted that he used a phonograph recording of it in the premier performance of his Pines of Rome. Here, this movement opens with mystery and surreal beauty. Beginning with low, long-held notes in the horns and basses, the strings begin to slowly pulse and undulate, growing from their depths and building higher in range, depicting the deep and dark of the depth of night. Shortly, the flute plays van Eyck’s extremely popular and catchy Nachtegaeltje folk tune outright — a lyrical tune that wanders like an improvisation — accompanied by a good-natured countermelody in the bassoon. While the string undulations tumble gently onward, Respighi adds more winds to the tune, some of them beginning to warble and wiggle, like the growing chorus of birdsong before sunrise. The addition of the celeste (a metallic keyboard instrument) adds a delightfully magical sound to this chorus. Eventually, the tender and graceful song of this beautiful bird fades out, as do the strings, into silence of night.
The final movement of Gli uccelli returns to another tune, Il cucù
(“The Cuckoo”) by the Italian composer Pasquini whose Preludio inspired Respighi’s first movement. Here, Respighi borrows an exquisite 1698 Pasquini harpsichord composition called “Toccata con lo Scherzo del Cucco.” This Toccata was a piece of many faces — from the almost giddy recitation of the two-downward-note call of the cuckoo bird to flights of magisterial splendor and frolicking runs of notes — all combining to create a masterful piece of light-spirited entertainment. It’s no wonder Respighi was drawn to this work, and he upholds its multifaceted qualities, while also giving it a rather cinematic grandeur. As the music dashes about, with grandness to fleet flashes of fanciful rhapsodizing, the cuckoo’s call returns consistently, yet never predictably, sung out by every instrument in some fashion or another. It’s comical and wonderful. As this marvelous musical aviary ends, Respighi returns to Pasquini’s music of the Preludio to recount all the birds that flew through his suite, and to end, lastly, on a note of great and valiant cheer.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn in 1770; died in Vienna in 1827
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”
1. Awakening of Cheerful Feelings Upon Arrival in the Country —
(Allegro ma non troppo)
2. Scene by the Brook — (Andante molto mosso)
3. Merry Gathering of Country Folk — (Allegro)
4. Thunderstorm — (Allegro)
5. Shepherd’s Song.Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm — (Allegretto)
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, is filled with charm and gratefulness, the light of the sun through summer leaves, and the grace and quietude of nature observed, as well as a little bit of stormy drama and a sprinkling of levity. When one regards Beethoven, with all his scowling portraits and allusions to monumental struggle in his Fifth Symphony, hearing his Sixth comes as a complete surprise.
As with his Fifth Symphony, the essence of the composition had been germinating in Beethoven’s mind for many years. His busy city life in Vienna was increasingly counterbalanced by long sojourns to its parks and out into the countryside, and especially in the lovely town of Heiligenstadt, where in the summer of 1808 he escaped to finish the Pastoral. As he wrote to a friend, “No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.” The composer, now truly suffering from his increasing deafness and dissatisfaction with human nature, found some of his greatest joy in nature that he captured in the expression he knew best – music.
Beethoven himself chose the name Pastoral for his Sixth Symphony as well as each movement’s subtitle, and together they suggest a “program,” or narrative series of scenes shaping a perception of the work. As such, the Pastoral is regarded as one of the first successful “programmatic” symphonies in the Classical repertoire — a fundamental structure that would soon dominate symphonic writing in the Romantic era. But despite these programmatic allusions, Beethoven cautioned against pictorial precision. In the brief, and rare, program note that he provided for its premiere, Beethoven called the Pastoral “… more of a matter of feeling than of painting in sounds… no picture, but something in which the emotions are expressed that are aroused by the pleasures of the country.” His subtitles evoke, in a metaphysical way, the psychological essence of what being in nature meant to him, honoring nature’s “music” with his own. Even so, Beethoven provides a few obvious, and delightful, musical representations in this symphony. The result is Beethoven at his happiest and most tenderhearted.
In the first movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings…”, Beethoven focuses on this gentle vein with quietness, repetition, and a relaxed (or, as the musicologist Donald Tovey called it, “lazy”) pace. The mood is exquisitely peaceful, and Beethoven seems to blissfully luxuriate in the simple repetition of themes: one little five-note descending motive is repeated 80 times. And the harmonic pace of the movement is also on holiday; for example, near the middle of the movement, the key (B flat) lollygags for some 50 measures before Beethoven moves to a new key (of D). All this contentment-in-your-bones nurtures us, calms us, and brings us into nature’s pacific realm. And this will be the spirit pervading the whole symphony.
The second movement, “Scene by the Brook,” contains some especially lovely naturalistic representations. The first one can be heard in the opening measures — a slow and sauntering triplet figure is played by the second violins, violas, and cellos representing a flowing brook. The brook gathers a little speed as Beethoven doubles the triplet’s rhythm. Most beautiful here is the melody in the first violins above the burbling of the lower strings — as if the sojourning Beethoven is simply basking in nature’s delights. It’s some of the sweetest music in the entire symphony. And just before the end, some delightful imitations of birdsong arrive in an unlikely little quartet. The birds themselves are identified by Beethoven in the conductor’s score: a nightingale, a quail, and a cuckoo are played by the flute, oboe, and two clarinets, respectively.
The third movement, “Merry Gathering of Country Folk,” is Beethoven at his most witty. His friend Anton Schindler remembered something Beethoven had observed:
Beethoven asked me if I had noticed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and keeping quite still, and then waking up with a start, getting in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, although usually in the right key, before dropping to sleep again.
It’s likely that Beethoven is making musical jokes at the musicians’ expense in this movement. Although the “Gathering” begins in a relaxed way, quite soon the instruments start getting a little out of hand in volume — making “Merry” indeed. Shortly, at about one minute into the movement, this friskiness leads to some overzealous French horn heralding, and it’s a gloriously fun moment. Perhaps Beethoven was having the horns wake up the bassoonist, for as the next section immediately begins with a chirpy little tune in the oboe, the sleepy bassoon apparently can manage only two different pitches in accompaniment.
The fourth movement, “Thunderstorm,” is another of the famous musical representations in this symphony. It’s a marvelous moment, too, crafted as a kind of “Meanwhile, as the band is engaged in their frivolity, a storm is brewing on the horizon.” Without a break, the country musical scene cuts to pianissimo (very quiet) tremolos (quickly repeated bow strokes creating a shimmering effect) in the basses, evoking the electricity that’s quivering in the atmosphere. The storm builds up rather quickly. To capture it, Beethoven uses thunderous timpani, piercing piccolo chirps, and, as the storm passes directly overhead of the now shelter-seeking country folk, the trombones sound out with a colossally dissonant set of chords to create the storm’s blistering climax.
As the storm gradually subsides, Beethoven creates one of the loveliest moments in any of his symphonies. Out of the shivering tremolos arise the oboes; then, without any pause, the final movement, “Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm,” opens up musically through the winds, then horns, and then the strings, like the breaking of the clouds and the glow of the sun spilling through the storm clouds and across the earth. The symphony ends in this happy radiance with a beautiful hymn-like theme, and as the essayist Basil Lam astutely observed, it’s Beethoven’s thanks to “… the Creator …, not for ending the storm, but for the glory of Nature, of which the storm is a part.”
https://www.friendswv.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/1-FOM_2025-26-Season-Concert-Graphics_Beethoven.jpg13501080Jen Rolstonhttps://www.friendswv.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/FOM_logo_340x156-300x138.jpgJen Rolston2025-09-24 09:46:402025-11-13 11:58:56Beethoven: For the Birders – September 27 & 28, 2025
The American composer Carlos Simon, who was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the most popular musicians and composers working in the United States, with a similarly growing reputation around the world. He is curretly the composer-in-residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as being an associate professor at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. Simon’s career as a composer has been boldly advancing for more than two decades, and he has accrued many awards and honors. In 2023, he received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his album, Requiem for the Enslaved. Simon is extremely prolific, writing in a host of genres for chamber, choral, and orchestral ensembles as well as film soundtracks, many of them on commission. His compositions are often powerful reflections on social issues, with a prominent focus on Black Americans’ struggles for equality. He told the Washington Post recently,
My dad, he always gets on me. He wants me to be a preacher, but I always tell him, “Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.”
Simon’s Elegy: A Cry from the Grave was written in 2015 as a personal protest and seeks to bear witness to injustice, as Simon explains:
This piece is an artistic reflection dedicated to those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. The stimulus for composing this piece came as a result of prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announcing that a selected jury had decided not to indict police officer, Daren Wilson after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The evocative nature of the piece draws on strong lyricism and a lush harmonic character. A melodic idea is played in all the voices of the ensemble at some point of the piece either whole or fragmented. The recurring ominous motif represents the cry of those struck down unjustly in this country. While the predominant essence of the piece is sorrowful and contemplative, there are moments of extreme hope represented by bright consonant harmonies.
The opening bars begin with the feeling of quiet, cold winds stealing through the air, as the upper strings rustle in tremolos marked to be played Sul ponticello, a musical direction to bow very close to the bridge, creating an eerie, hollow sound. This ghostly aura becomes even more ethereal as several of the strings make portamenti (small slides) between pitches. Above that, the central melodic idea soon arises in the violas. This melodic idea is an angular motive with several wide intervallic leaps, and yet it’s darkly lyrical, evoking the feel of a wounded soul singing out with passion and representing the crying out of those unjustly killed, which will be spoken by an increasingly angered chorus. The upper strings quickly respond with this same melodic idea, while the lower strings then continue the eerie tremolos. And from this sound bed, the melodic idea finds its way into every voice in the ensemble, often moving in tandem, or in harmony, or in polyphonic complexities. And yet, in the building of this chorus, Simon creates many moments of sheer beauty that shine spotlights of hopefulness. The exquisite harmonies that the lower strings create at only 30 seconds into the work is but one of these many beauties.
Eventually and inexorably, the voices build up to an anguished climax at about four and a half minutes, when every instrument breaks into a loud, aggravated tremolo. From here, the music recedes into quieter and quieter iterations of the melodic idea, like ebbing anger faintly illuminated by hope.
Eric Nathan
(Born in New York, New York, in 1983)
Double Concerto for Solo Violin, Solo Clarinet, and String Orchestra
The American composer Eric Nathan has received many prestigious awards and grants, including both Guggenheim and Rome Prize fellowships and a Charles Ives Scholarship, and has become a celebrated voice in the international musical scene. He is an associate professor of music at Brown University in Rhode Island and serves as artistic director of the Boston ensemble, Collage New Music.
Nathan wrote his Double Concerto for Solo Violin, Solo Clarinet and String Orchestra in 2019 at the request of both the New York Classical Players and the New England Philharmonic. And he wrote it specifically for our concert’s soloists, Stefan Jakiw and Yoonah Kim. The work is dedicated to them, and they performed its premiere in 2019 (and married each other during their preparation for the premiere).
Nathan describes this work as a “relationship” between its players that dramatizes “an emotional transformation”:
At the heart of Double Concerto is a focus on the relationships between our three main characters — the two soloists and the string orchestra. Some of my thinking on the roles these characters play grew out of early conversations I had with Stefan Jackiw and Yoonah Kim, the two soloists for which this piece was composed, and is dedicated. Jackiw described thinking of the role of the clarinet in string chamber works, such as Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, as an invited guest. In my Double Concerto, we begin alone with our protagonist, the violin, and the string orchestra, which acts throughout like a chorus from Ancient Greek theater, standing in solidarity with the soloists and narrating and personifying the internal or external struggles they face. The solo clarinetist does not enter until almost halfway through the work, but when it does, it unexpectedly alters the course of the concerto, perhaps also instilling hope when it is most needed. The work, cast in a single movement, follows an emotional transformation.
The orchestra opens the concerto by playing long, static pitches evoking a vast and desolate landscape. The violin soloist then enters with a slowly rising passage that’s both beautiful and lamenting. As the violin weeps, a series of descending glissandi (long slides) occur in the orchestra, creating an eerie and surreal effect as though, in the inky black of the night sky, the canopy of stars begins to fall. This weeping-wandering continues until about two and a half minutes, when the soloist plays a rather resolute passage that finishes by reaching upwards with three long pitches, each just a bit higher than the last. This motive will reappear several times in the concerto, and Nathan describes it as an idée fixe — a musical phrase that reoccurs at important moments.
After some darkly turbulent music, the violin climbs back up to its earlier high perch in pitch — meanwhile, the clarinet has been waiting silently for six minutes. From niente (nothingness) the clarinet enters here, joining the violin’s stratospheric pitch, and grows in volume from a tiny ray of light into pearlescent radiance. The violin responds with its idée fixe, to which the clarinet replies with growing resolve, seeming to lead the violin out of its gloom with an increasingly assured tone. As it does so, a remarkably beautiful accompaniment occurs. Here, Nathan borrows from one of Bach’s Twelve Little Preludes (1720s), a tutorial that Bach created to teach his son, Wilhelm Friedemann, how to play the keyboard. Nathan sets the basic chords of the collection’s first prelude (BWV 924 in C Major) as the orchestra’s accompaniment to the clarinet’s ruminations, and the appearance of such unexpected tonality is breathtaking. This, however, soon creates conflict with the violin, sparking a virtuosic madness of rhythms and volume.
When calm returns at about 13 minutes, the clarinet begins an unorthodox cadenza. Instructed to play “encouraging, teaching,” the clarinet sings small parts of the violin’s idée fixe. And at the end of each fragment the clarinet holds the last note, inviting the violin — “teaching” as Bach had done with his preludes for his son — to join in that note, which the violin does with touching vulnerability. The final bars are directed to be played “floating, timeless, blending,” and this fascinating, moving concerto then deliquesces into its final, healing silence.
Aaron Copland
(Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1900; died in North Tarrytown, New York, in 1990)
Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (with Harp and Piano)
1. Slowly and Expressively Cadenza
2. Rather Fast Coda
During the 1930’s America’s taste in popular music was all about “Swing” music (as Jazz was called then), which was played on the radio, on play-at-home records, and in local dance halls. One of the greatest Swing bandleaders in that era was Benny Goodman (1909–1986) who was also a phenomenal jazz clarinetist. But during World War II and later in the 1940’s, American tastes changed as Swing gave way to the “Bebop” jazz of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Goodman changed, too, and so began his second career as a classical clarinetist but with a jazz inflection. It was in this new role that in 1947 Goodman commissioned a concerto for clarinet from the greatest contemporary American classical composer, Aaron Copland.
At this time, Copland was lecturing and conducting in Brazil, where he created most of Goodman’s concerto. Copland infused the work with an ear towards Goodman’s hallmark jazz, while also weaving in aspects of popular Brazilian music — almost unconsciously, he said. The concerto was premiered to great acclaim in 1950 in New York, with Goodman as the soloist, and it quickly became a beloved fixture in the clarinet repertory.
The concerto is conceived in an unusual structure with only two movements, one slow and one fast, connected by a long clarinet cadenza. As accompaniment for the soloist, Copland relies on a sparse orchestra of strings, harp, and piano. The first movement, marked “Slowly and Expressively,” begins with the open and glowing simplicity of plucked basses and harp, and as the remainder of the strings slowly join in, the clarinet starts singing a meandering, intimate song. This first movement progresses through some exquisite harmonies under the singing clarinet as it enchants us with its exceptional lyrical abilities and extraordinary range.
At about six minutes, the music quiets considerably, and the soloist begins a two-minute cadenza. At first, the feeling is pacific, but soon the mood changes dramatically, shot through with increasingly frenetic passages. Within this lengthy cadenza, Copland shows off the clarinet’s remarkably athletic character, while also introducing many of the motives that appear in the next movement, which begins without any pause.
This second movement, marked “Rather Fast,” begins with the harp plucking, the stringed instruments playing harmonics and tapping their strings with the wooden end of their bows, and the piano playing short, soft notes, directed to be played “staccato, delicate, and wraith-like [like a ghost],” evoking a kind of mischievous, apparitional music box playing at high speed. This movement focuses on short ostinatos and riffs — little syncopated phrases that repeat –– and which are constantly changing. This is jazz in classical clothing and Copland employs ever-more jazzy elements throughout. He explained, “I used slapping basses and whacking harp sounds to simulate [jazzy percussion effects],” which you can hear at about three and a half minutes after the start of this second movement.
Evocations of Brazilian popular music start to show up in this movement as well: the first appearing only a few bars after the “slap-bass” begins, where Copland inserts a very singable little tune in the clarinet, rising up in steps and then coming back down, and then a second one appears about 30 seconds later with a little noodling run upwards, first heard in the strings, then the piano, and followed by the clarinet. The music, however, gets increasingly intense and filled with disorienting syncopations until, at about three minutes later, a pounding, descending bass line in the piano begins, launching the Coda (ending section) and setting off a melee of excitement. This masterpiece concerto nearly hurls itself to its final bars, jubilantly ending with “a clarinet glissando — or ‘smear’ [in jazz lingo].”
Giuseppe (Fortunino Francesco) Verdi
(Born in Roncole, near Parma, Italy, in 1813; died in Milan, Italy, in 1901)
Prelude to Act III from La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”)
In 1861, Verdi received a commission from the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, for a new opera. As he had with Nabucco and many of his previous operas, Verdi turned again to a loosely veiled theme of Italy’s current struggle for independence and unification that had consumed much of the 19th century. He also returned to one of the great librettists of the day, Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876), a longtime friend and librettist for nine of Verdi’s previous operas. Piave based the text for Verdi’s commission, La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”), on an 1835 Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (“Don Álvaro, or the Power of Fate”), by the Spanish Enlightenment author and politician, Ángel de Saavedra.
La Forza del Destino follows the plight of two ill-fated lovers, Álvaro and Leonora, set in 1740’s Naples.The opera begins with Álvaro and Leonora being hopelessly in love, but Leonora’s father, a Spanish dignitary, cannot accept Álvaro’s “half-caste” Peruvian-Incan blood as a sufficient lineage for his daughter, and so, the two lovers attempt to elope. The father discovers their plan and confronts them, and during the heated exchange Álvaro’s gun accidentally fires and kills the father. Thus is set into motion the current of Fate — an inexorable sequence of tragedies — that will dog the steps of the two lovers forever.
The opening of Act III takes place in the pitch of night, in a forest near Velletri, Italy, where, in fact, an important battle took place in 1744 between Spanish-ruled Naples and the Habsburg Empire. Álvaro has joined the Spanish-Neapolitan army and is camped with his regiment before the battle. He and Leonora have been hiding separately for some time, and without any word from her, Álvaro presumes she has died. Act III opens with martial music as soldiers rowdily play cards offstage. A forlorn Álvaro slowly and silently advances into the light, and he will soon reflect on his life that has been hounded by bad luck, crowned by the most recent tragedy of having lost his beloved Leonora. But before he sings, a musical prelude sets the tragic tone with exquisite beauty.
In the prelude, the strings shudder quietly in tremolos of tattered nerves and tension, and the clarinet begins with one of Verdi’s most famous solos for that instrument. Verdi often features the clarinet in La Forza del Destino (in fact, a former student and friend was the principal clarinetist of the St. Petersburg Opera). Considered to be an instrument that best resembles the human voice, the clarinet in this prelude creates a kind of psychological inner landscape of Álvaro’s tortured soul. Slowly at first, the clarinet sings a tune that is beautiful, but also wistful and pained. After a few bars, the horns alone softly play three ominous notes in unison, which is Verdi’s “Fate” motive that reappears throughout the opera. The clarinet sings again, but now with an even more beautiful and melancholic tune which will then become the tune of Álvaro’s subsequent aria. The clarinet’s singing soon branches out into small cadenza-like reveries, reflecting Álvaro’s tender hope that Leonora is now in the care of angels. But eventually, the lower strings begin a quietly menacing pulsing that scatters the clarinet’s ruminations, and as the clarinet plays its last, touching notes, the strings end this prelude with a series of upward steps, as though Álvaro is climbing out of his own tormented heart. Act III then moves on to feature Álvaro’s aria, but for the moment, the clarinetist has been the shining operatic star, having delivered a series of potent, heart-catching solos.
Felix Mendelssohn
(Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1809; died in Leipzig, Germany, in 1847)
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. posth.
1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Allegro
Mendelssohn’s upbringing was filled with privilege and took place in perhaps the most artistically and intellectually stimulating environment of any musician of his time. Besides receiving near-continuous visits from many of Europe’s most influential thinkers and artists, the Mendelssohn family hosted a Sunday morning musical salon for their latest guests, featuring young Felix and his sister, Fanny, performing music and showing off their own compositions. Nevertheless, there is no argument that Felix was, on his own merits, one of the greatest musical prodigies in history. Even before composing at the age of 16 or 17 his extraordinary String Octet (1825) and his Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Mendelssohn had already created 12 symphonies for strings; multiple sonatas for violin, piano, and organ; several lieder (songs); two short operas; a cantata; and in 1822, this violin concerto in D minor.
This D minor violin concerto should not be confused with Mendelssohn’s later, and hugely beloved violin concerto in E minor that he wrote near the end of his life, in 1845. This earlier Concerto was written to be performed by his violin teacher, Eduard Rietz (for whom Mendelssohn also later composed his String Octet as a birthday present), but it never made it into the family’s Sunday morning salons, and there is no record of it having been performed elsewhere during Mendelssohn’s life. In fact, the concerto was virtually forgotten until 1951, when a rare-book collector, a descendant of Mendelssohn’s, presented it to the great violin virtuoso, Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin premiered the Concerto in 1952 at Carnegie Hall, and slowly, this lovely work has been gaining a reputation as Mendelssohn’s marvelous “other Concerto.”
Written for violin soloist with string orchestra, Mendelssohn begins the first movement, Allegro, with the full orchestra playing a theme that cavorts with quick runs and clipped rhythms dancing up and down the scale. Though the minor key adds a sinister hint to the music, the theme nonetheless wanders into a series of somewhat playful cat-and-mouse exchanges between the upper and lower strings. The violin soloist enters at about one minute and a half with a new, more lyrical and melancholic theme, which quickly demands virtuosic runs. Virtuosity and lyricism, for both the soloist and the orchestra, then alternate in delightfully inventive ways until the end of the movement.
The second movement, Andante, is filled with tenderness and lyricism that feels uncannily mature for a 13-year-old composer. The violins begin with a slow and unpretentious theme, quietly climbing up the scale and then gently tumbling down. Behind them, the basses and violas echo that theme in a sort of canon that creates a sense of yearning. When the soloist enters about two minutes later with a short little cadenza, that yearning is intensified. The soloist then moves into a new theme composed of several measures of long, lyrical notes that periodically give over to more active rhythms, like a jittery love-smitten heart.The entire Andante explores these emotions in a number of gentle ways, until the last beautiful bars, where the soloist sings alone, quietly holding a note high in its register.
Without a pause, the fiery third movement, another Allegro, begins. The soloist and orchestra jump in together with a theme that’s free-spirited and frisky. The soloist quickly launches into virtuosic passages, which are often answered with equally virtuosic playing in the orchestra, and together they soon arrive at a series of cadenzas for the soloist that were written out by the young Mendelssohn. The rest of the movement then sprints away as if on a precipice, with an exhilarating feeling of coming dangerously close to slipping off the edge. As the soloist performs with increasing pyrotechnics, the movement comes to its exciting and wonderfully fun final bars.
https://www.friendswv.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/FOM_2024-25_May31-June1.jpg10801080Jen Rolstonhttps://www.friendswv.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/FOM_logo_340x156-300x138.jpgJen Rolston2025-05-28 10:26:082025-05-28 10:26:08En Famille – May 31 & June 1
Double Down: Two Cellos, Twenty Strings – November 15, 2025 – 7:30pm
Program NotesLuigi Boccherini
Born in Lucca, Italy, in 1743; died in Madrid, Spain, in 1805
String Quintet in C Major, Op. 30, No. 6 (G. 324)
La Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid (Night Music of the Streets of Madrid)
the Street Singers)
Luigi Boccherini was born in Italy and began his musical life as a cello prodigy. His debut concert occurred when he was 13 in his hometown of Lucca, and soon after, he and his father traveled to Vienna to show off Luigi’s talents. At the age of 22, he impressed audiences in Paris, including the Spanish ambassador to France who encouraged the young Boccherini to go to Madrid. Boccherini arrived in Madrid in 1768, and two years later he became “virtuoso of the chamber and composer of music” for the Royal Court of Infante Luis Antonio, the younger brother of King Charles III of Spain.
A few years later, political machinations led Charles to banish Luis to the small town of Arenas de San Pedro, Spain. Boccherini soon followed Luis, and on the condition of their staying in that small village, the king supported them with a generous patronage. It was here, from 1776 almost until his death in 1805, that Boccherini wrote his finest works. Usually, the only court musicians that Infante Luis had at his disposal in Arenas were members of a small string orchestra, so most of Boccherini’s compositions were for string ensembles. Aside from a few dozen fine symphonies and 12 cello concertos, Boccherini wrote more than 100 string quartets, trios, and sonatas; more than 100 general chamber works; and more than 100 string quintets for various combinations.
Boccherini’s idea of writing string quintets for two violins, one viola, and two cellos (rather than the more typical two violas) came to him in Arenas and was a natural invention for him as a virtuoso cellist. He composed a particularly excellent set of two-cello string quintets in 1780 (counted as G. 319–324), the sixth of which, Quintet in C Major, La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, was a rare programmatic piece describing the many songs and sounds of a typical night in Madrid. The set made its way to Berlin before Boccherini’s death but wasn’t published until much later (first in 1822, and then in 1921 as the first “official” publication in Paris). Boccherini himself said that no one outside Madrid would understand the work because of the quintet’s hyperlocal representations. Nonetheless, the quintet’s fame blossomed throughout Spain, such that Boccherini reused the tune of its last movement (Ritirata) for three of his later works. The entire work is surprisingly inventive for its time, brimming with imagination and delightful tunes and containing interesting instructions from the composer. The movements are quite short (often under a minute, with no movement longer than three minutes), and they occasionally wander into the next movement without much break.
The first movement is one of the shortest and perhaps most ingenious. Titled Le campane de l’Ave Maria, it represents the ringing of a particular set of bells, the Ave Maria church bells, as the main church in Madrid calls the faithful for end-of-day prayers. Boccherini instructs the musicians to pluck their instruments with “all [strings] pizzicato imitating the sound of the bells when the Ave Maria is rung.” Three slow and somber chords — spread throughout the second violin, viola, and two cellos — “strike” three repeated chords in three sequences, with no tune, just representing the hollow, clanging sound of these meaningful bells. With dusk having arrived in Madrid, and the faithful so evocatively called and engaged in prayer, Boccherini moves to his next nocturnal evocation.
The second movement, Il tamburo dei Soldati (The Soldier’s Drum), is played by solo 1st violin. Boccherini instructs the violinist to “imitate a military drum” by forcefully playing a vigorous rhythm on a repeated low C. (Occasionally, the 1st violinist waits offstage until this movement, entering the stage for the first time playing this rhythm.) The effect is dramatic and conjuring — here, the local military barracks are preparing themselves for the night patrol of the city. This passage is brief and marches directly into the third movement.
Next is Minuetto dei Ciechi (The Minuet of the Blind Beggars), in which Boccherini recalls the locally famous groups of blind musicians performing in the streets for charity. Apparently, not all groups were composed of expert musicians, however, as Boccherini instructs the quintet to play con mala grazia (with clumsy grace). He also asks the two cellists to hike their instruments up on their knees and strum them like guitars “with their fingernails.” Over that strumming and some light harmony from the viola, the two violins play a catchy tune that is suitable for dancing but also a little awkward. In the second phrase, the tune is loud and “harsh.” Delightfully redolent of this unique kind of folk ensemble, the whole movement, even with its repeats, lasts less than a minute and a half.
The fourth movement, Il Rosario (The Rosary), brings us inside a church where the prayers of the Rosary are being intoned in harmony by two priests, played by the 1st violin and 1st cello. Bewitchingly, the cello plays high in its register — a third above the violin — creating a very rich sound. Boccherini asks that the two “singers” play “sweetly and gracefully,” without strict attention to tempo. For spiritual emphasis, an acolyte rings a small handbell, represented by the 2nd violin occasionally plucking two high pitches. The tune is contemplative, much like a prayer might be sung, until about one and a half minutes when the tempo speeds up and the entire quintet plays a brief and rousing refrain from the congregation. The officiants return to the prayer, now with the cello playing a reservedly rhapsodic accompaniment and being asked to “imitate a bassoon” — it was customary at the time in Spain for prayers to be sung accompanied by a bassoon or an instrument like it. The sequences alternate several times until the movement ends with the congregation’s final response.
Out of the church and back onto the streets at night for the fifth movement, Boccherini now conjures the Passa Calle de Los Manolos (The Passacaglia of the Street Singers). (The performance of this tune, incidentally, became more famous recently in Peter Weir’s 2003 film, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe.) Manolos were a typical group of singing and playing street buskers that became beloved and yet somewhat notorious in 18th and 19th century Madrid. The manolos strutted with confident grace but were keen on mischief — they distinguished themselves by singing vulgarly in the early evenings, cavorting a little, and attracting attention from passersby. They were generally not appreciated by polite society. Here, the tune Boccherini created is representative of the manolos’ fun-lovingness and swagger. The movement has come to be called a “passacaglia” (a serious Baroque musical structure), but this was at some point confused with its true origins, pasa calle (along the street), in reference to where the manolos would sing and dance seguidillas (a popular Spanish dance form). As the two violins are instructed to strum like guitars, the viola and 2nd cello pluck away at a peppy pace, setting the harmonic field for the 1st cello to sing a song to all who may, or may not, wish to hear. The song is tuneful and filled with little runs that speak bravura in curious phrase lengths, as though the soloist may be inebriated. Out of the blue, the 2nd violin bursts into a rhapsodic and virtuosic little cadenza — obnoxiously intruding — and then fades out. The whole song and dance are repeated, yet interrupted profoundly by the violinist, and the piece then runs straight into the sixth movement, shut down by the military drum.
In Il tamburo (The Drum), the 1st violinist again plays a vigorous rhythm, this time calling the military to signal citywide curfew and the conclusion of the night watch.
This final movement, Ritirata (The Retreat of the Madrid Military Night Watch), begins as the “drum” concludes. The tune is one of Boccherini’s most famous, though in fact it was composed around 1761 by King Charles’s chamber musician, Mauel Espinosa de los Monteros. Monteros’s Ritirata was used to call all soldiers back to their barracks, whether on duty or carousing on leave. Boccherini uses Monteros’s tuneful melody here, transforming it into a rather regal affair in 11 variations. In those variations, different members of the quintet play a perpetually repeated rhythm in imitation of a military drum – beginning with the 1st cello, and then to the 2nd cello, then the 2nd violin, and lastly the viola. Generally, Boccherini wanted this movement to start very quietly, as though the military band’s calling of all wayward soldiers had begun far down the avenue. Gradually, the volume would grow as if the band were approaching and then passes by to fade into the distance and into the night. Other versions exist, however, that do not specify this transit and sonic shift, giving the tune itself more gravitas. The final variation brings this wonderful piece to an end, leaving a delightful feeling of having just experienced an evening in 18th century Madrid.
Franz Schubert
Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1797; died in Vienna, Austria, in 1828
String Quintet in C Major, D. 956
In the final two years of his life, between 1827 and his death in November 1828, the barely 31-year-old Schubert was a genius on fire with ideas and compositional accomplishments. In this short time, Schubert wrote, or began, more than 60 works spanning nearly every genre, including multiple masterpieces: the C Major Symphony, his last three Piano Sonatas, the song cycle Winterreise, several Masses, and his last instrumental masterpiece, String Quintet in C Major, composed for two violins, one viola, and two cellos. The latter was written in under two weeks, just two months before his death. As the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) said, this astounding period in the great composer’s life may be “the richest and most productive 18 months in our [Western] music history.”
This exceptional quintet has captured many hearts and minds since its posthumous publication in 1853 and is now considered to be Schubert’s greatest chamber piece. With its joyfulness, exquisite lyricism, and intimate emotion, it is widely cherished as one of the most moving pieces in the entire chamber repertoire; words such as “sublime” and “bottomless pathos” have been used to describe it. Having written more than 15 string quartets and countless works for string ensembles, Schubert had previously only dabbled during his teenage years with an all-string quintet. And although the precedent of using two cellos in a string quintet had been set by Italian composer Luigi Boccherini around 1780 (also performed tonight), Schubert was likely unaware of it. Instead, for this late quintet, Schubert was probably inspired by his heroes, Mozart and Beethoven, who had created quintets that included two violas (instead of two cellos). But Schubert’s imagination for sonic density was now entering a magical phase, and this use of two cellos creates amazing fields of sound, dense and singingly rich, rippling with athleticism.
The first movement, Allegro ma non troppo (fast but not too much), opens with a long chord that grows and dims in luminosity and over the next several bars blossoms into a gentle, but slightly restless, short theme. As the movement gathers vitality, at about one minute, Schubert unleashes the exuberant power of the two cellos as they play in unison, octaves, or harmony. The crowning theme of the movement occurs about a minute later, played as a soaring and singing cello duet. This theme is without care, tenderly lyrical and affable, and is often regarded as one of Schubert’s most magnificent. Even with sure moments of dramatic passion, the movement abounds with cheerful freshness and imaginative instrumental combinations, until it winds calmly down to its final bars, first capped with an exclamatory chord, and then with a soft goodbye.
The second movement, Adagio (slowly), is a tempo rarely used by Schubert. This movement is more timeless than slow, as it quietly unfolds. The music is gentle, slyly rhapsodic, and beckoning. The long opening theme is played by the three inner voices of the quintet (the 2nd violin, viola, and 1st cello) which create a slowly winding hymnlike tune that luxuriously harmonizes around itself. Underneath this hymn plucks the 2nd cello, lazily, solidly, unhurriedly. Overtop, the 1st violin gives an equally unhurried, but pensively self-absorbed, commentary, quietly filling in the spaces between the long-held notes of the inner voices’ theme. After about two and a half minutes of this beautiful wandering, Schubert sneaks in a truly sublime chord of B minor — a tonal region that he seemed to save for moments (and works) of greatest pathos. Here, it appears like an apparition of incomparable sadness, and then it vanishes into the next beat. This air of timelessness is interrupted by a dramatic and virtuosic middle section, and then the opening music returns, featuring the 1st violin and 2nd cello in a delicately quiet, yet virtuosic, duet over that long flowing hymn. When their conversation finally calms, the movement settles into a serene, ethereal conclusion.
Schubert had a lifelong love of dance music (he wrote over 500 dances in his short career) and the third movement, Scherzo presto (very fast), is a frolicking dance, complete with country stomping double-stops in the two cellos and hunting-horn heralding in the violins. Every instrument has a demanding role in this manic dancing music, during which Schubert includes a cascade of remarkable key changes (at about one and a half minutes) and bold dissonances. This rowdiness, however, is soothed by an Andante sostenuto (rather slow and sustained) Trio section. Here, Schubert creates the quintet’s most vulnerable moments, lyrical and resigned, almost confessional. And then, the bliss-seeking music of the first section returns to round out the movement and prepare us for the mirthful last movement.
The final movement, Allegretto (somewhat fast), flirts again with dance music, beginning with a very Hungarian-style country dance. It is bucolic, filled with the friendliest of cheer, as it moves oh so nonchalantly through several keys in a matter of seconds. A Viennese-sounding tune is next, followed by other danceable themes, and Schubert cycles cheerfully through them in this Rondo (a structure that cycles and recycles through several musical sections). After a good deal of merriment and some particularly fine virtuosic playing from the 1st violin, at about eight and a half minutes, the movement changes out of dance mode and into a Piu allegro (more fast) trot. Soon after that, the tempo speeds up again to Piu presto (much more fast), which launches the music into an excited sprint to the end, bringing this masterpiece to a close in a blaze of joy.
© Max Derrickson
Beethoven: For the Birders – September 27 & 28, 2025
Program NotesBorn in Bologna, Italy in 1879; died in Rome in 1936
Gli uccelli (“The Birds”), Suite for Small Orchestra, P. 154
1. Preludio
2. La colomba (“The Dove”)
3. La gallina (“The Hen”)
4. L’usignuolo (“The Nightingale”)
5. Il cucù (“The Cuckoo”)
By the late 19th century, composers throughout Europe were rediscovering older music. In Italy, for example, the older forms being adapted and celebrated ranged from the plainchant of the Roman Catholic Church and Gregorian chant of Medieval times to the exquisite music of Italy’s Baroque composers such as Scarlatti, Corelli, and Pergolesi, as well as many other lesser-known musicians. The great Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was one of those engaged in this rediscovery. And although he is typically remembered for his three gigantic Rome-centric orchestral tone poems (particularly The Pines of Rome), he was also very much in the avant-garde of composers who shared a keen interest in early music. Respighi used many “rediscovered” melodies from his “ancient” forebears and recast them into more modern instrumental and harmonic dressings. Starting with his 1902 Suite for Strings, he then achieved some certain popularity with his three instrumental suites collectively entitled Ancient Airs and Dances (composed in 1917, 1923, and 1932).
Perhaps Respighi’s most enjoyable foray into older music was his
Gli uccelli (The Birds), composed in 1928, a gloriously fun instrumental suite celebrating and recasting several Baroque composers’ evocations of bird songs. (Respighi had already established himself as a great admirer of birdsong: He created one of the most groundbreaking and enchanting moments in modern symphonic history when he insisted that the first performance of his Pines of Rome in 1924 include a phonograph recording of an actual Italian nightingale. This was the first time recorded sound was used in a classical music concert.)
For his Gli uccelli, Respighi uses a small, Baroque-sized orchestra and begins with a Preludio (Prelude) based on a melody from a harpsichord suite by one of Italy’s most influential keyboard players of the middle Baroque period, Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710). While we bask in this lovely melody of old, Respighi cleverly also uses this Preludio to introduce bits of the bird songs that he will feature in the following movements, delightfully evoking birds in all their quirky glory. After a brief and regal introduction, at just under a minute, the violins begin a series of quickly repeated pitches with the violin bows bouncing off the strings to evoke a sort of manic pecking. Embedded in the pecking, the violins and flute erupt in chirpy upward squeaks, followed by the sound of a cuckoo, then a birdlike chattering from the trumpets, and then a fluttering of wings in the clarinets and, at just after two minutes, a marvelous section of unbridled flight with rapid notes in the violins. The Preludio comes to a gallant close as it returns to the regal music of the opening melody.
The second movement, La colomba (“The Dove”), employs a tune that Respighi discovered in the works of the Parisian Baroque lutenist and composer, Jacques de Gallot (ca. 1625–ca. 1695). Gallot was one of his era’s greatest lute players and known for musical portraits of his human contemporaries as well as of animals, including an alluring composition entitled “Dove.” For his own “Dove,” Respighi uses the oboe to represent this most gentle of winged creatures, making Gallot’s original tune sing with gentleness and mournfulness. The harp strums and plucks gently with a nod to Gallot’s lute. To give his Dove even more character, Respighi has the violins play high, warbled pitches at what seems to be random moments, allowing for the bird’s tendency to flitter back and forth to shine through. Especially enjoyable is the way the melody tracks all around the orchestral instruments — through the basses, flutes, violins, and clarinets — while the flittering warbles grow and spread, as if the Dove is in conversation with the whole bird kingdom. At last, all flutter away into the sky to end the portrait.
In the third movement, La gallina (“The Hen”), Respighi quotes from the French musician, Jean-Phillippe Rameau (1683–1764). Rameau was one of the great composers and theorists of the Baroque era, perhaps most famous today for his 1722 monograph entitled Treatise on Harmony, a scientifically based music theory book on which all modern study in Western music theory is based. But Rameau was equally renowned as a composer, and Respighi turned to Rameau’s engagingly fun composition entitled La poule (“The Hen,” or “gallina” in Italian) from a 1727 harpsichord suite. The main theme here is a manic bird-pecking motive, borrowed from Rameau, that Respighi hinted at in his Preludio. (Rameau directed this motive to be played “like a hen pecking for bugs on the ground,” accompanied by surprised [accented] little chirpy clucks.) Respighi, however, ups the ante: He drops us into an entire field of fidgety, jerky, wildly beautiful feathered hens and creates a comically dramatic sense of seriousness to all their cavorting. Soon, this hen motive is heard nearly everywhere in the orchestra, even in the lower registers, suggesting that the roosters are marching into the pecking joy, too, creating an absolutely magical fantasy. The magic ends, appropriately, with a muted trumpet call evoking the beginnings of a rooster crowing.
The tune for the fourth movement, L’usignuolo (“The Nightingale”), comes from the very early Broque period in Holland when the great blind composer Jacob van Eyck (c. 1590–1657) wrote a piece for solo recorder that reimagined an old folksong entitled “Engels Nachtegaeltje” (“English Nightingale”). The nightingale’s song clearly bewitched Respighi — we’ve already noted that he used a phonograph recording of it in the premier performance of his Pines of Rome. Here, this movement opens with mystery and surreal beauty. Beginning with low, long-held notes in the horns and basses, the strings begin to slowly pulse and undulate, growing from their depths and building higher in range, depicting the deep and dark of the depth of night. Shortly, the flute plays van Eyck’s extremely popular and catchy Nachtegaeltje folk tune outright — a lyrical tune that wanders like an improvisation — accompanied by a good-natured countermelody in the bassoon. While the string undulations tumble gently onward, Respighi adds more winds to the tune, some of them beginning to warble and wiggle, like the growing chorus of birdsong before sunrise. The addition of the celeste (a metallic keyboard instrument) adds a delightfully magical sound to this chorus. Eventually, the tender and graceful song of this beautiful bird fades out, as do the strings, into silence of night.
The final movement of Gli uccelli returns to another tune, Il cucù
(“The Cuckoo”) by the Italian composer Pasquini whose Preludio inspired Respighi’s first movement. Here, Respighi borrows an exquisite 1698 Pasquini harpsichord composition called “Toccata con lo Scherzo del Cucco.” This Toccata was a piece of many faces — from the almost giddy recitation of the two-downward-note call of the cuckoo bird to flights of magisterial splendor and frolicking runs of notes — all combining to create a masterful piece of light-spirited entertainment. It’s no wonder Respighi was drawn to this work, and he upholds its multifaceted qualities, while also giving it a rather cinematic grandeur. As the music dashes about, with grandness to fleet flashes of fanciful rhapsodizing, the cuckoo’s call returns consistently, yet never predictably, sung out by every instrument in some fashion or another. It’s comical and wonderful. As this marvelous musical aviary ends, Respighi returns to Pasquini’s music of the Preludio to recount all the birds that flew through his suite, and to end, lastly, on a note of great and valiant cheer.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn in 1770; died in Vienna in 1827
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”
1. Awakening of Cheerful Feelings Upon Arrival in the Country —
(Allegro ma non troppo)
2. Scene by the Brook — (Andante molto mosso)
3. Merry Gathering of Country Folk — (Allegro)
4. Thunderstorm — (Allegro)
5. Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm — (Allegretto)
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, is filled with charm and gratefulness, the light of the sun through summer leaves, and the grace and quietude of nature observed, as well as a little bit of stormy drama and a sprinkling of levity. When one regards Beethoven, with all his scowling portraits and allusions to monumental struggle in his Fifth Symphony, hearing his Sixth comes as a complete surprise.
As with his Fifth Symphony, the essence of the composition had been germinating in Beethoven’s mind for many years. His busy city life in Vienna was increasingly counterbalanced by long sojourns to its parks and out into the countryside, and especially in the lovely town of Heiligenstadt, where in the summer of 1808 he escaped to finish the Pastoral. As he wrote to a friend, “No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.” The composer, now truly suffering from his increasing deafness and dissatisfaction with human nature, found some of his greatest joy in nature that he captured in the expression he knew best – music.
Beethoven himself chose the name Pastoral for his Sixth Symphony as well as each movement’s subtitle, and together they suggest a “program,” or narrative series of scenes shaping a perception of the work. As such, the Pastoral is regarded as one of the first successful “programmatic” symphonies in the Classical repertoire — a fundamental structure that would soon dominate symphonic writing in the Romantic era. But despite these programmatic allusions, Beethoven cautioned against pictorial precision. In the brief, and rare, program note that he provided for its premiere, Beethoven called the Pastoral “… more of a matter of feeling than of painting in sounds… no picture, but something in which the emotions are expressed that are aroused by the pleasures of the country.” His subtitles evoke, in a metaphysical way, the psychological essence of what being in nature meant to him, honoring nature’s “music” with his own. Even so, Beethoven provides a few obvious, and delightful, musical representations in this symphony. The result is Beethoven at his happiest and most tenderhearted.
In the first movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings…”, Beethoven focuses on this gentle vein with quietness, repetition, and a relaxed (or, as the musicologist Donald Tovey called it, “lazy”) pace. The mood is exquisitely peaceful, and Beethoven seems to blissfully luxuriate in the simple repetition of themes: one little five-note descending motive is repeated 80 times. And the harmonic pace of the movement is also on holiday; for example, near the middle of the movement, the key (B flat) lollygags for some 50 measures before Beethoven moves to a new key (of D). All this contentment-in-your-bones nurtures us, calms us, and brings us into nature’s pacific realm. And this will be the spirit pervading the whole symphony.
The second movement, “Scene by the Brook,” contains some especially lovely naturalistic representations. The first one can be heard in the opening measures — a slow and sauntering triplet figure is played by the second violins, violas, and cellos representing a flowing brook. The brook gathers a little speed as Beethoven doubles the triplet’s rhythm. Most beautiful here is the melody in the first violins above the burbling of the lower strings — as if the sojourning Beethoven is simply basking in nature’s delights. It’s some of the sweetest music in the entire symphony. And just before the end, some delightful imitations of birdsong arrive in an unlikely little quartet. The birds themselves are identified by Beethoven in the conductor’s score: a nightingale, a quail, and a cuckoo are played by the flute, oboe, and two clarinets, respectively.
The third movement, “Merry Gathering of Country Folk,” is Beethoven at his most witty. His friend Anton Schindler remembered something Beethoven had observed:
Beethoven asked me if I had noticed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and keeping quite still, and then waking up with a start, getting in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, although usually in the right key, before dropping to sleep again.
It’s likely that Beethoven is making musical jokes at the musicians’ expense in this movement. Although the “Gathering” begins in a relaxed way, quite soon the instruments start getting a little out of hand in volume — making “Merry” indeed. Shortly, at about one minute into the movement, this friskiness leads to some overzealous French horn heralding, and it’s a gloriously fun moment. Perhaps Beethoven was having the horns wake up the bassoonist, for as the next section immediately begins with a chirpy little tune in the oboe, the sleepy bassoon apparently can manage only two different pitches in accompaniment.
The fourth movement, “Thunderstorm,” is another of the famous musical representations in this symphony. It’s a marvelous moment, too, crafted as a kind of “Meanwhile, as the band is engaged in their frivolity, a storm is brewing on the horizon.” Without a break, the country musical scene cuts to pianissimo (very quiet) tremolos (quickly repeated bow strokes creating a shimmering effect) in the basses, evoking the electricity that’s quivering in the atmosphere. The storm builds up rather quickly. To capture it, Beethoven uses thunderous timpani, piercing piccolo chirps, and, as the storm passes directly overhead of the now shelter-seeking country folk, the trombones sound out with a colossally dissonant set of chords to create the storm’s blistering climax.
As the storm gradually subsides, Beethoven creates one of the loveliest moments in any of his symphonies. Out of the shivering tremolos arise the oboes; then, without any pause, the final movement, “Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm,” opens up musically through the winds, then horns, and then the strings, like the breaking of the clouds and the glow of the sun spilling through the storm clouds and across the earth. The symphony ends in this happy radiance with a beautiful hymn-like theme, and as the essayist Basil Lam astutely observed, it’s Beethoven’s thanks to “… the Creator …, not for ending the storm, but for the glory of Nature, of which the storm is a part.”
© Max Derrickson
En Famille – May 31 & June 1
Program Notes(Born in Washington, D.C., in 1986)
Elegy: A Cry from the Grave
The American composer Carlos Simon, who was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the most popular musicians and composers working in the United States, with a similarly growing reputation around the world. He is curretly the composer-in-residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as being an associate professor at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. Simon’s career as a composer has been boldly advancing for more than two decades, and he has accrued many awards and honors. In 2023, he received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his album, Requiem for the Enslaved. Simon is extremely prolific, writing in a host of genres for chamber, choral, and orchestral ensembles as well as film soundtracks, many of them on commission. His compositions are often powerful reflections on social issues, with a prominent focus on Black Americans’ struggles for equality. He told the Washington Post recently,
My dad, he always gets on me. He wants me to be a preacher, but I always tell him, “Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.”
Simon’s Elegy: A Cry from the Grave was written in 2015 as a personal protest and seeks to bear witness to injustice, as Simon explains:
This piece is an artistic reflection dedicated to those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. The stimulus for composing this piece came as a result of prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announcing that a selected jury had decided not to indict police officer, Daren Wilson after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The evocative nature of the piece draws on strong lyricism and a lush harmonic character. A melodic idea is played in all the voices of the ensemble at some point of the piece either whole or fragmented. The recurring ominous motif represents the cry of those struck down unjustly in this country. While the predominant essence of the piece is sorrowful and contemplative, there are moments of extreme hope represented by bright consonant harmonies.
The opening bars begin with the feeling of quiet, cold winds stealing through the air, as the upper strings rustle in tremolos marked to be played Sul ponticello, a musical direction to bow very close to the bridge, creating an eerie, hollow sound. This ghostly aura becomes even more ethereal as several of the strings make portamenti (small slides) between pitches. Above that, the central melodic idea soon arises in the violas. This melodic idea is an angular motive with several wide intervallic leaps, and yet it’s darkly lyrical, evoking the feel of a wounded soul singing out with passion and representing the crying out of those unjustly killed, which will be spoken by an increasingly angered chorus. The upper strings quickly respond with this same melodic idea, while the lower strings then continue the eerie tremolos. And from this sound bed, the melodic idea finds its way into every voice in the ensemble, often moving in tandem, or in harmony, or in polyphonic complexities. And yet, in the building of this chorus, Simon creates many moments of sheer beauty that shine spotlights of hopefulness. The exquisite harmonies that the lower strings create at only 30 seconds into the work is but one of these many beauties.
Eventually and inexorably, the voices build up to an anguished climax at about four and a half minutes, when every instrument breaks into a loud, aggravated tremolo. From here, the music recedes into quieter and quieter iterations of the melodic idea, like ebbing anger faintly illuminated by hope.
Eric Nathan
(Born in New York, New York, in 1983)
Double Concerto for Solo Violin, Solo Clarinet, and String Orchestra
The American composer Eric Nathan has received many prestigious awards and grants, including both Guggenheim and Rome Prize fellowships and a Charles Ives Scholarship, and has become a celebrated voice in the international musical scene. He is an associate professor of music at Brown University in Rhode Island and serves as artistic director of the Boston ensemble, Collage New Music.
Nathan wrote his Double Concerto for Solo Violin, Solo Clarinet and String Orchestra in 2019 at the request of both the New York Classical Players and the New England Philharmonic. And he wrote it specifically for our concert’s soloists, Stefan Jakiw and Yoonah Kim. The work is dedicated to them, and they performed its premiere in 2019 (and married each other during their preparation for the premiere).
Nathan describes this work as a “relationship” between its players that dramatizes “an emotional transformation”:
At the heart of Double Concerto is a focus on the relationships between our three main characters — the two soloists and the string orchestra. Some of my thinking on the roles these characters play grew out of early conversations I had with Stefan Jackiw and Yoonah Kim, the two soloists for which this piece was composed, and is dedicated. Jackiw described thinking of the role of the clarinet in string chamber works, such as Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, as an invited guest. In my Double Concerto, we begin alone with our protagonist, the violin, and the string orchestra, which acts throughout like a chorus from Ancient Greek theater, standing in solidarity with the soloists and narrating and personifying the internal or external struggles they face. The solo clarinetist does not enter until almost halfway through the work, but when it does, it unexpectedly alters the course of the concerto, perhaps also instilling hope when it is most needed. The work, cast in a single movement, follows an emotional transformation.
The orchestra opens the concerto by playing long, static pitches evoking a vast and desolate landscape. The violin soloist then enters with a slowly rising passage that’s both beautiful and lamenting. As the violin weeps, a series of descending glissandi (long slides) occur in the orchestra, creating an eerie and surreal effect as though, in the inky black of the night sky, the canopy of stars begins to fall. This weeping-wandering continues until about two and a half minutes, when the soloist plays a rather resolute passage that finishes by reaching upwards with three long pitches, each just a bit higher than the last. This motive will reappear several times in the concerto, and Nathan describes it as an idée fixe — a musical phrase that reoccurs at important moments.
After some darkly turbulent music, the violin climbs back up to its earlier high perch in pitch — meanwhile, the clarinet has been waiting silently for six minutes. From niente (nothingness) the clarinet enters here, joining the violin’s stratospheric pitch, and grows in volume from a tiny ray of light into pearlescent radiance. The violin responds with its idée fixe, to which the clarinet replies with growing resolve, seeming to lead the violin out of its gloom with an increasingly assured tone. As it does so, a remarkably beautiful accompaniment occurs. Here, Nathan borrows from one of Bach’s Twelve Little Preludes (1720s), a tutorial that Bach created to teach his son, Wilhelm Friedemann, how to play the keyboard. Nathan sets the basic chords of the collection’s first prelude (BWV 924 in C Major) as the orchestra’s accompaniment to the clarinet’s ruminations, and the appearance of such unexpected tonality is breathtaking. This, however, soon creates conflict with the violin, sparking a virtuosic madness of rhythms and volume.
When calm returns at about 13 minutes, the clarinet begins an unorthodox cadenza. Instructed to play “encouraging, teaching,” the clarinet sings small parts of the violin’s idée fixe. And at the end of each fragment the clarinet holds the last note, inviting the violin — “teaching” as Bach had done with his preludes for his son — to join in that note, which the violin does with touching vulnerability. The final bars are directed to be played “floating, timeless, blending,” and this fascinating, moving concerto then deliquesces into its final, healing silence.
Aaron Copland
(Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1900; died in North Tarrytown, New York, in 1990)
Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (with Harp and Piano)
1. Slowly and Expressively Cadenza
2. Rather Fast Coda
During the 1930’s America’s taste in popular music was all about “Swing” music (as Jazz was called then), which was played on the radio, on play-at-home records, and in local dance halls. One of the greatest Swing bandleaders in that era was Benny Goodman (1909–1986) who was also a phenomenal jazz clarinetist. But during World War II and later in the 1940’s, American tastes changed as Swing gave way to the “Bebop” jazz of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Goodman changed, too, and so began his second career as a classical clarinetist but with a jazz inflection. It was in this new role that in 1947 Goodman commissioned a concerto for clarinet from the greatest contemporary American classical composer, Aaron Copland.
At this time, Copland was lecturing and conducting in Brazil, where he created most of Goodman’s concerto. Copland infused the work with an ear towards Goodman’s hallmark jazz, while also weaving in aspects of popular Brazilian music — almost unconsciously, he said. The concerto was premiered to great acclaim in 1950 in New York, with Goodman as the soloist, and it quickly became a beloved fixture in the clarinet repertory.
The concerto is conceived in an unusual structure with only two movements, one slow and one fast, connected by a long clarinet cadenza. As accompaniment for the soloist, Copland relies on a sparse orchestra of strings, harp, and piano. The first movement, marked “Slowly and Expressively,” begins with the open and glowing simplicity of plucked basses and harp, and as the remainder of the strings slowly join in, the clarinet starts singing a meandering, intimate song. This first movement progresses through some exquisite harmonies under the singing clarinet as it enchants us with its exceptional lyrical abilities and extraordinary range.
At about six minutes, the music quiets considerably, and the soloist begins a two-minute cadenza. At first, the feeling is pacific, but soon the mood changes dramatically, shot through with increasingly frenetic passages. Within this lengthy cadenza, Copland shows off the clarinet’s remarkably athletic character, while also introducing many of the motives that appear in the next movement, which begins without any pause.
This second movement, marked “Rather Fast,” begins with the harp plucking, the stringed instruments playing harmonics and tapping their strings with the wooden end of their bows, and the piano playing short, soft notes, directed to be played “staccato, delicate, and wraith-like [like a ghost],” evoking a kind of mischievous, apparitional music box playing at high speed. This movement focuses on short ostinatos and riffs — little syncopated phrases that repeat –– and which are constantly changing. This is jazz in classical clothing and Copland employs ever-more jazzy elements throughout. He explained, “I used slapping basses and whacking harp sounds to simulate [jazzy percussion effects],” which you can hear at about three and a half minutes after the start of this second movement.
Evocations of Brazilian popular music start to show up in this movement as well: the first appearing only a few bars after the “slap-bass” begins, where Copland inserts a very singable little tune in the clarinet, rising up in steps and then coming back down, and then a second one appears about 30 seconds later with a little noodling run upwards, first heard in the strings, then the piano, and followed by the clarinet. The music, however, gets increasingly intense and filled with disorienting syncopations until, at about three minutes later, a pounding, descending bass line in the piano begins, launching the Coda (ending section) and setting off a melee of excitement. This masterpiece concerto nearly hurls itself to its final bars, jubilantly ending with “a clarinet glissando — or ‘smear’ [in jazz lingo].”
Giuseppe (Fortunino Francesco) Verdi
(Born in Roncole, near Parma, Italy, in 1813; died in Milan, Italy, in 1901)
Prelude to Act III from La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”)
In 1861, Verdi received a commission from the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, for a new opera. As he had with Nabucco and many of his previous operas, Verdi turned again to a loosely veiled theme of Italy’s current struggle for independence and unification that had consumed much of the 19th century. He also returned to one of the great librettists of the day, Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876), a longtime friend and librettist for nine of Verdi’s previous operas. Piave based the text for Verdi’s commission, La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”), on an 1835 Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (“Don Álvaro, or the Power of Fate”), by the Spanish Enlightenment author and politician, Ángel de Saavedra.
La Forza del Destino follows the plight of two ill-fated lovers, Álvaro and Leonora, set in 1740’s Naples. The opera begins with Álvaro and Leonora being hopelessly in love, but Leonora’s father, a Spanish dignitary, cannot accept Álvaro’s “half-caste” Peruvian-Incan blood as a sufficient lineage for his daughter, and so, the two lovers attempt to elope. The father discovers their plan and confronts them, and during the heated exchange Álvaro’s gun accidentally fires and kills the father. Thus is set into motion the current of Fate — an inexorable sequence of tragedies — that will dog the steps of the two lovers forever.
The opening of Act III takes place in the pitch of night, in a forest near Velletri, Italy, where, in fact, an important battle took place in 1744 between Spanish-ruled Naples and the Habsburg Empire. Álvaro has joined the Spanish-Neapolitan army and is camped with his regiment before the battle. He and Leonora have been hiding separately for some time, and without any word from her, Álvaro presumes she has died. Act III opens with martial music as soldiers rowdily play cards offstage. A forlorn Álvaro slowly and silently advances into the light, and he will soon reflect on his life that has been hounded by bad luck, crowned by the most recent tragedy of having lost his beloved Leonora. But before he sings, a musical prelude sets the tragic tone with exquisite beauty.
In the prelude, the strings shudder quietly in tremolos of tattered nerves and tension, and the clarinet begins with one of Verdi’s most famous solos for that instrument. Verdi often features the clarinet in La Forza del Destino (in fact, a former student and friend was the principal clarinetist of the St. Petersburg Opera). Considered to be an instrument that best resembles the human voice, the clarinet in this prelude creates a kind of psychological inner landscape of Álvaro’s tortured soul. Slowly at first, the clarinet sings a tune that is beautiful, but also wistful and pained. After a few bars, the horns alone softly play three ominous notes in unison, which is Verdi’s “Fate” motive that reappears throughout the opera. The clarinet sings again, but now with an even more beautiful and melancholic tune which will then become the tune of Álvaro’s subsequent aria. The clarinet’s singing soon branches out into small cadenza-like reveries, reflecting Álvaro’s tender hope that Leonora is now in the care of angels. But eventually, the lower strings begin a quietly menacing pulsing that scatters the clarinet’s ruminations, and as the clarinet plays its last, touching notes, the strings end this prelude with a series of upward steps, as though Álvaro is climbing out of his own tormented heart. Act III then moves on to feature Álvaro’s aria, but for the moment, the clarinetist has been the shining operatic star, having delivered a series of potent, heart-catching solos.
Felix Mendelssohn
(Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1809; died in Leipzig, Germany, in 1847)
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. posth.
1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Allegro
Mendelssohn’s upbringing was filled with privilege and took place in perhaps the most artistically and intellectually stimulating environment of any musician of his time. Besides receiving near-continuous visits from many of Europe’s most influential thinkers and artists, the Mendelssohn family hosted a Sunday morning musical salon for their latest guests, featuring young Felix and his sister, Fanny, performing music and showing off their own compositions. Nevertheless, there is no argument that Felix was, on his own merits, one of the greatest musical prodigies in history. Even before composing at the age of 16 or 17 his extraordinary String Octet (1825) and his Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Mendelssohn had already created 12 symphonies for strings; multiple sonatas for violin, piano, and organ; several lieder (songs); two short operas; a cantata; and in 1822, this violin concerto in D minor.
This D minor violin concerto should not be confused with Mendelssohn’s later, and hugely beloved violin concerto in E minor that he wrote near the end of his life, in 1845. This earlier Concerto was written to be performed by his violin teacher, Eduard Rietz (for whom Mendelssohn also later composed his String Octet as a birthday present), but it never made it into the family’s Sunday morning salons, and there is no record of it having been performed elsewhere during Mendelssohn’s life. In fact, the concerto was virtually forgotten until 1951, when a rare-book collector, a descendant of Mendelssohn’s, presented it to the great violin virtuoso, Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin premiered the Concerto in 1952 at Carnegie Hall, and slowly, this lovely work has been gaining a reputation as Mendelssohn’s marvelous “other Concerto.”
Written for violin soloist with string orchestra, Mendelssohn begins the first movement, Allegro, with the full orchestra playing a theme that cavorts with quick runs and clipped rhythms dancing up and down the scale. Though the minor key adds a sinister hint to the music, the theme nonetheless wanders into a series of somewhat playful cat-and-mouse exchanges between the upper and lower strings. The violin soloist enters at about one minute and a half with a new, more lyrical and melancholic theme, which quickly demands virtuosic runs. Virtuosity and lyricism, for both the soloist and the orchestra, then alternate in delightfully inventive ways until the end of the movement.
The second movement, Andante, is filled with tenderness and lyricism that feels uncannily mature for a 13-year-old composer. The violins begin with a slow and unpretentious theme, quietly climbing up the scale and then gently tumbling down. Behind them, the basses and violas echo that theme in a sort of canon that creates a sense of yearning. When the soloist enters about two minutes later with a short little cadenza, that yearning is intensified. The soloist then moves into a new theme composed of several measures of long, lyrical notes that periodically give over to more active rhythms, like a jittery love-smitten heart. The entire Andante explores these emotions in a number of gentle ways, until the last beautiful bars, where the soloist sings alone, quietly holding a note high in its register.
Without a pause, the fiery third movement, another Allegro, begins. The soloist and orchestra jump in together with a theme that’s free-spirited and frisky. The soloist quickly launches into virtuosic passages, which are often answered with equally virtuosic playing in the orchestra, and together they soon arrive at a series of cadenzas for the soloist that were written out by the young Mendelssohn. The rest of the movement then sprints away as if on a precipice, with an exhilarating feeling of coming dangerously close to slipping off the edge. As the soloist performs with increasing pyrotechnics, the movement comes to its exciting and wonderfully fun final bars.
© Max Derrickson