Series Concert V
Thursday, September 19
Program notes by Timothy Summers
Program notes by Timothy Summers
Franz Schubert — Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano in A minor, D. 821
No composer understood the epic potential of small-scale house music better than Franz Schubert. He wrote music with a strange, deceptive fluidity. Melodies flow like water, or jump like fish, until suddenly a hint of something haunted occurs, and the floor disappears. The depth of interior life, with its quick changes between personal and social impressions, is always in the foreground.
This mix of the familiar, joyful, and haunted stands out in the rare beauty of the Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano. Beyond that, it needn’t be explained: three movements; a small-scale sonata.
The ‘Arpeggione’ part deserves a bit of commentary, however: an ‘arpeggione’ is (or rather was) an instrument which resembles the cello, but has six strings and is tuned like a guitar. Its fretted fingerboard must have made the absolute lyricism of Schubert’s writing hard to achieve. But no matter: it is now most often played on cello or viola, and has the character of a gift in both cases.
Salina Fisher — Hikari (ciaccona)
From Salina Fisher:
This piece entitled Hikari, meaning light, brightness, or radiance, leans into the violin’s natural resonance and brilliance. Its musical language integrates the instrument’s expressive warmth and lyricism with more ‘transparent’ timbres, in a constant search for light. The featured open string-crossing is an homage to Bach’s Chaconne, a work that is both central to this recital and to my own relationship with the violin.
Andrew Armstrong — She Fell For A Flyfisher
As of this writing, we have no precise information about who fell for whom, or under what conditions.
George Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue has become a central symbol not only of American Music, but of the American 20th century. What is still a bit surprising is the extent to which it was intended to fulfill a symbolic role: Gershwin intended to represent the kaleidoscopic ‘melting-pot’ quality of the country. Somewhat uncomfortably, Gershwin himself only heard second-hand that he had been assigned to write a piece for Paul Whiteman. The legend is that George’s brother Ira interrupted him while playing pool and gave him the news that, in a concert with the subject ‘What is American Music?’, he was to have a ‘jazz-concerto’ performed. Gershwin gave a hell of an answer. Choosing a title jauntily reminiscent of American visual art, he wrote something that we all didn’t seem to know that we already knew, about who we are and what we like to hear.
So, Rhapsody in Blue flies forward still as a cultural touchstone, in endless excerpts and arrangements. From Paul Whiteman and Ferde Grofé’s original jazz band premiere, partly improvised and collectively assembled, to the dense, brand-ready versions of United Airlines (heard at the end of each hour of the Oprah Winfrey show for decades), it lives on in our collective ear and has become, in the parlance of our time, ‘iconic’. The grounds for it holding that status keep seeming, on the whole, pretty solid.
Johannes Brahms — Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26
Rather than talk about biography, which can be rather dry, or sketching out an analysis, which would be even drier (to read, anyway), it can be interesting to looking a few compositional details in the A Major Piano Quartet. As with many of the finest classical composers, a few generative details can open onto broader thoughts and sounds. In particular, there are two things to notice — just at the outset of this piece — which quickly show enough potential energy to assure that things are ready to move.
The first detail is the dynamic marking: poco forte (A). This is a queer cocktail of a dynamic. It seems laced with contradiction, with a troublesome and misleading intimation of ‘littleness’ in the word poco. (Curiously, Brahms was once complimented publicly by King George of Hanover as being a ‘little Beethoven’, and there is something rather poco forte about that…) But poco forte is also the dynamic marking of the last movement of Brahms’ epic first symphony – ‘little’ is clearly not the controlling idea here. There is also nothing little about the opening of the piano quartet, though it isn’t loud. So, what is this poco forte? How might it be read, played, and given?
No composer understood the epic potential of small-scale house music better than Franz Schubert. He wrote music with a strange, deceptive fluidity. Melodies flow like water, or jump like fish, until suddenly a hint of something haunted occurs, and the floor disappears. The depth of interior life, with its quick changes between personal and social impressions, is always in the foreground.
This mix of the familiar, joyful, and haunted stands out in the rare beauty of the Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano. Beyond that, it needn’t be explained: three movements; a small-scale sonata.
The ‘Arpeggione’ part deserves a bit of commentary, however: an ‘arpeggione’ is (or rather was) an instrument which resembles the cello, but has six strings and is tuned like a guitar. Its fretted fingerboard must have made the absolute lyricism of Schubert’s writing hard to achieve. But no matter: it is now most often played on cello or viola, and has the character of a gift in both cases.
Salina Fisher — Hikari (ciaccona)
From Salina Fisher:
This piece entitled Hikari, meaning light, brightness, or radiance, leans into the violin’s natural resonance and brilliance. Its musical language integrates the instrument’s expressive warmth and lyricism with more ‘transparent’ timbres, in a constant search for light. The featured open string-crossing is an homage to Bach’s Chaconne, a work that is both central to this recital and to my own relationship with the violin.
Andrew Armstrong — She Fell For A Flyfisher
As of this writing, we have no precise information about who fell for whom, or under what conditions.
George Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue has become a central symbol not only of American Music, but of the American 20th century. What is still a bit surprising is the extent to which it was intended to fulfill a symbolic role: Gershwin intended to represent the kaleidoscopic ‘melting-pot’ quality of the country. Somewhat uncomfortably, Gershwin himself only heard second-hand that he had been assigned to write a piece for Paul Whiteman. The legend is that George’s brother Ira interrupted him while playing pool and gave him the news that, in a concert with the subject ‘What is American Music?’, he was to have a ‘jazz-concerto’ performed. Gershwin gave a hell of an answer. Choosing a title jauntily reminiscent of American visual art, he wrote something that we all didn’t seem to know that we already knew, about who we are and what we like to hear.
So, Rhapsody in Blue flies forward still as a cultural touchstone, in endless excerpts and arrangements. From Paul Whiteman and Ferde Grofé’s original jazz band premiere, partly improvised and collectively assembled, to the dense, brand-ready versions of United Airlines (heard at the end of each hour of the Oprah Winfrey show for decades), it lives on in our collective ear and has become, in the parlance of our time, ‘iconic’. The grounds for it holding that status keep seeming, on the whole, pretty solid.
Johannes Brahms — Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26
Rather than talk about biography, which can be rather dry, or sketching out an analysis, which would be even drier (to read, anyway), it can be interesting to looking a few compositional details in the A Major Piano Quartet. As with many of the finest classical composers, a few generative details can open onto broader thoughts and sounds. In particular, there are two things to notice — just at the outset of this piece — which quickly show enough potential energy to assure that things are ready to move.
The first detail is the dynamic marking: poco forte (A). This is a queer cocktail of a dynamic. It seems laced with contradiction, with a troublesome and misleading intimation of ‘littleness’ in the word poco. (Curiously, Brahms was once complimented publicly by King George of Hanover as being a ‘little Beethoven’, and there is something rather poco forte about that…) But poco forte is also the dynamic marking of the last movement of Brahms’ epic first symphony – ‘little’ is clearly not the controlling idea here. There is also nothing little about the opening of the piano quartet, though it isn’t loud. So, what is this poco forte? How might it be read, played, and given?
The other fruitful detail, also from the first bar, is the simple chord-wobble (B) which flows to the next bar. It’s a tiny bit of music, but full of possibility, instability, and potential for melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal development. It’s a little thing, this melodic/harmonic oscillation, but it will reappear significantly and memorably in every movement.
Taken together, the elements of poco forte and slight oscillation show a powerful desire to grow outward from unity, to unwind some potential, and to let music grow as though from an unbroken, or just-sprouting, seed. The poco forte dynamic marking contains intimations of forte and fortissimo to come, in particular by demanding restraint before their occurrence. And the oscillating small intervals show a strong desire for motion from stable (in the singleness of the first beat of the first bar), to unstable (seeking, and not getting, resolution the second bar). There ends up being something very simply declarative in all of it. But the content of what it declares (‘in the character of forte but with the sound of piano’, as Brahms is reputed to have said), contains the seed of a grand construction – and with that sort of content lying behind it, to make an opening statement ‘a little strong’ is plenty strong enough. From this seed comes a great many consequences. For, at least, the next grand hour of music.
Taken together, the elements of poco forte and slight oscillation show a powerful desire to grow outward from unity, to unwind some potential, and to let music grow as though from an unbroken, or just-sprouting, seed. The poco forte dynamic marking contains intimations of forte and fortissimo to come, in particular by demanding restraint before their occurrence. And the oscillating small intervals show a strong desire for motion from stable (in the singleness of the first beat of the first bar), to unstable (seeking, and not getting, resolution the second bar). There ends up being something very simply declarative in all of it. But the content of what it declares (‘in the character of forte but with the sound of piano’, as Brahms is reputed to have said), contains the seed of a grand construction – and with that sort of content lying behind it, to make an opening statement ‘a little strong’ is plenty strong enough. From this seed comes a great many consequences. For, at least, the next grand hour of music.