JULY 26 VLADIMIR FELTSMAN, PIANO
Sunday, 4:30pm ~ Venetian Theater
Imaginative, powerful, insightful, Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman is one of the most consummately interesting artists performing today. He returns to Caramoor with a bag full of masterpieces: Bach's first published work, Beethoven's earliest success, and a full dose of Russian virtuosity.
Concert Al Fresco
Introduce your family to Caramoor, and enjoy the sounds of the concert from the picnic lawns. Tickets $10.00
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750
Partita No. 1 in B-flat, BWV 825
The six partitas formed Bach’s first work to appear in print. He engraved and published them himself, issuing them essentially one per year from 1725 to 1730. In this way he minimized his financial risk by spreading out the workload and the cost of production. When it was clear that the partitas were welcomed by musicians, Bach brought them out as a complete set of six, his “Opus 1,” in 1731, under the generic title Clavier-Übung I (“Keyboard Exercise I”), with the Roman numeral hinting at more to come. Indeed, he used the title for three other important volumes of keyboard music.
Bach’s early biographer Forkel noted that the publication “made in its time a great noise in the musical world,” which can hardly be surprising, since harpsichord music of such stylistic range, expressive richness, and virtuosic challenge to the performer had never been printed before. These partitas and the other keyboard publications played the major role in Bach’s posthumous reputation until 1827, when Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion also drew attention once again to the large body of liturgical vocal music, which remained in manuscript.
The standard keyboard suite of the time consisted of four stylized dances, almost always in the same key and appearing in the same order: allemande, courante (sometimes called by the Italian equivalent, corrente), sarabande, gigue. The allemande, usually in 4/4 time, was a dance of moderate tempo. The next two dances were in some form of triple meter, with the sarabande as a slow and often contemplative movement whose harmonic stress usually fell on the second beat, while the gigue (the name is derived from the English “jig”) offers a lively close, usually in 6/8 or 12/8 time.
But for the six partitas in Clavier-Übung I, Bach expanded the suite through the addition of “other gallantries,” as he put it on the title page—dances not normally part of the suite, and he opened each work with a substantial introductory movement—all of different types—so as to provide an individual character to each partita.
The partitas represent Bach’s most “modern” view of the keyboard suite, possibly in part through a familiarity with the keyboard works of his near-contemporary Rameau, because they offer freer treatment of the basic dance forms that they contain, and they make greater use of galant elements, the fashionable tone of the new musical style that was soon to make much of his own music seem dated and old-fashioned to many.
Partita No. 1 (BWV 825), in the key of B-flat Major, opens with a prelude that is cast as a three-part invention; it is not especially long, but it is very challenging to the performer despite the relatively light texture. Touches of imitation between the voices enrich the texture as it unfolds, and Bach enriches the final two measures with five voices and a closing chord that spreads over four octaves.
The Allemande is traditionally a rather stately dance movement, but Bach’s arpeggiated figures divided between the two hands and unfolding over a pedal-point in the first four measures is livelier than most. It becomes livelier still when the two hands move together in 16th-note figures and still more when the texture briefly expands to four parts at the end of the first half, with the two inner voices providing complementary parts, filling in at the moments when the outer voices sustain longer notes or rest.
The Courante is written in 3/4 time, but the beats are subdivided into triplets, giving to the ear the effect of 9/8 time and a lively, rollicking spirit like that of a Gigue.
Bach decorates the Sarabande with a rich fioritura of ornamentation, especially at the beginning of the second half, where the flurry of thirty-second notes all but hides the simple framework underlying the piece, a regular characteristic of Bach’s relatively late works.
By comparison with the remaining movements of the partita, the two minuets (which are “extra” pieces, not part of the standard layout of the suite at the time) are surprisingly easy. But since some early performers found the rest of the work a serious challenge, perhaps Bach purposely made the minutes easier so that less-experiences players could perform something in his earliest publication. We don’t know whether these were separately composed and simply inserted here (as the minuets of the French suites were), or whether Bach wrote them along with the rest of the B-flat partita. In any case, they offer a respite from the virtuosity of the rest.
The Gigue employs a keyboard technique that was relatively new at the time: the consistent crossing of hands in performance. Bach offers no guidance as to how to play the piece; perhaps he expected performers capable of it to know Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin, Book II, published in 1724, which contains keyboard writing very similar to this, with an extensive explanation. David Schulenberg suggests that Bach may have written this movement as something of a joke to disarm critics who were already complaining that his music was too serious. The joke in question is that the piece begins with a single F at the top of the treble staff, and any performer would, at first sight, assume that it would be played by the right hand. But in fact the most practical way to play it is with the left hand crossing over the right (and immediately crossing back for lower notes on the second and third beats). This is the beginning of a pattern in which the hands cross almost throughout.
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 (Pathétique)
From the beginning of Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna in 1792, there were indications that here was someone to pay attention to—and this despite the fact that the aging Haydn was still turning out remarkable masterpieces in the realm of the symphony, the string quartet, and the oratorio (all genres that Beethoven himself avoided at first).
Well before 1800, the year that saw publication of his first set of string quartets and the composition of his first symphony, the signs of Beethoven’s novel musical conception were appearing with greater frequency—and perhaps nowhere so strongly as in the Pathétique sonata, composed in 1798-99. Not only does the work display a degree of passionate expression rarely found at the time, but it makes use of daring and effective formal extensions of classical convention. Its overall consistency of mood was a striking achievement at a time when a sonata consisted of more loosely related contrasting movements.
Beethoven himself approved the title Sonata pathétique, with its emphasis on feeling and expression. This expression is conveyed by means of unusual formal elements. The powerful introduction to the first movement—with its crashing chords and sharply dotted rhythms—is integrated into the body of the movement through two later unexpected appearances, and the arrival of the secondary key area is no longer a signal to relax the tension into a lyrical melody but rather contains its own bold expressive harmonic treatment.
The slow movement is in some ways the locus classicus of the Beethoven slow movement, with its artfully sustained tensions at even the slowest basic tempo through harmonic surprise, melodic extension, and textural diversity. (It was evidently this passage that was discussed by Edward Elgar and his music editor Jaeger of the publisher Novello when they agreed that no composer wrote finer slow movements than Beethoven; the discussion was immortalized in the “Nimrod” movement of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, in which his original theme is presented in such as way as to echo Beethoven’s melody.)
The final rondo is less “serious” than the opening movement, but it is by no means trivial in its expression. The minor mode continues to the very end, and in the contrasting episodes avoids the dominant key for mediant and submediant—a prophetic occurrence in view of Beethoven’s later exploitation of those relationships.
Perhaps because it seems to hint already at the “second period”—that portion of Beethoven’s work that has always been most popular with audiences, the Pathétique sonata is far and away the most popular of the early piano sonatas—indeed of almost any Beethoven composition preceding the First Symphony.
Modest Mussorgsky
1839-1881
Pictures at an Exhibition
The music of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky is the triumph of genius over faulty technique. Though he had the least formal training of any of the Russian “Five” and was certainly regarded as little more than a dilettante by composers of far greater polish, Mussorgsky had also a burning originality that sometimes overcame both his lack of technique and the tragic addiction to the bottle that led to an unstable life and an early demise. His genius expressed itself most directly in opera, for he had the ability to translate verbal and physical gestures into extraordinarily imaginative, lifelike music. Few purely instrumental works are ever performed, and even those that are heard (like the famous orchestral piece Night on Bare Mountain) were created originally for an opera.
The signal exception to this rule is the suite Pictures at an Exhibition for piano solo, one of the great achievements of romantic keyboard music and of Russian nationalism. Even here Mussorgsky was inspired by a kind of dramatic event. The exhibition in question was a real one, a memorial showing of works by a talented architect named Victor Hartman, who had died at the age of forty in July 1873. Mussorgsky, an admirer and a close friend of the artist’s, himself wrote an obituary describing Hartman’s first important work, the reconstruction of several buildings for an All Russian Manufacturing Exhibition: “In his hands a clumsy prison like building where wine had previously been stored took on an artistic, even graceful appearance, both inside and outside, in the Russian style.”
Vladimir Stasov, critic and spokesman for a whole generation of Russian artists and friend to both Mussorgsky and Hartman, wrote: “He was the most talented, the most original, the most enterprising, and the most daring of all our architects...For me, so much hope and anticipation perished with him!” At Stasov’s initiative, a special exhibition of Hartman’s work was put together in St. Petersburg, where it opened in mid February 1874. The show included both architectural work and extremely various drawings and paintings with scenes of every day life and different human types. Sometime in the first month after it opened, Mussorgsky visited the exhibition. It was to have a powerful effect on him. On June 12 or 19 (the date is not certain) he wrote to Stasov with good news: “Hartman is boiling as Boris boiled.” This was his way to say that he was deeply involved in composition and that it was going well. Clearly he had already discussed a Hartman project with Stasov, since he offered no other explanation. But he continued: “Sounds and ideas have been hanging in the air; I am devouring them and stuffing myself—I barely have time to scribble them on paper—My profile can be seen in the interludes....How well it is working out.”
In that view, he was certainly right. Composing at a terrific pace, Mussorgsky finished the work by June 22—fast work indeed for so elaborate a score. The suite was immediately hailed by the composer’s friends, particularly Stasov, to whom the composer dedicated the work as the one whose work on the Hartmann exhibition motivated the composition. Yet though his friends admired it enormously, few people played the suite; it is fiendishly difficult. It was not even published until five years after the composer’s death. It only became famous and popular in the brilliant orchestral guise created by Maurice Ravel at the suggestion of conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
The various “pictures” are linked here and there by references to the opening Promenade, which, as Mussorgsky reported, was his own self portrait as he moved from picture to picture. The music is so vivid that no explanation is required, but the listener might care to know something about the original pictures. (The following description also notes the various returns of the opening Promenade.)
The Gnome was a grotesque drawing for a nutcracker. [Promenade.] The Old Castle depicted a landscape of markedly Italianate cast with a troubador singing his lay. [Promenade.] Tuileries, a Parisian scene, showed children quarreling at play, an image perfectly captured in the taunting figure that begins the scene and returns again and again throughout. Bydlo is the Polish word for “cattle”; Hartman’s picture showed a heavy ox cart lumbering along. [Promenade.]
The unlikely sounding Ballet of unhatched chicks consisted of designs for a dance performance in which the dancers wore egg shaped costumes. Mussorgsky himself owned Hartman’s drawings (two separate images, not one) of a rich Jew and a poor Jew; he translated these into a single movement contrasting the arrogance of wealth to the cringing obsequiousness of poverty, and which he called Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuÿle. [Promenade.] Hartman’s lively drawing of The Market at Limoges becomes a brilliant scherzo, followed at once by the powerful contrasting scene of the Catacombs (A Roman Sepulchre) in Paris. The mood is continued in the passage headed Con mortuis in lingua morta (“With the dead in a dead language”), in which Mussorgsky himself becomes our guide through the city of the dead with a ghostly version of his Promenade.
The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga) evokes the fearsome witch of Russian fairy tales, whose wild ride brings us to the powerful finale of the suite, The Bogatyr Gate (at Kiev, the Ancient Capital), described in Stasov’s review of the exhibit as “unusually original.” Mussorgsky filled his musical image with the perpetual ringing of bells large and small, recreating the sounds heard around a Russian public monument, and Ravel has seconded him in this, capping off the score with sonorous fireworks.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
