THREE PRELUDES FOR PIANO
George Gershwin
1898-1937

George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to the classical music audience. The performance of his Rhapsody in Blue at the Paul Whiteman concerts in 1924 made history by being a groundbreaker. It was however his Concerto in F, which appeared in the following year, which was the first large-scale jazz composition in a traditionally classical form.

The three piano preludes, but especially no.2, are on the encore repertory of most concert pianists. The history of the preludes is somewhat of a mystery: At the Premiere Performance by Gershwin in 1926 he apparently played five preludes, but published only three the following year. The identity of the others is not known, but from the description of critics and other people present they were probably two Novelettes from his 1919 exercise book collection. The same two Novelettes had previously been transcribed by Samuel Dushkin for violin and piano and published under the title Short Story.

SOUVENIR D’AMERIQUE, Op.17
Henry Vieuxtemps (Variations on “Yankee Doodle”)
1820-1881

Belgian composer and violinist Henry Vieuxtemps was the son of an amateur violinist and violinmaker who served also as his first teacher. A child prodigy, he gave his first public concert at age 6. By the age of 14 he had already launched a whirlwind career that permitted him to become acquainted with most musical luminaries of the era, including Robert Schumann, Niccoló Paganini and Louis Spohr. During a stay in Vienna in the winter of 1833-34 he met a number of musicians who had been close to Beethoven. He undertook to learn Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – virtually forgotten only a few years after the great master’s death – and after only two weeks of preparation, performed it with resounding success. Vieuxtemps continued his itinerate career throughout his life, making three increasingly successful American tours in 1843–4, 1857–8 and 1870–71.

Vieuxtemps was idolized in Russia where he spent five years (1846–51) as soloist to the Tsar and professor of violin, contributing significantly to the development of violin playing in the country. Although he composed only a few chamber works, he apparently had a special affinity for chamber music. He promoted the quartets of Beethoven and Haydn, as well as those of his contemporaries.

A prolific composer, especially for his own instrument, Vieuxtemps composed seven violin concertos, the first at age 16. He composed the Souvenir d’Amerique in 1844, during his first US tour. From the get-go the composer makes changes in the tune, both rhythmically and melodically. Modifications of the original simple harmony and avoidance of exact repeats create enough surprises to keep the familiar tune from eliciting the boredom that might ensue with a mere increase in virtuosity and pyrotechnics from variation to variation. Vieuxtemps ties up the piece with a fantasy-like coda.

Tradition has it that British officers made up the song “Yankee doodle” in pre-Revolutionary days to mock the ragtag colonial militia. The colonists, however, took it as a mark of honor. The origin of the melody is uncertain but is believed to come from the nursery song “Lucy Locket.”

PIANO TRIO No.1
Mark O’Connor “Poets and Prophets”
b.1961

What Aaron Copland did in classicizing the American folk music of the nineteenth century, Mark O’Connor aims to accomplish for country music of the twentieth century, epitomized by the musical legacy of Johnny Cash.

Violinist, composer and fiddler Mark O'Connor was born in Seattle and began his fiddling career studying with Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson and French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli. He always successfully maintained this two-track career. Along the way, between these two musical extremes, O'Connor absorbed knowledge and influence from a multitude of musical styles and genres, melding and shaping these influences into a new American classical style.

O’Connor composed the Piano Trio No. 1 during the Fall of 2003, inspired by the music of Johnny Cash who had died in September that year. It was commissioned by Kathryn Gould for the Eroica Trio and received its premiere on March 5th, 2004.

O’Connor first encountered Cash at age eight, in 1969, when he and his mother caught Cash's first television show, the famous one on which Cash and Bob Dylan sang “Girl From the North Country.” In a letter to the members of the Eroica Trio O’Connor wrote about the inspiration for the work: “Johnny was a boyhood hero of mine, I used to sing his songs when I was 8, 9 and 10 years old, and played the guitar like him (sometimes up the fret board strumming away).... I am at my very best when I compose with my emotions at my sleeve, and … I believe I will be able to craft a very unique tribute into the form of a Piano Trio... Cash was one of the few country music and rockabilly musicians to appeal to all ages, all types of people all the way in to the MTV generation, which is something that is hard to fathom. He sang about the prisons, riding the trains, about killing, and living, about lost love, about the gospel, about the downtrodden and the Native American, and about being stoned. His musical sound was the thing that got everybody though.”

O’Conner also knew Johnny personally, worked with him and visited him privately at his home. He envisioned his job to bridge the gap between his love for Cash and his inspiration from his music in order to transform it for instruments that he loves writing for.

O’Conner has composed his own themes, based on various aspects of the Cash sound. His work can be compared to that of Copland, who was able to capture the sound of rural America and the frontier to such an extent that it has become its own brand of folk idiom, recognizable in westerns, TV commercials and his ubiquitous imitators.
For the first movement, “Man in Black,'' O’Connor took his cue from Cash's final recordings. In the second movement, “The Tennessee Two,'' O'Connor draws on the guitar licks of Luther Perkins, Cash’s guitarist in the 1950s: “[they] were responsible for a lot of the Johnny Cash sound, that new kind of rockabilly groove,'' he says. “I took the idea of the rhythms they crafted and some of the licks and I make kind of a minimalist classical piece out of it.''

“My June,'' is named for Cash's late wife, June Carter Cash. Its theme has the warm Carter family sound, and especially the gentleness of June. The last movement, “Hello, I'm Johnny Cash,'' refers to Cash's introductions to his TV show. According to O’Connor, there's a rhythm to the way he said that, and there's a melody, too. He took that “tone of voice” and turned it into a gospel hoedown.

STRING QUARTET IN F MAJOR, Op.96, “AMERICAN”
Antonín Dvorák
1841-1904

In 1892, Antonín Dvorák accepted the invitation of the philanthropist Mrs. Jeanette Thurber to take up the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York which she sponsored. While the composer was intrigued by the possibilities, he found America strange and suffered extreme homesickness for his native Bohemia. To feel more at home, he spent the summer of 1893 in Spillville, a Czech community in Iowa. Coming from the small farms of his native land, the vastness of the Iowa landscape overwhelmed him: “We often went to visit Czech farmers 4-5 miles away. It is very strange here. Few people and a great deal of empty space. A farmer’s nearest neighbor is often 4 miles off, and especially in the prairies (I call them Sahara) there are only endless acres of fields and meadows and that is all you see, you don’t meet a soul.” he wrote to a friend back home.

Dvorák put his stay in Spillville to good use, and within a month composed what was to become his most popular chamber work, the String Quartet in F, Op.96. Usually known as the “American” quartet, it makes use of pentatonic scales (scales which have only five different notes and no semitone intervals) which was common in the Afro-American music he heard in New York. Nonetheless, this scale can be found all over the world, from China to Scotland, including Dvorák’s native Bohemia. The quartet was premiered in Boston in 1894.

The quartet opens with the pentatonic theme on the viola, accompanied by the violins tremolo. The flowing second theme is distinctly Bohemia, far removed from any American influence. Most of the development involves the first theme.

The plaintive, soaring violin melody of the slow movement, Lento, is considered the highlight of the quartet. It is a beautiful love song without words. The other instruments take up the melody one by one over a delicate accompaniment.

The vigorous theme of the scherzo, which again makes use of the pentatonic scale, includes in its middle part the song of the scarlet tanager, a bird common to Iowa woodlands. The rhythmic and high-spirited finale recalls lively country dances and music-making. In the middle the movement is interrupted briefly by a short chorale, perhaps derived from one of the hymns Dvorák played on the Spillville church organ.

PIANO VARIATIONS
Aaron Copland
1900-1990

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Aaron Copland was the creator of what has become an almost stereotypical “down home” American musical style. His suites of “Americana” ballets have become concert hall favorites, including Billy the Kidd, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. So thoroughly ingrained is the Copland American sound that we have been hearing it authentically or in imitation in countless film and TV scores, not to mention decades of commercials. Starting in the late 1930s, Copland, by then a well-respected “serious” composer, brought a fresh new sound to Hollywood as well, to replace the heavily orchestrated fare of what he called “Dvorák - Tchaikovsky generalized music.”

Less well known to the public are Copland’s many piano works, including such major works as the Piano Variations, Piano Fantasy and Piano Sonata. He also wrote many smaller works written mostly for friends or for personal use, often using material left over or extracted from larger orchestral works.

Consisting of 20 variations and a coda, the Piano Variations is not the Copland we are familiar with from the popular ballets. Composed in 1930, it belongs to what Copland called his “hard-bitten” pieces, sparse and economical in texture. The entire work is based on the opening four note motive, and is, according to Copland, his personal way of making use of Arnold Schoenberg’s serialist methods, without disposing of his own earlier and more tonal style: “These pieces are more dissonant than my earlier works, yet I did not give up tonality. If a composer is secure in his judgment, his sense of what is musically valid does not change when he adopts a ‘new’ method.”

The variations flow freely, without breaks or episodes between them. Based as they are on a four-note theme, they do not conform to the classical variation structure with its two complementary strains and formal repeats. Rather, each variation sets a specific mood, using the “theme” in a variety of ways, both horizontal (melodic) and vertical (as chords). Nor is there a gradual buildup in embellishment and virtuosity.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

VIOLIN PARTITA No. 2 IN D MINOR, BWV 1004
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750

Johann Sebastian Bach’s three sonatas and three partitas for violin solo are the ultimate challenge for any violinist, presenting both a technical and musical challenge; among their most interesting aspects is Bach’s ability to create the sound of complete harmonies by judicious use of double stops and arpeggiated chords.

Bach composed the six works during his tenure as Capellmeister at the princely court of Cöthen (1717-1723), probably between 1717 and 1720, although they are based on earlier work from his Weimar period. The surviving manuscript in Bach’s hand is dated 1720. To judge from the many copies that have survived, including some copied by his second wife, Anna Magdalena, the works must have become popular even beyond Germany’s borders. That the six works were probably used as teaching tools by Bach is indicated by the detailed instructions for articulation given in Bach’s hand in the surviving manuscript. In spite of their popularity, the complete set did not appear in print until 1843.

It is unknown for whom Bach composed these works, but such technically demanding compositions for solo violin were not uncommon, especially in Germany where Bach’s older contemporary Heinrich Ignaz von Biber’s (1644-1704) “Rosary Sonatas” are 12 works for solo violin representing the life of the Virgin Mary, each involving a different tuning of the instrument.

In contrast to the three sonatas, which are all four movement works (slow-fast-slow-fast), with the second movement a fugue and with tempo indications for the other movements, the partitas are in the style of the Baroque dance suite. Thought to have originated in France, the suite consisted of a set of four standard dances, usually Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue, often preceded by an introductory movement not in dance form. Optional additions of other dance movements were common. These dances originated in the sixteenth century but by Bach's time had severed their ties with the ballroom, and only the shells of the characteristic opening rhythmic patterns for each dance had survived.

Partita No. 2 consists of five movements, the four standard dances plus its pièce de résistance and that of the set as a whole, its final movement, the Chaconne. The four dance movements conform to a pattern of two repeated strains; the second strain is based on the same thematic material as the first but is considerably longer. The Sarabande serves as the slow movement.

The chaconne is a variation form dating from the Renaissance, in which a repeated bass pattern underlies increasingly complex contrapuntal figuration in the upper voices. It was but one of the many works in which Bach set rigidity of form against the highest level of technical virtuosity, musical creativity and expressiveness. For similar reasons the chaconne has remained a popular genre to this day; among Bach’s prominent successors are Brahms (Finale of the Symphony No. 4) and Benjamin Britten (interlude from the opera Peter Grimes).

KEYBOARD CONCERTO IN A MAJOR, BWV 1055
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750

It sometimes comes as a surprise that not every note of the two most famous composers of the Baroque period, Bach and Handel, was original. These prolific giants were so overwhelmed with their duties that recycling was considered the norm rather than an aberration. More surprising is that the autographs of Bach’s transcriptions of works by Vivaldi bear his own name. A practice that would be considered plagiarism today, in the Baroque period would have been seen as a compliment to the original composer.

In addition to his enormous responsibilities in his final and most prestigious job as Kantor of the entire musical program at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig – where he produced weekly cantatas for the liturgical year, rehearsed the musicians, trained the boy choristers and taught Latin – Bach was also expected to put together a weekly concert of secular vocal and instrumental music for the Leipzig Collegium Musicum. The Collegium was a German university extra-curricular town-and-gown institution for which students and local musicians got together to perform at public gatherings. At least Bach got credit for this extra work since during his tenure in the post from 1729 to 1741, the institution was called the “Bachisches Collegium.” It was held in Zimmermann’s Coffee House, a high-class bourgeois establishment spacious enough to accommodate a large ensemble. Apparently, Zimmermann did not charge for these concerts, assuming that enough money was coming in from refreshments.

Bach prepared the seven solo keyboard concertos (BWV 1052 to 1058) for the Collegium after 1738. For reasons unknown, he preferred to use more than one harpsichord before that date. Perhaps he had been joined at the keyboards by his older sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, who were still living at home.

Definitive research has shown that all of Bach’s concertos for one, two or three harpsichords were arrangements of his own works originally composed for either violin or oboe – or both together. At least half of Bach’s original manuscripts were irretrievably lost, since after his death half his manuscripts were consigned over to his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, who, often “in his cups” and perennially short of cash, probably sold them as scrap paper, a valuable commodity at the time. The rest of the manuscripts ended up in the hands of Carl Philipp Emanuel, who took good care of them. Musicologists have used the keyboard concertos to reconstruct the presumed original versions, but this task has been daunting, as well as controversial. Bach created the harpsichord transcriptions decades after the original compositions and probably made significant revisions in line with his more mature style.

While it is not known for sure what the original solo instrument for the A Major Concerto was, it probably was the oboe d’amore, which came into use around 1720. The Concerto has been transposed for oboe and is frequently heard in that arrangement today. The manuscript reveals that Bach wrote out the continuo part, indicating the presence of a second harpsichord for continuo purpose.

The first movement is in the ritornello style, where a single theme acts as a refrain. Between the statements of the ritornello are passages of new music. The ritornello concerto, a product of middle and late Baroque, was “invented” by Antonio Vivaldi and enthusiastically imitated and expanded by Bach.

The second movement is similar to a passacaglia (or chaconne). Over its eight-measure ground bass, the upper voices weave intricate but subdued contrapuntal lines
The final movement is another ritornello form, the theme consisting of a series of rapid descending scales.

BRANDENBURG CONCERTO No. 2 IN F MAJOR, BWV 1047
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750

The six Brandenburg Concerti stand at the crossroads in musical history, where chamber music and orchestral music went their separate ways. These Concerts á plusieurs instruments (Concerti for various instruments) as Bach named them, were dedicated to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, who employed a modest orchestra that was in all probability too small and inexpert to play all the Concertos. The Dedication Score, including an obsequious cover letter by Bach, has been preserved and is now in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. The mint condition of the manuscript indicates that in all probability the Margrave’s orchestra seldom if ever performed them.

However, the Concerti were probably common fare at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach's employer. We know from letters and records that the personnel in the Cöthen orchestra corresponded closely to the instrumental requirements of the Concerti. Three of the Concertos, nos. 2, 4 and 5, are true concerti grossi, requiring a solo instrument or group of instruments, and these requirements correspond closely to better players in the prince’s orchestra.

The Concerti were composed between 1718 and 1721, although parts may have been written as early as 1708. They were not composed as an independent group, but rather assembled from various orchestral works Bach had already composed over the years; they may be described as courtly entertainment music on the highest level.

The second Concerto shows a homogeneity of origin and was probably conceived as a three-movement concerto in the Italian model from the start, like a true concerto grosso. In the first movement, the entire ensemble plays the ritornello while the episodes features a different combinations and organization of the four soloists with chances for each one to dominate. The many permutations and combinations of the soloists continually change the sound and timbre of the ensemble in a kaleidoscope of orchestral color.

The Andante, which begins as a canon, features only the soloists and continuo, omitting the trumpet. Bach breaks the single theme into motivic fragments – here a "sighing" figure – for variety in both melody and sonority.

The final movement is a fugue in which the trumpet introduces the fugue subject, which itself serves as a ritornello.

It is uncertain which brass instrument Bach used. In the manuscript he prescribed a "tromba," denoting the valveless trumpet of his day. But the part was written for an instrument in F, although Bach usually used C and D trumpets in all his other works, except for an E-flat trumpet in the first version of the Magnificat. Whatever the instrument, the range and passagework are extremely difficult, especially on a trumpet without valves.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com