Jonathan Biss

Peter Oundjian

JULY 25 JONATHAN BISS PLAYS MOZART

Jonathan Biss, piano; Orchestra of St. Luke's; Peter Oundjian, conductor

Grieg		Holberg Suite, Op. 40
Stravinsky		Pulcinella Suite
Mozart		Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 21, in C Major, K. 467

Peter Oundjian returns to Caramoor with his young friend and Caramoor favorite, Jonathan Biss. This offering of works by Grieg, Stravinsky and Mozart rounds out the Orchestra of St. Luke's symphonic season at Caramoor.

The brilliant twenty-something American pianist proclaims his Mozartian credentials in scintillating, beautifully proportioned performances… with a limpid, 'centred' tone and crystal-clear articulation...
-- The Daily Telegraph (London)

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Edvard Grieg
1843-1907
Holberg Suite, Op. 40
Edvard Grieg was born on June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway, and died there on September 4, 1907. He composed the suite for solo piano in 1884 and scored it for string orchestra by February 1885.  He conducted the first performance in Bergen on March 15, 1886.
 
Ludwig Baron Holberg (1684 1754) is regarded as the founder of Danish literature, and thus a Scandinavian cultural hero. For the bicentennial of his birth, several composers, including Edvard Grieg and Niels Gade, were commissioned to write commemorative music. Grieg’s contribution was a suite for solo piano entitled From Holberg’s Time, an early example of the pastiche style recreating the musical forms and language of a bygone day. In February 1885 he wrote to a friend to report that he had made an arrangement for string orchestra of “the poor Holberg suite” to be introduced at a concert that he would conduct in Berlin. “It may sound quite well,” he admitted. Indeed it does. Yet, as with his music to Peer Gynt, the composer himself tended to underestimate the quality of his work because it was produced on commission and under circumstances that he did not find ideal. Only after it achieved a genuine and lasting popularity, did Grieg think better of it.

Grieg referred to the Holberg music rather scornfully as a “peruke-piece,” a work metaphorically adorned with a powdered wig. Yet it is a pioneering example of the revival of Baroque styles and a real charmer to boot. The opening prelude works a short figure against a persistent rhythmic accompaniment, like the preludes of Baroque harpsichord composers. Some of the dance patterns used in traditional Baroque suites—sarabande, gavotte and musette (imitating the small bagpipe), and rigaudon—are recreated by Grieg in a modern style, and the Air seeks to recapture the style of development found in slow movements by composers like J.S. Bach.   

Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971
Pulcinella Suite
Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, Russia, on June 17, 1882, and died in New York on April 6, 1971. He began the ballet Pulcinella in the fall of 1919, completing it on April 20, 1920; the Ballets Russes premiered it at the Paris Opéra on May 15, 1920, under the direction of Ernest Ansermet. Stravinsky prepared the suite about 1922. The score of the suite in its 1949 revision (performed here) calls for two each of flutes, oboes, bassoons, and horns, one trumpet, one trombone, a quintet of solo strings (two violins, viola, cello, and bass), and a medium sized group of orchestral strings.

After the end of World War I, Serge Diaghilev was eager to bring his prize composer, Igor Stravinsky, back into the fold of his Ballets Russes, where he had achieved such epochal pre war successes as Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. Big ballet productions had not been practical during the war, and Stravinsky had worked during that time with a Swiss writer, C.F. Ramuz, in the creation of a small stage work, The Soldier’s Tale, which had been produced with great success.

Diaghilev was jealous and sought a project to attract Stravinsky’s interest. The Ballets Russes had recently produced a piece based on old works by Scarlatti dressed up in new orchestrations, and Diaghilev thought Stravinsky might enjoy a similar undertaking. The new idea was first proposed to Stravinsky in a letter of June 10, 1919, from Ernest Ansermet, who was then conducting the Ballets Russes. When Stravinsky first learned that Diaghilev wanted him to arrange the music of Pergolesi, the composer thought the impresario had taken leave of his senses. He knew little of Pergolesi’s work—only the little intermezzo La serva padrona and one liturgical work, the Stabat mater—and he didn’t think much of that little.

Diaghilev, who was an experienced musician as well as an impresario, had already gathered pieces that he thought might be suitable in a balletic context (mostly by buying them from a Neapolitan professor who had a lucrative sideline in selling copies of music from the Naples Conservatory), and he finally persuaded Stravinsky at least to look at what he had collected—much of it, he said, completely unknown. The composer fell in love with what he saw and agreed at once to accept the commissions. We do not know exactly when he reached this decision, but he began actively composing in early September, though he only signed a contract for the ballet in December. Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and the choreographer Massine jointly created a scenario for the course of the action, and Stravinsky set to work choosing and “coloring” the two hundred year old scores.

Stravinsky did not realize at the time, though we now know, that of the selections he finally used in his ballet, fewer than half were actually by Pergolesi, so the official title of the full work—“Pulcinella, Ballet in One Act for Small Orchestra and Three Solo Voices, Based on Music of Pergolesi”—is actually a substantial error. And considering that the genuine Pergolesi is to be found almost entirely in the songs (which are not included in the orchestral suite), the title is even more thoroughly incorrect for the suite.*

The other composers, who have recently been identified, are almost entirely unknown, though no doubt worthy in their own way: Domenico Gallo and Alessandro Parisotti. Gallo, in particular, composed the original material on which Stravinsky based the Overture; the Scherzino, Allegro, and Andantino group; and the Finale. The Tarantella comes from a series of six Concerti armonici once considered to be among Pergolesi’s most famous works, but actually they are by a Dutch count named Unico Wilhelm von Wassenaer (these were copied out from originals in the British Museum by the Belgian musicologist E. van der Straeten). The Toccata and the following Gavotta are from a harpsichord work by that favorite composer, “anon.” And, finally, the Serenata, the Trio of the Scherzino, the Vivo, and the Minuetto are based on originals by Pergolesi himself.

When doing his work of “recomposition,” Stravinsky often worked directly on the manuscripts sent for his consideration, working out the details of his own version before then writing them directly into the full score, as he reported he was doing on already on December 5.

Of course, the actual source of the originals need not trouble us in the slightest when listening to Stravinsky’s witty score. What matters in the concert hall is the use to which Stravinsky put these borrowed ideas, and on that point there has been general agreement from the very beginning: they have become thoroughly and delightfully Stravinskyized. For the most part he retained the original melodies and bass parts, but he made the phrases less regular by using unexpected repetitions or elisions, and he elaborated the harmonies by adding ostinatos or by prolonging chords beyond the point at which they would normally change. He chose to write for a fairly standard classical orchestra—woodwinds in pairs without clarinets, no percussion, and the strings divided in concertino and ripieno sections. The one rather unlikely component (from the eighteenth-century point of view) is the trombone, but Stravinsky’s amusing writing for that instrument, especially in conjunction with the double bass in the Vivo, more than justifies its inclusion.

Stravinsky confessed that he had a wonderful time working on this score, and although it had no immediate repercussions in his next compositions, it undoubtedly brought home to him some unexplored possibilities of eighteenth-century style treated anew in the twentieth century and ultimately led to such neo-Classical marvels as Oedipus Rex, the Symphony in C, and The Rake’s Progress. And quite aside from the role Pulcinella played in engineering Stravinsky’s turn to neo-Classicism, the joyous wit inherent in the score itself remains its own justification.

*Pergolesi has suffered more than perhaps any other composer from sloppiness and errors in the preparation of editions of his music. The so called “complete edition” of his works omits a great many genuine compositions and includes an extraordinarily high percentage of works by other composers masquerading as Pergolesi’s. A new edition, based on much more highly refined source research, is now well advanced.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
No. 21 in C Major, K. 467
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgang Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. The score of the C-major Piano Concerto, K.467, is dated March 9, 1785; Mozart first performed it in Vienna three days later. The orchestra includes one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Mozart was the greatest opera composer and the greatest concerto composer of his generation. There is a strong connection between these two genres, though one is vocal and one is instrumental. In both cases the composer is writing for a soloist who must function with an orchestra and who must be allowed to stand out, to project an independent personality. In the opera, of course, this happens in part because the soloist is in costume and on a stage physically separate from the orchestra, playing a role in a story which presumably attracts some of the audience’s attention. In the concerto, the composer is restricted to the notes he writes to create and project a specific personality for the soloist as distinct from the orchestra. Part of this happens because the soloist plays material which is faster or higher (though the orchestra, in a pinch, can play more loudly and drown him out), and part of it comes from a strategy in which the composer reserves some of the best tunes for the soloist, who has them exclusively or at least presents them first.

Sometimes, though, a concerto can suggest opera in another way. The C Major Concerto, K.467, was composed as part of an extraordinary string of works produced in just over a year—eight piano concertos altogether between February 1784 and March 1785 (with four more to come before the end of 1786). Mozart had written many operas, but of the works still in the regular repertory, only Idomeneo and The Abduction from the Seraglio had already been composed. The Marriage of Figaro was to come in 1786 and Don Giovanni a year and a half later. Nonetheless, the opening music of K.467 strongly hints at Leporello’s impatient marching up and down outside the home of Donna Anna, waiting for his libertine master to finish his nocturnal rendezvous inside. It is the gestural quality of the music that gives this effect, the element that implies physical movement on an actual stage. In the present instance, of course, the continuation of this little marching tune is more symphonic than we could expect in the opera house, but the vivid theatricality of the interplay between winds and strings, between small instrumental groups and the full tutti, and (eventually) between the soloist and the orchestra is all of the character that Mozart constantly turned to such dramatic purpose in his operas.

The essence of drama is surprise, and the same is true of a good classical piano concerto. From the beginning the audience waits for the principal player to make his appearance on this musical stage. The orchestra has played an elaborate ritornello providing plenty of material for discourse; it has ended with a ringing tutti and a full cadence. Now we are ready for the soloist—but no! The oboe carries on with an extension, and we evidently have to wait through a closing section before we can hear piano. Just as we have reconciled ourselves to further delay, the soloist sneaks in—just a little comment on the flute’s last phrase, not even a noticeable theme. It is rather like a dramatic scene in which some of the characters have been talking about the principal figure in the plot, unaware that he has quietly entered from the wings and overheard the entire conversation until he draws attention to himself with a remark.

Once on stage, the pianist begins his own discussion of the material already presented, offering elaborate decorations for variety. Of course Mozart is concerned with concerto structure, one signal point of which is the arrival of a new key. The orchestra was quite unable to move out of C major, but the pianist boldly charts new territory—though he does so by first offering a minor-key version of the dominant, a tactical feint that leads us astray and once again establishes the pianist as the leading personality of this dramatic discourse, guiding the course of action where he wants it to go.

If the first movement suggests opera buffa, the slow movement seems to be in every essential respect to be a serious aria that happened to get composed for a pianist rather than a singer. The accompanimental figures (especially the repeated triplets) are operatic stereotypes, and the soaring melody, while perfectly suited to the piano, has the kind of languishing grace that a prima donna could work wonders with. The melodic lines that climb to an early peak then gradually descend in graceful arcs call for a bel canto treatment from the lucky instruments that get to sing this delicate melody. The muted strings and the passing chromaticisms suffuse the whole with a tinge of unutterable melancholy.

In the final rondo we are back in the realm of opera buffa, with the orchestra playing straight man to the piano’s jester. The orchestra presents a perky little tune echoed very briefly by the piano. But things seem about to turn rather more grandiose. An orchestral tutti sets up the cue for the pianist’s next entrance; the piano starts with what could be the beginning of a heroic gesture—a theme rising in slow notes through the triad—but suddenly it turns again to cheerful laughter (though the horns quietly echo the grand gesture behind the fun). And on it goes, throughout this delicious rondo until, at the final return of the rondo theme, the soloist races off in a burst of high-spirited runs to close the concerto.
© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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