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Fauré - Piano Quartet no.2 in g minor

Thunderstorms are rolling overhead and this morning has been a grey blur. Scrolling through my iPod, my finger fell over an album of Fauré’s piano quartets, which I haven’t gotten familiar with. On the one hand, you can hear Parisian salon music, something light and charming for entertainment…but at the same time Fauré takes unexpected shifts in key, harmonic backdrop, and rhythm, often enough to keep the music interesting. The second quartet opens with a deliberate rush in the piano, and the strings pull out a passionate melody to add to the dense texture. Of the “impressionist” composers, Fauré is a bit ignored in favor of the more rebellious Debussy and Ravel. Even so, Fauré’s more  “conservative” language has some obscure and impressionist  “vocabulary”. The music constantly modulates, but despite touching so many keys, it’s easier to follow the logic and flow, and it’s great to get lost under the watery surface. The second movement is a fun syncopated mini scherzo. The piano’s notes are light and staccato, the strings switch from warm bows to harsh plucking. The slow movement opens with a calm chord passage on the piano, that is paired with a mournful melody in the strings after each iteration, and the work builds up to a heavy outburst that subsides back into the calm of the opening. The finale throws us into the hectic energy that opened the work. Again, the chromaticism tosses us around the musical horizon up until the spirited and dizzy coda. I would put this in my list of “perfect rainy day music”

Movements:

1. Allegro molto moderato

2. Allegro molto

3. Adagio non troppo

4. Allegro molto

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Bartók - Piano Concerto no.2

While Bartók was hailed in his life as one of the greatest Hungarian composers, as well as a giant of 20th century music, he had struggled to make a larger name for himself outside of Europe early in his career. He’d contemplated moving to the United States and touring there as a pianist because Hungary’s government was threatening to turn over to fascism. The work is written in a symmetrical arch form, with a fast-slow-fast-slow-fast pattern. Like the Strove Fair of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, it opens with a brass fanfare before the piano launches into the incredibly difficult movement. Through constant chords and runs and semiquavers, the pianist only rests for about 23 measures in the entirety of the ten minute movement. Bartók had intended to write this piece as a more simple and easy to grasp work than his first concerto, but even so it is still a challenge for pianists. As wild and fun as it is, it is also contrapuntally complex, and in an interesting move, he does not use the full orchestra yet. The second movement opens mysteriously in the strings. The slow tole of piano notes makes me think of this movement as another example of his “night music”, trying to recreate the sounds of nature, insects, the haunting of darkness. Though it doesn’t nearly match up as his first concerto, but it does hold an anxious atmosphere. It soon breaks into a feverish little toccata with a main theme built out of repeated notes and full of dizzying chromatic scales. The orchestra lightly chimes in with little bird calls, or a murky cloud behind the piano with a few brass chords here and there. The music shifts back to the calm of the movement’s opening before rushing into the finale. The piano brings back a main melody over the timpani rolls, and the movement takes off in the same energy of the first, and the main melody of the first returns with slight variation. Through the frantic interplay between piano and orchestra, the music surges into a more cheerful finale.

Movements:

1. Allegro

2. Adagio - Presto - Adagio

3. Allegro molto - Più molto

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Poulenc - Valse (1919)

This little waltz was Poulenc’s contribution to L’Album des Six. “The Six” were a group of French composers who rejected the Post-Romanticism and Expressionism of other European contemporaries. They preferred a lighter, capricious neo-classical style. And this waltz captures the mood well. It’s charming, fun, and its modal writing gives it a slightly more ambiguous feeling than a strict major or minor scale would [which is more from cultural conditioning]. The waltz is in a simple ternary form, the book-end sections are based around a carefree but awkward melody. The middle section is more “stable”, with a swinging melody. And this piece has been stuck in my head for two days.

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Poulenc - Cello Sonata

Poulenc is a problematic composer in that he is one of those “conservative” 20th century artists. In order to present important milestones, and to make a historical narrative that goes in one direction, clear of diversions or exceptions, composers like Poulenc get forgotten or pigeonholed. Even though this sonata stays clear of sharp dissonance, it is an incredible work in cyclical form. Despite how moving the piece is, and despite being hallmark Poulenc [fun melodies juxtaposed with “serious” tones], it isn’t played often. Probably because its a difficult piece for both musicians to play and syncopate.

Movements:

1. Allegro - tempo di marcia

2. Cavatine

3. Ballabile

4. Finale

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Messiaen - Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964)

Holy Saturday is the day between the somber Good Friday and the joyful Easter Sunday. It is the day when Jesus' body lays dead in the tomb. Nothing happens except for Christians to wait for the inevitable feast of Resurrection. And Jesus' Resurrection is supposed to reflect how all of humanity will be resurrected at the end of time; the title of this piece is referring to the line in the Apostle's and Nicene creed of this specific belief, "And I await the resurrection of the dead". That's the main reason I chose to write about this work for today, but originally it wasn't related to Holy Week at all. Messiaen was commissioned by France's office of cultural affairs to write a memorial piece for those who died during the great world wars. Originally he was going to write a large scale choral and orchestra work, but around the time of writing he was vacationing in the Alps and felt more inspired by the open air, the outdoors, the grandeur of the forest and the mountains. Traditionally, wind music and wind ensembles were preferred for outdoor events because the sound travels better than other instruments. Messiaen wanted something that could create a full sound both inside a church and out in the open air, so he reduced the soundscape to winds and percussion. The effect is like a recreation of organ stops, and Messiaen was a church organist all his life who used that instrument for most of his religious music. But typical for Messiaen, the "religious" music doesn't sound like Palestrina, Bach, or Bruckner. The first movement, "Out of the depths of the abyss, I cry to you, Lord: Lord, hear my voice" is named after the opening of Psalm 130. It starts in the lowest winds, crawling up in unison until breaking out with the full ensemble in large crying chords. The next movement, “Christ risen from the dead,” is a quote from Romans. It opens with chattering winds in Messiaen's birdsong style, and then goes into a slower and somber passing of a melody between flute, oboe, clarinet, and cor anglais. The closeness of color between these instruments gives the effect of listening to a duet (at least to my ears it does). The next section gives us a more upbeat rhythmic dance with the larger ensemble, including chimes and cow bells. Most interesting is that this rhythm is a Simhavikrama from 13th century India. The word means "power of the lion" and refers to the Hindu god Shiva, god of Death and the end of the eternal life cycle. Messiaen uses this reference in a unique way to tie it in with the Christian symbolism of Jesus as "the Lion", and the theological idea that Jesus has defeated death. The third movement, "The hour is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God", quotes the Gospel according to John. It brings back the 'birdsong', and brings in an awesome and fear-inducing might after a 'summoning' with bells; horn blasts, fanfare, marching, and a gong crescendo, act as the procession of God's arrival. The fourth movement holds the longest title, "They will rise again, glorious, with a new name - in the merry concert of the stars and the acclamations of the sons of heaven." is quoting Corinthians, Revelations, and Job. It tries to reflect the joy and color of the universe after the resurrection at the end of time. It is the most upbeat dance of the work, especially the second half with blazing horns and ringing bells, a fluid chorale, and ending with what feels like gargantuan chords, the loudest sounds of the work. The last movement, "And I heard the voice of a huge crowd ...", quotes Revelation, acts as a closing chorale of the innumerable voices that constitute the risen dead, proceeding along with bells until a magnificent coda.

Movements:

1. "Des profondeurs de l'abîme, je crie vers toi, Seigneur: Seigneur, écoute ma voix!"

2. "Le Christ, ressuscité des morts, ne meurt plus; la mort n'a plus sur lui d'empire."

3. "L'heure vient où les morts entendront la voix du Fils de Dieu..."

4. "Ils ressusciteront, glorieux, avec un nom nouveau -- dans le concert joyeux des étoiles et les acclamations des fils du ciel."

5. "Et j'entendis la voix d'une foule immense..."

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Penderecki - St. Luke Passion (1966)

Thinking about music for Good Friday, it’s almost “obvious” to go for one of Bach’s Passions, which I haven’t heard before I confess. However, Penderecki was calling to me after I found a CD of his St. Luke Passion at my library. And even though it was what I expected it to be, I was still blown away. Lost without any key, and listening to an orchestra and organ and choir play out in unorthodox ways, created multiple waves of dread, and recreated the drama of execution. But this drama isn’t theatrical, it is….it is almost brutally realistic. Despite the subject being Jesus Christ, the work has more focus on the human side of Good Friday, focusing on a man’s suffering and humiliation, on his mother crying for his pain, and the onlookers who either morn or hiss and mock him. The “ordinary” aspect of the crucifixion is that humans have been brutally killing each other in all kinds of imaginative ways through history. The “horror” is that the suffering of Christ is only still lamented because He is God, whereas we don’t express as much sympathy for people who are put to death every day. Out of sight out of mind maybe. It’s a very dark work, full of unique effects [especially the disturbing moments where the crowd mocks Jesus with vocal spitting and unintelligible babbling] and also works out of old Gregorian chant writing while still sounding completely “new” and unique. As bleak as the work is, it tries to end on a higher note of victory, and also at least tries to convey the message that we can work toward ending suffering if we recognize others as ourselves.

Euguerrand Quarton - La Pièta (mid-15th century)

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Ferruccio Busoni

( 1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924 )

Happy Birthday, Ferruccio!

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April Fools

Mozart - Divertimento for 2 horns and string quartet, “A Musical Joke”

For April Fool’s day, I thought of sharing one of my favorite pieces of meta-musical jokes. This divertimento is a piece of satire by using all kinds of problems that mark an unexperienced composer, in Mozart’s time. Some of the jokes include: asymmetrical phrasing, which goes against the expected writing constraints of Classical era music, the horns are often “out of tune”, monotonous accompaniment, thin orchestration, uninteresting repetition, a “pathetic” fugato in the finale, and ending in four separate keys, and collapsing in dissonant chords that sound like farts. Ironically, this piece employs one of the earliest uses of polytonality in written music, where the strings are in the key of F, and the horns are in the natural C. 

Movements:

1. Allegro

2. Menuetto and trio

3. Adagio cantabile

4. Presto

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Sergei Rachmaninoff ( 1 April 1873 - 28 March 1943 )

Happy Birthday, Rachy!

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Bach/Webern – Ricercar a 6 [arr. orchestra]

I’ve shared the backstory to Bach’s Musical Offering before, but I’ll recap it here: One of J.S. Bach’s sons played in Frederick the Great’s court, and one day Bach came to the palace at Potsdam to visit him, and meet the king. Because Bach was a well-known musician with a knack for improvisation, King Frederick wanted to show him the recently invented fortepiano. He asked Bach to improvise a three-voiced fugue on a long and complicated subject [the second half of the melody is a walk down the chromatic scale, hard to keep a fugue harmonically sound per Baroque standards with that], and even with the obstacle of playing a difficult melody on a new instrument, Bach did put together a decent fugue on the spot. But King Frederick was notorious for poking fun at artists in his court, and to try and stump him, he asked Bach to improvise a fugue off the same melody but with SIX voices this time. Instead of trying, Bach smiled and said that was too much for him to do at the time, but he would work on the fugue and send it to the King later. Not only did Bach write the Ricercar a 6, but he also filled an entire book with canons and fugues on the theme, a fantastic display of contrapuntal virtuosity, along with a trio sonata with the flute [King Frederick was a flutist], all as one big F YOU to the court. Even when Bach is at his most playful and humorous, the music is compelling. This piece is heavy of course, but it is also a moving work that feels like it’s struggling with pain. In the 20th century, the serialist composer Anton Webern arranged the work for orchestra, and in doing so, showed his own philosophy toward orchestration. The orchestra never once plays in its entirety, only parts and snippets here and there, coming in and out. Webern focuses on the sound, color, and texture, by breaking the melodies along several lines, bouncing from one instrument group to the next. It’s an interesting way to listen to Bach, taking a very dense fugue and reimagining it as pointillism.

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Johann Sebastian Bach

31 March 1685 - 28 July 1750

Happy Birthday, Herr Kapellmeister

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Johann Sebastian Bach

31 March 1685 - 28 July 1750

Happy Birthday, Herr Kapellmeister

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Joseph Haydn ( 31 March 1732 - 31 May 1809 )

Happy Birthday, Joe!

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Skandalkonzert: The Rite, before The Rite

The Musikverein is a gorgeous old concert hall in the heart of Vienna, where the capital Philharmonic plays. It’s in a Neoclassical style; its columns, arches, sense of balance and symmetry, give the illusion of age and rich tradition, even though it was built in the 1860s. The Great Hall on the inside is a simple rectangle, adorned with gorgeous chandeliers. Behind the stage for the orchestra, a decorative organ, the King of Instruments, towers overhead. The hall is luminous with gold. This is where orchestras would play the great works of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and even the catchy waltzes by Johann Strauss II. It’s luscious, lyrical, and heavily Romantic.

And if we want to make a poetic statement out of history, we could say that it symbolizes the old. Or at least, the love of the familiar. Built in the 1860s, but it tries to emulate the spirit of antiquity, and it follows a trend that was popular two centuries prior. Vienna was the seat of Brahms, and the music critic Hanslick. In the 1790s, it was the hot spot for Haydn’s final days, and Mozart’s mature period. And from the 1790s to 1827, it was Beethoven’s home. And at the turn of the century, the music of Brahms, Bruckner, and Strauss II dominated.

Schoenberg was the controversial figure of that city. He had been writing in the late-Romantic style that everyone loved, but he was following too many Wagnerian gestures. Too much chromaticism, wandering into keys that “didn’t exist”. But lately, he seems to have lost his sanity. He is writing music that is completely atonal. At the premiere of his second string quartet, someone had called out “Enough! Enough!”. Most recent was a song cycle he wrote the year before, “Pierrot Lunaire”, with “blasphemous” and “provocative” lyrics being half-sung, half-spoken by a soprano over chamber music that doesn’t seem to be in any key whatsoever. Can we even call this music?

But then, on February 23, 1913, he premieres Gurre-Lieder, a gargantuan post-Romantic cantata. The audience fell in love. Critics who heard his Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot Lunaire and thought he wasn’t writing “real music” were finally won over. They thought he was the next great genius of German music. But Schoenberg as not appreciative of the praise. Gurre-Lieder is everything that Pierrot Lunaire is not; it has a large orchestra writing lush music in conventional tonality with lyrical singing. While it is a wonderful piece of music, it was, to Schoenberg, a regression of his compositional aesthetics. He did not want to write music that depended on public taste. After the cantata, during the roar of applause, he came to the stage, and bowed for the musicians, his back to the audience. He didn’t turn and bow, didn’t even wave or smile. He left the stage.

This contempt for public approval insulted the audience. And this small gesture would carry over into the next concert in the same theater one month later.

March 31, 1913. Schoenberg is conducting a concert of music by him, and a few of his disciples. He would conduct one of his strange early works published a few years prior, then new music by Anton Webern, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Alban Berg. Webern and Berg were his most promising students. Zemlinsky was his brother-in-law, whose music for the program would turn out to be representative of “conservative” tastes [even then, the songs still indulge in the murkiness of obscure tonality and heavy chromaticism].

The program was as followed:

Webern – Six Pieces for Orchestra, op.6

Zemlinsky – Four Orchestral Songs on Poems by Maurice Maeterlinck (would later be published as his op. 13. Songs nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5 were performed here)

Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no. 1

Berg – Two Songs from Altenberg Lieder (nos. 2 and 3)

Mahler – Kindertotenlieder

Webern’s orchestral pieces are short, sparse, nothing is in ‘harmony’, the score shows instruments seemingly playing irrespective of each other, its sonorities are startling, sometimes the brass shoots out in growls, the winds shriek, and other times the silence that is paired with them is deafening. The audience started making noises of disapproval. Most were baffled by what they heard. As “controversial” as Schoenberg was, Webern was already writing sound-worlds that he wouldn’t yet imagine.

Zemlinsly’s songs acted as a palate cleanser. The music was still dense and hard to follow along with the first listen, but they were, at least, tonal. They followed expectations, luscious chords moving up and down chromatically as the soprano sings mournful songs. They were received well.

Schoenberg’s first Chamber Symphony was not new, and it also was not in his current atonal style. But it was still “Modern”. Chords are built out of fourths. The textures are bizarre. The melodies are nothing singable. It isn’t “new” for the concert, but it is the “new” Schoenberg style that the audience didn’t like, and clearly voiced their preference at the Gurre-Lieder concert. Preferences which Schoenberg outright insulted.

Berg’s Altenburg Lieder was the breaking point. “Do you see the forest after the rainstorm?” asks a soprano without the orchestra. Then when it enters, we get an eerie soundscape, some hints of tonality but vague, distant. “Beyond the Boundaries of the Universe” opens with a massive chord with all 12 pitches playing at once. It is quiet, but a tone cluster. If “chromatic” means coloring, then this chord is as colorful as possible. As expressive as possible. We are now beyond the universe as we know it. And the audience had enough.

Laughter grew louder than the chord. Those who thought the music was stupid were ready to voice their opinion as it happened. Those who wanted to listen yelled back. A fist fight broke out, which took over everyone’s attention. Because of the chaos, the police had to be called to break up the fights. The concert was shut down before Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder could have been performed.

The fight caused a lawsuit, and one of the witnesses, an operetta composer Oscar Straus, testified “The public was laughing. And I openly confess, sir, that I laughed too, for why shouldn’t one laugh at something genuinely comical?”. Straus also joked that the sound of the fight was the most harmonious moment in the evening.

Had the audience listened to the late Mahler’s song cycle, contextualized after the new music, maybe they would have a chance to reflect on how what they’d heard had been influenced by ideas that were being pushed forward in music writing. Strange tonalities, new textures, pushing beyond the limits of tonality. Of course Mahler isn’t nearly as adventurous, but still, it could have helped understand the process. I lined up the program in my iPod, with Zemlinsky’s and Berg’s song cycles completed, and it has a run time of 1 hour, 28 minutes. I think that so much “new music” could be a bit exhausting on the ear. Engaging with the unfamiliar for so long, you might want a break with something familiar. And of course, this is me speaking over a century after the concert.

It was the shock of the art music world at the time. It seemed to mark a new age of composer-artist against a misunderstood public. That’s a false dichotomy, though, and not historically accurate. More aptly the concert helps demonstrate the point of the Modernist motto, “Make it new!” as Ezra Pound said, follow your own vision regardless of what the public might think.

Two months later, on May 29, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring would premiere in Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Nijinsky.

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Andreas Pevernage (1542/3–1591) - Epitaphe de Christophe Plantin: Pleurez Muses (à 5) ·

Huelgas Ensemble · · Paul Van Nevel

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Prokofiev - Sonata no. 6 in A Major

I first heard this sonata in high school and honestly it was THE angsty bangy piano piece that my rebellious self could relate to. Of course, that was me focusing on the more garish parts and the unstable tonality. I haven’t listened to that sonata in forever, and it recently came up in my “recommended videos” on YouTube. I listened through again, following the score, amazed how much I remembered it. Like, with every passing bar, I could only recall what happens right after, and this strange recollection of memory, in patches, made it feel surreal. I know more about music now and about Prokofiev’s overall style, and I was captivated by all of the small details coming through that I hadn’t known before. The sonatas nos. 6, 7, and 8 were written between 1940-44, and so are known as the “War Sonatas”. No.7 is the most popular, but I’ve always had a soft spot for no. 6. Because of current political trends, the threat from the Nazis, the fear under Stalin, loss of his close friend to the regime [Vsevolod Meyerhold was an opera director and was arrested by secret police and shot. A month later, Meyerhold’s wife was found murdered under “mysterious circumstances”], and being basically forced to write an obnoxious and saccharine cantata for Stalin’s 60th birthday, Prokofiev had to channel his true anger and pain in these sonatas. The sixth opens with an unstable main theme, that rides forward like a grotesque and cold machine. The second melody has a thinner texture and is almost dreamlike, before the machinery of the opening takes over in a grotesque march. The second movement is kind of like a march, built of staccato chords throughout. The third is like a very slow waltz, lushly written and elongated, full of longing. The final is a rushed speed through hell, as dark as you’d expect a Soviet toccata to be.

Movements:

1. Allegro moderato

2. Allegretto

3. Tempo di valzer lentissimo

4. Vivace

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Franck - Prélude, Choral, et Fugue (1884)

Franck was a great organist, and so he carried organ writing experience into his piano works. This is a great example of using Baroque forms late in the 19th century. He also uses it as another vehicle for cyclical transformation. It is a very expressive piece of music, opening with dark waves with a longing melody trying to sing through them, delicate but complicated figurations looping around. Then, we get an interjection of chords that introduce another main theme, a restless and unstable resolution. We wrestle with three themes at once in this prelude, and like so many organ masterpieces of the Baroque, it flows as a continuous strand of music threaded together with these little gestures. Soon it builds up into a giant storm with one main theme being articulated out of soaring waves, only to die off again in the transition toward the choral. It is solemn, but not as tragic and dark as the opening, the main melody now given a brighter pairing. That makes way to another restatement of a theme with glassy arpeggiated chords. Funnily, Saint-Saëns, who never cared for Franck, dismissed that the “choral is not a choral and the fugue is not a fugue”, which is true, neither movement really fits with their traditional standards, but Franck wasn’t trying to write academic music. He was using these forms as a guide for the cyclical expression he was going for. This piece could have an even more abstract title divorced from any suggestion of Baroque forms, and would still work. The choral develops into a larger and larger sound, and ends with a transition section to open the fugue, giving us the theme with some chordal accompaniment, building in intensity until breaking out in a giant wave across the keyboard, then bleeding into the fugue proper. It is heavily chromatic, making the harmonies shift often, and later the texture gets thicker with heavy octaves in the bass, recreating the organ pedals but also keeping in line with the kind of drama and “thick” fugal fantasies that people like Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Taneyev also wrote. The “fantasy” part breaks through in the middle of the fugue with free flowing waves. Funny how often I’ve used the word “wave” to describe this music, mostly because I can’t help but picture murky dark water, and a single boat trying to sail through it. The coda breaks out with a restatement of main themes, all clashing against each other, with some flair from his salon pianist days, but ending with a conversion into light, unexpectedly, we get a great luminous flourish of triumph. Stephen Hough wrote a great blog post on this work, comparing it to Advent season in the Christian calendar, the darkness just before the dawn.