Bach at the Keyboard

Bach was only 22 when he landed his third church job, as organist of St Blasius in the city of Muehlhausen. His audition was on Easter Sunday of 1707 – imagine the stress! – and there’s a good chance that his audition piece was this very cantata.

If so, it was a good choice. The Muehlhausen city council met a month later and no one even discussed any other musician. His second interview was on the 14th of June. The very next day, Bach signed his contract.

For this cantata, Bach used a text by Martin Luther. Unlike some of his later Easter Sunday works, it’s not a bright, joyous piece – but it’s not by any means dark. It’s celebratory, all right, but in a reserved, pensive way.

Bach opens with the chorus, the sopranos carrying the melody and the violins adding florid decorations. He keeps the mood relatively somber until the text says "des wir sollen fröhlich sein" ("thus we should be joyful"). Finally, then, he starts to open things up.

Bach was both a sensitive musician and a devout one: he wrote the letters SDG (Soli Deo Gloria, or glory only to God) at the end of every sacred manuscript. Thus he didn’t hesitate to use word-painting to illuminate the religious meaning of this cantata. He writes scales around "Menschenkinder" and "Tod," ("mankind" and "death") and assigns strong chords to the words "Recht" ("rule") and "Gewalt" ("power"). He paints the phrase "Tods Gestalt" ("death’s empty shell") in a dim, hazy light. His voices chase each other as "Tod und Leben ringen" ("death and life battled"), and "ein Tod den andern fraß" ("one death ate the other").

Then Bach drives home his point. A low part for the bass and a surprisingly dissonant orchestral part represent the Passion – and then rising scales in the violins symbolize the Resurrection. He ends with an elegantly direct setting of the gospel lesson for the day, "Christus will die Koste sein" ("Christ will be the sustenance").

Bach must have thought this cantata was effective, because he didn’t let it gather library dust forever. In his harried, overworked Leipzig days, he revived it not once, but twice – for Easter Sunday of 1724, and again on Easter of 1725.

Philippe Quint (Arts Management Group)

During the 2005-2006 season, the Akron Symphony was led by candidates for their music director gig. These auditions were all musically satisfying. You’d expect that, since any finalist in such a selection process is going to have pretty good chops.

The October 2005 concert was given a further boost by the presence of a rising young violin soloist. He played Mozart’s Turkish concerto (#5) with a heady level of musicianship and precision.

This impressive fiddler was Philippe Quint. Since then his career has continued to blossom. In 2009, he recorded the Korngold concerto; the CD hit the Billboard classical top 20 in its first week on the market. He’s been nominated for 4 Grammy awards. This month (March 2012) he’ll release a recording of the Mendelssohn and Bruch concertos, and Beethoven’s Romances.

It’s also taken an intriguing new trajectory. Quint has become an actor – at least for one film. He’ll reach the big screen in New York next month (April 2012).

Downtown Express turns on the tension between the tux-and-tails world of the concert hall and the blue jeans attitude of popular music. Philippe Quint plays Sasha, a Russian violinist on scholarship to Julliard. From the time Sasha was a child, his traditional cellist father has been grooming him for a career on the concert stage.

But Sasha finds himself drawn to the gritty, raucous attitudes and rhythms of New York’s downtown music scene. Then he meets Ramona, a bohemian singer-songwriter. Soon he is a part of her band – and her life.

Afraid of his father’s censure, for a time Sasha tries to live both lives, careening between concert violinist and pop fiddler. A crucial recital looms. Which path will he choose?

“I was instantly swept away by this story because it mirrored my life,” says Quint. He was born in Russia and defected to the US as a teenager, to avoid army service in Russia and to study with Juilliard’s Dorothy DeLay.

Many musicians have appeared in films as themselves or as famous virtuosi of the past. However, it’s not at all common for a classical musician to play a fictional character. To prepare for his role, Quint studied with producer and acting coach Sondra Lee.

Downtown Express is based on a true story. It was filmed on location in New York in the summer of 2010. Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay plays Ramona, the street musician. The director is David Grubin and the producer is Michael Hausman (Brokeback Mountain, Gangs of New York, Amadeus).

Does this mean an end to Quint’s concert hall careeer? Not likely, given the success that’s been bringing him. In addition to his CD release, just this year (2012) he’s played concerts in Bochum, Germany; Mons, Belgium; Sofia, Bulgaria; Mexico City; and in Santa Monica, El Paso, Brevard, and Harrisburg. Later this month (March 2012) he’ll head for Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

Downtown Express opens on 20 April at the QUAD Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, New York.

Further reading:

Downtown Express (official public website)

Downtown Express at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)

Downtown Express trailer

Philippe Quint at Arts Management Group

This is an update of an article first published in WKSU Classical on 2 February 2011.

Opening chords of Beethoven’s Eroica (string parts) (public domain, via IMSLP)

The producer of the video clip below must really like Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony – and must have quite a record collection. Here we have no fewer than 66 different approaches to the opening chords of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

It’s pretty entertaining in its own way, especially if your idea of humor is (in)variation on a theme! In fact, that may be all that its creator intended. But I wonder if it doesn’t say something, deliberately or not, about changing performance practice, and the way different conductors approach the same work.

You can’t assign a formula to it, of course. Still, as the years have gone by, prevailing ideas about Beethoven’s tempi have changed – mostly toward faster.

This is an issue that musicians have argued over for generations. Johann Maelzel’s metronome dates from 1812, eight years after Beethoven completed the Eroica, but Beethoven later added metronome markings to the score. Many conductors – and scholars – still insist that Beethoven can’t possibly have meant for his works to be played as fast as his markings indicate, that his metronome must have been inaccurate. But in more recent years, some conductors have taken Beethoven at his word, and not just those closely associated with the historically informed performance movement, either. That has resulted in some – shall we say – exciting, even breathtaking, readings.

So, are the more (dare I call them) ponderous deliveries of these chords near the beginning of this 1929 – 2011 chronology? That will be left as an exercise for the reader.

As for overall stylistic trends, those too have evolved, but interpretation remains highly individual with the conductor. Just ask anyone who has heard a work he loved on WKSU and bought a CD of it, only to find – maybe to his chagrin! – that it sounds quite different under a different baton. (I know this experience all too well from my own light-walleted early days of record buying, when I fell victim to the siren song of $2.98 bargain-table LPs.)

This is nowhere more apparent in the immense range of ways these conductors interpret the same two measures. To my ears, at least, Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwaengler, and Fritz Reiner give Beethoven’s chords something akin to a gravitas. George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Osmo Vanska, and Andrew Manze pull back the slingshot with these notes, launching the orchestra into the first movement. Rene Liebowitz, Michael Gielen, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt almost breeze past them.

This clip will drive one more contrast home: the pitch difference between modern instrument and period instrument orchestras. The latter play about a half-step lower. Once you’ve heard it this way, you’ll never forget it. The producer of this video clip has no mercy.

Below are two links, each complimenting the other.

The first one is for you to hear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-FUEidQc-E

It’s a recording of Giacomo Puccini and his wife from 1907. They stopped by a studio while on a visit to New York City. Both were quite happy with the hospitality the dignitaries and fans had shown them. Their address is mostly in Italian, but even if you don’t understand the language, you’ll hear him say “New York.” Just before his entourage starts to applaud, he says, “America, forever!”.

The next click will get you to a film of the streets of New York City, made about the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo

It’s just traffic, but use your imagination a little bit. Look at the windows of the buildings. Behind one of them might be the very studio where the above recording was made.

In those days, a recording studio was nothing like today’s. Electricity was used mainly for lighting. The first “electrical” recordings (made with microphones, amplifiers, and electric cutters) were still almost 2 decades in the future.

The recordings of 1907 were acoustical – that is, they were made with nothing more than the faint energy of the sound waves themselves. The sound was directed from a small room into a huge cone (often several feet in diameter). The cone went through the wall into the next room. Where it came to a point was a vibrating diaphragm with a needle attached. The needle inscribed a groove onto a wax cylinder (Edison system) or a flat gramophone disc (Berliner system).

Modern studios are soundproof, but that was hardly necessary in those days. The acoustical recording equipment was so insensitive that any noise beyond a few feet from the cone was not picked up.

Edward Elgar circa 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

When you think of long-lost manuscripts rediscovered, you probably think of works by Bach or Mozart. Certainly it’s cause for celebration when such an ancient manuscript turns up, since it can give musicologists insight into the composer’s original ideas about the piece.

But such discoveries are rare. Let’s face it – in those days, most composers were writing for the moment. They didn’t consider the possibility that their works would outlive them. If they kept their manuscripts, it was mostly for reference.

Bach and Handel, for example, saved their manuscripts so they could recycle from them. They often lifted entire movements from those earlier works to adapt for their present needs. Handel’s Messiah contains sections of his Italian operas. Bach’s concertos draw on movements from his cantatas (and vice versa).

You’d think that by the 20th century composers would have realized that they might be writing for the ages, and would have learned to be more careful with their originals. Still, they clearly placed more value on some works than others. It’s not too surprising that a composer might not think a short work written for a special occasion would be of much interest beyond that day. And in fact it appears that Edward Elgar wasn’t too careful with the original manuscript of just such a work .

That manuscript turned up just this past Tuesday (14 February 2012) in Leicestershire, after being lost for over half a century.

It’s a work for carillon (church bells, usually mechanized and played with a keyboard, but sometimes played entirely manually). Edward Elgar composed it for the 1923 opening of the Carillon Tower in Queen’s Park, Loughborough, which was built as a memorial to the fallen in the first world war. Although copies of the manuscript have been known for some time, the original was thought to have been lost.

But on Tuesday staff at Charnwood Borough Council were cleaning and reorganizing a secure room, and they found a dusty old folder. It contained the original hand-written score for Carillon Chimes. They also stumbled across several letters from Elgar, and a film which may be footage of the tower’s opening. The items had been donated to the Council in the 1950s, filed away, and forgotten.

The film has been sent for analysis, to determine what it contains and whether it can be restored. As for the music itself, maybe this will bring new attention to a composition nearly forgotten.

About a year ago, pianist Simone Dinnerstein was featured on the television program CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it all this time, and finally, here it is.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/23/sunday/main7274692.shtml

Johannes Brahms and Eduard Remény (seated)

“My father was a dear old man, very simple-minded, and most unsophisticated.” Those words are from Johannes Brahms. They help to explain why, while studying not just music, but also Latin and classics in school, Brahms had to help pay the family’s bills by playing the piano. In dirty Hamburg, the places that paid were the bars and brothels in his neighborhood.

Playing mood or dance music, mostly ignoring the activities around him, he was paid in coins dropped in a stein on the piano (and given as much beer as he wanted). He was only 12 years old. The ‘ladies’ would hang around waiting for business, teasing the cute little boy, but staying clear of improprieties.

Within a couple of years, Brahms was finding work elsewhere in town – not just as a pianist, but also as an arranger for small ensembles in which he was often participating.

By the age of 15, Brahms was able make his official premiere as a concert pianist. That was 1848 and Hamburg was experiencing the overflow of Hungarian refugees trying to get to the United States. During the summer, the Austrian and Russian governments had crushed a revolution in Hungary. Those trying to get out of the mess were passing through the port of Hamburg.

While waiting, Hungarians (including gypsies from the area) would entertain themselves and passers-by with their songs, quite ready to accept cash for these impromptu performances. Young Johannes made his way to the docks for this wonderful music.

About two years later, a violinist born Eduard Hoffmann changed his name to Reményi – essentially a Hungarian translation of his name – out of love for his homeland. He was among those Hungarian refugees in Hamburg. Brahms heard this young phenom, and before long the two were performing around Hamburg.

A rumor started circulating that there was an arrest warrant out for Reményi, so the fun was over for the time being. Reményi was off the U.S. for two years, only to return with bigger plans in mind. The two would tour Europe. It would be a chance of a lifetime for the young unknown Brahms. He would be touring with a true Hungarian violinist at a time when the popularity of that country’s music was peaking. They were a hit.

But the young Brahms was so good that the more famous Reményi became jealous. Their friendship soured. When Brahms published his Hungarian Dances, Reményi claimed that Brahms had stolen pieces that the violinist had actually originated. Brahms responded that they were indeed folk tunes and therefore basically ‘public domain.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself. While the two were on one of their tours, they met other famous musicians. One of them was the Jewish-Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. Reményi and Joachim were close friends and both had that feeling for the music of their people.

Let me stop for a moment and take us to another place and time. You are in the back of a bar in New York City – maybe the Village Vanguard. The year is 1959. The Dave Brubeck Quartet or Miles Davis are playing the latest take on this heavily styled genre of music. You can hear it better than you can see it, thanks to the grey haze of smoke – smoke that over the years has glazed the place with a light shade of ochre-brown. Your beer is warm, but your company is cool, as you are completely mesmerized by what you hear.

That’s what it was like in many of Europe’s hip taverns in the mid-nineteenth century. The Jazz of the day was variations on Hungarian or Gypsy music. Even when Brahms wasn’t playing it with Reményi, he could certainly hear it close by.

About five years later, this time on his own and better known, Brahms would find himself at the piano at the center of a small crowd waiting for his next tune. He’d play these ‘out-there’ gypsy-style pieces. Before long, these ideas ended up on paper, one Hungarian dance at a time, until his friend Clara Schumann started adding them to her concerts.

By 1868, Brahms had penned ten of these Hungarian dances in a scoring for two pianos. He and Clara performed them in a concert. The he gave them to his publisher, Fritz Simrock. They proved to be very popular.

Four years later, another publication – this time for single piano – sold even better. Brahms then orchestrated three of the dances. Simrock made a ton of money from these dances. Before long, he had the brilliant idea of asking Brahms to come up with more. Brahms obliged.

In time, other versions appeared, and Brahms’s good friend Antonín Dvořák orchestrated the last four Hungarian Dances of Book Four. He may have done this partly as thanks to Brahms for hooking him up with the publisher Simrock. (Simrock’s first request to Dvořák was a set of Slavonic Dances – which made Simrock even more money).

The 21 Hungarian Dances brought in cash for Brahms too, not just for his publisher. But what was more important to Brahms was that now he had leverage with Simrock. Now Brahms could ask Simrock to publish his more ‘serious’ music, which both knew would be less profitable.

Brahms’ Hungarian Dances may not have been his greatest work. But by helping to bring his other works to light, they may have been some of the most important pieces of music he ever composed.

Jenő Blau was born in Budapest, Hungary. We know him by the name he adopted early in his career when he moved to the United States.

The first name he took is the English version of his given name, Jenő. Legend has it that he invented his American last name by looking at the boat from which he was disembarking and removing the N.

He left 501 boxes of marked scores, arrangements and more for the University of Pennsylvania Library. Here is the website the library set up to let you in on the life of Eugene Ormandy.

Hallelujah Chorus Manuscript (British Library)

Most years at least one of the major Northeast Ohio orchestras – the Cleveland Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, the Akron Symphony Orchesta, or the Canton Symphony – slates a November or December performance of Handel’s beloved oratorio, Messiah. This year (2011), though, none of them has programmed that famous oratorio. Nevertheless, you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to hear it.

Ross Duffin’s chorus, Quire Cleveland, is offering a Messiah performance as part of the Chagrin Valley Chamber Music Concert Series. They’ll sing with conductor Michael Gelfand and the Cleveland Virtuosi. Soloists: Dorota Sobieska, Lara Nie, Daniel Doty, and Brian Keith Johnson. It’s Saturday 3 December, 7:30pm, at Valley Lutheran Church, 87 East Orange Street, Chagrin Falls.

Orrville Community Chorus will present their 68th annual reading of Messiah on 4 December at 7pm. It’ll be performed at Central Christian School, 3970 Kidron Road, Kidron. The chorus and soloists will be accompanied by a 12-member chamber orchestra and piano.

This year’s will be the Cleveland Messiah Chorus‘s 90th performance of Handel’s famed oratorio. Virginia Wieland-Mast will conduct at Grace Lutheran Church, 13001 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights. It’s Sunday, 27 November, 7pm. As with public radio, the admission is free, but they’ll gladly accept your monetary offering.

Various area churches will present programs including excerpts and, in some cases, substantial portions of Messiah.

Some of them even invite you to join in. One such reading will be on 27 November, when Canton’s Christ Presbyterian Church, 530 West Tuscarawas Street, will offer their 3rd annual Messiah singalong. If you’ve sung Messiah, or if you’re a good sight-singer, you can take your score along and add your own voice. If you’d rather just listen, you can discover the heady feeling of immersing yourself completely in Handel’s music.

On 11 December at 5pm, Samuel Gordon will lead First Congregational Church’s Festival Choir, Singers Companye, and a chamber orchestra in Part One (the Nativity sequence) of Handel’s Messiah. First Congregational is located at 292 E Market St, Akron.

If you don’t mind a bit of a hike, the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus will offer Messiah on the 18th of December at 2pm. It’s at Cincinnati Music Hall, 1241 Elm St. The Toledo Symphony‘s reading will be at 8pm on the 3rd and 4th of December, at Peristyle Theater, 2445 Monroe Street. The Dayton Philharmonic‘s is set for Sunday 11 December at 4pm, at Dayton’s Westminster Presbyterian Church.

One of the more intriguing Messiah performances this year is the one being assembled by the Pittsburgh Symphony and Mendelssohn Choir. This dramatization of the work reportedly de-emphasizes the three sections’ religious interpretations – Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection – and re-imagines them as eras in American history – the 1950s, the present, and the years round the turn of the 20th century. PSO music director Manfred Honeck will conduct. As in an opera, soloists Laura Heimes, Lindsay Ammann, William Ferguson, and Philip Cutlip will be costumed on a set stage, and the orchestra will play from the pit. Performances are on 2, 3, and 4 December.

Know of a Messiah performance that I’ve missed? Add it in the comments below!

The link below is another item from Oberlin Conservatory’s web site, this one about harpist Yolanda Kondonassis.  It’s a well produced and edited piece showcasing her as a teacher, person and ambassador for the harp.  

You can explore the Oberlin website for dozens of these little vignettes. This is just a taste.

Oberlin Conservatory

Oberlin College Conservatory has one of the best music school websites I’ve seen. For instance, the faculty section has a video presentation on pianist Peter Takács, where he shares a little about himself. Here, he talks about his recently released CD set – a complete recording of the Beethoven piano sonatas.

Rescue worker, 11 Sept 2001 (US Navy)

Through the ages, very little has done as much as music to settle an unsteady world. Wherever and whenever people have mourned, it has soothed their grief and given them comfort. In this universal art form we find peace, consolation, and reconciliation.

Music is, at its core, organized sound. Like so many in past centuries, ours is an age of disorder, a world of violence. To bring order and peace to our world, we must begin with ourselves, and music’s order can help us stem the chaos of our own lives.

Many of these works we present today (Sunday, 11 September 2011) have a direct connection with the outcomes of violence between people: requiem, remembrance, reconciliation, and pleas for human unity and peace. I hope that, in some small way, they will help to heal some of the world’s wounds.

In memoriam: Baroque tombeaux

Sylvius Leopold Weiss: Tombeau sur la mort de Mr. Logy

Marin Marais: Tombeau pour Mr. de Saint-Colombe

The term tombeau means “tombstone.” It was first applied to poetry in the 16th century. Then, in the 17th century, musicians began using it for compositions written as memorials to persons of significance. That might be a public figure, but just as often the person was “of significance” mainly to the composer. In the late 17th century, the tombeau became common in the repertoire of lutenists, harpsichordists, and viol players. Today we present two tombeaux.

Sylvius Leopold Weiss

Sylvius Leopold Weiss was one of the 18th century’s most successful lutenists and composers, the highest-paid musician at the Dresden Court. He met the Bohemian lutenist Jan Anton Losy, Count of Losinthal, in 1717 in Prague. They became good friends. Weiss’s compositions may even have been influenced by the Count. When Losy died just four years later, Weiss composed the Tombeau sur la mort de Mr. Logy in his memory.

Today we remember Marin Marais as France’s master viol player and composer round the turn of the 18th century. Monsieur de Saint-Colombe (we think his first name was Jean, but we’re not positive) was his teacher. It’s said that Saint-Colombe tried to keep some of the secrets of his playing from Marais, but Marais hid nearby while Saint-Colombe was practicing.

The development of the viol owes a great deal to Saint-Colombe. He added a 7th string to the bass viol, adopted overspun bass strings (still used today on modern string instruments), and developed a new left hand technique. But somehow the story of his life has evaded the historians. If not for the heartfelt tombeau Marais composed for him in 1701, we wouldn’t even know the year of his death.

Ernest Bloch (Ernest Bloch Foundation)

For reflection: Ernest Bloch: Suite Modale

Ernest Bloch arrived in the United States during the Great War. He expected to stay only long enough to conduct for a dance company’s tour, but when the company disintegrated, he stayed on, teaching, conducting, and composing. In 1920, Bloch was the founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Four years later, he became an American citizen.

Although he spent much of the 1930s in Europe, the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment drove Bloch back to the United States in 1940.

In 1956, Bloch had only 3 more years to live, so it’s not surprising that his Suite Modale has an autumnal, pensive mood.

Bach at the Keyboard

In memoriam: J S Bach: Cantata No. 170 “Vergnuegte Ruh”

Though we know Bach for his big, powerful works, from 1726 he seems to have abandoned the chorus in favor of just one or two voices with instruments. This may have been a stylistic evolution. Or perhaps it’s simply that Bach, ever the pragmatic musician, found himself with a surfeit of fine soloists — or a shortage of choral singers.

Case in point: the Cantata “Vergnuegte Ruh.” Bach composed this warmly glowing image of heavenly rest for the sixth Sunday after Trinity, probably in 1732. The opening aria is a perfect example of Baroque tone-painting. The gentle, rocking rhythm feels like a reassuring cradle song.

Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, dich kann man nicht bei Höllensünden, wohl aber Himmelseintracht finden; du stärkst allein die schwache Brust. Drum sollen lauter Tugendgaben in meinem Herzen Wohnung haben.

Pleasant rest, favored desire of the soul, one cannot find you through the sins of hell, but rather through heavenly harmony; you alone strengthen the weak breast. Therefore, pure gifts of virtue shall dwell in my heart.

Gabriel Faure (Wikimedia Commons)

In memoriam: Gabriel Faure: Requiem: In Paradisum

Faure called it “a requiem as gentle as I am,” and Faure’s may indeed be the most comforting and affirmative of all. It has none of the storms and threats that usually darken the big Romantic-era requiem settings.

Like Brahms and his German Requiem, Faure composed his requiem after a personal loss – the death of his parents. Unlike Brahms, Faure didn’t discard the entire Latin Requiem Mass text, but in purging the requiem of its fire and brimstone he made it just as non-liturgical. The Faure Requiem is muted, but far from somber – its mood is more that of peaceful resignation.

Faure ends the work with a setting of the In Paradisum from the Burial Service. This movement is bathed in warmth and light. The voices float weightless on a soft summer breeze. The organ sways as the strings gently, graciously, lift us heavenward.

In paradisum deducant te angeli, in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem.

May the angels lead you to paradise; at your coming may the martyrs receive you, and guide you into the holy city of Jerusalem. May the choir of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.

Rick Sowash (sowash.com)

For reflection: Rick Sowash: An American Pavane

Their music could hardly be more different, but Ohio composer Rick Sowash is in one way similar to the earlier American composer, Charles Ives: he doesn’t make his living from his music. Sowash has been a radio broadcaster, a theater manager, an innkeeper, and a county commissioner. More recently he’s been earning his daily bread as an author, lecturer, and filmmaker.

After college, Sowash returned to North Central Ohio, lived in Gambier (near Mount Vernon) for some years, and now makes his home in Cincinnati. His works have a kind of folksy appeal that’s hard to categorize.

Of Une Pavane Americaine: Homage a Ravel, Sowash says: “It borrows the structure of [Ravel's] Pavane for a Dead Princess. But the piece remains very American in character: in it there are echoes of Gershwin and jazz. Ravel admired both.”

Johannes Brahms

In memoriam: Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem: “Selig sind die toten” (Blessed are the Dead).

Brahms was deeply saddened by the death of his friend Robert Schumann. It’s likely that the German Requiem was his way of coping with his grief.

Despite the name, Brahms’s requiem is not really a liturgical work. Instead of setting the usual texts of the Latin Requiem, Brahms chose his own texts – all in German. Although he took them from the Christian Bible, Brahms specifically was not writing a church service. He meant the German Requiem to be a source of comfort and hope in the face of death and loss.

Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben, von nun an. Ja, der Geist spricht, dass sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit; denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach. (Revelation 14: 13)

Blessed [holy] are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth. The Spirit says that they may rest from their labors, because their works follow them.

Ravel and Couperin (Wikimedia Commons)

In memoriam: Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin

Ravel had a real fascination for French music of earlier times, so it was natural for him to pay homage to his Baroque counterpart, Francois Couperin, in Le Tombeau de Couperin. But this is really a triple homage. He’s also recalling the 17th century tombeau form, and paying tribute to six of his friends who had perished in First World War.

Ravel composed Le Tombeau de Couperin for solo piano in 1917. By the time he had orchestrated it, choosing four sections he felt were most suitable for the orchestra, the war was over.

Maurice Durufle (durufle.org)

In memoriam: Maurice Durufle: Requiem: Introit and Kyrie

Maurice Durufle spent most of his life as organist at Saint-Etienne du Mont de Paris. He grew up with the sound of Gregorian Chant in his ears, and chant infused both his playing and his composition.

As a composer Durufle was an unremitting perfectionist. Thus he left us only a few works – but those he did give us are finely crafted and brilliantly polished. The most beloved of them is the Requiem.

Durufle modeled his requiem on Faure’s. Like Faure’s, his requiem is a peaceful work of rest and light: not for him the fury and darkness of the Judgment Day. Durufle even used Faure’s editorial revisions in the Latin text, including the inclusion of the In Paradisum from the Burial Service.

This similarity is a bit surprising,when you look at the two composers’ religious backgrounds. Faure was a church chorus master, but he thought of himself as a skeptic. Durufle had no such doubts. He was deeply dedicated to the Catholic Church.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem. Exaudi orationem meam; ad te omnis caro veniet. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

Grant them eternal rest, Lord; may perpetual light shine on them. A hymn becomes You in Sion, Lord, and a vow paid to You in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer; to You all flesh shall come. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Henryk Gorecki (Artur Gierwatowski)

In memoriam: Henryk Gorecki: “Sorrowful Songs” from Symphony #3

The best known work of this modern Polish composer is his moving Third Symphony. It’s a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

The spare text of the second movement’s vocal part is taken from a prayer found on the wall of a cell in the Gestapo headquarters in Zakopane. It is signed, “Helena Wanda Blazusiakowna, 18 years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944.”

No, mother, do not weep.
Most chaste Queen of Heaven,
Support me always.
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Gerald Finzi

For reflection: Gerald Finzi: Eclogue

The First World War left Finzi bereaved. He’d lost friends, a beloved mentor, and three brothers. Surely this colored his music. Though it has moments of celebration and joy, much of it is tinged with a gentle melancholy.

The word eclogue comes from Middle English. It’s a pastoral poem. But this musical eclogue could be called an elegy – at least for its composer.

Finzi composed his Eclogue in 1929, intending it as the middle movement of a piano concerto. He tinkered with ideas for the outer movements off and on until just a few years before his death in 1956. He reworked this one at least twice, but never finished the others. This is all we have, the composer’s final word.

Finzi didn’t hear this music played in concert. Nor did he publish it – in fact, he never even named it. After his death, his friends and relatives, along with his editors and executors, decided on the title. Eclogue was premiered at a memorial service for Finzi, four months after he’d died.

Alan Hovhaness & Rajah Hoyden c1948 (Frank Ferrante) Click for more info

Toward unity: Alan Hovhaness: Symphony #11 “All Men are Brothers”: Finale

When Alan Hovhaness died in June of 2000, he left behind one of the 20th century’s largest catalogs of works – in spite of the fact that he’d burned many of his early pieces.

While he was studying with the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, Hovhaness discovered Eastern music. This led him to explore Eastern cultures and religions. His own heritage brought him into contact with musicians of the Armenian Church, who carried on the ancient traditions of Armenian music. All these influences found their way into his music.

Of his Symphony #11, Hovhaness wrote, “The symphony is an attempt to express a positive faith in universal cosmic love as the only possible ultimate goal for man and nature. Let all unite in peace on our tiny planet …” He says the finale “begins with a theme in praise of universal love.” Then he quotes a Buddhist sutra: “And the voice of the Lord Buddha was heard like the sound of a great gong hung in the skies, saying that though one met a thousand men on his way, they would all be one’s brothers.”

Leonard Bernstein (Wikimedia Commons)

Toward unity: Leonard Bernstein: Chichester Psalms: Finale

The Chichester Psalms are an intriguing union of Bernstein’s religious and ethnic background with the source of the commission. The name “Chichester” points to the Anglican cathedral in Sussex. Every summer since 1903, the cathedrals of Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury join forces to put on a Southern Cathedrals Festival in Winchester.

As music director of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein never felt that he had enough time to compose, so in 1965 he took a sabbatical. Among the works he created that year, Bernstein said the one he was happiest with was the Chichester Psalms, created for the Southern Cathedrals Festival.

Bernstein drew his psalm texts from the Hebrew. He deliberately used instruments that evoke Biblical times — harp, trombone, and trumpet. His final text in the fourth and last section is the gentle Hineh mah tov.

Adonai, Adonai, lo gavah libi,v’lo ramu einai,v’lo hilachtiBig’dolot uv’niflaot mimeni. Im lo shiviti V’domam’I, naf’shi k’gamul alei imo, Kagamul alai naf’shi. Yahel Yis’rael el Adonai me’atah v’ad olam.

Behold how good, and how pleasant it is, for brethren to dwell together in unity.

Samuel Barber

In memoriam: Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings

Barber composed his string quartet in 1936. He said the adagio second movement was inspired by a passage from Virgil’s Georgics, describing how a stream becomes a river.

When Arturo Toscanini asked Barber to arrange that movement for string orchestra, he could hardly have known its future. Toscanini’s NBC Symphony first performed the arrangement in 1938. Less than seven years later, it was played for the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was also heard at President Kennedy’s funeral, and has since been used at other times of deepest public mourning. The Adagio for Strings is elegant, almost archaic, in its simplicity and strength.

Keith Jarrett (Micael Engstroem/IBL)

Toward unity: Keith Jarrett: Bridge of Light

If you know of Jarrett, probably you think of him as a jazzman. However, his early training was classical. In fact, before he was even twenty, he found himself preparing for a trip to Paris and study with the famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Almost on the eve of the trip, though, he abruptly cancelled. Instead, he went to New York to make a career in jazz.

Despite his success in jazz, Jarrett never lost his interest in classical music. Bridge of Light dates from 1990. Jarret writes, “This piece is a sort of multicultural hymn … born of a desire to praise and contemplate … I am trying to reveal a state I think is missing in today’s world: a certain state of surrender … to an ongoing harmony in the universe that exists with or without us.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams and friend (bach-cantatas.com)

For reconciliation: Ralph Vaughan Williams: Dona nobis pacem: “Reconciliation”

In mid-1930s Europe, the talk was once again of war. Vaughan Williams was deeply fearful of the outcome. Against this grim backdrop, he created the Dona nobis pacem. It was premiered in 1936. Ironically, the third performance of the work, in 1939, had to be canceled after fighting broke out.

Vaughan Williams found a text to match his anguish and despair in Walt Whitman’s anti-war poem Beat! Beat! Drums!, inspired by Whitman’s own close-up view of the Civil War. He added more texts from other sources, including other Whitman writings. Over it all he suspended the words “Dona nobis pacem” – grant us peace – from the Latin Mass.

The third movement of Dona nobis pacem is titled “Reconciliation.” It takes its text from Whitman’s Drum Taps. The movement ends with the chorus bearing the image of Death and Night, which “incessantly, softly, wash again and ever again this soiled world,” as the soprano intones the invocation, “Grant us peace.” It is a plea that echoes from Whitman’s time to Vaughan Williams’s, and indeed to our own.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly,
Wash again and ever again this soiled world.

Dona nobis pacem.

Robert Moran (courtesy of the composer)

In memoriam: Robert Moran: Trinity Requiem

When Trinity Youth Chorus director Robert Ridgell asked Denver-born composer Robert Moran to create a work in observance of the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster, Moran wasn’t sure that young voices were right for such a serious event. But then he recalled that “a friend of mine in England, as a little child, was sent off to Wales during the Nazi bombing of London. He returned at the end of the war to find that both his parents had been killed.”

“I remember so many past stories of children who had lost their parents, their families and in fact lost everything to wars, famine, vicious governments, and natural catastrophes,” Moran says. “Trinity Requiem is a reflection upon those thousands of children throughout the world with no future and little if any hope.”

The official world premiere of the Trinity Requiem took place this past Wednesday (7 September 2011) in Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.

The recording we hear today was made last November (2010) in Trinity. Listen carefully during the opening of the Offertory movement, the fourth. You’ll hear a quiet introduction built upon the bass of the famous Pachelbel Canon in D – and over it, a police car’s siren.

Such ambient noise intrusions are just another challenge when you’re recording in a real-world public space rather than a studio. Most producers would have declared the take a loss, stopped, and re-recorded. Composer Moran and and chorus director Robert Ridgell didn’t. They decided that the siren would be “a reminder that the World Trade Center, 10 years before, had been just behind Trinity.” The siren became part of the music, part of their remembrance.

Masques et bergamasques was one of the last pieces that Gabriel Fauré finished. The Prince of Monaco commissioned it, and it premiered in Monte Carlo in April of 1919.

He composed only a small part of it anew. Most of the rest was ideas that had been lying around, Fauré wondering what to do with them.

When the work was finished, Fauré is supposedly to have said that “It is like the impression you get from the paintings of Watteau.” Here are some of those paintings.

The Ahn Trio has one of the most impressive websites I’ve seen for a Classical ensemble.
http://www.ahntrio.com/v2/

A performer cannot move others unless he is also moved. He must feel all of the affects he hopes to arouse in his audience.

A mere technician can lay no claim to the rewards of those who sway the heart rather than the ear … one meets technicians who astound us with their prowess, without ever touching our sensibilities. They overwhelm our hearing without satisfying it, and stun the mind without moving it.