by Will Hertz

The standard catalog of Bach’s works – the Bach Werke Verzeichnis – lists four compositions under the heading of "orchestral suites," but Bach himself would not have recognized that designation. The four works were unpublished during Bach’s lifetime, and for a century after his death the manuscripts lay in the Royal Library in Berlin. When the Leipzig publisher C. F. Peters finally issued them in 1853, he dubbed them "orchestral suites" to enhance their appeal to 19th century musicians and audiences. And that’s how they are generally known today.

Bach himself called the works "overtures" since he modeled them after the operatic overtures that had originated at the court of Louis XIV a half-century earlier. To Bach and his contemporaries, the so-called "French overture" reflected the majesty and brilliance of Versailles, and it became one of the most popular forms for non-operatic orchestral music in other European countries. German composers, in particular, turned out "French overtures" by the dozens to satisfy the "frenchified" tastes of their employers. Georg Philipp Telemann wrote more than 130 of them, and Bach may well have written more than the four examples we have today since so much of his music was lost or destroyed.

Initially, the "French overture" was a one-movement piece of some seriousness, and strictly speaking the term "overture" applies only to this movement. As the format caught on, however, composers sought to balance its sobriety by adding a series of lighter movements, mostly dances, using French titles and styles. It was this multi-movement format that appealed to Bach.

Bach wrote his four overtures over a 20-year period, starting in 1717, when he became kapellmeister at Cöthen and extending into his service in Leipzig. In Leipzig, in addition to his many church duties, he became the director of the Collegium Musicum, an organization of professional musicians and talented university students. The Collegium Musicum’s records show that it performed all four of the overtures at its weekly public concerts, but some or all of them may date from the Cöthen period.

The four suites, to return to their modern designation, differ in their instrumentation. The B Minor Suite, which we hear this evening, calls for a flutist, first and second violins, viola and continuo. The violin and viola lines may each be played by a single instrument as in chamber music or by a small group of instruments as in a chamber orchestra. At times, the flutist simply doubles the first violin, and at other times it performs as a virtuoso solo instrument. The continuo is the standard Baroque accompaniment of a bass line with filled-in chords; in orchestral works, this role was customarily assigned to a harpsichord and cello.

The B Minor Suite opens with the traditional "French overture," and following that format, the movement is in two sections. The first section is slow and majestic, marked by dotted rhythms and a profusion of trills. The second section is faster, in fugal style, and ends with a short slow passage similar in mood and content to the opening section. In the first section and part of the second, the flute doubles the first violin; in the course of the second section, however, the flute emerges with its own musical line.

The overture is followed by six French dances: a piquant rondeau in the style of a gavotte; a stately sarabande; a lively bourée with a second bourée sandwiched inside it; a polonaise with a variation called a double; and a menuet. The suite closes with a delightful badinerie (banter).

As the suite progresses, it becomes increasingly a showpiece for the solo flute. Note in particular the flute’s lead in the second bourée, its arabesques in the double of the polonaise, and its impudent virtuosity in the closing badinerie.

Osvaldo Golijov is one of today’s fastest rising composers. He was named "2006 Composer of the Year" by Musical America. In January and February, New York’s Lincoln Center presented a festival of his music, "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov." London’s Barbican Center also presented two evenings of his music earlier this year. Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony premiered his new cello concerto in March. The Chicago Symphony appointed him composer-in-residence for its next two concert seasons, and Deutsche Grammophon began releasing a series of CDs of his works

Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina, the son of a piano teacher mother and physician father. He was raised, he recalled, surrounded by classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla, and these diverse idioms have remained important influences on his music. After studying piano in Argentina, he studied music in Israel, and then earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with composer George Crumb.

In the early 90’s Golijov began to work closely with two string quartets, the St. Lawrence and the Kronos, which performed and recorded his early music with its strong impressions of his Jewish background. Kronos also expanded Golijov’s musical family through collaborations with a Romanian Gypsy band, a Mexican rock group, an Indian tabla (drum) virtuoso, and an Argentine composer and guitarist. In addition, Golijov composed several works for soprano Dawn Upshaw, including the Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, the opera Ainadamar, the cycle Ayre, and a number of arrangements of popular songs.

In 2000, his St. Mark Passion, commissioned for the European Music Festival to commemorate the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death, took the musical world by storm. The work mixed various traditions and genres – Latin American dance rhythms, synagogue chants, and the bird calls of an Argentine choral group. After its premiere in Stuttgart, it has been performed in Boston, Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

Among many other awards and commissions, Golijov was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, has collaborated with the Atlanta Symphony, Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, and Spoleto USA Festival.

According to Musical America, Golijov differs from other composers in his willingness to surrender control to the performers. "He prizes spontaneity, earthiness, rough corners, raw emotion. He is not one to sit at a rehearsal with the score open on his lap, protesting the slightest deviation from the text. Often, he invites musicians to assist in the realization of his vision. When he works with folk musicians and others of non-classical training, he lets the composition become, in part, a souvenir of an improvisation."

Golijov composed Lullaby and Doina in 2001 for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and it was premiered in Jordan Hall, Boston, in April of that year. The composer has provided the following program note on his website:

"This piece starts with a set of variations on a Yiddish lullaby that I composed for Sally Potter’s film The Man Who Cried, set to function well in counterpoint to another important music theme in the soundtrack: Bizet’s Aria "Je Crois Entendre Encore", from The Pearl Fishers. In her film Sally explores the fate of Jews and Gypsies in Europe during the tragic mid-years of the 20th century, through a love story between a Jewish young woman and a Gypsy young man.

"The lullaby metamorphoses into a dense and dark doina (a gypsy slow, rubato genre) featuring the lowest string of the violas. The piece ends in a fast gallop boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks."

 

Bartók wrote Contrasts in 1938 at the request of clarinetist Benny Goodman and the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti. Two years later the three recorded the work in what quickly became a classic recording and is now available on CD.

Now recognized as a 20^th century masterpiece, Contrasts had a difficult childbirth. When Goodman first proposed the work, he had in mind a light rhapsodic piece in Hungarian folk style with a slow introduction followed by a fast main section. However, Szigeti, to demonstrate Goodman’s skill on the clarinet, sent the composer some records of Goodman’s band. These spurred Bartók into expanding the introduction into a separate movement and producing music far more challenging and freer in style than Goodman’s original intention.

Further, Goodman, eager to build his name as a recording artist, had asked for a piece that could fit on the two sides of a 78 RPM record – that is, about six to seven minutes of music. Bartók was unaccustomed to the phonograph’s time restrictions, and now the two movements totaled about eleven and a half minutes, making a single 78 rpm record impossible.

In January, 1939, the two movements were performed under the title Two Dances in Carnegie Hall by Goodman and Szigeti with Egon Petri on the piano, but neither Goodman, Szigeti nor Bartók was happy with the results. Bartók, in particular, was persuaded that the work’s expanded two-movement structure needed a balancing slow movement. His solution was a new movement sandwiched between the two dances and aptly titled, "relaxation." The first performance of the revised three-movement work, under its new title Contrasts, took place in April, 1940, in the recording studio.

Contrasts is Bartók’s only chamber-music score with a wind instrument. In his string quartets, he normally treated the strings as a homogeneous group – that is, he was concerned with finding novel ways of blending instruments of similar tonal quality. That approach, Mozart and Brahms had demonstrated in their quintets for clarinet and strings, was impossible with the reedy clarinet. In this work, consequently, Bartók sought instead to find novel ways of contrasting the instruments, thus giving the work its name.

Contrasts also reflects Bartók’s life-long effort to integrate into his own music the extensive research of his early years in central European folk music. Two of the work’s three movements are, in fact, highly sophisticated treatments of folk dances.

The first, Verbunkos, derives from an 18^th century Magyar dance performed by soldiers in full uniform with swords and spurs. The dance was often used to attract new recruits, and is thus sometimes referred to as a "recruiting dance." The richly ornamented figures characteristic of the dance were traditionally played on a primitive conical clarinet called the tarogato, which became a freedom symbol in the Hungarian struggle against Hapsburg oppression. The clarinet, consequently, presents the main theme of the movement and retains much of the interest, including a brilliant cadenza.

Piheno, the title of the second movement, means simply "relaxation." The first section is a short and slow chorale for the clarinet and violin, punctuated by bass trills in the piano. A middle section is more agitated, and a closing section repeats the elements of the opening section but with the melodic interest assigned mainly to the piano.

Sebes is a fast dance, again in three sections. The movement requires two violins, one tuned normally and one with the G and E strings flatted a half step, and two clarinets, one in A and the other in B flat. The first section is opened by a series of bare fifths on the open strings of the mis-tuned violin, against which the clarinet states the main theme. The central section of the movement is in a characteristic Bulgarian rhythm of 8+5 over 8, with the 13 beats within each bar grouped 3+2+3+2+3. After the return of the first section, it is the violin’s turn to have a cadenza, and the work then accelerates to a hectic close.

Schumann’s Piano Quintet – a string quartet plus a piano – was the first work of its kind, and was made possible by the developing technical capabilities of that instrument. Mozart had written piano quartets (three strings plus piano), but the piano of his day could not produce the volume necessary to balance four stringed instruments. Schumann’s quintet, in contrast, was clearly intended as a new way to exploit the enriched resources of the piano, particularly in the hands of a virtuoso performer.

More specifically, Schumann’s quintet was made possible by the introduction in the early 19th century of the damper or sustaining pedal – the pedal now ordinarily on the right. When depressed, this mechanism enabled the performer to continue the sound produced by keys that his or her fingers were no longer depressing. This substantially increased the sonority of the instrument, and facilitated the production of a smooth legato, arpeggios and wide-spaced chords. Beethoven was the first to profit from this innovation, and his example was followed by the romantics, whose piano music would be unimaginable on a pedal-less instrument.

Schumann’s pioneer quintet became the model for a small but select line of similar works by other composers – Brahms, Franck, Dvorak, Fauré, Elgar, Reger, Bloch and Shostakovich. It is interesting that, with a single exception, each of these composers, including Schumann, wrote only one piano quintet, and that in each instance it was one of
the composer’s most successful compositions. (The exception was Fauré, who wrote two piano quintets.) It was as if each composer felt challenged by the unique sonorities of this combination of instruments, but then found that it took only one effort to satisfy his curiosity about its possibilities.

Schumann’s quintet was written in 1842, the year in which, in one compulsive effort, he composed most of his major chamber-music compositions. Inspired by the great works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, he first completed his three string quartets. He then had the idea of adding to the four instruments a piano part for his wife Clara, a renowned concert pianist, and the resulting piano quintet was written in less than three weeks.

The first public performance of the quintet took place in Leipzig the following January with Clara at the piano, and was an immediate success. Further, Berlioz, then a leading critic as well as a composer, was visiting from Paris, and his drum-beating for the work did more than anything else to establish Schumann’s reputation throughout Europe.

Today the quintet is generally regarded as the greatest of Schumann’s chamber-music works, and the peer of any for this instrumental combination. In a sense, it is really a piano concerto with a string quartet rather than an orchestral accompaniment. The piano carries one-half rather than one-fifth of the tonal body, and while it has no cadenza, its part is written out in a more brilliant virtuoso fashion than that of any of the strings. In many passages, in fact, the strings simply double one another in unison, octaves or simple chords. This blending of virtuoso piano writing with doubled strings, particularly when contrasted with characteristic Schumann moments of grace and charm, produces a degree of full-blooded excitement with few equals in the chamber-music repertoire.

The contrast between robust exuberance and gentle lyricism is evident at the outset in the main theme of the first movement. Note the big jumps of the opening two measures – they will recur in this form or in inversion throughout the work. The second theme, a wistful dialogue between the cello and viola, continues the lyricism. The development is based on the main theme only – the piano playing two long virtuoso passages against a simple string accompaniment, which quietly emphasizes the jumping intervals.

The second movement is a funeral march with two contrasting episodes. The first episode is repeated later in the movement, resulting in an A-B-A-C-A-B-A pattern. Like the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the first episode is in a major key to provide some relief. The second episode is an agitated minor, with the theme derived from that of the march. Listen for the dramatic passage after the second episode when the agitation continues while the viola hoarsely recalls the march theme.

The third movement, a vigorous scherzo, shows what a resourceful composer can do with ascending and descending scales. There are two contrasting middle sections. The first is an inversion of the interval jumps of the main theme of the first movement. The second was originally much simpler, but Mendelssohn complained that it was not lively enough. Schumann rewrote it accordingly, and the result, with its flurries of 16th notes, is the work’s most demanding passage for the strings, particularly the cello.

The fourth movement is unorthodox in its key scheme and structure. At least three themes are stated and interlaced in a number of ways and a number of keys, leading to a tremendous climax. This is followed by an astounding coda in which the pianist pounds out with the right hand the main theme of the first movement – the theme with the jumping intervals – while the left hand and the other instruments play against it as a fugue the first theme of the finale.

© 2006 by Willard J. Hertz